Crimes of Punishment

My firsthand glimpse of prison was an experience for which there was no adequate preparation.

I waited in line in the cramped prison office to sign in. That process included having my left hand stamped with an ultraviolet light, walking through a metal detector, emptying my pockets, having my briefcase searched, and finally being patted down by a guard.

I made the mistake of taking my tape recorder out of my briefcase. No tape recorders or cameras are allowed in the prison. The guards at the front office said they would hold it for me until I returned.

I had been granted permission to accompany the members of the National Commission on Crime and Justice, a group of 20 African-American, Asian-American, Latino-American, and Native American activists, academics, and attorneys convened by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). We were to inspect the Central Facility at the Lorton Correctional Complex, operated by the District of Columbia Department of Corrections, in Lorton, Virginia.

Ninety-eight percent of the inmates at Lorton are African American. Whites and Hispanics make up the remaining two percent. I saw African-American prisoners, and I saw Hispanic prisoners, but I saw no white prisoners. I did see a lot of white guards.

Johnny Showell, assistant administrator for programs at Lorton, and our guide, led us first through the Industrial Division where license plates are made. I watched one inmate place new license plates in plastic bags. That was his job. It's an act of unskilled labor that will not get him a job when he leaves prison, pay him a decent wage, instill in him any sense of accomplishment, or keep him from returning to prison.

Our next stop was a dormitory where inmates are housed. This was an unscheduled stop on the tour. Jacquie Holmes, a prisoners' family rights advocate and a commission member, insisted we make the stop. It made no sense, she said, to take a tour of Lorton and not see the men where they live. Holmes, the wife and mother of offenders incarcerated in Oregon, has been battling with prison officials a long time and is naturally suspicious of them. She was right, of course, and the rest of us agreed.

The one-story building resembles an Army barracks with guards stationed at each end of the building. Sixty-seven men live here together, their beds side by side in rows, with a small locker resting behind each bed. The building is not air-conditioned during the summer months.

KERWOOD CORBIN, 40, LIVES HERE. He has been at Lorton for nine months. He was arrested for petty larceny -- he stole a bicycle off the street. Corbin has three more months to serve before he is scheduled to be released. A convict by society's standards, he is also a prisoner of the corrections bureaucracy.

Corbin was originally scheduled to go before the parole board in June 1989. Because of chronic backlogging due to overcrowding -- each caseworker at Lorton oversees approximately 105 prisoners -- Corbin was not brought up before the parole board until November. By that time he had already served more than half his sentence. The parole board decided that he might as well complete it.

Corbin cannot take advantage of the numerous vocational training programs offered at Lorton because his stay there is less than two years. Incarceration for less than two years means "you're just sitting around," according to Corbin. "They're sending people over here that don't meet the criteria [for training programs]," he says. Administrative officials say it takes at least two years for an inmate to learn a new trade or skill given their schedules -- which may include up to six hours of paid work a day, psychological therapy, classes, and meetings with their caseworker.

The last stop on the tour was the academic central facility. Principal Barbara Hart, a former teacher in the District of Columbia public school system, has an excellent vantage point from which to observe the flaws in the educational system. When the schools are working well, they can be instrumental in keeping people out of prison. Presently 90 percent of the men coming in to Lorton are operating on fourth- and fifth-grade reading levels, meaning they are functionally illiterate.

Hart is under no illusions about how much she and those she works with can accomplish. "Our job mainly is motivating 35-to-40-year-old men who were drug kingpins in the street and have a reputation in the dorm, " Hart said. "In the classroom, however, his peers know he can't read. "

PRISON, FOR MANY AMERICANS, remains a vague reality. That seems odd since we pay so much to keep prisons in operation. But the debate around prison reform has focused mainly on overcrowding, longer sentences, racial disparities, and the spiraling costs of incarceration, while there is another element of incarceration that needs immediate redress: the treatment of prisoners while incarcerated.

On February 28, 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mentally disabled prisoners can receive anti-psychotic drugs against their will even if the drugs have "serious, even fatal, side effects." According to the American Psychological Association these drugs have "grave effects, inhering potential for abuse, and an actual history of indiscriminate use by the psychiatric profession." The 6-3 Supreme Court decision overturns a previous ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court.

