Prisonville USA, Population 2.2 Million

The Back Road Café is on the road this summer, heading to different American cities across the nation. Today we travel to our nation’s fourth largest city, just behind Chicago’s 2.7 million folks and slightly ahead of Houston. But this city is hard to visit. Unless you’re in trouble.

Welcome to Prisonville USA. Population 2.2 million. That’s the number of US adult men and women behind bars. It’s a different kind of city, almost futuristic, like a series of pods spread across the nation, connected by an underground infrastructure, in this case fed by racial hatred and fear, unemployment, drug addiction and the prison industrial complex. Sounds pretty American to me.

Sorry that my travelog this week is a bit of a downer. No funny stories as in previous weeks about John Denver and Rocky Mountain High. Prisonville simply is: it’s huge, growing, dangerous, wasteful, ugly, expensive, and mean.

The US prison industrial complex is just that, complex. It’s peopled not only by millions of inmates, but millions of employees, working on acres of infrastructure, in most counties, every state. Add in the family members of all these people and the number of people closely connected to our punitive criminal justice system could make a megalopolis.

Some numbers:

• 25% - of all the world’s prisoners are in US prisons. (We are 5% of world population.)
• 743 – people per 100,000 US population who are in prison. (.7%) (Russia: 557. England and Wales: 154. Canada: 117. Japan: 59 per 100,000.)
• 1 in 32 – Americans are in the justice system: jail, prison, parole, probation.
• $24,000 – cost per US prisoner per year.
• $60.3 billion – annual prison expenditures (including $5.1 in new prison construction.)
• 500% - increase in California prison population since 1982.

(Source: Wikipedia article “US Incarceration Rate” – read it and weep.)

It’s hard to talk with the residents of this prison city, if you’re looking for the (literally) “inside” story. News is hard to come by, and communication within this “city” of all US prisoners is pretty limited.

So it’s all the more amazing that 30,000 prisoners in California’s federal prisons went on a hunger strike this week.  It’s the largest prison strike in the state history. Almost one-fifth of all California prisoners are refusing to eat, and a smaller number are refusing to work. They are demanding changes in policies around solitary confinement for prisoners. 10,000 of California’s 160,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement. Strikers are demanding a reduction in so-called security housing units (cells where prisoners are held in solitary for up to 23 hours a day). A change in the way prison gangs are punished, improved nutrition, construction programs for those in solitary, and an end to rewarding those who inform on others.

I’m no romantic about prisoners. I’d rather mass murderers were off the streets. But the sheer numbers are an embarrassment for our supposedly civilized country, not to mention the inconsistencies and inequalities in sentencing and treatment.

GuantanamoAnd there’s Guantanamo. Another American prison, on a US Naval base in Cuba, which the Bush administration established to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists from Iraq and Afghanistan. Also to commit massive amounts of torture and abuse. Worse than in US “regular” prisons? Probably so,  but in the same way stabbing is worse than slicing; there’s blood and pain in both.

More numbers; at one time there were almost 800 detainees at Guantanamo. Now it’s down to 166, but Obama or Congress or something makes it impossible to carry out Obama’s repeated pledge to close it entirely. In its five separate prisons a staff of 2,000 federal employees – Army guard, Navy medics, contract cooks and intelligence analysts, keep an eye – and a heavy hand – on those 166 people.

They too have been on a hunger strike. That seems to be one of the few ways to get the public’s attention when you in prison. But some of them quit the strike this week, it was reported, because of Ramadan. They wanted to be able to eat and pray together during the holy month, and if you refuse to eat you are put in solitary confinement. A new more lenient policy allows some hunger strikers, if they are well behaved, six hours a day of communal time. 

This policy does not apply to the 45 captives who are considered so malnourished from months of hunger strikes that they are being force fed.

There are no plans yet to force feed the California prison hunger strikers. It’s only been a week. And while the publicity of the Gitmo forced feedings is bad, California would be worse.

And in one last bit of criminal justice news; George Zimmerman was found innocent yesterday of murder or manslaughter changes after killing unarmed Florida black teenager Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman said Martin looked suspicious, and under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, Zimmerman, a private security guard, could kill if he felt nervous or threatened. 

Zimmerman escaped jail time, for now at least. But he has been in hiding for month because of the negative publicity around his case. One wonders if he will ever escape the prison-like effect of public threat and scorn. Maybe some prisons do have value.  Keep George Zimmerman running in fear, and out of my life. Guys like that I do want locked up. 

Copyright 2013 Deborah Streeter