Tom Matlack wants drugs and prison to become a part of every American’s life. He’s not as crazy as you think.
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings…
Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things
—U2, “Grace”
I have a Google alert for my name that lets me know when someone writes something about me. Sometimes it’s a nice surprise—someone saying that I’m actually a decent human being—but a lot of the time I get links to someone criticizing some crazy post I have written. I just like to keep track…not that I respond all that often anymore; it’s more a really silly way to keep score. And I admit to getting some kind of sick pleasure by stirring the muck. Pissing people off is perhaps the highest form of flattery.
On August 24th, I got quite a start. I got an email with a Google alert link to a guy with my same name and his mug shot. Apparently this Thomas Matlack was booked just after midnight the night before. He had long hair and a soul patch. The guy’s eyes looked bloodshot and very sad. He was arrested in Casselberry, Florida—which is the interior of the state, about parallel with Cape Canaveral.
“Just a coincidence,” I told myself, deleting the email as fast as I could. But those sad eyes have haunted me ever since. I’ve spent enough time visiting prisons to be scared to death of having to stay in one. And my fear of prisons and the very thin line between those of us on the outside and those stuck inside has made me think very hard about what a rational prison policy might be in this country. I am convinced that I didn’t end up in prison not because of some superior moral fiber than my namesake, but by the sheer luck of birth.
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If there is a problem of economic inequality in our country—and when guys like Warren Buffett start signing up to pay more taxes to stave off food riots, most people would have to agree there is—prison policy plays a pivotal role. With 5 percent of the world’s population, we Americans house a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Our incarceration rate is unmatched the world over. No other country has close to 2.3 million inmates.
As a part of an “American Exception” series exploring the U.S. criminal justice system, New York Times reporter Adam Liptak goes to great length to show how “criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.”
But its not just a moral issue; it’s a economic one. Prison is the driving force behind the acceleration of poverty in our country. Bruce Western of Harvard and Becky Pettit of the University of Washington showed in a recent study just how poverty sends people to prison—at least under current law—and prison, in turn, ruins any ability for that person—and very often that person’s children—to escape poverty. “It’s a vicious feedback loop that is affecting an ever-greater percentage of the adult population and shredding part of the fabric of 21st-century American society,” noted Sasha Abramsky in her Slate piece, “Toxic Persons.”
And, of course, it’s inherently racist. In 1980, one in 10 black high school dropouts was incarcerated. By 2008, that number was 37 percent. Western and Pettit calculate that 68 percent of African-American male high school dropouts born from 1975 to 1979 will spend time. Of the 2.3 million inmates, well over a million are minorities. The percentage of African Americans in this country is 12.6 percent.
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My niece is a senior at an elite college this year. She grew up in New Jersey and went to public school. She was a good student. I never heard about her getting into trouble. She doted on her younger brother and was quite involved in theater. She didn’t get into a good college because of any privileged upbringing; in fact, her father never went to college. No, she just worked hard and stayed out of trouble.
This particular niece happened to go to the same college I did, so I have been particularly interested in the periodic reports over the course of her college experience. There was the semester abroad where she met a new boyfriend, the shows she acted in, the psychology classes. But she has kept coming back, again and again, to a particular group of people, a group that fundamentally changed her.
Because she is an aspiring actress, I expected to hear about Matt Weiner, the creator of Mad Men; or Michael Bay, the famous producer of Transformers and a billion other films; or even Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While all of these alums have been on campus, I didn’t hear about it from her.
What I heard about was a yearlong course in which my niece went into a maximum-security prison to work with the female inmates to adapt Shakespeare and then Dante to the women’s own life stories. My niece and her classmates worked with the inmates to take their plays and bring them to the stage. The inmates performed inside for their peers and their families. Then the students performed the same plays back at school for their classmates. Both performances were transformational for all involved—the inmates, students, and audience members alike.
So my question is pretty simple. What if every elite college (meaning an undergraduate university where enrollment is selective) made a course involving intense interaction between students and inmates mandatory? If there are two education systems in our country—one ending up in prison and the other with a fancy diploma—that would go a long way toward bridging the gap. If kids these days are anything like my niece—who reported to me that “the professor wasn’t even all that great, it was the inmates that I learned everything from”—they will get it.