On March 5, 1990, less than a week later, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down another devastating decision. In a 5-4 vote, the court made it significantly more difficult for prisoners in state prisons to challenge their convictions in federal court. The ruling reflects the Supreme Court's conservative-majority impatience with state prisoners who appeal to federal courts because their constitutional rights were violated or claim that changes in the law since their original trial void their conviction. The new ruling, which does not take into account mitigating factors that would legitimately lead to a federal appeal, will have a major impact on death penalty cases.

"I see no parallel to this era of public meanness, legislative cruelty, and societal apathy with regard to the problems I am addressing," says Carl Upchurch, executive director of the Progressive Prisoners Movement (PPM), a prisoners advocacy group based in Newark, Ohio. "The Constitution is being brazenly circumvented in efforts to deny and renege on those rights which are guaranteed by that document."

Using Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign as a model, Upchurch is urging prisoners to empower themselves through nonviolent resistance. "For the last two years, I have been trying to form a cadre of people who won't participate in a system I see as brutal," he told Sojourners.

THIS YEAR MARKS THE 200th anniversary of the penitentiary in the United States. Since 1790, when the first prison was established in Philadelphia, the perception of crime and punishment by incarceration has been framed and inflamed by political rhetoric.

Incarceration -- indeed the entire criminal justice system -- has evolved into a $25 billion industry. We love to build jails and prisons, even though we know we cannot continue to do so. Incarceration makes us feel good, if not necessarily safe, and prevents us from critically assessing the root causes of crime.

During 1990, AFSC's National Commission on Crime and Justice will lead a yearlong campaign, officially called "200 Years of the Penitentiary Project: Breaking Chains, Forging Justice." The campaign intends to raise public awareness by highlighting, addressing, and proposing solutions to the root causes of crime. In 1991, the commission will release a "call to action," which will include public policy recommendations concerning criminal justice reform.

"There is an interconnectedness between the struggle for a more equitable criminal justice system and the continued fight for social justice for people of color and poor people," stated project coordinator Linda Thurston. "Alternatives to our current reliance on lengthy incarceration exist and must be brought to light, supported, and strengthened."

The combined number of people languishing in federal and state prisons and local jails has surpassed one million. Major penitentiaries and entire prison systems in more than 40 states are under order to improve conditions and put a ceiling on their inmate populations. Meanwhile, state and local governments must increasingly choose between building a new prison or building a new school. By 1995, the interest on bonds used to finance prison construction in the United States will be $600 million. That is $600 million not being spent on health care, education, or child care.

Consider these statistics: In the last decade, the official crime rate has risen only 7.3 percent while the number of people incarcerated has risen by 100 percent; on any given day, 3.5 million men, women, and children are under some type of correctional control -- incarceration, probation, or parole; $13 billion a year is spent on federal and state prisons and local jails; per capita spending on prisons and jails has increased by 218 percent during the last decade; and, it costs on average more than $1 million to incarcerate one prisoner for 30 years.

In May 1989 President Bush proposed a $1.2 billion federal anti-crime package that he claimed would "take back the streets by taking criminals off the streets." This proposal has several components: spend $1 billion on new federal prisons to house 24,000 additional inmates; hire 1,600 federal prosecutors; hire 825 new agents to work in the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the U.S. Marshals Office; increase the maximum sentence for a person convicted of using a semiautomatic weapon during a kidnapping or felony drug deal from the current five years to 10 years. The problem with the Bush plan is that its emphasis rests solely on punishment.

EXPANDING THE DEFINITION OF criminal justice, then, must be the place to start. This process can only begin by moving away from the "lock 'em up and throw away the key" language of conservatives as well as from the "more means better" policy of liberals who advocate for social programs as a cure-all for crime.

There are, in fact, merits and flaws to both the conservative and liberal perspectives on criminal justice. Prisons are necessary for certain people who commit certain -- usually violent -- types of crimes. But incarceration is no substitute for rehabilitation. Advocating for the elimination of racism and economic injustice will not eradicate crime or deter criminals in society.

The point is that politics can neither solve, nor replace as a theological anchor, what is ultimately a moral problem. Connecting aspects of both liberal and conservative perspectives about criminal justice, while challenging their underlying assumptions, can be accomplished through a faith perspective.

