by Grayson Lewis (staff writer)

On May 4th, 1989, two older boys convinced Joe Sullivan to rob a house with them in their town. The three boys robbed the house while the resident was not there and left, but later that day, someone broke into the house and sexually assaulted the woman who lived there. The suspect was described as a Black boy, which all three of the young robbers were. The older boys pinned the assault on Joe, and he was soon charged with life in prison and incarcerated. When he was charged and sentenced, Joe was thirteen years old with mental disabilities and had endured abuse and neglect with no stable home. Despite these characteristics and the lack of solid evidence of the sexual assault, Joe was said to be a ‘violent recidivist.’ While in prison, his mental state and livelihood did not change; in fact, they got worse. An inmate that had been housed with Joe solemnly described him as “disabled, horribly mistreated, and wrongfully condemned to die in prison” (Stevenson 259). When visited by Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson noted that his mental development had stagnated from when he was incarcerated at 13. Confined to a wheelchair, Joe behaved like a child, clapping his hands joyously and asking Stevenson what his favorite color and cartoon character were. This young, disabled, hurting boy was trapped in the body of a 31-year-old, desperately seeking companionship and solace behind bars (Ibid., 262-263). 

Joe’s story is not unique or uncommon. Prisons are used as a dumping ground for the disabled, the neglected, the minority, and the addict. Joe’s story is one of hundreds of millions that display the horrific outcomes of incarceration: the pain, horror, sorrow, and deprivation from society and growth. Instead of being actually assisted, Joe was discarded and sentenced to life in a facility that is useless to his rehabilitation and reform. Prisons do not serve real justice, as they do not support rehabilitation and reformation, and instead, exist directly to punish in an inhumane manner. The problem runs so much deeper than truly meets the eye, and so much deeper than the story of Joe Sullivan. The American prison system has been and continues to be oppressive and racist through the harmful, discriminatory practices that uphold the institution itself as we see throughout its history. This system of justice serves no justice at all, as it targets groups who are marginalized and oppressed, and serves no actual help to these communities, leaving them broken. Prisons are obsolete, and must be abolished and replaced with community corrections, rehabilitation, and offender-based reform in order to ensure true reform and justice in America.

In the midst of the Civil Rights and antiwar movements, ‘law and order’ rhetoric became popular amongst politicians across the board, especially conservatives who drew an ever growing base. This linkage of criminality and race in the rhetoric of politicians, connected criminality and race in the consciousness of the American public, welcoming in President Richard Nixon and his infamous War on Drugs. Richard Nixon was a conservative who was highly against protest, as he had made clear by calling Black people ‘thugs’ and using other racist language in his rhetoric. Stating that drug abuse was “public enemy number one” in 1971, Nixon increased federal funding on drug-control agencies and proposed mandatory minimums. In 1973, he created the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to target drug use and smuggling in the United States (War on Drugs). All of this was coupled with heavily racially charged rhetoric, alluding to what Nixon’s true motives behind the drug war were: incarcerating minorities. Past allusion, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, came out in 1994 describing the true motives of the War on Drugs as being directly to disrupt Black communities, saying, “we could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did (Ibid.).”

After a hiatus in the mid and late 1970s, the War on Drugs resumed at a much more oppressive and disastrous level with the Reagan administration, ultimately opening the gates for the era of mass incarceration. Elected in 1980, the charismatic Ronald Reagan was a manifestation of the conservatism that had been growing since the 1960s. Reagan promised the public to have an agenda to crack down on drug use and crime, discussing a crackdown on drugs and those who smuggled them across the borders; he laid out a strategy that would prevent drugs from coming into the US using military intelligence and honing in on drug traffickers. Despite all of this, there was no drug crisis. In 1982, when Reagan first spoke of a large crackdown on drug trafficking, marijuana, heroin, hallucinogens, and cocaine, use had either dropped or leveled out. Reagan knew a drug spike was coming, though, as he was manufacturing it (Anderson 124).

Reagan and his administration manufactured and facilitated the drug crisis they claimed to be combating in order to target Black communities with the help of the Contras. After having already funnelled millions to the Contras, a right-wing Nicaraguan military group, the group’s leaders proposed the idea of trafficking cocaine into California in order to provide funds to train and weaponize more members. There was a network of gangs and cartels already in place, and with the CIA and National Security Council protecting the smugglers from the FBI and the DEA, the plan was in place. Once in the US, top-tier cocaine was sold as crack rocks for cheap, getting people hooked fast. The result of this plan was an explosion of crack in inner cities, especially Los Angeles, California, that wreaked havoc on a population that was already inflicted with double-digit unemployment and wage inequality. Crack spread into Black communities all across the country, pulling out the rug from under them and dismantling any chance they had to move out of poverty (Anderson, 125-126). Whilst funnelling crack into Black communities, Reagan enacted harsh, racist incarceration policy for drugs with the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. This act established harsh and unequal mandatory minimums for crack and cocaine, with the possession of five grams of crack immediately causing a five year prison sentence even though it took 500 grams of cocaine to warrant the same sentence (War on Drugs). Crack and cocaine are both the same drug chemically; the only difference between them was that Black people were more likely to use crack and white people cocaine due to the cost of crack, a ‘poor man’s drug’ and coke, more commonly seen with rich, white, upper class people. Critics of the legislation pointed out just this, along with data displaying that people of color were targeted and arrested on drug charges more than white people (Ibid.). 

