Adam Gopnik writes a fascinating article on “The Caging of America” for The New Yorker. Gopnik poses a good question: Why do we lock up so many people?
Gopnik presents the problem when he writes:
“The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)”
He ends by presenting some possible solutions:
“Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities.”
Gopnik presents a very real picture of the problem with our prisons. As Prison Fellowship has experienced for 35 years, and Justice Fellowship knows well, there’s not necessarily a miracle cure for the problems in our prisons, but there is reason to intercede with “a thousand smaller sanities,” as Gopnik writes.
Read Gopnik’s work and consider what he poses, that every society has a “poor storm that wretches suffer in.” Every generation has its problems. Every generation has its injustices. Do we “wait for a better world” or do we do something now? But in all of your thinking, never forget what Gopnik makes clear, “At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life…and in every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away.” We agree with Gopnik’s point that prisons are our “this” and we do well to take more care.
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