Prison Madness: United States vs. Finland

Adam Hochschild is an award-winning journalist and author who has collected (and updated) a number of his articles into the book Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays.  These essays provide numerous interesting insights and perspectives on historical and current events.  Here we will discuss an article titled Prison Madness in which he presents a brief summary of the state of incarceration in the United States and provides a startling comparison of what it is like to be an imprisoned criminal in our country and in Finland.  A more detailed discussion of U.S. issues related to incarceration can be found in John F. Pfaff’s book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration-and How to Achieve Real Reform.  Pfaff’s work was reviewed in Understanding Mass Incarceration in the United States.

Hochschild provides this perspective on our incarceration practices.

“With a twentieth of the world’s population, the United States has a quarter of its prisoners…If all Americans behind bars constituted a state, its population would be greater than that of fifteen other states, big enough to be entitled to three seats in the House of Representatives.”

What is particularly strange is that as crime levels began to fall, peaking in the early 1990s, the rate of imprisonment continued to rise.  There seems to be no clear consensus on why crime has continued to fall, but it is clear that the rate of incarceration rose until just a few years ago when the whole system became unaffordable.

The standard explanation for such huge prison populations involves the notions that the war on drugs and the biased application of drug laws towards blacks has swelled the prison population with nonviolent offenders guilty of minor crimes.  The statistics suggest otherwise.  More lenient drug penalties and race-neutral application of them would not produce a great change.  And notably, about half the prisoners today were involved in crimes of violence.  The explanation lies elsewhere.

Criminal prosecutions for crimes have always been discretionary.  Roughly 10% of the population is thought to be using illegal drugs.  This number is nearly race independent.  That means over 30 million people should or could be in prison on drug charges alone.  That will not happen because law enforcement decides who they will target for criminal investigations and prosecutors decide who they will try to send to jail.  Most crimes are committed and prosecuted at a local level.  Discretion in enforcement is driven by local attitudes—and those attitudes vary widely.  Lower crime rate rural areas tend to have much higher incarceration rates than higher crime urban areas.  Pfaff suggested that we really have 3,144 legal systems, one for each county in the nation.

The real seat of power (and discretion) resides in prosecutors.  They have many tools at their disposal to threaten the accused with dire consequences if they do not plead guilty, and since they tend to be elected officials they are essentially forced to a “tough on crime” stance if they wish to be reelected.  Popular election of judges supports similar tendencies.  It is not quite clear why, but the number of prosecutors has been rising while the crime rate has been falling.  Pfaff provides these figures.

“….the number of line prosecutors (those who actually try cases) has grown significantly over the past forty years, but in a somewhat peculiar way….Between 1970 and 1990, violent crime rates rose by 100 percent, property crime rates by 40 percent, and the number of line prosecutors by 17 percent.  From 1990 to 2007, violent and property crime rates both fell by 35 percent, but the number of line prosecutors rose by 50 percent—a faster rate of growth than during the crime boom.”

Hochschild refers to a political scientist, Marie Gottschalk, author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.  She suggests that mass incarceration will not be brought down to more reasonable—and affordable—levels until people realize that imprisonment is not a solution to crime.  It solves nothing, is ineffective as a deterrent, and does not prevent prisoners from committing crimes again.  Some other form of treatment is required.  In addition, sentencing decisions must yield shorter prison terms.

“It used to be that a life sentence meant that a well-behaved American inmate was likely to be released after ten to fifteen years—a recognition that merely growing older has far more influence than length of time served on the likelihood that someone might commit another crime.  But U.S. prisons are now full of people serving several consecutive life sentences or life without parole—a punishment that virtually did not exist a half century ago and is almost unknown in the rest of the world.”

So, the U.S. has a big, unique problem.  Hochschild points out, hopefully, that perhaps there is an example to be followed in Finland where the rate of incarceration was once higher than in the U.S. but the legal system was reformed and settled in at a much lower rate.

