Our skyrocketing incarceration rates are less related to crime than to racial politics, tough-on-crime rhetoric and for-profit prisons.<br /><br />Question: Why have incarceration rates skyrocketed in recent <br />years?Robert Perkinson: There's a lot of reasons. I <br />think it's a momentous shift in American history, and it's really a <br />divergence... a place where the U.S. diverged from Europe and other <br />industrial democracies. You know, incarceration rates in most <br />democracies are pretty stable and were for most of American history. But <br /> starting in the late 1960's, the U.S. changed course pretty radically <br />and incarceration rates quintupled over the last third of the 20th <br />century. Conventional wisdom is that it must have something to <br />do with crime. Turns out it doesn't. Crime rates fluctuate pretty much <br /> independent of or largely independent of incarceration rates and what I <br /> argue in the book is that it really has to do with politics, and in <br />particular it has to do with racial politics.Question: <br /> Have tough-on-crime rhetoric and sentencing guidelines affected <br />incarceration rates?Robert Perkinson: What I'm <br />arguing is like the big causative shift has to do with the backlash <br />against civil rights and the kind of Southern strategy in the way <br />Democrats have tried to protect their right flank by throwing criminal <br />defendants to the wolves in a sense. But there's all sorts of <br />legislative initiatives that have gone through that have made that <br />happen. And certainly sentencing guidelines have had the unintended <br />consequence of shifting discretionary... shifting discretion from judges <br /> to prosecutors, because almost all cases are dealt with and plea <br />bargains and it's meant that the real decision on how much time someone <br />is going to do takes place at filing, rather than in a court room. And <br />even more than that, mandatory minimums. But there's all sorts <br />of, you know, every legislative session from the 1970's forward has had, <br /> in every state almost and in the federal government have had different <br />kind of foci and different slogans, "Zero Tolerance," "Mandatory <br />Minimums," "Three Strikes." All of them have converged to build the <br />largest prison system in the world.Question: How have <br />for-profit prisons changed the way we incarcerate people?Robert <br /> Perkinson: They have some. My own sense is not as much as some <br />critics of the so-called "prison industrial complex" think. You know, <br />Texas locks up more people in private prisons than anywhere else; <br />there's 20,000 of them. My own state where I am now living in, Hawai'i, <br /> ships a huge part of its population to private prisons on the mainland <br />to the desert prison in Arizona and it's mostly indigenous Hawai'ians <br />there who are bearing the brunt of the drug war and that kind of war on <br />crime. And those private prison companies are skilled lobbyists. They <br />often hire former bureaucrats, former legislators, former lieutenant <br />governors to make their case. And I think in some cases, they have... <br />in many cases they have argued for longer sentences and tougher law <br />enforcement as a way to generate demand for their services. But I don't <br /> think you can—and they've done that successfully. So some small extent <br /> of breathtaking prison growth in America can probably be attributed to <br />the profit motive. There's even more money to be made in construction <br />contracts for new prisons. But there's a whole lot of ways that private <br /> industry can feed at the trough of government. And I don't know that <br />prison lobbyists are any more effective than road contractors or even <br />people who could build community colleges if government were going in a <br />different direction. And also, some states have very high rates <br /> of prison growth—California, for instance—with no private industry <br />because the guard union there is so powerful and so effective that they <br />are well paid compared to correction officers across the rest of the <br />country, and they have thus far, though we'll see what happens in the <br />next few months, been able to avoid much privatization.Recorded April 14, 2010
