Bobby Beausoleil Reference Archive

BACK IN 1970, when I first came to prison, there were about 10,000 prison inmates in California’s state prisons. There are now over 170,000 inmates in the state’s prisons—a seventeen fold increase, most of which developed from the early 1980s to the present. This ballooning of the prison population is grossly out of proportion with increases in per capita incidents of criminal violations; nor does an increase in the state’s general population account for it.

To be sure, the emergence of the incarceration model that exists today was precipitated by justifiable concerns about public safety. Crimes related to the abuse of drugs were at an all-time high. In a corresponding trend, urban gangs were proliferating, and street thuggery with its associated violence was very visibly on the rise. This visibility in and of itself greatly exacerbated the threat from crime that many people were perceiving and sensing.

An ever more pervasive corporate media machine had locked onto the formula that nothing attracts advertising revenue like a good scary story taken from real life. News media outlets fell all over one another in their competition to be the first to bombard the American public with frightening images and sound bites. The same media outlets published editorials beating the drum for a war on crime and drugs. Popular entertainment media, meanwhile, threw gasoline on the flames with television programs, films, music videos, and magazine features glamorizing thug lifestyle. The home security business was booming.

Reliable statistics were scarce, making it nearly impossible to determine if criminal activity was actually that much worse, with population growth factored in, than it had been previously. But the general perception was that it was much worse. Understandably frightened, the public clamored for the government to do something to reduce the double threat of drugs and crime. Do something it did.

I EXPERIENCED THE GROWTH of the prison industrial complex in a very personal way, from inside prison. First came an increase in the number of prison guards in evidence—as if the state government knew in advance what was about to happen. Then, beginning in the early 1980s as prison inmate populations increased, second bunks were installed in cells designed for single occupancy. Many of the recreation and rehabilitation-oriented programs were mothballed or dismantled. Gymnasiums and other common area structures were converted into dorms where, in some cases, triple bunk beds were installed with less than two feet of space between them. For a time, there was a tent city on the lower yard at San Quentin.

There was some temporary relief in the density of individual prison populations when the first of the new prisons that California constructed came on line. To build these new prisons the state spent money it didn’t have, borrowing from subsequent generations of California citizens. Both the Republican and Democratic parties in the state’s government supported and promoted the multi-billion dollar bond measures, one after another, that were used to fund the prison expansion.

They had no choice. The new “get tough” laws with their lower threshold for felony prosecution, vastly stiffer penalties, and no-parole policies guaranteed that prison populations would rise inexorably. The correctional officers union became the most powerful lobby in the state, and, in collusion with groups claiming to be acting in support of victims rights, successfully advocated for new crime laws with harsher sentences that would insure a steady stream of inmate “bodies” (as the correctional guards sometimes refer to us) into the prison system. Most famous of these is California’s “three strikes” law that mandates a life sentence for individuals convicted of a third felony offense, regardless of magnitude. Other mandatory minimum sentence laws have beer written into California’s statures as well.

WHEN THE U.S. CONGRESS ENACTED the Federal Sentencing Act of 1984, the discretion of judges in setting the terms of sentences in criminal court proceedings was virtually curtailed in favor of a grid system of uniform sentences that judges would be forced to follow in all cases that came before them. At the time this legislation was passed, Representative John Conyers, Jr., then chair of the Criminal Justice Subcommittee, entered a dissenting opinion into the congressional record that included a dire warning. It was Conyers’ opinion that taking discretion from judges would effectively put the criminal justice system in the hands of prosecutors, leading to escalating sentences in response to political pressures, and bringing about an increase in prison populations. Conyers was in the minority and his warning went unheeded. History has borne him out, however.

Emboldened by the new federal sentencing legislation, the states soon followed suit, California and Oregon among them. With prosecutors in charge, any semblance of mercy ceased to be a factor in criminal proceedings. In this new world of mechanized justice, prosecutors hardly have to break a sweat to obtain with a plea bargain the kinds of lengthy sentences that would previously have required a trial by jury. Few criminal defendants facing compounded charges will turn down an opportunity to plead out to one of the lesser charges when far more onerous penalties are likely to result in a jury trial.

On the back side, too, relief was cut off or greatly restricted. Recently enacted federal legislation instituted strict limits on the ability of prisoners to seek relief through the courts. Paroles that had been previously granted to prisoners were revoked or rescinded, often for petty or incredibly contrived reasons. In the federal corrections system, laws that provided for parole were repealed entirely, and some of the states adopted similar legislation. In states that still have parole laws on the books, parole boards have been reluctant to grant paroles in the hostile atmosphere of reverberating get-tough political rhetoric that persists.

Consequently, even after building more than twenty new prisons—some of them gargantuan—California’s prison population is still well over the capacity the system was designed to accommodate. The gymnasium dormitories with their triple-tier bunk beds are still very much in use today. And with prison gangs having spread like a plague throughout the California corrections system, many of the state’s facilities are in a near perpetual state of lockdown as a consequence of frequent and widespread outbreaks of violence.