Then, what if we went one step further in this line of thinking? What if we made these same privileged students attending a selective four-year college commit to two years of national service post graduation? This would include classroom teaching, but also tutoring, mentoring, working at boys’ and girls’ clubs, being Big Brothers and Big Sisters, and even supporting police in the most dangerous areas. Target those areas of our country with the highest rates of poverty and incarceration (same thing, obviously).
I have two teenage kids. I am not very excited about the idea of either one setting off to fight for our country, though if that was their choice I would, of course, be proud of their service and courage. But I would be particularly proud of them if they set off to save our country on the ground in some poor community where most of the men are making a living in the drug trade and ending up in prison. To my way of thinking, that is way more important than tracking down the bad guys who happen to be sitting on strategic oil reserves a world away.
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So here’s my most controversial but most important idea: Let’s make it impossible to make money selling drugs in the ghetto by decriminalizing them all. Let’s put drugs in the CVS rather than the projects.
I was discussing this idea over dinner recently with a good friend who happens to be a great mom and social worker. She disagreed strongly, pointing out how addictive cocaine and heroin are. “We don’t want to make them available to our kids,” she said after I had gone through a long-winded explanation of how I would auction off licenses to corporations, just like the FCC has done for years with the airwaves. “Drugs like that change your brain chemistry and are addictive immediately.”
Here’s the thing: Those drugs are available on every street corner in housing projects across the country. Sure, affluent moms would prefer not to have them available at the local pharmacy. And they may have a point, in theory. Hard drugs are addictive and dangerous, not just in their impact on body chemistry but on families and communities. But then, there are millions of moms whose kids have to walk past crack houses and drug dealers every morning on the way to school. Even more troubling, those moms are raising their kids alone because the fathers are in prison…and they basically have to hope to hit the lottery, lest their own sons follow their dads to the same fate.
As Julio Medina, at one time the head of the largest drug gang in the South Bronx and a man who was sentenced to life in Sing Sing by the Federal Task Force on Drugs, told me, “The family business was drugs…I was really good at it. I just never knew I had a choice. I felt the need to take care of my family since my dad was not around.”
Sure, we may not want drugs in the leafy suburbs. But to say that kids shouldn’t be exposed to coke and heroin is to ignore the reality faced by the growing underclass. Being out of sight to the privileged does not mean it isn’t rotting our country from the inside out.
Prohibition did not work with booze, and it isn’t going to work with drugs either. Prohibition led to the growth of the mob, and our drug policy has led to a fundamental fracture in our society. Legal booze and cigarettes kill many more people than any narcotic in our country—yet by legalizing, taxing, and educating, we have successfully taken the criminals out of the process, generating huge tax revenue that we have used to educate the populace on the dangers of smoking and drinking.
Fighting the war on drugs by attempting to stem the tide of supply from Mexico and throwing everybody in the supply chain here in the States in prison is not working. Drugs, prison, education, and poverty are inextricably linked, and that complexity of issues goes to the very heart of the failing economy and is a true threat to national security.
Maybe I am crazy, but I would rather have the drugs out of the shadows and brought into the light where we can see it. I’d rather have legal producers of narcotics dragging small-time drug dealers into court for infringing on their economic rights rather than perpetuating the downward spiral of our poorest people—particularly minorities—by locking them up for drug-related crimes.
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So if college students become engaged with inmate populations and work in the most at-risk communities as part of a national service program, and we legalize drugs to get them out of the streets, what do we do with the 2.3 million inmates we currently have? How do we think about violent crime going forward?
Half a million people in the United States are imprisoned on drug-related charges. That’s ten times more than in 1980. It’s hard to estimate how many of the remaining 1.8 million inmates are incarcerated for more serious violent crimes committed as part of the hand-to-hand combat associated with the black-market drug supply chain or, in fact, because addiction made violence and property crime the only means to get a fix. There are certainly murderers and bank robbers who just commit crimes because they have evil intents completely unrelated to drugs—but I would argue that at least half of the current inmate population is in some way related to our drug policy, with its ripple effect on poverty, social structure, unemployment, the economy, and national security down the road.
So my vote would be to separate violent criminals from those who are charged only with non-violent drug crimes, are addicts, or suffer from mental illness. Rather than keeping addicts locked up, focus on treating them. Keep the laws on rape and murder and violent assault as they are—and strengthen them if you want. But separate issues of law and order from a war on drugs that hasn’t worked. Locking up a large proportion of poor minority men in our country does far more damage than good.