“In 1950, with a prison system and criminal code that had changed little from their origins under the Russia of the tsars, Finland had a higher incarceration rate than we had in the United States.  In Finland 187 people out of every 100,000 were behind bars, as against only 175 here.  A long series of reforms—not without their hard-line opponents—brought the Finnish rate of incarceration far down, just as our own soared.  Today we have 710 people per 100,000 in prison in the United States, compared to 58 in Finland.”

“’One important idea that emerged’, writes two scholars of Finland’s changes, ‘was that prison cures nobody.  As a result policies were enacted that prison sentences should rarely be used in smaller crimes and other penalty systems should be developed instead’.”

Hochschild was moved to produce his essay after visiting a few Finnish prisons.  It was important to compare the treatment of inmates there with that encountered in our prisons.  From the outside Finnish prisons look as one would expect with “barbed-wire fences, bars on some windows and plenty of locked doors.  He would be provided a tour by its governor (or governess, not warden), a former prosecutor named Kirsti Nieminen.  Her facility housed about 150 men, with features Hochschild found surprising.

“In the greenhouses the inmates raised flowers, which were sold to the public, as were the organic vegetables they grew.  As we walked around the prison grounds, Nieminen pointed out a stream where prisoners could fish, a soccer field, a basketball court, a grain mill, and something she was particularly proud of, a barn full of rabbits and lambs.  ‘The responsibility to take care of a creature—it’s very therapeutic,’ she said.  ‘They are always kind to you.  It’s easier to talk to them’.”

A meeting with several inmates was arranged for Hochschild.  Their crimes were about what one might expect in a U.S. prison.  A few involved violence, including armed robbery, most of the others involved drugs.  Nieminen and another female official provided translation for the communication.

“No armed guards were in sight, and both officials and convicts wore their own clothes, not uniforms.”

“Prisoners are assigned jobs, but most spend much of their day in classes, on subjects including auto repair, computers, welding, and first aid.  A library holds several thousand books—more than you would find in many American high schools—and inmates can use the national interlibrary loan system to order others.  I sat in on a cooking class and then shared a tasty lunch its students had prepared: Karelian stew, which included beef, pork, potatoes, and cranberries.”

Hochschild refers to a book by a Missouri state senator, Jeff Smith, who was convicted of breaking a campaign spending law and sentenced to a year in prison.  He wrote about his experiences in Mr. Smith Goes to Prison: What My Year Behind Bars Taught Me About America’s Prison Crisis.

“…he hoped that as a Ph.D. who had taught at Washington University in St. Louis, he would be put to work teaching.  Instead…he was assigned to a warehouse loading dock, where he observed and took part in the pilfering of food by both inmates and guards.  A month from the end of his stay he was finally transferred to the education unit—and assigned to sweeping out classrooms.  A computer skills class consisted of the chance to sit at a computer for thirty minutes, with no instruction whatsoever; at a nutrition class, a guard ‘handed out a brochure with information about the caloric content of food at McDonald’s, Bojangles, and Wendy’s, and released us after five minutes’.”

The goal of the Finnish system is to return prisoners to society as people capable of participating as functioning members.

“If you had half your sentence completed and had permission, you could leave Kerava prison on weekends.  Everything possible was done to ease that transition.  The diploma you get on completing one of the classes I saw, for instance, is certified by an outside organization; it doesn’t say you received your training in prison.”

“A host of offerings within the walls addressed the problems that landed the men in trouble in the first place.  There were programs for anger management and drug rehabilitation, as well as both individual and group psychotherapy.  Prisoners could take part in a twelve-step program similar to Alcoholics Anonymous and a class in life skills that met three times a week.  And in an idea copied from Sweden, the prison hosted a series of speakers: former convicts who shared their experiences in readjusting to the world.”

The process of exiting prison is quite different in our country from what is encountered in Finland

“A released prisoner in the United States is frequently barred from voting, public housing, pensions, and disability benefits, and is lucky if he receives anything more than bus fare and, according to Jeff Smith, a routine farewell from a guard: ‘You’ll be back, shitbird’.”

“At Kerava prison in Finland, before an inmate is released, a social worker travels to his hometown to make sure that he will have a job and a safe place to live.”

