“Don’t say that you will never wear the beggar’s bag, nor go to prison.” –Russian proverb
Adult males have about a 1 in 200 chance of going to prison, but this perverse lottery has climbed substantially in the last several decades. According to Counting Prisoners in Wisconsin, “The United States has had the highest incarceration rate in the world following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The general level of incarceration in this country hovered around 100 per 100,000 persons for 50 years until the 1980s and ‘90s, when it shot up to nearly 500 per by the turn of the century.”
The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that, of those who get arrested, “Almost nine out of every 10 jail inmates were adult males. However, the number of adult females in jail increased faster than males.”
In Wisconsin, we’ve largely overlooked this problem. However, as the Capital Times reported in April, then Chancellor of UW-Madison John Wiley “let loose on a number of issues facing Wisconsin in a sharply worded piece in the September 2008 issue of Madison Magazine. Wiley not only blasted some legislators for their hostile stance toward the University of Wisconsin System, he also asked why Minnesota, a state with a population similar to Wisconsin’s, had roughly 14,000 fewer people behind bars, 8,757 compared to Wisconsin’s 22,966 inmates.”
Wiley raises an important issue since Wisconsin taxpayers paid 16 percent higher than the national average in 2008 for corrections percentage of total state government expenditures.
Race plays a large factor in Wisconsin’s prison problem. According to Bruce Dixon of The Black Commentator, “Wisconsin leads the nation in the percentage of its black inhabitants under lock and key. Just over four percent of black Wisconsin, including the very old and the very young of both sexes, are behind bars. So Wisconsin, and in particular the Milwaukee area justly merit the invidious distinction of the Worst Place in the Nation to be Black.”
The Prison Policy Initiative also illustrates how Wisconsin has skewed its prison populations in various counties. According to Wagner, “the census doesn’t tell us where the prisoners came from, but we have six counties in Wisconsin that have more than half of their black population incarcerated. That makes it pretty easy to see that prisoners are coming from one part of Wisconsin and are incarcerated in other counties.”
Since the “tough on crime” slogan has so distorted Wisconsin state politics, anyone who questions the need for new prisons gets shunned.
The sick quality to this discussion is that we seem to be heading down a road only leading to more prisoners, more guards and more problems to taxpayers and prisoner alike. Mandatory minimum sentencing is just one of many policies that are consuming valuable state resources that could be used to benefit citizens without criminalizing greater portions of the population. Many prisoners are locked up simply because of the minimum sentencing requirement when they could be more productive in the community as a part of it, rather than a prisoner to it.
The psychological toll taken is to alienate those who have become prisoners from the rest of the citizenry, especially when the aftermath ruins their chances at job opportunities, plunges them further in debt and withers empathy with the powers that put them behind bars.
The problem that our nation and Wisconsin in particular must confront is the idea that more prisons do not make our state better, our people happier, or society better. As the percentage of people who have been in or are in jail keeps expanding, we need to realize that throwing more tax dollars at the problem each year only encourages the profiteers and prison-makers, and does little for the rest of us.
Underlying this problem is the insane behavior of the state, and ultimately our complicity with this system. Wilson sums up the position best when he says, “On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge maximum security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.”
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