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I’m still thinking about the other Tom Matlack. He’s a few years older than I am and a few inches shorter. I don’t know what he did or what happened to him, but those haunting eyes are like looking in the mirror to me. Every time I go into a prison, I am overcome with fear. I think that the guys inside must be monsters. Seeing the bars and the cells only heightens my terror.
And then I sit down. Someone offers me a cup of coffee. A hand rests on my shoulder in a sign of welcome. I tell my story, and he tells his. He weeps, and I weep too. And I realize just how much we are the same, these supposed monsters and me.
There’s just one difference: I get to leave.
About Tom Matlack
I’m with you Tom on the decriminalization of drug-related crimes for all the reasons you mention (unless of course they escalate into or entail the violent crimes we both want punished as usual). But this photo really grabbed me because until I got into the piece I flashed on the possibility that it might actually be you at some low, physically transmogrified point in your life. Yikes!
An eye-catcher with your name at the top certainly, and a thoughtful piece.
Thanks Mark. Imagine how I felt when I saw that picture with my name attached?!?
I would consider legalizing above decriminalizing drugs so as to be able to manage and address addiction issues at the local level. Savings taken from prison systems should be diverted to local management centers that dispense, monitor, and assist users.
Likewise for prostitution – most, very big portion, of street prostitutes are drug users. Giving them resources to manage their habit would be a good thing. It should also help some young men steer clear of the gang lifestyle. They are not much different than prostitutes chasing money and drugs, even though they are often painted as villains of the inner city.
Bemoaning how many prisoners we have in this country and then comparing it to the rest of the world is a little misleading. Yes crime is lower in other parts of the world and there are less inmates? But part of the reason for that is the punishments for crimes are that much more harsh. Canings, cutting off the hands of thieves and death for crimes that would be misdemeanors here will certainly cut down on the crime rate and the number of people in jail. But let me ask you this…where would you rather live? Here or there. I think we all know the answer.
In most prisons, you can get a GED and even advanced degrees. Rehabilitation is possible, but not everyone takes advantage. And legalizing all drugs is just a bad idea. Granted, I think you can legalize pot and tax it. But the harder stuff? No way. I watched several of my family members waste away to nothing because of drugs and prescription pills. Legal pills they were addicted to. Until one day I found my aunt dead on the bathroom floor next to a pile of pills. And you want to make it EASIER for addicts to have these?? Addicted is the key word. It doesn’t matter if we tax the drugs, because people are addicted and they will have them no matter the cost. Your plan just doesn’t make sense.
You look at people in jail and wonder how the system failed them. I look at people in jail and wonder how they failed to abide by the laws of the land. After all, I’ve spent enough time in district and superior courts to see that it is UNBELIEVABLY DIFFICULT to get jail time, even on drug charges. I can’t tell you how often I’ve scratched my head as the judge lets third, fourth and fifth time offenders go with nothing more than probation. And, of course, drug testing and treatment programs. Which they do at the taxpayers’ expense and then go right back to using. So excuse me if I have a hard time feeling bad for people who have every opportunity to turn things around, but simply choose not to.
You get to leave because you didn’t commit a crime. You get to leave because you’re not a criminal. They are. And while I’m all for rehabilitation, I’m also a big fan of some personal responsibility. Let’s let them practice that before we go around feeling bad for them for no reason.
I’d just like to point out that incarcerating people does NOT cure their addictions, and has been proven to turn people INTO addicts at an alarming rate. Prison culture has a lot of drugs in it, and the rehabilitation options nationwide are not that great. Also, the recidivism (return) rate in most prisons ranges from 60-80%, if I recall my figures from sociology class properly. Not only that, but former prisoners have such a black mark on their record that they are often unable to find legit employment once released from prison.
Prison is not the answer to the drug problem. Addiction is a disease of the soul, as much as anything else, and incarcerating people in metaphorical plague pits will NOT (and hasn’t!) fixed anything.
Removing the stigma by decriminalizing/legalizing changes the landscape of social pressures which induct new people into being addicts. It also helps addiction counselors do their jobs and help people. I’d think it’s much less scary to go get help for booze than heroin right now, for example, because the heroin addict currently deeply fears and mistrusts a system that is likely to incarcerate him for his disease, while the alcoholic is not.