Preserve Your Democratic Norms: Lessons from a Dark Time

There are two ways (at least) that democracies can fail.  The majority can unjustly and unfairly impose its will on minorities, or the majority, through indifference or ignorance, can allow a minority to use democratic means to impose its will on the majority.  The danger currently is that a minority will use an autocratic leader to diminish our democratic norms to the point where the leader has the power to persecute any person or institution that disagrees with his/her policies.  Adam Hochschild, a journalist and author, addresses our current situation in Lessons from a Dark Time, the first in a collection of essays from his book Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays.  What Hochschild provides us is an example from our not too distant past that demonstrates how badly our government and our society can behave when our chief executive has inadequate checks on his actions.  The current threat is Donald Trump.  The villain from the past is none other than Woodrow Wilson.

As president, Trump has attacked anyone who has had the temerity to disagree with him.  This includes newspapers, judges, politicians, random individuals, and even leaders of our traditional allies.  This moved Hochschild to ask what might occur if none of these people or agencies had any power to check Trump’s policies?

“For a chilling answer, we need only roll back the clock a century, to a time when the United States endured a three-year period of unparalleled surveillance, censorship, mass imprisonment, and anti-immigrant terror.  And strangely, all this happened under a president usually remembered for his internationalist idealism.”

Wilson may have acquired the trappings of an idealist intellectual, but he was also a southern racist who was intolerant of any opposition to his policies.  He was elected as the man who kept us out of war, but subsequently decided he wanted to join the action.  There were plenty who wanted to join with him, but also a considerable minority who would rather not get involved.

“President Wilson was not sure he could count on the backing of some nine million German Americans or the 4.5 million Irish Americans who might be reluctant to fight as allies of Britain.  Hundreds of elected state and local officials belonged to the Socialist Party, which strongly opposed American participation in this or any other war.  And tens of thousands of Americans were ‘Wobblies,’ member of the militant Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, and the only battle they wanted to fight was that of labor against capital.”

Wilson set the table for what was to come by making inflammatory statements about those who might disagree with the direction he wished to follow.

“In strikingly Trumpian fashion, Wilson himself helped sow suspicion of dissenters and hidden enemies…Well before the declaration of war, he had ominously warned that ‘there are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags…who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life…Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out’.”

Those were words designed to stir up hatred of anyone Wilson thought might be an opponent of going to war.  It worked, and the public and the government (local, state, and national) accommodated his wishes.

“The moment the United States joined the conflict in Europe, a second, less noticed war began at home.  Staffed by federal agents, local police, and civilian vigilantes, it had three targets: anyone who might be a German sympathizer, left-wing newspapers and magazines, and labor activists.  The war against the last two groups would continue for a year and a half after the First World War ended.”

The “crushing” of German Americans began quickly.

“The government started arresting and interning native-born Germans who were not naturalized U.S. citizens—but in a highly selective way, rounding up for example, all those who were IWW members.  Millions rushed to spurn anything German.  Families named Schmidt quickly became Smith.  German-language textbooks were tossed on bonfires.  The German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Karl Muck, was locked up, even though he was a citizen of Switzerland; notes he had made on a score of J.S. Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion were suspected of being coded messages to Germany.  Berlin, Iowa, changed its name to Lincoln, and East Germantown, Indiana, became Pershing, named after the general leading American soldiers in their broad-brimmed hats to France.  Hamburger was now ‘Salisbury steak’ and German measles ‘Liberty measles.’  The New York Herald published the names and addresses of every German or Austro-Hungarian national living in the city.”

Incidents of anti-German violence became commonplace.  Hochschild tells of the sad fate of German-born Robert Prager in Collinsville, Illinois.

“They kicked and punched him, stripped off his clothes, wrapped him in an American flag, forced him to sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and lynched him from a tree on the outskirts of town.  No matter that he had tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was turned down because he had a glass eye.  After a jury deliberated for only forty-five minutes, eleven members of the mob were acquitted of all charges, while a military band played outside the courthouse.”

