Some real effects of the US approach to crime - Part 4

Prison is big business now – they employ a lot of people and require technological and construction expertise. Prison construction and control are increasingly being privatized. Think of the kind of industry required when a new prison is being built every week. Whole segments of the economy are now entirely devoted to the incarceration industry. Campbell’s Soup discovered in 1994 that prisons were the fastest growing food market. Some pharmaceutical companies now specialize in just developing and providing drugs to prisons to deal with mental illness and public order issues. Web pages are devoted to the promotion and sale of "correction industry" products for super-max prisons – surveillance devices, leg and arm restraints, stun guns and pepper sprays to name a few products cheerfully advertised.

Is it a coincidence that the decline of the Southern agrarian economy has seen a boom in imprisonment – that ‘the Cotton Belt’ is now nicknamed ‘the Prison Belt’? Is it a coincidence that after the end of the cold war, and a world wide decline in military spending, that the two biggest imprisoners in the world, with recent massive leaps in spending, are Russia and the USA?

What does this mean for Australia? Well firstly, just like weapons, prisons are an exportable industry. The US is a standard setter and increasingly harsh sentences and longer prison terms have become a world-wide trend. Who do we consult about policing and law enforcement? Where will we go for the latest in surveillance technology or prison construction expertise? Our friend across the Pacific, as usual. British companies are already trading with the US incarceration industry leaders. The US has a lot invested in promoting the idea that crime rates drop when you get ‘tough on crime’.

If you look at Australia, it seems to work. People get excited when they go to New York city and they feel so safe. John Howard invites US law enforcement people to Australia to discuss zero tolerance and the war on drugs. But ‘tough on crime’ and ‘zero tolerance’ are more than just buzzwords being bandied around – we may have more in common with the US than we like to think. On the weekend I was reading an article in the New York Times about the US trend of putting juvenile offenders (some as young as 10) into adult prisons. The article discussed the vulnerability of the young boys and girls to sexual abuse and beatings in jail and suggested that faced with such brutal treatment at an impressionable age, most young offenders will never become rehabilitated into normal society. As I often do here, I reflected on how a country that seems so familiar can also seem so foreign and brutal to me at times. Then I picked up the Sydney Morning Herald.

I read about how an eleven-year-old boy spent a night in an adult jail (because that is exactly what police custody is) for shoplifting. I read that another twelve-year-old spent two nights in jail for a similar offense. I discovered that another little boy, also eleven, was handcuffed by police to move him to a neighboring courtroom. Of course the boys were Aboriginal. Just as half the juveniles in adult detention in the US are black, half the juveniles in detention in Australia are black (and Aborigines are two per cent of our population, not 15 per cent like African-Americans). Mandatory sentencing in WA and NT is a copy of California’s three-strikes system – and it produces similarly absurd and brutal results. We can’t keep telling ourselves "well the US is different, it is a country of extremes" or even that "NT and WA are different and a little strange about aborigines". In NSW prison number have doubled in a decade. More non-violent drug offenders are being imprisoned than before and for longer, despite commendable initiatives like Drug Courts. We are becoming more like the US every day, in everything, and crime control is far from being an exception.

Australia has to make a decision about crime and punishment. Should we go down the US path? It is tempting. I mean, the US is a prosperous country, they must be doing something right! Right?

Whenever I see hints of the US example I shudder in horror. People can’t be tossed in jail because they don’t make money. The US has paid a terrible price for its prosperity. It is a price we should refuse to pay.