Legalizing WOULD make drugs more available, in short, but it would also increase treatment options and decrease the social pressures that cause people to become addicts in the first place. I’ve lost people to death by addiction, too– and it has left me wishing for a world that stigmatizes and punishes less, and does more of the things that are proven to help, instead.
Also– there is a certain portion of the population who are just addicts. That is the way they will always be. Criminalizing BECAUSE of them makes NO SENSE. They will get their hands on stuff no matter WHAT, so we should be making decisions that ameliorate the overall impact of their addictions on society– and prison is NOT the answer that has proven to be effective.
And finally– people who say they don’t get how poor people broke the rules have clearly never lived in deep poverty. Below a certain income bracket, the whole of society becomes a trap just waiting to happen. If you are desperately poor, and I have been, you need to be fairly savvy in order to avoid trouble with the law. I have to run or I’d get into it more… Maybe someone else can field this one…?
How would legalization of drugs increase treatment options? Are you assuming the government taxes the drugs and the revenue generated from those taxes pays for the treatment? If so that’s a pretty awful cycle you’re creating. But if that’s not what you’re suggesting, please tell me how we’re going to get more money in a recession to increase addiction treatment programs. We’re broke. Money is being cut from these programs, not added. Yet you seem to gloss right over this.
And no, I’ve never been “desperately” poor. I’m not sure what qualifies someone as desperately poor, but I am in the process of losing my home to foreclosure. So while I fully admit I’ve had advantages in life, I’m also no stranger to being broke and scared. Yet I’ve never been in prison.
But I have known people who have managed to rise above the circumstances you describe. That’s why I’m all in favor of the part of Tom’s proposal where we have collegiate volunteers work to improve the situation. I think that’s great and anytime someone in a privileged position can provide a boost to someone less fortunate, I believe that can only be a good thing. But classifying everyone below the poverty line as “trapped” is also a little unfair (and mildly insulting) I might add. If you keep telling them they’re trapped then why are they going to even attempt to get out of the situation??
And lastly, of course prisons are awful places. Because they’re filled with prisoners. Not all criminals are automatically bad people, but the vast majority are in there for a reason. But if you’re really against the prison system that much, then what is the solution? You spend an awful lot of time pointing out what’s wrong, but you don’t suggest anything to better the situation. And that’s a big part of the problem.
The legalization of drugs, taken out of its context, would NOT increase treatment options– you’re right. But legalization is a step in a society-wide shift towards policies of enlightened self-interest instead of the crime and punishment paradigm. The more people know about the factors that go into addiction and crime, the more effective treatments and social policies will become. (When people were informed that smoking cigarettes kills you, over time society produced help for people to quit.) This is an organic process and as I am not a politician, nor ever desire to BE one, I have no idea how making this work would look like in reality. But, this is a discussion, not a lawmaking session.
Being poor is many, many ways and I can’t claim to speak to all of them. I do know what I’m talking about when I say “trapped,” though, because I’ve been there, lived it aside many other people, other people who said often that they felt trapped, that there was no way out. I also didn’t say that EVERYONE in that situation is trapped, and I don’t particularly appreciate having words put into my mouth– which is, to wit, mildly insulting.
In order to speak on the subject of poverty tho, I feel I should speak to my own experience, and that’s probably the most effective thing I can do to illustrate “trapped.” There’s a lot of people, not just @DaddyFiles, that don’t have much of a window into deep poverty… I want, for the sake of keeping this conversation interesting, to provide a window. Everything from here down, I want to emphasize, is MY subjective experience, and MY subjective conclusions, and I am most certainly NOT speaking to every experience of poverty ever. Okay? Okay.
The desperately poor I know is living on $349 dollars a month, disabled, with no contact with family and few friends, none of whom could take me in. $349. Food, transit, basic survival supplies. Forget shelter, $349 a month won’t buy you that *and* food, and frankly, one needs food to survive way worse than one needs shelter. All of the food had to be something I could eat as-it-was, because there was nowhere I could cook it. I had to carry everything with me. Being unable to eat wheat or dairy made it harder. I was malnourished, often cold and wet, and didn’t have the money that would give me “permission” to be inside someplace– most of that $349 goes into groceries, at the end of the day, and buying a cup of coffee (forget a meal!) was a luxury I barely dreamt of most days. You don’t get to just walk into a restaurant or cafe and sit down and enjoy it– you have to pay for the privilege of sitting in there. You don’t realize it when you have had a regular flow of money your whole life, but once that money drops out, almost every door in the city slams shut on your face. In some way, every day, every building you are in, you are in because you have the money to buy entrance.
