MAGAZINE REVIEWS

Prison Blues

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Dec. 26, 1998) -- Undoubtedly you've heard the statistics. The population of America's jails and prisons is great than that in all of China, a nation at least four times as large as ours. In California alone, there are more people incarcerated than in France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined.

The Atlantic Monthly

My heart doesn't bleed for the majority of these people. Our streets and homes and business are probably a lot safer with many of these folks locked up behind bars. The dramatic drop in violent crime we've seen over the last decade is probably in part due to the consistency and vigilance with which strict sentences are handed down. But as Eric Schlosser shows in "The Prison-Industrial Complex" in the December issue of the Atlantic, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about our bursting prisons.

In fact, the skyrocketing growth in our prison population has not come primarily as a result of putting more violent offenders behind bars. Instead, credit goes to two main phenomena: draconian sentences passed down for minor drug convictions (accounting for the whoppingly disproportionate percentage of black men behind bars) and the closure of most state-run psychiatric hospitals. Prisons, in large part, are now society's easy if ill-equipped answer to the problems of drug addiction and mental illness.

But what Schlosser's article is mostly concerned with is, as the title indicates, the industry that has grown up around the burgeoning prison population. Just as the Cold War provided opportunities for creative entrepreneurs to profit from a thriving, government-dominated defense industry, spawning the self-perpetuating industry President Eisenhower forebodingly dubbed "the military-industrial complex," so have the needs of the state and federal prisons sprouted an entire "prison-industrial complex" dedicated to servicing the prison economy.

Just as entire towns, cities and geographical regions once relied on military bases and government defense contracts for their economic health, so now do areas vie for a piece of the prison-industrial pie. The problem with all this is that once the prison-based economy gets big enough to wield political influence, prison policy is no longer necessarily based on what is best for the administration of criminal justice. Instead, the same factors that led to $300 hammers and $500 toilets in the defense industry will begin to dictate how decisions are made in corrections policy.

Toward Freedom

In "Slouching Toward Barbarism" in the November issue of Toward Freedom (also on the web at http://www.towardfreedom.com), reporter Sasha Abramsky echoes much of what Schlosser says, but warns that more than just economic ruin is at stake. Quoting Winston Churchill on the measure of a society being the manner in which it treats those it imprisons, Abramsky concludes that "the U.S. is plunging down a steep, rutted path to barbarism."

Abramsky cites instances of brutality, the execution of juveniles and the mentally deficient, sensory deprivation, the use of chain gangs and, again, the excessive mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent, petty drug offenders, as all putting the U.S. in consistent violation of several international treaties and conventions regarding human rights and the treatment of prisoners.

Abramsky also points to the growing use of cheap or free inmate labor by private corporations, including Microsoft, TWA, Lucent, IBM and Intel, as a growing abuse not only of prisoners but of all Americans, in terms of private profits made at the expense of the taxpayers who subsidize the inmates while seeing their own employment opportunities dwindle in number and quality.

"As the U.S. moves into gulag-mode," writes Abramsky, "locking up ever more people, employing entire communities to guard them, investing too much of the public purse in subsidizing this complex, and letting private industry reap the profit through free labor -- the niceties of respect for human rights become mere rhetoric."

George

In the January issue of George, editor John F. Kennedy interviews Richard Mellon Scaife, the man some believe is behind the vast, right-wing conspiracy to destroy President Clinton.

Kennedy doesn't cut Scaife any slack. He comes right out and asks him if indeed he is behind such an effort. Scaife denies any organized conspiracy, but then slyly proceeds to question the explanations for the deaths of White House aide Vincent Foster and Cabinet member Ron Brown, suggesting indirectly that Clinton bears responsibility in both cases. He claims that a total of 60 people in the Clinton administration, including eight former bodyguards, have died mysteriously in the last six years, insinuating that the president is somehow responsible for all of these deaths.

"He can order people done away with at his will," says Scaife, neglecting to explain, however, how this all-powerful Don Corleone of the U.S. government managed to let himself get impeached, much less explain why Clinton uses his power to eliminate his closest friends while his most fervent enemies continue to get away scot-free with character assassination and worse.

Index on Censorship

"Smashed Hits: The Book of Banned Music" is the title of the November/December issue of Index on Censorship (on the web at http://www.indexoncensorship.org), devoted in its entirety to musical censorship around the world, from the prisons of Tibet to the BBC in London, from Nigeria to Mauritania and back again.

The issue kicks off with an overview by Julian Petley, putting the suppression of music in an historical context, looking particularly at Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Other articles look at the campaigns against certain genres of music here in the U.S., particularly the overenthusiastic efforts of some law enforcement agencies to prosecute rap artists for a variety of alleged infractions and the efforts by right-wing fundamentalist groups to ban outright performances by rock groups, beginning with Elvis Presley, running through the Beatles and heavy-metal music to Marilyn Manson today.

The issue also looks at the struggles of musicians in tradition-dominated societies in Africa and the Near East, and the varied history jazz has met with in terms of cultural and political suppression.

The issue comes packaged with a CD containing 11 tracks of "smashed hits," including two recordings of Tibetan nuns smuggled out of prison, popular African singers Malouma and Fela Kuti, who were both banned and suppressed, as well as Ian Dury and several other British performers who have had run-ins with the highly-politicized BBC and British security forces. These include Flannel, a group of Brighton "agitpoppers" who turn in an hysterically devastating parody of pop-rock superstars Oasis, who are apparently deemed beyond parody by the powers-that-be in Britain.

[This column originally ran in the Berkshire Eagle on Dec. 26, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]