One unseasonably warm day in February, photographer Stefan Ruiz and I wander over to the Brooklyn Detention Complex, a towering monolith of a jail that I’ve walked by a thousand times and never really noticed before. Ruiz is there to shoot a photo of the window where defendants—or more likely, members of their families—go to hand over bail money. I’m tagging along. It’s only a minute before a young man—gray sweatpants, white undershirt—emerges through the main doors. He’s grinning and wants us to take his photo, to capture his first moments of freedom after eight months in lockup. It’s not clear what crime he did or didn’t commit; he makes clear that he has no intention of going back. A corrections officer hanging out on the front steps sidles up to us. “What are you doing?” she asks him. “You can’t loiter here.” He’s waiting for the bail window to open so he can collect a MetroCard. “What are you doing here?” she asks us. We’re just passing by. She nods. Okay then. He slips back inside the building. In that moment the obvious is made all the more obvious. Neither of us is currently incarcerated, but we stand on two sides of an invisible line: He’s black, in prison-issue sweats, and part of the system. I’m white, in vintage Levi’s, and not.
“The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time,” writes civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander in her seminal book The New Jim Crow. “Once swept into the system, one’s chances of ever being truly free are slim, often to the vanishing point.” In America, where we have less than 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, we talk a lot about “mass incarceration,” but rarely do we stop to define exactly what that means. Data assembled by the Sentencing Project spells it out: Currently 2.2 million people are in prison or jail in the U.S. (some statistics say 2.3 million), and approximately 7 million are under some sort of correctional control (including surveillance, probation, parole, et cetera). In the past 40 years, owing in no small part to the war on drugs—born under President Nixon, realized by President Reagan, made indelible by President Clinton’s harsh sentencing policies and federal grants to expand state and local law enforcement—incarceration has increased by roughly 500 percent. Per Alexander, drug offenses alone “account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000.” And arrests for marijuana possession—a drug that is now legal for recreational use in nine states—made up “nearly 80 percent of the growth in drug arrests during the 1990s.”
Crucially, prisons and jails do not reflect demographics outside, where non-Hispanic white Americans still represent a majority (about 61 percent). “Blacks are nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested for drug offenses and 2.5 times as likely to be arrested for drug possession,” says a 2016 Sentencing Project report on state prisons. “This is despite the evidence that whites and blacks use drugs at roughly the same rate.” (An NAACP fact sheet suggests that ratio jumps to six to one when you look at rates of imprisonment for drug charges—which could in part be explained by studies like this one, showing major racial disparities in the plea bargaining process, which accounts for more than 90 percent of convictions both at the federal and state levels.) One in 17 white men in this country is likely to end up behind bars. For Latino men it’s one in six. For black men it’s one in three. (Black women are more than six times as likely as white women to end up in prison—Latina women more than twice as likely—and women’s incarceration has been outstripping men’s at a rate of 50 percent since 1980.) Even for those who have finished paying their debt to society, as criminal justice reform advocate and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker likes to say, there are more than 40,000 collateral consequences, including decreased access to social services (food stamps, public housing) and educational and job opportunities, loss of ability to serve on juries and, in some cases, to participate in the democratic process (in Alabama, for example, nearly 30 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote).
[For more on this story by JULIA FELSENTHAL, go to https://www.vogue.com/projects...inal-justice-reform/]
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