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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In your book, you cite a study finding that the average time served for drugs is about 11 years, while for murder it's only six. How did this happen? Are we punishing drug dealers too harshly, or are we not punishing murderers harshly enough?
It's interesting. Unlike, say, murder, which has always been around and been a crime since biblical days, crack hasn't been around [that long]. In the early '80s, you had an odd confluence of political support for [tough penalties for drug criminals]. You had conservative Republicans on one side -- the Ronald Reagans. Then you also had the political left -- the Jesse Jacksons of the world, who saw what drugs were doing to the black community. And they kind of merged. They pushed a message that drugs were horrible and destroying not just America but the black community in America. This was the equivalent of public enemy No. 1. Something needed to be done, and the only way they could think to take care of it was to come up with unprecedentedly strict laws.
In 1996, Gallup took a poll and found that 80 percent of Americans supported life imprisonment for drug dealers. It's astonishing, really astonishing -- a tremendous hardening of attitudes toward drug crime. Eighty percent is whopping. Even the death penalty doesn't get support that high.
Steven Soderbergh's film "Traffic" caught the public and political eye; DARE is being abandoned. Are attitudes changing?
I really think we're at a turning point. The New York Times recently had an editorial talking about efforts in New York to soften the Rockefeller-era drug laws that were responsible for so much of the prison population increase. Although there are different versions of the law, there is support for softening, both from Gov. [George] Pataki and from the legislative leadership. I think that's a bellwether. I also think you're beginning to see a bit of rebellion against the mandatory-sentencing laws, those that deal both with drugs and with other crimes. Take Lionel Tate, the 14-year-old boy in Florida who just got the mandatory sentence [for murdering a 6-year-old girl when he was 12]. I think people are beginning to see the downside of these extremely harsh laws as well as the cost.
Your book focuses on the people who have a vested interest in the status quo, powerful people like Ed Meese, who became a lobbyist for the prison industry after leaving his post as Reagan's attorney general from 1985 to 1988.
I don't know if Ed Meese profited by holding stock in companies, but he certainly did encourage the buildup of the prison population and then, after he left office, encourage the tapping of that population for the private gain of companies.
Others have done the same thing. Michael Quindlan, for example, the former head of the Bureau of Prisons, left and joined CCA [Corrections Corporation of America, a publicly traded company that builds prisons]. A number of lesser-known people have followed in their tracks.
But actually, the more lucrative end is the less obvious end, which is the companies that sell to prisons. Companies like AT&T, Procter & Gamble -- their fingerprints aren't directly on prisons, yet they make enormous amounts of money from prisons.
The prison industry boomed at one point. How's it doing now?
It's just like the dot-coms, almost identical. You can throw up a stock chart of CCA and Amazon.com, and the drop-off is startlingly similar. It's really quite amazing.
Is that just a coincidence?
I think it's a coincidence, an odd confluence in American culture where you had tremendous technological innovation and optimism combined with a certain mercenary influence in the prison system.
Were the prisons also victims of irrational exuberance? Did they expand too quickly, just as dot-coms did?
I wouldn't say [states] overbuilt. There are [at least] 18 states where the prison population exceeds the capacity of the prisons. But you're beginning to see states -- Indiana, for instance -- considering mothballing some prisons they've built. Even though they may not have enough space for their inmates, they're running out of money to run their prisons.
If we consider overbuilding in that context, then you're beginning to see people pulling back. They're saying, "Gosh, we built an awful lot of prisons and we still don't have enough room for all our inmates, but the cost of this is killing us. As the economy goes down and tax revenues go down, we need to find someplace to cut.
