by MITCHELL PETERSON
The American carceral state is an abomination. ‘The Land of the Free’ locks up more of its own population than any country on earth and has more than twenty percent of the global prisoners despite having only five percent of the population. The explosion of prisoners has far outpaced population growth and doesn’t even reflect increases in crime.
And while a Senator, Joe Biden was instrumental in creating the mass incarceration problem we face today.
The over two million people in American jails or prisons cost the taxpayers $80,000,000,000 a year. And they’re not just sitting in six-by-eight cells trying to stay sane and alive; they’re working.
They’re working for corporate America, the states they’re serving in, and the military-industrial complex for pennies an hour and sometimes nothing at all.
People often say that slavery never ended, it just changed form. It was made illegal, but crucially, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” opening the door for chain gangs and the corporate exploitation we see today.
The American Civil Liberties Union recently released a report that details how these prison laborers are creating $11 billion in value and getting little to nothing in return, inside or outside of the institutions.
It is too easy to ignore the plight of people behind bars. With a litany of other issues, it is especially difficult for a politician to champion their cause. But tireless work from activists and the utter inhumanity and exploitation of the system has finally made it a large enough issue that things are slowly happening at a local level, and Democratic Party politicians have to pay lip service to it.
The Washington Post reported that, as a candidate, “Biden says he will work to repeal federal mandatory minimum sentences, end cash bail, stop the use of solitary confinement, suspend sentences for drug use and instead divert defendants into drug courts, expand alternatives to detention, knock down barriers to reentry, and liberally use clemency to secure the release of inmates facing overly long sentences for drug and nonviolent offenses.”
Obviously, none of that happened. In a semi-functioning society, those are no-brainers. Mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and ‘broken windows’ policing have all led to a 500% increase in the prison population since 1970. The ACLU says the cash bail system means, “There are twice as many people incarcerated in local jails awaiting trial and presumed innocent than in the entire federal prison system.”
Again, it’s just so inhumane.
America puts more of its own citizens behind bars than any ‘authoritarian regime of the month.’ And it’s not like Americans are more prone to commit crimes, the US is just a settler-colonial state and violence is the only language the country speaks.
The answer is always more police, rather than addressing any underlying poverty-related causes.
Poor communities in desperate need of economic investment, better schools, better teachers, counselors, community centers, jobs programs, after-school programs, maternity leave, healthcare, mental health services, and green spaces receive nothing but a larger and more militarized police force to patrol their poverty-stricken streets.
Community activists, researchers, and academics know the answers to these crime problems, and candidate Biden also showed his team understands the issue better than one would expect, promising on the campaign trail, “to establish a $20 billion grant program that would incentivize states to shift from incarcerating offenders to addressing the underlying causes of crime through funding for counseling for mental health, addiction and child abuse, as well as a range of social services and early-childhood education.”
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