AT PRESENT, and as of some years back, no prison administrator or employee has been working in corrections longer than I have been in prison. Having witnessed the emergence of the prison industrial complex in my home state firsthand, from the inside, I naturally fancied myself something of an expert on this talking point … until, that is, I read Joseph T. Hallinan’s excellent book, Going Up The River. The social dilemma posed by incarceration in this country is worse than I knew or even imagined.

In the late 1990s, Joseph Hallinan—a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and seasoned investigative journalist—sent himself out on a tour of state and federal prisons in the United States. In essence, he wanted to find out what the anti-crime and anti-drugs legislation of the mid-1980s and wrought, so that he could inform the American people about what their taxation dollars had purchased. What he learned, and what he reported back to us in professional, matter-of-fact language, is chilling to the bone.

Put simply, the so-called War on Crime has unleashed a juggernaut on the American landscape that threatens to undermine the integrity of a nation. This is a case of the cure being worse than the sickness it was intended to remedy.

The prison buildup that has occurred in California over the past quarter of a century is only one of the more gross examples of a similar process that has taken place in every state in the union. It is not even the biggest—Texas holds that distinction. A systematic disintegration and abdication of ethical responsibility in criminal justice policy has crept into existence across the country while most Americans, trusting their government to know what’s good for them, were blissfully unaware that this was happening.

When Hallinan first published his book in 2001, he reported that there were 1.3 million men, women, and children imprisoned in the United States—compared to all other countries in the world, second only to Russia in per capita rate of incarceration. The most recent figure I’ve seen published, reported in 2008, is 2.4 million incarcerated Americans. It is quite possible that Russia, like it did in the race to the moon, has now lost to the U.S. the dubious honor of having the largest percentage of its national population behind bars.

Make no mistake; imprisoning Americans is a growth industry. Hundreds of billions of dollars—in mostly future taxes—have been invested in constructing, populating, maintaining and servicing prisons. For a good many people, the nation’s prison boom has been a cash cow that keeps on giving. Wall Street investors, private prison corporations, and building contractors have benefited enormously from the expansion of the prison industry. Numerous product manufacturers, distributors, telecommunications and security systems providers have made impressive fortunes supplying goods and services specific to the unique needs of prisons and prison populations. Correctional staff unions have built financial empires from membership dues, enabling them to make sizeable political campaign contributions to advance their agendas: continued job security, benefits and pensions for their membership organizations.

As a jobs program, the prison boom has been a windfall for some. Impoverished communities in mostly rural areas, left stranded with double-digit unemployment after other industries collapsed or moved away, have been only too willing to welcome a new prison into their towns. Hallinan remarks on this phenomenon in his book:

No one asked what happens when prison becomes an industry, like steel or coal, or when large numbers of free people are given an economic stake in the imprisonment of others . . . [B]y 1990, prisons were no longer simply houses of detention but engines of economic salvation.

That regular working class folks accepting such employment would have to steel their hearts to make a living on the misery of other Americans is a sacrifice many have been willing to make. Not surprisingly, there have been reports concerning these communities about increasing levels of dysfunction and domestic violence in families in which one or both parents are employed in a prison.

The exploitation for profit of one segment of the nation’s population by another is supported by the rationale that the exploited segment of the population are “bad people” who “deserve” the harsh treatment they receive in prison as punishment for their crimes. How is this different from the slavery that once existed in this country? Slavery, too, is supported by the notion that some groups of people are inferior to their avowed masters, and that the group of people assumed to be inferior deserve to be treated as property for the purposes of profit. Have we unconsciously chosen as a nation to return to the practice of slavery, only in another guise?

Hallinan comments:

By building so many prisons so fast we have created a climate in which it is now in nearly everyone’s interest to argue for prison terms that are tougher, longer, harsher. Because only through longer, tougher, harsher terms can the prison boom perpetuate itself. And self-perpetuation is where the money is. Americans have learned to profit from every kind of prison but an empty one, and this alone is incentive enough to keep prison populations growing.

APPLYING A LITTLE OF MY OWN EXPERIENCE, I can say without much reservation that the view from the inside is vastly different from what most free citizens imagine. Prisons in this nation have gradually become repositories for the disenfranchised and the disaffected, or persons who are simply undesirable in the view of many people in mainstream society. With the closures of a majority of state mental health facilities there has come a more or less proportionate increase in the numbers of persons in prison who suffer from delusions and other mental challenges—problems that are likely to be worsened in a prison environment where there is an inherent tendency for psychosis to develop in relatively well-adjusted people. There are also a great many homeless people who have committed petty crimes because they prefer prison to going hungry and living in a cardboard box or under a bridge. And there are many old people in prison, some so decrepit they could not possibly be much of a threat to anyone.