For Christians, biblical justice is not merely essential, it is the point from which any effort at reform originates. Prison evangelist Charles Colson summed up the role of the church best when he wrote on how to bring the conservative and liberal perspectives together. Calling the difference between the two views -- and the role of the church in each one -- "a false dichotomy," Colson said. "The church today urgently needs to recapture its whole biblical vision, understanding that there are not two calls upon Bible-believing Christians, only one ... It is not enough to say that we are working to fulfill the Great Commission nor to say merely that we are working for justice in society."

The role of the church looms large in the debate around prison reform, whether from the vantage point of an individual outside of prison or from the perspective of an individual within the criminal justice system. The church must become an active participant in the struggle to keep people out of prison and the work of ministering to those who are already incarcerated. "Prison ministry must be holistic, " says Ken Rogers, director of the prison ministry at Times Square Church in New York City. "This translates also into helping the families of the inmates," he says, primarily by providing spiritual guidance and by attending to other needs.

OUTSIDE OF THE CHURCH, services provided primarily by local and state governments outside of prison -- education, jobs, adequate housing, and health care -- should provide a system of checks and balances, leaving prison as a place of last resort, and a place for extreme cases such as Charles Manson or the "Son of Sam." When this system fails, prison then becomes society's first solution for its social ills. But "the criminal justice system is a poor second choice for treating societal problems," states Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates sentence reform and researches criminal justice issues.

A new report released by the Sentencing Project -- Young Black Men and the Criminal Justice System: A Growing National Problem -- finds that 609,690 black men in their 20s are under the control of the criminal justice system while only 436,000 (1986 figure) black men of all ages were enrolled in college. According to the report, 23 percent -- one in four -- of black men ages 20-29 are either in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole at an annual cost of $2.5 billion. For Hispanics, the rate is 10.4 percent, and for white men, 6.2 percent. Sixty percent of all females incarcerated are women of color.

The nation's prison population exploded by a record 46,004 inmates during the first six months of 1989. This is the highest half-year increase ever recorded. Since January 1, 1981, the number of prisoners per capita doubled to 260 per 100,000, or one out of every 400 people. If these figures continue to rise at this rate, one out of every 200 people will be a convicted felon by the year 2000. "Prisons work essentially for those people who have something at stake in the community," according to Charles Rouselle, director of the Offender Rehabilitation Division of the Public Defender Service in the District of Columbia. "This automatically excludes the poor and indigent who have nothing to lose." Indeed, the economic and human resource drain caused by increased incarceration, particularly for first offenders convicted of nonviolent crimes, only heightens the sense of anger, separateness, and neglect by society.

For minorities and poor people, it is becoming harder to distinguish life in prison from their own neighborhoods. Many criminal justice reform activists point to housing projects located in inner cities as an extension of prison. In housing projects women and children are the primary "prisoners," while the men are often literally behind bars. Increasingly, the housing projects themselves have bars on windows, armed guards and police patrols, and are surrounded by high fences.

To escape such an environment, poor young people are turning to drugs. As a result -- either by death or incarceration -- an entire generation of adult leadership is being lost in black communities.

New mandatory sentences for drug offenses are overloading all aspects of the criminal justice system -- police, prosecution, parole, probation, and courts. And city and county jails are bearing the brunt of incarcerating these young men and women.

"The drug epidemic caught us by surprise, and now we are forced to try and fix a train while it is running at a rapid speed," says Walter Ridley, acting commissioner of the D.C. Corrections Department. Ridley's frustration stems from the fact that corrections officers are not only required to incarcerate criminals, but they are also expected to rebuild values shattered by drugs, and care for an offender's physical and mental well-being, with inadequate facilities and low funds.

"We are subjected to all these criticisms. Corrections needs the same kind of support given to fire departments, police departments, judges, and prosecutors," according to Ridley. "So goes corrections, so goes the entire criminal justice system in this country." Elmanus Herndon, acting commissioner of the Maryland Division of Corrections in Baltimore, agrees. "What is it that we want the system to do?" he asks. "Educators, social workers, and corrections officers are also in prison. They have stress levels, too."