Due to the War on Drugs compounded with the years of disparities in the prison system, we see today the effects of decades of oppression and incarceration. Policies like the Anti-Drug Abuse Act during the Reagan administration led to a quick rise in incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses, with 50,000 people incarcerated for these crimes in 1980 to 400,000 by 1997 (War on Drugs). People incarcerated on drug crimes make up nearly half of those incarcerated in federal prisons (76,700 out of 162,904 prisoners) and most aren’t kingpins or major traffickers, but rather nonviolent users (Trends in U.S. Corrections). Despite the same rate of drug use, Black people are more likely to be incarcerated on drug crimes than white people. People of color account for 70% of all of those convicted of charges with a mandatory minimum sentence (which are mostly for drug offenses), and prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for a Black person than a White person (Pearl). Overall, there are incredible racial disparities in prison, with Black people (a racial minority nationwide) making up 32.9% of the federal prison population in 2018 versus only 30.4% of the federal prison population being made up of White people that same year. The rate of imprisonment in 2018 was 2,272 Black men per every 100,000, with 392 White men and 49 white women by the same metric. Most shockingly, 1 in 3 Black men are likely to be incarcerated in their lifetime versus 1 in 9 men over all; additionally, 1 in 17 white men and 1 in 111 white women are likely to be incarcerated (Trends in U.S. Corrections). The war on drugs compounded with Black Codes and a cultural assumption of the criminality of people of color, prisons are festering with racial disparities. People of color, a nationwide minority, make up a majority of the prison system, and it is not due to inherent criminality, but instead, tactics that have been used to keep them down in the societal hierarchy, preventing them from succeeding.

Prisons, being oppressive, useless institutions that only serve a purpose of holding minorities and not helping them, are obsolete in American society. As it has already been established that prisons are unequal due to them being the dumping site for people of color, prisons furthermore fail to rehabilitate and stop crime. Carting people off to prison does not make for a safer world. The US has 5% of the world’s population, yet 25% of the world’s prisoners (Rossum). With the logic that when more offenders are incarcerated, the world is safer, the US should be the safest country in the world, correct? The US is actually the 56th safest country in the world, fully displaying that prisons don’t prevent crime whatsoever (Foster). Furthermore, the environment of prisons is degrading to one’s character. Prisoners are harmed and assaulted by guards who get no punishment for allowing and even participating in the harassment, fights, brutalization, and rape of inmates in order to secure hazardous duty pay and more overtime for themselves and their colleagues. Due to court decisions dealing with equal protection and employment discrimination, male prison guards can be assigned to women’s facilities, and vice versa. Male guards utilize their positions of power and the subordination of the women they supervise in order to sexually harass and assault them without punishment. In a culture that treats them and their peers as objects of subordination and for harm, prisoners cannot be rehabilitated and learn to treat people with respect (Rossum). Despite the net negatives of incarceration, we as a society still rely on incarceration while things like parole and probation, forms of rehabilitation in which offenders can have a chance to interact with their community and support system, fail. The rate of success of community supervision through parole and probation are disappointing, as most who fail their parole or probation return to prison to be incarcerated once again. Parole and probation are not sustainable systems of community corrections, though. People fail this community supervision due to caseworkers having large caseloads and ‘one size fits all’ conditions of release that don’t acknowledge cycles of addiction and recovery (Center on Sentencing and Corrections). A system that degrades the soul through a lack of communication with society and the abuse from figures of superiority does not teach offenders how to re-enter the world with new, improved ways of living. We must move to a model of criminal justice that focuses on rehabilitation and help, and this can only be done through prison abolition.

