Compared to most places in America, South County doesn’t suffer the worst of street crime or caging.
In 2011 Great Barrington’s crime rate of 1,276 per 100,000 ranked behind Massachusetts’ rate of 1,362 and the national rate of 1,576 (covering murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, automobile vehicle theft, and larceny, but excluding drug offenses) — though the incidence of those crimes here increased by 48 percent in just six years, whereas the crime rate both statewide and nationwide dropped during that period.
We spy no fortress prisons in the western part of the state. And those way off in places like Walpole and Bridgewater are kept off limits to intrepid reporters of which there are none. Not even the local jails or lockups ever get exposed to public view.
All of America’s “secret prisons” seem a world away. Including those right under our noses. Nobody wants to know what goes on there. We keep them out of sight, out of mind.
That doesn’t mean it’s right. We shouldn’t shrink from the struggle for justice. As Dorothy Day once put it, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
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Compared to other states, Massachusetts seems maybe not so bad. In 2010, our rate of incarceration of 377 per 100,000 persons ranked as the sixth lowest in the U.S. — nowhere the jaw-dropping rate of 1,341 for Louisiana, or the 1,155 for Mississippi, or Oklahoma’s 1,081. (Neighboring Connecticut registered 561 and New York 492.) But those numbers, too, reveal only part of the story.
Lest we gloat that Massachusetts (377) uses incarceration so infrequently, we need to keep in mind that this state’s addiction to imprisonment is still much higher than that of 77 other nations, including the United Kingdom (147), Canada (118), Germany (79), Japan (51), and India (30).
A recent study by the Prison Policy Institute of Northampton reports that the U.S. resorts to imprisonment more than any other nation in the world, holding more than 2.4 million people locked up in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,259 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories. That doesn’t include the CIA’s “black sites.”
At any given moment our known prisoners include an estimated 722,000 people in local jails who have not been convicted, as well as almost 15,000 children behind bars whose “most serious offense” wasn’t a crime, and thousands of probation and parole violators who broke some rule but not necessarily a criminal statute. A large percentage are mentally ill; in fact, we keep more of our mentally ill in prisons than mental institutions.
Government statistics often conceal how many individuals are locked up for a simple drug offense. But the total includes at least 237,000 people in state prison, 95,000 in federal prison, and 5,000 in juvenile facilities, plus some unknowable portion of the population confined in military prisons, territorial prisons and local jails.
Furthermore, more than 22,000 are in federal prison for violating federal immigration laws. A separate 34,000 are technically not in the criminal justice system; they are detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), undergoing deportation.
Break down our own Mass. incarceration and we see that the use of state prison here varies greatly by race. The white rate is 241 per 100,000 residents, Hispanics’ 928, and blacks’ 1,502 or close to seven times more imprisonment than Anglos. Whites make up 79 percent of our state’s overall population, but they account for only 49 percent of the imprisoned population, whereas Hispanics number only 10 percent of the state population but 24 percent of the prisoners, and blacks represent 7 percent of the population but 26 percent of the inmates.
In that imbalance, Massachusetts is not much better than Deep South parts of “post-racial America,” and in fact, our racial disproportionality is even worse than the national average.
Massachusetts has long doled out some of the harshest penalties in the country for juvenile killers; a 1996 law provided for children as young as 14 to be tried as adults when charged with first- or second-degree murder. The sentence: life imprisonment without parole — for kids.
It wasn’t until last year that Gov. Deval Patrick signed legislation raising the age of adult jurisdiction for any crime from 17 to 18. In 2013 the state’s highest court also struck down life sentences without parole for juveniles, saying scientific research shows that lifelong imprisonment for youths is “cruel and unusual” because their brains are “not fully developed.”
Massachusetts was not rising ahead of the wave when it made those changes. The fact was, even the Paleolithic United States Supreme Court had forced the issue regarding juvenile life without parole. Massachusetts was no shining light there.
Neither was it showing leadership when Governor Patrick also signed a Three Strikes sentencing law modeled on California’s abominable failure that has virtually bankrupted that state.
Dostoevsky said, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
Yet prison conditions in oh-so-civilized Massachusetts get very little public scrutiny. Media access to state prisons here is tightly restricted. And inspectors are few and far between.
Some prison conditions here are especially atrocious. As of 2013, Massachusetts was one of only two states — the other was Arkansas — that allowed state prisoners to live in solitary confinement for up to 10 years because of disciplinary infractions.
Prison reform in the age of our own Mass. imprisonment has become a low-priority issue for today’s brand of timid political activists, who often seem more concerned about their own comfort than they are about the greater good of the society.
In the lead-up to the great Civil War, Massachusetts was the center of a powerful movement of abolitionists, prison reformers, and other champions of social justice. Activists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Samuel Gridley Howe and Charles Lenox Remond, Abby Kelley Foster, Horace Mann, Dorothea Dix and Franklin Sanborn led the charge. They labored in behalf of the downtrodden and oppressed — slaves, prisoners, and others less fortunate than themselves.
Who today will pick up the torch?