The placing of a target on the backs of German and Austro-Hungarian nationalists by the New York Herald may have been self-initiated, or it may have been driven by pressure to “join the program.”

“People from the highest reaches of society bayed for blood like a lynch mob.  Elihu Root, a corporate lawyer and former secretary of war, secretary of state, and senator, was the prototype of the so-called wise men of the twentieth-century foreign policy establishment who moved smoothly back and forth between Wall Street and Washington, DC.  ‘There are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot,’ he told an audience at New York’s Union League Club in August 1917.  ‘There are some newspapers published in this city every day the editors of which deserve conviction and execution for treason’.”

The most efficient way to control the dissemination of information by magazines was to put an operative in charge of the Post Office.  Albert Burleson was Wilson’s man.  Any publication associated with the IWW, the Socialist Party, or anything considered less than pro-war was harassed or totally banned from the postal service.

“With so many recent immigrants, the United States had dozens of foreign-language papers.  All were now required to submit English translations of all articles dealing with the government, the war, or American allies to the local postmaster before they could be published—a ruinous expense that caused many periodicals to stop printing.  Another Burleson technique was to ban a particular issue of a newspaper or magazine and then cancel its second-class mailing permit, claiming it was no longer publishing regularly.  Before the war was over seventy-five different publications would be either censored or completely banned.”

The chaos and tumult of the era provided the perfect opportunity to attack organized labor whose members could now be considered “traitors to the war effort.”

“Virtually every IWW office was raided; at the group’s Chicago headquarters, police smashed tables and chairs, left papers strewn all over the floor, and took away five tons of material, including even some of the ashes of the popular Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill, recently convicted of murder on shaky evidence and executed.  In Seattle, authorities turned Wobbly prisoners over to the local army commander, who then claimed that because they were in military custody, they had no right of habeas corpus.  When 101 Wobblies were put through a four-month trial in Chicago, a jury found all of them guilty on all counts after a discussion so brief it averaged less than thirty seconds per defendant.  The judge passed out sentences totaling 807 years of prison time.”

After the war ended the Russian Revolution provided the threat of Bolshevism as an excuse to continue the various persecutions.  Woodrow Wilson, again in true Trumpian fashion, made this contribution to peace between the races.

“Woodrow Wilson, himself a Southerner and ardent segregationist, predicted that ‘the American negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America’.”

“Nearly 400,000 blacks had served in the military and then come home to a country where they were denied good jobs, schooling, and housing.  As they competed with millions of returning white soldiers for scarce work, race riots broke out, and in the summer in 1919 more than 120 people were killed.  Lynchings—a steady terrifying feature of black life for many years—reached the highest point in more than a decade; seventy-eight African Americans were lynched that year, more than one per week.  But all racial tension was also blamed on the Russians.”

Clearly, our nation is capable of horrible behavior—particularly when it is led by a horrible president.

Hochschild leaves us with a concluding observation.

“The final lesson from this dark time is that when a president has no tolerance for opposition, the greatest godsend he can have is a war.  Then dissent becomes not just ‘fake news’ but treason.  We should be wary.”

Humans vs. Other Animals: Rationality and Irrationality

The topic of rationality versus irrationality was discussed in Knowledge, Rationality, and Irrationality, where we assessed an article on the topic by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah titled Dialectics of Enlightenment that was published in the New York Review of Books.  The hope was that philosophers could provide some explanation for why our political opponents insist on irrational behavior.  The unsatisfactory conclusion drawn was that the term rational is usually applied to describe behavior or beliefs with which we find consistent with our own behaviors and beliefs.  The term irrational then refers to actions and claims with which we disagree.  There is no political relief to be gained from that realization.

Another exploration of the differences between rational and irrational behavior can be found in Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.  That author provided a fascinating look at what researchers have learned about animal cultures, behaviors, and capabilities.  Safina’s goal is to convince us that we should not underestimate our sister species.  We come in different shapes and sizes, but within, we have much the same body parts, and have become similarly remarkable given the constraints our external bodies and environments provide.  He includes a few pages of discussion of rational and irrational behavior as it relates to the differences he perceives in our characteristics compared to those of other animals.  Safina concludes that other animals are more rational than humans, but, perhaps irrationally, that human irrationality is a source of superiority for our species.