Prisons should be abolished and replaced by offender-based rehabilitation and community corrections. The current state rehabilitation and ‘justice’ is more offense-oriented than offender-oriented, creating ‘one-size-fits-all’ punishments and forms of rehabilitation. Even if incarceration was remotely helpful, the offense-based punishment of prison sentences cannot be expected to help everyone. With so many different people with different backgrounds and motives in the justice system for the same offense and similar sentences, it cannot be expected for all people to respond in the same, positive way. There needs to be a culture of civility and respect for offenders in the criminal justice system; without respect and civility for our fellow man, regardless of what they have done, how are they expected to learn and grow in a positive direction? Offender-based rehabilitation would create a system more focused on what the offender themself needs to grow and rehabilitate, not what the crime they committed arguably deserves (Rossum). Within this offender-based rehabilitation would be community corrections, which is the supervision of people who are under the authority of the justice system, but aren’t incarcerated, and are instead members of their community while in rehabilitation. An offender-based system of community corrections would consist of behavioral management approaches, goal-based rehabilitation and reform, supervision of offenders based on level of risk, social support, and drug and mental rehabilitation (Center on Sentencing and Corrections). For certain violent offenders, there would be some sort of inpatient rehabilitation and reform centers where these individuals could work through their issues based on their background and needs, and then could become a part of the full community correctional system. Community corrections are incredibly beneficial to offenders and their support systems, as when not incarcerated, offenders can retain employment, spend time with their families, and participate in supportive treatment. Drug and mental health treatment, job skills training, and behavioral interventions are much more helpful to offenders than incarceration, as they assist the offender rather than punishing the crime (Ibid.). Offenders should be treated with humility and respect rather than impunity and incarceration in order to create a justice system that is more focused on civility and rehabilitation rather than retributive justice. 

Despite the discriminatory and useless background of the prison system, some still argue for its alternatives, claiming that community corrections are unsafe to the public and incarceration is the safer option. It is argued by some that letting offenders into communities will subject the public to violence, as there will be offenders walking the streets and engaging with non-offenders who expect their communities to be safe places. This could make people fear for their lives and, past simple fear, subject them to violence and irrationality. Incarceration withholds offenders from their communities and protects people from heinous acts (Sowell). This is valid to an extent; it could be frightening knowing that offenders are in your community, but there would not be the level of fear that this argument predicts there to be. There are offenders in our communities already that are on probation and parole which we all know and are okay with. Community corrections would be similar, but would have more of a structure to these offenders’ paths to rehabilitation that would be more personal and therefore, more effective. As for violent offenders, this could instill fear, understandably, in the public, but they will have been put through therapy and will be supervised as per their need. When discussing community corrections, many people get hung up on the issue of violent offenders and their role in the community. It is important to note that much of violent crime, particularly in communities of color, comes from the same manufactured instability that nonviolent crime comes from. Without socioeconomic restrictions and the displacement of people of color, much of violent crime wouldn’t happen. Furthermore, incarceration does not work, plain and simple. The US spends 60.9 billion dollars yearly on incarceration (Sentencing Project), and holds a quarter of the world’s offenders (Rossum), but is still not the world’s safest country, not by a long shot. Thailand and Canada are two of the 55 countries that outrank us for safety, displaying all we need to know: incarceration does not equal safety (Foster). Compounded with the inequalities of the prison system and the overall uselessness in the system itself, incarceration equals oppression and harm. 

Prisons are inhumane and unjust institutions that do not serve any sort of justice, and must be replaced with offender-based programs and community corrections to truly rehabilitate offenders. Popularized in the Reconstruction era as a place to hold and demonize Black people, prisons at their roots have been riddled with oppression. The use of them for cheap and inhumane labor stretched all the way into the 1900s, and when prisons were ‘reformed’ to a correctional model, inmates of color experienced none of the reforms made. Racist rhetoric fueled the War on Drugs, a manufactured crisis that demonized and destroyed communities of color, specifically Black communities. What we see today are the effects of society’s reliance on incarceration as a way to demonize and oppress. Mass incarceration has ripped the fabric off communities to shreds and has taken parents away from their children and vice versa. This destruction of America’s communities must end, and that comes with the end of incarceration and replacing it with humane, offender-based rehabilitation. Once we begin to treat offenders like what they are- people- healing can begin and we can begin to see broken communities regenerate and flourish.

Works Cited

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury, 2016. 

Center on Sentencing and Corrections, Vera Institute of Justice. “The Potential of Community Corrections to Improve Communities and Reduce Incarceration.” Federal Sentencing Reporter, vol. 26, no. 2, 2013, pp. 128–144. JSTOR. 

Delaney, Ruth, et al. “American History, Race, and Prison.” Vera Institute of Justice, 1 Sept. 2018.

Foster, Caitlin. “These Are the 20 Safest and Most Crime-Free Countries.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 31 Oct. 2018. 

Pearl, Betsy. “Ending the War on Drugs: By the Numbers.” Center for American Progress, 2021. 

Rossum, Ralph A., Rossum, C. “Rehabilitating Rehabilitation.” World & I, vol. 18, no. 12, Dec. 2003, p. 24. EBSCOhost.

Sowell, Thomas. “Alternatives to Prison Are Dangerous and Ineffective.” America’s Prisons, edited by Noah Berlatsky, Greenhaven Press, 2010. Opposing Viewpoints. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021. Originally published as “Alternatives to Incarceration and the Costs of Crime,” Capitalism Magazine, 2008.

Stevenson, Bryan. “Just Mercy.” Spiegel & Grau, 2015, p. 256-275. 

The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of The Justice Department’s Investigations and Prosecutions. U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. 

Trends in U.S. Corrections. The Sentencing Project, August 2020.

“War on Drugs.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 31 May 2017.