Good News

It's time for some good news about architecture. No more sinkholes or collapsing bridges. It turns out that conservative ideology is good for one, very specific kind of public construction. See if you can guess. The answer comes after the break.

You got it: Prisons.

2.3 million Americans are incarcerated-- that's about 762 per 100,000 people. We're the top in the world, both in absolute and relative. (In case you are interested, China has the second most absolute, and Belarus the second most relative ) And that number has increased four times since 1980.

But statistics are easy. Too often, progressives rely on mantra-like repetition of a numbers to make an point. But saying that 1% of the worlds population earns more than the other 60% is not an argument about inequality. It's a brute fact. So, if we want to understand the prison boom, we have to get beyond the stats.

And that's what makes the recent issue of the Boston Review -- focused on prisons -- so useful. The BR site has three good essays up; but if you're going to read one, check out Guarded Hope, by Robert Perkinson.

Perkinson details the origins of the current prison boom in the response to the crime boom in the late 60s, and traces it forward into the Reagan period, to today. He examines several different explanations of the prison explosion -- American fear-culture, post-industrial economic structures, broader policy paradigms, revanchism against civil rights. All of this is far more exciting than it sounds.

The essay ends with a small note of hope:
At the close of the Bush era, there are scattered signs that America’s prison paroxysm may have run its course. Although the country’s inmate population continues to rise (climbing 16 percent between 2000 and 2006, not counting the advent of U.S. detention abroad, from Guantánamo to Bagram), budget crises are forcing an array of politicians to reckon with what their tough-on-crime posturing has created. In New York the state assembly has been revising the Rockefeller drug laws to make them more forgiving. In Kansas, parole officers are no longer automatically reincarcerating their charges for low-level violations like failing a urine test. In Iowa lawmakers are requiring that all new sentencing laws be assessed for potentially negative racial impacts, and in Nevada politicians have started rolling back mandatory minimums. Across the country and on both sides of the aisle, increasing numbers of policymakers are starting to agree with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who told the American Bar Association in 2003 that “our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long.”

Posts at the Big Con often (rightfully) call for for renewed investment in America's infrastructure. But prisons are one part of the American infrastructure that we could afford a little benign underfunding. Maybe we could use the extra money for those poor bridges?

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