Safina appears to associate rational behavior with evidence-based reasoning; and that other animals are much better at it.

“Other animals’ actions and beliefs are evidence-based; they don’t believe anything unless the evidence justifies it.”

“…it is many humans who are demonstrably incapable of asking whether evidence justifies their beliefs, then adjusting their conclusions.  Other animals are consummate realists.  Only humans cling unshakably to dogmas and ideologies that enjoy complete freedom from evidence, despite all evidence to the contrary.  The great divide between rationality and faith depends on some people choosing faith over rationality, and vice-versa.”

The faith Safina refers to would include religious faith, but humans have demonstrated a capability to shun evidence in order to cling to cherished beliefs in economics, health, law, politics, and even sports.  Practitioners of the modern, major religions today may be startled to be told there is no evidence for their beliefs, but it should be recognized that belief in supernatural things has seemingly always been part of humanity’s makeup.  And the major current religions are evolutions from earlier, simpler beliefs.

“Many believe that rocks, trees, streams, volcanoes, fire, and other things have thoughts, that everything is inhabited by spirits that might act for or against us.  That’s called panpsychism.  The religion that follows from this primal human assumption is pantheism.  It is common among tribal hunter-gatherer peoples (our ancestors), and it’s also alive and well in modern life.  On the summit of Mount Kilauea, in Hawaii, I’ve seen offerings of money and liquor, put there by people who think that volcanoes have a god within who watches, tallies favors, and sometimes acts vindictively.  Don’t get the volcano mad by ignoring it.  A little more booze and a few more bills, some flowers and some food and a roast pig occasionally, and the volcano’s fiery goddess, Pele, will perhaps be mollified.  And this is in the United States, where anyone can just stroll into the visitors’ center and learn some volcano geology…It appears that deep belief in the supernatural comes easy to us.”

“While a dog might bark to rouse someone sleeping on the living room couch, they never seek assistance from the sofa itself.  Or from volcanoes.  They easily discriminate living things from inanimate objects and even from imposters.”

Faith is, by definition, belief or trust without a need for evidence.  Given that many humans are willing to believe without a need for evidence, then Safina’s claim that other animals are more rational than humans has some credibility; but how does this turn out to be advantageous to humans?  To get to that point, he requires a different perspective on irrationality.

“Perhaps believing false things comes bundled with our peculiar, oddly brilliant ability to envision what is not yet, and to imagine a better world.  No one has explained where creativity arises, but some human minds lurch along sparking new ideas like a train with a stuck wheel.  It’s not rationality that’s strictly human; its irrationality.  It’s the crucial ability to envision what is not, and to pursue unreasonable ideas.”

A major example for Safina of where human irrationality has led to human progress is the desire to fly through the air like a bird.  Safina seems to be selling his animals short by concluding that none of them were ever capable of watching a bird fly by and wishing that they could fly as well.  That is not irrational; it is the belief that one could actually fly that is irrational.  Once humans learned the technology that explained the flight of birds, the belief in human flight was not irrational; it was merely difficult—and highly rational.  Other examples provided by Safina follow this same sequence where knowledge renders dreams rational.

Until chimps start building temples, it seems the major difference between humans and other animals lies in the ease with which humans believe in supernatural agencies.  Or perhaps it is that humans have a need to believe in the supernatural.  We can all decide as individuals if this trait has been harmful or beneficial to humanity—and what it will mean for the future.

Knowledge, Rationality, and Irrationality

The Enlightenment refers to a period centered around the eighteenth century when philosophers argued over the need to focus on the use of reason to justify opinions and actions.  This was an era where the goal was to establish rules for society in which the dominance of religious faith and monarchical power were diminished and were replaced by principles that were “rational” and evidence-based.  This “Age of Reason” has always been viewed as a mixed blessing for humanity.  Reason has led to mankind’s greatest advances as well as its most horrendous errors; producing both tremendous advances in health and longevity as well as repeated instances of genocide. And if one defines a rational person as one who uses reason and logic to form opinions and guide actions, why do we feel that we are surrounded by so many irrational people?  Could it be that we are inherently irrational, or could it be that we misunderstand the concept of rationality?

Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses some of the philosophical contentions surrounding rationality and irrationality that exist to this day in Dialectics of Enlightenment for the New York Review of Books.  In the process, he discusses things of interest to philosophers, but also produces some illuminating thoughts for the rest of us.  On the topic of what is rational and what is not, Appiah refers to his father’s cultural belief systems.

“My father, as was the norm among Asante of his generation, thought that there were many invisible spirits in the world, who could advance his causes if he conformed to rules they had laid down, and he was taught that ‘avoid eating bush meat,’ a stipulation of his particular Asante clan, was one of those rules. He was being reasonable, therefore, in his avoidance of eating bush meat. From an outside perspective, though, we can see that it was not rational, because there are no such spirits. (Sorry, Dad.)”

Appiah fails to quote the source for his conclusion that “there are no such spirits.”  It would seem it continues to be just as difficult to prove there are no gods or spirits as it is to prove that they exist.  Yet, without proof, Appiah defines his father to be irrational by a perspective of his choosing.  He goes further and allows that his father’s views were “reasonable” given his father’s state of knowledge at the time.

“To learn about an illness, my Asante ancestors might have consulted a fetish priest; today we might send a blood sample off to a lab. On an individual level, my Asante ancestors, acting on the basis of trusted authority, weren’t less reasonable than we are.”

So how can it be that Appiah uses reason and logic and is rational, while his father used reason and logic and was deemed irrational?  An explanation for this is provided which implies that individuals are incapable, on their own, of acquiring the knowledge required to act rationally.  They must be supported by a “rational” knowledge infrastructure that can assist them.

“…the analysis of rationality must expand beyond the individual level. Where traditional belief practices and natural science differ is as institutions: the social organization of inquiry makes all the difference.”

“It’s a critical fact that the cognitive division of labor in advanced societies provides each of us with epistemological resources far greater than any that would fit between our ears. We can talk casually about entangled electrons, the Bantu migration, gram-negative diplococci, and Petrarchan sonnets because there are communities of researchers who know about these things. ‘Meanings’ just ain’t in the head!’ the philosopher Hilary Putnam once observed: that is, the meaning of our sentences involves both a particular relation to reality and a particular relation to other, expert users of the language. Rationality, a fortiori, isn’t in the head, either. It’s something we do with one another and the world.”

Appiah seems to be claiming that modern people have access to knowledge canonized by agreement of experts on particular topics.  He doesn’t say whether that agreement has to be unanimous or could result from mere majority rule, but he does imply that belief in these collective conclusions forms the basis for rational deliberations on the part of a “rational” individual.  This dependence on unknown others as a basis for individual analyses is rather disturbing.  It is well documented that consensus opinions by economists, historians, and scientists have often been found to be in error.  In the medical sciences, errors, inaccuracies, and outright fraud are exposed almost daily.  In addition, this reliance on “recognized” experts reeks of conformity rather than cognitive deliberation.  Disagreement with conventional wisdom is not necessarily irrational; and how can progress ever be made without the questioning of conventional wisdoms?

As society has become more complex, individual success has become more dependent on becoming expert in a few particular things.  We are guided to “learn more and more about less and less.”  It can be exciting and entertaining to become an intellectual gadfly, wondering about asking annoying and troubling questions of these experts, but it is difficult to earn a living that way.  This enforced specialization may produce an “efficient” economy, but it does not necessarily produce good citizens.  Citizenship requires time and effort spent deliberating on issues, but our “efficient” economy produces wealth and the perverse need to work ever-longer hours in pursuit of that wealth.  A more ideal society might focus more on the creation of leisure time than on the creation of wealth.

Meanwhile, given the society we live in, we should recognize that one person’s treasure can be another person’s trash, and one person’s rationality can be another person’s irrationality.