November 2009

The use of solitary confinement is on the rise, according to a recent editorial in The Washington Post. In addition to increasing prisoners' risks of mental health issues, solitary confinement costs roughly twice as much as standard incarceration, says the Post.

Assessing those subjected to solitary confinement, The Post states: 

They are not, by and large, the "worst of the worst" -- mass murderers or psychopaths in the mold of Hannibal Lecter. They are, instead, men and women serving time for all manner of offenses, some of them relatively minor. But they have been deemed disciplinary problems -- or potential disciplinary problems -- by prison staffers. And so they find themselves locked up in what is commonly known as solitary confinement, sometimes for months, sometimes for years and sometimes with devastating consequences.  

The constitutionality of long-term solitary confinement is currently being litigated by a group of prisoners known as "the Angola 3." They spent 23 hours per day confined to their cells in Louisiana's Angola prison for up to 37 years, and are challenging the conditions of their incarceration under the Eighth Amendment. 

[Image via Derek Purdy.]

Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice is about why locking up so many people is bad for the average law-abiding citizen. It might not be a thesis you'd expect from me, a former prosecutor, but making the streets safer is exactly why I wrote the book.

The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the history of the planet. We have 5 percent of the world's population, and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Let's Get Free's main argument focuses on the "tipping point" that criminologists have demonstrated about this level of incarceration. When too many people are locked up, the crime rate actually goes up. Too much prison has the ironic consequence of being crimogenic.

Let's Get Free suggests ways that we can safely reduce the number of people in prison. In addition to safer streets, a big advantage would be the diversion of billions of dollars out of locking people up (which costs about $50,000 annually per inmate) and back to more productive areas like education, health care and the environment. The fixes that Let's Get Free recommends range from helping at-risk students graduate from high school, to getting lead out of the environment (a high percentage of the people in prison for non-drug related crimes suffered lead poisoning as a child, which affects their brain in a way that makes them more violence-prone) to ending racial profiling.

The book also includes more controversial recommendations, including strategic jury nullification to protest the war on drugs. Let's Get Free calls for "Martin Luther King jurors" who would consider acquitting defendants in non-violent drug cases, even if the defendant is technically guilty. This kind of protest is perfectly legal, and was credited with hastening the end of alcohol prohibition, the government's last failed "war on drugs."