It’s Not Just the Drug War
The prison reforms on the table are unlikely to make even a dent in the forces that keep millions behind bars.
When it comes to uniquely American nightmares, it’s hard to beat our carceral state. Living in a country with 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, many are aware of the human rights catastrophe taking place around them. But when it comes to what’s actually driving this, the explanatory power of standard progressive narratives falls short.
Jacobin
One of the most shocking statistics in your 2016 book Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics is that simply rolling back punishments for violent offenses to their 1984 levels in 2004 would have done more to lower the incarceration rate — resulting in a cut in state prison rates of 30 percent — than simply ending the drug war.
Marie Gottschalk
The intense focus in criminal justice reform today on people convicted of nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual offenses — the so-called non, non, nons — is troubling. Many contend that we should lighten up on the sanctions for the non, non, nons so that we can throw the book at the really bad guys. But the fact is that we’ve been throwing the book at the really bad guys for a really long time.
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