Corrupting Everything

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It’s serendipitous because our current top story about prisoner-gerrymandering to oust a black member of Congress just landed this afternoon. But today’s live chat in The Hive (sub req), with Eli Hager of the Marshall Project, delves further into the core issues here which are both mass incarceration and the perverse incentives created by the privatization of the prison system – which is inextricably tied to evolution of mass incarceration over the last 35 years. Check out the conversation. Fascinating stuff.

Here are some highlights from the chat:

On Police Brutality:

“I’ve written in the past about how the way we’re talking about police right now is the same way we talked about teachers during the height of the education reform craze. We’re blaming the front-line practitioners for all the problems of the system, which in the worst cases is fair, but which also risks alienating the entire profession — and we need them to do the work.

“So we need to balance our approach by better training and preparing the majority of police rather than only focusing on firing the bad ones (I’d say the same of teachers). We need to heap more scrutiny on the policymakers who continue to do nothing about urban blight and poverty, instead of purely blaming the police (i.e. the bottom end of the implementation chain of policy) whom we send out to meet those problems,. And we need to consider other solutions to things like mental illness, drug addiction, etc. than sending police, who are armed with guns and the power to arrest. Why don’t we send another type of institution than the criminal justice system to go meet those problems?”

On Private Prisons:


“Contracts with private prisons for guaranteed beds cause policymakers to avoid dealing with mass incarceration. I’ve been reporting on the four states (Vermont, Idaho, California, Hawaii) that transfer prisoners OUT of state to private prisons in other states. They do this because they don’t have the capacity in their own state facilities. But doing so allows them to postpone dealing with over-incarceration, because they can just use these guaranteed beds elsewhere instead of sending fewer people to prison in the first place.

“Aside from corruption, advocates also argue that the profit motive reduces private prison companies’ incentive to rehabilitate people and keep them from coming back to prison. Because more prisoners, ultimately, means more money.”

On The Criminal Justice System:

“I know what you mean when you say that the criminal justice system likes to ‘kick these guys around’ but I think that might simplify things a little bit. What happens in the criminal justice system is less human than that. It’s more insidious, more built-in to the system. The bail system is the bail system, and it keeps a lot of poor people locked up even in cases where there are no individual bad people who like kicking the poor people around. The shoddy state of public defense keeps poor people flowing into jails and prisons, but it’s not because individual public defenders are bad people — in fact, most of them work incredibly hard. It’s simply built into the system that there is no funding for public defenders. And the system relies on fines and fees from poor people to keep functioning, even though there may not be any bad officials who explicitly want to punish those poor people.

“In other words, we have an underfunded, overburdened system in which injustices against poor people are built in. That’s what makes these problems so intractable — there are some clear bad guys, but human evil is not the problem. It’s the sedimentation of decades of unequal funding and opportunity that have solidified into a system that’s very hard to change.”

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