The popular belief that prisons are full of bad people is simply untrue. Unquestionably, a significant segment of the incarcerated population—and, regrettably, I must include myself here—have committed serious crimes. But in all these years I have met very few prison inmates who might fit the definition of “bad people who deserve to be punished” that free citizens are prone to apply to their incarcerated brothers and sisters—when they think of them at all.

Yet such definitions create a disconnect that makes a real and successful solution to crime an impossibility. Such definitions provide a basis of justification that perpetuates a process of systematically stripping millions of human beings of their autonomy, dignity, hope, and meaningful life purpose, while shattering the lives of many of their families. Such definitions form the foundation for a system that makes it possible for a relative few to profit from the fears of a nation.

THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH is that, as a society, under the auspices of the United States criminal justice system, America is trading in human suffering and misery through the wholesale warehousing of human beings in prisons. How has this been allowed to happen in a country that prides itself on its high standards in matters of human rights? Is this simply a case of good intentions gone awry, or is some clandestine, diabolically deliberate profiteering scheme at work here? Or is it merely that we’ve invested more credit for savvy and farsightedness in our elected officials than was warranted?

Evil, I’ve heard it said, happens in the dark. The American people have been insulated from the costs, both in human and economic terms, of the current U.S. incarceration policies. The imprisoned are a faceless population hidden from view in mostly remote locations. The economic costs are largely hidden as well, with corrections budgets—conveniently for some—couched in safety budgets that include such essentials as police and fire departments, the courts, and homeland security. School budgets and numerous valuable social programs are getting the axe right and left but corrections budgets are evidently immune to being put on the chopping block. Lawmakers, it seems, have painted themselves into a corner with their own tough-on-crime rhetoric, and are fearful of the possible repercussions of suggesting a reversal of failed policies. It’s as though each of them is afraid to be the first to blink.

There is no question in my mind that incarceration as punishment fails as both a fiscal policy and a strategy for correcting the behavior of those who break laws. Investing in failure with the expectation of achieving a successful result, it seems to me, is a symptom of insanity. It’s that kind of strategy that got a lot of us sent to prison. A successful outcome can only be realized out of efforts built on a success orientation. As things stand at present, it’s a sure bet that the skyrocketing costs associated with unbridled prison growth will prove to be unsustainable in due course. A breakdown of some sort is inevitable.

IT COULD BE ARGUED that the current incarceration model might be worth the tremendous costs if the country were actually made safer from crime as a result. Most of us would agree that every man, woman and child has the need to be safe, and that safeguarding Americans must be a primary national concern. But locking up millions of people will not make the country any safer in the long run. Eventually, no matter how long and harsh sentences are made, most of the people sent to prison will be released back into communities on the outside. It is very unlikely, given the nature of human warehousing conditions most incarcerated persons experience, that many of them will have been able to improve their socialization skills during their imprisonment.

While discussing this topic with a friend the other day, he made an interesting remark. “I can punish my dog by closing him up in a closet for a month,” he said, “but I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to let him out.” This allegory illustrates the dilemma the country is now faced with.

There is a punitive aspect to any response to crime. Degradation, isolation, and perpetual condemnation do not need to be a part of it. Subjecting a human being to harsh treatment in the belief that applying enough external discomfort will “break” the individual into submission and conformance may produce some short term compliance in some people, but will also tend to make them more hostile, resentful, and possibly psychotic. Such practices tend to make broken people, crushing their empathy and teaching them that hurting others in an acceptable way to get what they want.

A diminished awareness of empathy is a root cause of why some individuals engage in acts that do some kind of injury to others. If the intent of the nation is to reduce or eliminate the problem of crime in this country, any strategy going forward must include, as a core component, providing the opportunity and skill set necessary for individuals who commit crimes to develop empathy and understanding and self-awareness. These tools are readily available, proven effective, and a great many jobs can be made for teaching and administering them. This is absolutely the best way I know of to insure the safety of Americans.

The commission of a crime can be described as a poor strategy for meeting basic human needs—the kinds of needs we all have. Rather than approaching crime as an enemy of war, treating it as the social illness it is by helping persons who commit crimes to learn better strategies for meeting their needs is the solution to the problem of escalating crime.

People are not changed from the outside in. they are changed from the inside through a process of personal transformation. This process can be taught and readily learned because it is a process of restoration to a natural human state.

We have all, in one way or another contributed to the culture of fear that has given rise to Incarceration Nation, and we all bear some responsibility for finding a way out of this morass we have created. Any response to crime that does not involve the persons who commit crimes in the process of developing a solution to the problem of crime is doomed to failure. The path to a solution resides in partnering with the people who know the problem from the inside. My 40+ years of experience in this area bears this out. Put those individuals who were or are a part of the culture of street crime to work on the problem and I promise you will be amazed by the results.

Bobby BeauSoleil Summer ‘09