An unspoken alliance between the news media and politicians seems to have presented the public with a simplistic view of criminal justice: When someone commits a crime, they should be punished. "The system is characteristic of the military-industrial complex," says Jerry Miller, director of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA) in Arlington, Virginia. In the rush to incarcerate, individual needs are often caught up in "a very banal, manipulative series of arrangements." In other words, justice is often overlooked in the whole process.

INAPPROPRIATE RESPONSES to non-violent crime are responses that substitute punishment for rehabilitation and accountability; prohibit the participation of victims, offenders, local communities, and forward-thinking corrections officials in the debate; and ignore the fact that by placing people -- particularly first-time offenders -- in an environment that reflects the one from which they were taken defeats the purpose of criminal justice. "Americans fantasize about incarceration," says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a criminal justice research group based in San Francisco. "Punitive responses are embedded in the American psyche."

The whole question of alternatives to incarceration has historically been absent from any public debate about criminal justice. But recently advocates for alternatives to incarceration have had some positive examples across the nation on which to base their argument.

Alternatives require individualized attention, as an attempt is made to match the punishment to the crime, rehabilitate the offender, and compensate -- as much as possible -- the victim. Adequate treatment of the cause of an offense cannot take place if officials are operating from the premise that the same yardstick should be the measure for all crimes. But an increasing number of judges across the country welcome the alternatives because they are provided with options and because the alternatives often cost far less than incarceration.

Even in cases of violent crime, alternatives to incarceration should be considered, asserts Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project. Critical to understanding and accepting the idea of alternatives is the ability to "distinguish between a violent offense and a violent offender."

As an example Mauer compares the situation of a battered wife who hurts or kills an abusive husband with that of a first-degree murderer. "Can it really be said that the battered wife will commit the same crime? No. But it can reasonably be argued that a murderer would kill again." The majority of crimes -- including drug-related offenses -- and the majority of people incarcerated -- including repeat offenders -- are nonviolent in nature, according to statistics compiled by the federal government.

The Correctional Alternatives Act of 1989 (H.R. 2374), a bill introduced in Congress in May 1989 by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), seeks to involve the federal government in the debate about prison reform. The bill would provide federal money to states and cities to support programs for alternatives to incarceration. The bill encourages state and private-sector partnerships in providing vocational and job training, as well as drug and alcohol abuse programs for offenders.

These programs would be in addition to two relatively new alternative concepts. The first, a type of "boot camp" for drug offenders, is basically modeled after military boot camps, where a strenuous daily regimen of exercise and work is required. But reaction to the usefulness of boot camps has been mixed because of questions raised about their rehabilitative potential. The second alternative, which is more accepted, is electronic monitoring, in which offenders wear an electronic bracelet around their ankle that allows their probation officer to track their movements by computer. If offenders leave home when they are not supposed to, the authorities are immediately alerted.

THE INCREASING SOCIAL AND financial costs of increased incarceration, and the worsening condition of those most likely to be incarcerated, however, have demanded that activists not wait for the federal government to set up alternative systems. In 1989, Michigan became the 15th state to enact a community corrections bill. This bill serves to "encourage communities to assume greater responsibilities for their own offenders by having local boards develop and support a range of community sanctions and services which offer alternatives to incarceration and reduce recidivism."

The Association for Community Corrections in Michigan (ACCM), a non-profit association composed of 33 organizations located across the state that advocate for community corrections or offer community corrections programs, was formed to aid in the implementation of Michigan's Community Corrections Act (P.A. 511). The services offered by ACCM include substance abuse programs, job training, peer counseling, vocational and educational training, and mental health services.

A community corrections program -- with its emphasis on neighborhood sanctions -- is particularly valuable because it offers poor and minority people equal access to alternative opportunities for rehabilitation -- alternatives given to middle- and upper-class whites on a regular basis.

"Alternatives supplement what is in the community but is not being done in the home, school, family, and churches," says Cecelia Wright, executive director of the Alternatives Center/Offender Aid and Restoration of Oakland County in Pontiac, Michigan. Wright also serves as president of ACCM. "People get arrested and they get incarcerated, but it doesn't stop their problem. We have to intervene in this cycle if we are to save our cities."

More than 70 percent of the Alternative Center's clients are between the ages of 17 and 24. Fourteen percent of the clients are women. Typically, men coming into the program have a problem with substance abuse and some have committed larceny, according to Wright. Women usually have been convicted of prostitution, fraud, and shoplifting.