Having just enough money to eat, brush my teeth, and replace clothing at Goodwill as it fell apart… was a very focusing experience. The whole world became like a game on the other side of a window, one that I couldn’t participate in, even though I *did* theoretically know the rules. Knowing the rules didn’t count for crap if I wasn’t able to pay into the pot, so to speak. Due to my singular situation there was nowhere for me to gain a toehold to get back into the game. Because I had no place to be, I was constantly in the wrong place, and underfoot with the police for the sheer fact that I didn’t have an “inside” to go to and that made me “suspicious.” Everyone treated me as “suspicious.” No one wants to give you anything, and no one wants you to touch them, and no one wants to talk to you. It’s like being a leper. It gets maddening really, really fast. So does not having a place to sleep. The psychological toll is enormous, and the pressures it exerted on me were enormous– terrifying. This is the kind of stuff that makes people go nuts and do stupid things, even people who in another context would be quite normal. How would YOU feel if you weren’t welcome anywhere and no one wanted to talk to you? Solitary confinement is supposed to be one of prison’s worst punishments– imagine experiencing it, but without walls. It’s like being a ghost. It’s like being dead.
I ended up often wandering around with other homeless young people, for lack of anything better to do and craving both company and safety. Wandering with the other ghosts. A number of times the young people around me pulled stunts that would *definitely* gotten me arrested just for being there, if there had been any police around. Opportunities to slip into crowd mentality and do destructive things were incredibly thick around me (and this isn’t even talking about the drugs, which I’ll get to in a minute.) I didn’t participate in theft or vandalism, but most people in that peer group did. Virtue, as it were, may be the “better” choice– but when the people who are the only sense of reality and companionship and belonging that you HAVE are doing destructive things, it’s very easy to want to remain a part of the “tribe” and do the destructive things too… instead of being alone. (And that’s not even getting into the bullying that often happens when people step outside of “the tribe’s” behavioral agreement.)
So let me break this down for you: No home. No car. No phone. No computer. No lattes. No eating out. No new clothes. No legitimate reason to be anyplace (in a school, in a gym, in an office, in a store). No home address means no taking books out of the library, because you get no library card– so unless you want to spend all day at a library, no books. No sketchpads and pens. No video games. **Nothing–** except hours and hours and hours to kill between meals that happen too fast. Hobbies take money to acquire the materials, especially in a city. There aren’t many creative options for how to spend one’s time and energy, unless you’re a yogi and happen to _really dig_ meditating. Oh, except unless you find someplace people aren’t walking through, you can’t stay in one place that long in a city, because someone will eventually tell you to move, no matter HOW harmless and quiet you are.
I had the fortune to actually know what was wrong with me, (an Autism-spectrum-disorder) but none of the state-assigned doctors I had would listen to me, and pathologized me in a number of incorrect and unhelpful ways. I was completely unable to work due not only to my original issue, which includes such poor body-language skills that I don’t interview well enough to hire, but also malnutrition, intense (and totally understandable) situational anxiety, and PTSD. Oh yes, and who the hell is going to hire someone with no address, little work history, and a wardrobe from Goodwill that’s seen time sleeping on concrete? Uh, yeah.
