Does sentencing a teenager to life without parole serve our society well? The United States is the only country in the world that routinely condemns children to die in prison. This is the story of one of those children, now a young man, seeking a second chance in Florida. At age 15, Kenneth Young received four consecutive life sentences for a series of armed robberies. Imprisoned for more than a decade, he believed he would die behind bars. Now a U.S. Supreme Court decision could set him free. 15 to Life: Kenneth’s Story follows Young’s struggle for redemption, revealing a justice system with thousands of young people serving sentences intended for society’s most dangerous criminals.
Mass Incarceration Has Become the New Welfare
When Ta-Nehisi Coates says that America’s bloated and enormously expensive dependence on imprisonment has created a “social service program … for a whole class of people,” he hits the nail on the head. Perhaps correctional expenditures—police, courts, jails, prisons, halfway houses, parole offices, and all the rest—are better classified as “welfare” expenditures.
Mass incarceration is not just (or even mainly) a response to crime, but rather a perverse form of social spending that uses state power to address a host of social problems at the back end, from poverty to drug addiction to misbehavior in school. These are problems that voters, taxpayers, and politicians—especially white voters, taxpayers, and politicians—seem unwilling to address in any other way. And even as this spending exacts a toll on those it targets, it confers economic benefits on others, creating employment in white rural areas, an enormous government-sponsored market in prison supplies, and cheap labor for businesses. This is what the historian Mike Davis once called “carceral keynesianism.”
.. Bringing together Moynihan’s concerns about black family structure with the cold fact of mass incarceration produces a striking conclusion: Mass incarceration actually causes crime. In its long-term impact on the black family, mass incarceration has many of the disintegrative effects that Moynihan attributed to slavery.
.. Still, this continuity does leave open important questions—why did the incarceration rate, which remained steady for a century after the end of slavery, spike after 1970? Why did the black incarceration rate, which had always exceeded that of whites, increase so much more rapidly in the same era?
One view is that cries for “law and order” in the late 1960s brought together southern Democrats and conservative Republicans under the umbrella of the “southern strategy.” Unable any longer to object openly to housing and school integration, civil rights, or black political power, politicians decried instead the threat of “crime” and “welfare” as shorthand for white racial resentment.
.. How would the nation react if one out of every four white men between the ages of 20 and 35 spent time in prison
Justice Breyer v. the Death Penalty
Evidently, Kennedy and Breyer felt strongly enough about the issues of solitary confinement and capital punishment to break from that tradition.
.. As Kennedy noted, an estimated twenty-five thousand inmates in the United States are currently serving their sentences in solitary confinement—a condition in which the prisoner is generally held, as Kennedy put it, “in a windowless cell no larger than a typical parking spot for 23 hours a day.” The hour each day when prisoners are allowed out, to shower or exercise, is also usually in isolation. This practice deprives individuals of almost all human contact, other than with guards. Some prisons go even further. According to Human Rights Watch, prisoners in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania are not allowed to have photographs of family members, or newspapers and magazines (unless the periodicals are religious).
.. But, in 1972, the Court did declare the death penalty—as it was then administered—unconstitutional, reasoning that the imposition of death, at the time left to the unfettered discretion of prosecutors and juries, rendered the sanction so arbitrary as to be cruel and unusual. As Justice Potter Stewart famously put it, “These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.”
.. What’s more, Breyer noted, defendants today routinely spend decades on death row while their cases are reviewed. That lengthy period of intense uncertainty, nearly always spent in solitary confinement, adds to the cruel and unusual character of capital punishment.
Chris Hedges: America’s Slave Empire
The kryptonite to fight the prison system, which is a $500 billion enterprise, is the work strike.
.. In the St. Clair prison there is also a chemical plant, a furniture company and a repair shop for state vehicles. Other Alabama prisons run printing companies and recycling plants, stamp license plates, make metal bed frames, operate sand pits and tend fish farms. Only a few hundred of Alabama’s 26,200 prisoners — the system is designed to hold only 13,130 people — are paid to work; they get 17 to 71 cents an hour. The rest are slaves.
.. An estimated 80 percent of prisoners entering the Alabama prison system are functionally illiterate.
.. “For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth and that anything could be done to us,” Ray said. “Then the word ‘n-word’ became politically incorrect. So they began calling us criminals. When you say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not matter. It means he or she is a n-word. It means they deserve what they get.”