The Alternatives Center operates a 30-bed residential facility where clients can live from four to six months. Program services include counseling, vocational training, and G.E.D. preparation. Clients pay a small fee as if they were paying rent. After 30 days, clients can begin a job search and work, but they must return to the facility at night. Less than 20 percent of the clients get into trouble with the law once they graduate from the program.

BY HER OWN ADMISSION, Judy Stevenson never wanted for anything growing up as a child. She was reared in a stable home with two hard-working parents and finished high school. Just over a year ago, Stevenson, 36, a divorced mother of three teenagers, stood before a judge in Detroit. She had been arrested for stealing. She had sold what she stole and used the money to buy drugs.

Since 1977 Stevenson had been in and out of jail, usually for parole violations. Her last term in jail lasted 18 months. This time, however, her latest arrest marked her as a fourth habitual -- a repeat offender on a new charge. The sentence for a fourth habitual is a life term, which means in her circumstances serving anywhere from one to 20 years in prison.

From her cell in the Detroit House of Corrections, Stevenson wrote a letter to the judge who was to sentence her. "I was tired of going through these changes," she says. "I was tired of going through the criminal justice system. I needed help." She asked the judge to get her into a drug treatment program. Not once during her long history of arrests had she been offered the chance to get drug treatment, Stevenson said in the letter. She had always been incarcerated.

At her sentencing the judge told Stevenson that he had received her letter and sentenced her to one year at a drug treatment center called Rap House. If she left Rap House without permission or got into any kind of trouble, she would immediately begin serving an eight-year prison term.

After six months at Rap House, Stevenson left without permission. She walked out the front door, went home, and called her probation officer to ask for an appointment with the judge.

Through a friend, Stevenson had heard of the Alternatives Center, and asked to be placed in that program. The staff at the Alternatives Center told her that this was her last chance and that she could do right or go to prison. The choice was hers. She persevered and successfully completed the program with no violations.

Stevenson currently works as a press operator at a steel factory. "I go to church now, " she says, "because God has answered all my prayers."

CHRISTOPHER THAMES IS FROM the Southfield section of Detroit. He was 17 and a senior in high school when he was arrested in Pontiac, Michigan in 1985. Thames was originally arrested for two counts of accessory to a crime -- he was driving a vehicle which was carrying stolen merchandise. The charges carried a penalty of five to 15 years, but the sentence was reduced through plea bargaining to breaking and entering. Placed on probation, Thames missed two consecutive appointments with his probation officer.

"I was a time bomb emotionally, " says Thames. "I had no respect for authority." On the recommendation of a family friend, and with the consent of the judge, he entered the Alternatives Center. It was his first time away from home and was not an easy transition.

Sentenced to four months at the Alternatives Center, Chris served six months for "disciplinary problems." He was required to attend classes to make up for lost time at high school and to learn how to fill out job applications and resumes.

After serving his first 30 days at the center, Thames found a job as a parking valet at a night club. The environment was not conducive to staying out of trouble, so he left and found work as a retail salesperson, the job he held when he graduated from the program.

Thames, now 22, is currently working as a licensed insurance salesperson and living on his own. He has also completed two semesters of college. He credits his experience at the Alternatives Center as a blessing.

Prisons and jails have become a dumping ground for the aged, insane, infirm, poor, and people of color. Nonetheless, prisons and jails remain a fact of life. By incarcerating people -- particularly the most vulnerable in our society -- without regard to what influenced their crime, we give up hope for them. Unfortunately, it is the financial implications of increased incarceration, and not a moral imperative, that is spurring such a flurry of activity in recent years around prison reform.

The damage done by unnecessary incarceration extends beyond the criminal justice system. For every man, woman, or youth incarcerated, there is usually someone left behind -- wives, husbands, children, siblings, parents, and other loved ones. Families and communities become dysfunctional as a result.

Alternatives to incarceration offer a more potent symbolism about how justice should operate in a modern, supposedly "kinder and gentler" society. The criminal justice system is not an entity unto itself; it is a spin-off of the wider culture. The two must be reformed concurrently.

Anything less is simply not reform.

Anthony A. Parker was assistant editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.