|
|
|
Features
< Back
Compliance : Sarbanes Oxley : Auditing : Thought Leader
WE ARE ALL PRISONERS NOW
By
Nell Bernstein
|
|
Nell Bernstein
Author
Nell Bernstein
|
Over the past year, 1,000 new prisoners entered America?s packed jails and prisons every week, bringing the nation?s prison population to 2.2 million?a record high here and anywhere on the planet.
During much of this time, I was traveling around the country speaking in person and on talk radio about my book, All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated. Everywhere I went, without exception, I heard the same thing: My family has been touched by this, too.
Once, after a radio interview, the engineer told me that he had been arrested in front of his children. Another time, the engineer was a young grandmother trying to gain custody of her incarcerated son?s children. During yet another interview, the host announced on air that his brother-in-law had done time, leaving his children fatherless.
In reporting my book I spoke with children across the country whose families had been severed by incarceration, and the drug war?which is single-handedly responsible for the boom in the prison population?in particular. Many of these children were black: African American children are nine times more likely than white to have an incarcerated parent. But plenty were white: the drug laws, while disproportionately targeting blacks and Latinos (blacks use drugs at almost exactly the same rate as whites?and so make up about 14 percent of the nation?s drug users?but they comprise 74 percent of the nation?s drug prisoners), are so broadly written that they inevitably reach beyond these targets.
When I set out to promote my book, I hoped to reach beyond preaching to the converted. By letting those who had little first-hand experience of the criminal justice system see that system through children?s eyes, I hoped to spark new ways of thinking about crime and punishment. Think of it, I imagined myself exhorting the unenlightened, as if it were your children.
This instruction, I quickly learned, was superfluous. Everywhere I went, someone told me, This is my child. This is my story, too. The biggest surprise has been how hard it is these days to find anyone who has not, in some way, been touched by the criminal justice system.
A reading at a Borders Books in Phoenix quickly devolved into a tearful group therapy session. One woman?a black child welfare worker?was struggling with whether to take her young son his visit his incarcerated father. Another?a middle-age white woman who looked every inch the soccer mom?had been visiting her daughter, a grad student picked up for her first DUI, in the county jail for the past several months, and was stunned by the hostile indifference she met as a family member.
At a university in New Mexico, a student thanked me for the book; she came to the reading, she told me, because of her younger brother, who is growing up in the shadow of their mother?s incarceration. She herself, she added, was no longer affected; she was grown up now and able to care for herself. Then, in the lobby of the student center, she began to shake.
I spent five years researching my book, talked to hundreds of children; I thought I had limned the pain caused by our policy of indiscriminate incarceration. I may have tested the depth of that pain, but I underestimated the breadth. At a panel at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, I spoke alongside young people whose parents had been incarcerated, before an audience of other young people studying for a career in corrections. Soon, it seems, there will be no one left but the jailer and the jailed.
Is it desperation that leads me to find hope in these numbers? One of the basic functions of incarceration is invisibility: We place our prisons in remote rural counties, build high walls and lock out the media. Then we fortify those walls with stigma, so that those who have been there, or seen family sent there, will keep that journey secret.
But an elephant can grow only so large before people start remarking on its presence in the living room. One in ten American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision today?in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. The numbers, who have had this experience at some point in their lives, or will, is obviously much larger. Those who have lived or worked inside a prison, or seen a family member spirited away, have seen what we are hiding from ourselves, and they are beginning to speak of it. I have to believe that it is their voices, their experience, that will turn back the tidal wave that incarceration has become.
Recently in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush signed an executive order aimed at rolling back the multiple restrictions on employment that make it virtually impossible for those leaving prison to get back on their feet. He?s got occasion enough to be concerned: Each of his three children has had run-ins with the police, and his daughter Noelle has found herself behind bars, albeit briefly, because of her drug problem.
At a drug conference in Florida after his daughter?s arrest, Jeb Bush wept onto the podium as he talked about his family?s struggle. Critics were quick to cry ?hypocrite," but rather than pointing fingers, why not ask him to join hands with the thousands of parents whose children are locked up in his state prisons for non-violent drug crimes; the thousands of children who won?t have Dad there to bail them out when they forge a Xanax scrip, because Dad is incarcerated, too.
The reasoned arguments against the drug war have been made ad infinitem, and new ones emerge every day. A study released in April, for example, found that Proposition 36, California?s treatment-instead-of-incarceration initiative, has saved the state?s taxpayer?s $7 for every dollar spent.
The economic argument against indiscriminate incarceration is irrefutable, but that doesn?t mean it can?t be ignored. What may bring it home is a river of tears, from governors and grandmothers ?the millions of Americans who have seen their families shattered by our insistence on answering addiction, and myriad other social problems, with incarceration only.
In Phoenix, I told the weeping soccer mom with the DUI daughter how powerful her testimony was, and encouraged her to share it more widely. Not now, she said; not while her daughter was still in the clutches of the state. But soon, she promised, we?d be hearing from her.
Nell Bernstein
Author
Nell Bernstein
Author of ALL ALONE IN THE WORLD: CHILDREN OF THE INCARCERATED
|
|
|
|
|
