Addicted to Imprisonment

TWO WHITE TEENAGERS were recently convicted of spraying racist graffiti on a historic black school in northern Virginia. Their somewhat unusual sentence: Read from a list of 35 books, one a month for a year, and submit a report on all 12 to their parole officers. The booklist included Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton,To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, Night, by Elie Wiesel, and other classics.

The remarkable feature of this sentence was how it clashed conceptually with the customary default question that suffuses our judicial system: How long a prison sentence does the crime deserve?

A strange mathematics is at work in our criminal justice system: For every crime, a matching time in prison. Translating the crime of racist graffiti into reading books that might reform the minds of two teenagers makes a certain rational match with the crime. Putting them in prison for five years is no match at all.

In the recent era of mandated sentences for drug possession, judges themselves have sometimes protested the effects of such law. For example, in 2004, in Utah, 25-year-old Weldon Angelos was sentenced to 55 years in prison for trying to sell a pound and a half of marijuana. The sentencing judge, Paul Cassell, a George W. Bush appointee, called the mandated sentence “unjust, cruel, and even irrational.” Twelve years into that sentence, another federal judge reduced the sentence and released Angelos.

The foundation of many of these draconian punishments is the set of guidelines from the U.S. Sentencing Commission unveiled in 1987 (echoed in state-level systems in nearly half the states). The federal document, with its “sentencing table,” is a marvel of lawyerly specification of alleged fits between crimes and punishments. The recommended sentences range from a month to life imprisonment.

This chart, while not mandatory, is now followed by many federal judges since it has the endorsement of Congress. But there is something narrow, deceptive, and potentially cruel in all this quasi-mathematical calculation of justice, beginning with our default assumption of prison as society’s response to crime. So pervasive and typical is this resort to imprisonment that we might conclude that our criminal justice system itself is addicted to imprisonment.

And the addiction isn’t cheap. While government entities spend an estimated $80 billion per year to incarcerate 2.2 million people, the true cost, according to a 2016 study at Washington University, exceeds $1 trillion, half of that borne by families and communities of those incarcerated.

In our religious institutions, discussion of the moral issues of crime and punishment are often very superficial. I can hardly count the times in church discussions when someone quotes Exodus 21:24—“eye for eye, tooth for tooth”—as though this formula is the heart of the Hebrew Bible’s message about social response to human misbehavior. Few seem aware of the following verse that supports the idea of restorative justice. Exodus 22 uses terms such as “restitution” as responses to lawbreaking in common with norms of restorative justice. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is full of teachings that ask believers to imitate a justice of God that is suffused with mercy and forgiveness, a belief as basic to the prophets of Israel as to the teachings of Jesus.

Supreme Court Justice David Souter decried mandates that have sent people convicted of minor crimes to prison for decades, saying if these sentences are “not grossly disproportionate, the principle [of fitting punishment to crime] has no meaning.” One has to wonder if the principle itself has lost its meaning over centuries of its dominance in our criminal justice systems.

Editor's note: A version of this essay ran on BillMoyers.com.