The news and pictures after George Floyd’s death have been numbing: protests; riot-geared police swinging nightsticks; police kneeling and marching with protestors; white supremacist infiltrators; “anarchists”; Trump tweeting, hiding in the White House, holding a Bible aloft and preaching militarism; looting, burning, and peaceful protest in over 60 cities here and more abroad.
I’ve had a hard time finding an edge to hang onto in this—and more importantly, a good story for tomorrow. Then came Danielle Allen in yesterday’s Washington Post. She’s Harvard, she’s black, and has her own sad family story. A cousin, incarcerated at 15, served an 11-year sentence for a failed carjacking and was killed by a man he’d met in prison.
Allen zeroes in on incarceration. And she has information that is new to me and I’m sure to most Americans. Our prisons, places we know incarcerate people of color at an inordinate rate and can turn petty wrong-doers into criminals, do not have to be this way. And they can be a key to unraveling the mess we’re in.
Allen suggests we “reduce our reliance on incarceration from 70 percent of the sanctions imposed in our criminal-justice system to 10 percent.” “This is not utopian,” she says. “The Netherlands uses incarceration at about this rate and Germany at [a] lower rate… If we pick this one goal and organize our energy around that, everything else will change — policing, drug policies, court processes, the depths of our despair, our health, our freedom, our economic opportunities. Everything.”
That’s bold, but a quick check says the US incarcerates 693 of 100,000 citizens; Germany 76; the Netherlands 69! Both use fines and other forms of community-based sentences and stress “normalization.”
Sens. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) have proposed a national commission tasked with “a comprehensive review of the criminal justice system.” Let them do it!
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