Growing up clean in America
Iused to go to jails a lot. And to prisons sometimes. I was there when they found the body of a kid arrested for drunk driving hanging in his cell in the Jefferson Davis Parish Jail in 1982. Every workday morning for two years I checked in and drank cop-shop coffee with the jailers in Shreveport and Bossier City. I made small talk and copied down the fresh names in the book-in and what they were being held on.
The magnetometer in Arizona’s Maricopa County Jail was tuned so sensitively it picked up the tacks in my shoe heels. They made me go in in my sock feet. There is a gut-sinking finality in the sound of steel doors clunking closed; you feel an acidic panic rising in your throat. There is something profoundly unnatural about people in cages.
It never became routine. Not for me.
Lots of people never think about our criminal justice system, figuring it has nothing to do with them. If you tell them that America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, that we have 5 percent of the world’s population but nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, some people might cheer. Lock ’em up.
But most of us understand that’s not ideal, that it’s a moral crisis. In
2012, in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik observed “there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag under Stalin at its height.”
Some of those people need to be locked up. But a lot of them are being held for crimes that, in other countries, wouldn’t require incarceration. We put more people in prison—and keep them there longer—than any other country in the world.
(Except for the Seychelles archipelago, which by some measures has a higher rate of incarceration than ours. But consider the country has a population of less than 100,000 and hosts a jail where the United Nations deposits Somali pirates captured in the Indian Ocean.)
On Saturday night, as part of the Arkansas Cinema Society’s Filmland events, a documentary about our prison-industrial complex called A Survivor’s Guide to Prison was shown. Now you might wonder why this film was chosen, and part of the reason is that there is an Arkansas connection. One of its producers is Hope native Christina Arquette, the niece of Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, a childhood friend of Bill Clinton who went on to serve as the 42nd president’s first chief of staff. Christina is married to David Arquette, of the famous show business family, who also served as a producer.
And so A Survivor’s Guide to Prison winds up on the screen at Little Rock’s Ron Robinson Theater before about 300 fairly well-heeled folks, most of whom probably didn’t take the title literally. For they are not the sort of people who have bad interactions with the police; they are not the sort of people who imagine they might someday find themselves having to try to negotiate life in prison.
It’s tempting to discuss the aesthetic values of the movie, a spectacularly well-edited film with a style that might be fairly described as assaultive. It’s about as rousingly entertaining as a movie about a thoroughly depressing subject can be.
Directed and at times narrated by Matthew Cooke, who directed the similarly paced How to Make Money Selling Drugs (2012) and edited Amy Berg’s superb Oscar-nominated doc Deliver Us from Evil (2006), Prison employs depressingly familiar footage of out-of-control police officers beating suspects and losing it on journalists and citizens with the audacity to witness their bad behavior, as well as celebrity faces (Danny Trejo) and voices (Susan Sarandon) offering advice on how to get through the worst day (or years) of your life.
“Be prepared to be completely humiliated and violated,” rapper Busta Rhymes intones. Elsewhere we are advised that the police can legally lie to you, and that if confronted by an officer we should be polite but never engage without having our attorney present.
And if you think being innocent is enough, think again. As many as 15 percent of the people in prison aren’t guilty of the crime for which they’re serving time. Part of this has to do with what Cooke identifies as authority bias—most of us are willing to believe a police officer’s word over a private citizen’s—and part of it is due to the overwhelming advantage the government has in most trials. Prosecutors overcharge suspects to the point that the only rational choice is to take a plea deal; 95 percent of suspects do. Public defenders are overburdened and underpaid and have little choice but to keep the system operating, though if more suspects insisted on going to trial, the extra time and expense would cause the courts to lock up.
Facts and statistics fly by fast, and, since this is a work of advocacy, maybe we ought to examine them a little closer. One that caught my ear was the assertion that the average American inadvertently commits three felonies a day.
That factoid apparently comes from Harvey A. Silverglate’s 2009 book Three Felonies a Day, which argues no one can “predict with any reasonable assurance whether a wide range of seemingly ordinary activities might be regarded by federal prosecutors as felonies.” So in practice, an overreaching prosecutor could find a way to charge you with a crime. And, in practice, a bad cop can arrest you because he doesn’t like your face.
It’s worth thinking about. In this country, you have a better chance of being acquitted if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. If you have the resources, you can buy a better quality of justice. Elected prosecutors have to consider public opinion if they want to hold onto their jobs (or aspire to higher office).
Prison reform isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—a partisan issue. Conservatives have long railed against the over-criminalization of American life by the expansion of the regulatory state. There are now nearly 5,000 federal statutes on the books. Maybe we’d all better pay attention.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.