Again and yet again, America is bleeding. The latest eruption of protests and anger came in response to the brutal, unnecessary police killings of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and then the carnage in Dallas where a deranged sniper killed five police officers and wounded more before being killed in turn.
Whether any of this will spur reform, or whether violence will only beget more violence, either way it’s clear that there’s a chasm between police and the communities that – in theory – they serve and protect. I wanted to take a step back and highlight some of the reasons for this mutual hostility and mistrust.
One of the major reasons, I believe, has to do with the unavoidable effects of cost-cutting and privatization in the justice system. If we want the law to be fair, robust and humane, we have to pay what that costs. Instead, many “tough-on-crime” voters demand the imagined benefits of a carceral state but don’t want to pony up. Politicians try to cater to their wishes either by cutting costs to the bone, or worse, turning the prison system over to private companies that claim they can transform it into a for-profit business. The inevitable fraud and abuse inherent in this scheme ruins the lives of innocent people and only further hardens the guilty.
A case in point is this ProPublica report on the flaws of the field drug test kit. Police officers are supposed to carry these kits to tell them if an unknown substance is an illegal drug or not, but the cheap tests are untrustworthy and riddled with errors. As many as one-third give false positives, according to one study. Because of this, the test results are supposed to be inadmissible at trial without a full lab test for confirmation.
The problem is that the vast majority of criminal defendants don’t get trials. Most of those arrested for drugs are poor people who can’t afford bail and can’t afford to spend months in jail waiting for a trial. Even if they were acquitted, they’d lose their jobs, their homes, their children, everything they have. Instead, they’ll plead guilty in exchange for a short jail term – but when they get out, they find they’ve been branded with the scarlet letter of “felon” that cuts them off from jobs, housing, benefits, and voting rights.
ProPublica spotlights the case of Amy Albritton, who was arrested for supposedly possessing “crack cocaine” and coerced to plead guilty to a felony, even though the “drug” was nothing but an over-the-counter painkiller consisting of aspirin and caffeine.
Next, there’s the Marshall Project’s exposé of private prisoner transport companies that shuttle suspects to trial and transfer convicts from one prison to another. Because they’re paid by the mile, these companies have every incentive to set grueling driving schedules with few breaks for rest. Crammed into vans like cattle, prisoners are often denied food and water, beds, toilets and medical care. Some have died from treatable ailments when guards ignored them, others from injuries when fatigued drivers get into crashes.
Last but not least, there’s a must-read story by Shane Bauer, a reporter who spent four months working undercover as a guard at a private prison. Private prison companies, like the kind I wrote about while reviewing Atlas Shrugged, tout their ability to run prisons more cheaply and efficiently. The reality, according to Bauer’s report and other investigations, is that they mainly save money by understaffing and rock-bottom pay. The prison that Bauer worked at, Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, paid just $9 an hour and had staffing ratios as low as one guard for every 176 prisoners.
Unsurprisingly, an understaffed prison is a dangerous prison. Prisoners live in appallingly filthy, degrading conditions and are often denied medical care even in emergencies. Prison amenities like the library, hobby shops and recreation yards, were closed for lack of staff, leaving them no outlet to pass the time. Inmate-on-inmate violence is chronic, and the guards are encouraged to ignore it unless it becomes a full-scale riot. There was at least one escape while Bauer worked there that went unnoticed for hours.
There’s only one thing that the American justice system seems willing to spend freely on, and that’s the military-style weapons used to suppress citizen protests. In Baton Rouge, police responded to a protest march with a Ferguson-style show of force, coming out en masse with assault rifles, tank-like armored vehicles, and head-to-toe armor that looks appropriate for a war zone. One photo from the confrontation became instantly iconic:
Baton Rouge PD looks ridiculous. I never wore so much armor in combat. This is their own community. (Photo: Reuters) pic.twitter.com/clCFFyD6jx
— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) July 10, 2016
All this, in response to peaceful protests on an American street, sends the message that the police think of themselves as an occupying army and the populace as their enemy. The police are supposed to be public servants who answer to the democratic will. Instead, this goonish posturing says loud and clear that they see public opinion as something to be contained and crushed.
This isn’t about atheism per se, but criminal justice is a profoundly humanist issue. The way we treat the people who transgress against us is the clearest sign of what kind of society we want to be. We ought to want a justice system that rehabilitates people, that offers them a chance to reform themselves so they can rejoin society. Instead, what we have right now is a justice system that hardens people with cruel treatment, extracts as much profit as possible from their confinement, and tars them with permanent stigma that makes it all but impossible to rejoin society.