I was trying to get on SSI so that I could at least afford housing. In order to get SSI, I had to have a doctor backing me up. In order to get a doctor to back me up, I had to be able to convince them that they should help me, which they didn’t want to do– they wanted LESS work on their overfilled plates, not MORE. They were rude, insulting, and unhelpful– Many people who were getting social services for a minute decided to drop them because they were begin treated so badly… and many more chose not to get social services, because they were being treated so badly. Besides, since I was applying for help with a “mental” disorder rather than a clear-cut physical disability, everything that came out of my mouth was automatically invalidated by the sheer fact that I was trying to get psych treatment– and was therefore crazy– and was therefore unable to speak for myself (apparently.) (Poor social skills don’t mean “out of touch with reality,” for those of us who have missed the memo…)
I went around this merrygoround for several years, and I was about to be totally cut off from the general assistance that I had been living on when I got rescued. Even though I wanted to help myself, and even though I was trying, there was no way that I found for me to help myself or get out of this situation on my own. I was really blessed, thankfully… Someone managed to connect me with a long-lost family member, who was thankfully able to help out by buying me private care. Getting a private clinic to diagnose and treat my autism is EXPENSIVE– and not something I could have done on my own. This set me on the road on which I eventually met my very loving and supportive partner, who I now live with. We split rent and expenses in a way that leaves me with a little money for socializing, and this is really revolutionary for me. And even now, if I had to go back to living on my own, I would be basically unable to afford simple pleasures like an occasional dinner out with friends, or a movie, or any of the other avenues of socializing that most people in this society take utterly for granted. It is very isolating and demoralizing, even WITHOUT my disability getting in the way. The friends I had in high school, who are mostly neurotypical and able to fend for themselves, live in a different world than I do. The only friends I have left are the ones who can deal with almost always getting Q-T with me that doesn’t involve spending money, or very little money. Board games, puzzles, walks in the park… Examine what you do with your friends: does it involve spending money? What would you do if you couldn’t spend that money? Not being able to do things “everyone else” takes for granted puts a huge damper on both your desire to reach out and try to find activities that you and your wealthier friends can do together, but also on THEIR desire to reach out to YOU… eventually, this can lead to only having friends of a similar socioeconomic situation.
Haha… Okay, so this is getting really long, let me see if I can wind this up with any sort of succinctness. So, I am a singular individual who is not particularly prone to violence. I was also raised in a (first-generation) middle class home, which leads me to believe that I can demand to be treated like a human being and not a leper. Even WITH the amount of advocacy I was able to exert for myself, I got absolutely square nowhere until someone was generous enough to give me a financial leg up. Those pressures I was living under, as I’ve said before, were incredible. They are easily enough to make someone else violent, or turn them into an addict or a criminal. I was extremely fortunate in my brush with desperation. But being in welfare-land is scary, and has given me enormous empathy for the other people I came to know and in some cases love who were also getting caught in the gears of poverty. Society’s a scary place, in welfare-land. I didn’t understand the rules, I didn’t trust the people who were supposedly there to help me — because hard experience taught me that it was easier for them to screw me over than it was for them to help me– and I was so dizzyingly malnourished that rational thought (as opposed to emotional reactivity) was really actually difficult. (It’s hard not to feel like an itchy crocodile when you haven’t eaten or slept well in several years.) I have a high verbal IQ, and trying to wade through and understand all of the rules around being on said welfare was very difficult for me, not to MENTION the rules for transitioning OFF of it. And my social workers were useless– Most of them barely even spoke English, and were incredibly rude and short with me, and made it very clear that they did not want to answer my questions. And if I asked them anyway, I usually got short and unhelpful responses, that were often as not lies or half-truths. (Ask a different social worker, get a different answer!) I can only IMAGINE what it would be like for someone with a bad education and little sense of entitlement, trying to hack their way through that mess! And not only that, but anyone I’ve known living close to or below minimum wage has to be a **numbers wizard** to stretch those dollars across the basic living expenses necessary to maintain a toehold in society. Let’s talk emotionally, mentally, spiritually exhausting. It can be way, way easier to abandon a few of those living expenses to the dogs in order to stay high all month than it is to face a reality that appears both grim and inescapable.
So, I ended up seeing a story that went a little bit like this: The utter lack of trust with authority means not really being able to ask what the rules are. Not being able to intellige legalese means not being able to find out for ONESELF what the rules are. Being surrounded by people in the same situation, they will inevitably start talking about it and forming their own mythology about the rules which is only partially correct. When one tries to act in accordance with this mythology, one ends up breaking some rules and not others. At the same time, one is not only unable to access the rules, but also does not have the money to do “what everyone else is doing,” (“everyone” in this case being the people in “the system” who are working it and looking like they’re having fun,) and feels very left out. This whole scene leads to a feeling of being both oppressed and randomly punished, and terribly afraid to re-engage. Hey-presto, disenfranchisement! The more punished people feel, the more they want to react, “strike back” at the thing that’s punishing them, or “escape.” Introduce Crime and Drugs, stage right. Bitterness is the name of the game, and the more bitter people get, the more likely they are to behave in an antisocial manner. Disenfranchisement is also a downward spiral that is usually cheerfully peer-reinforced. One of my cousins, for example, once stabbed me with a fork because I read too many books and used too many big words, which was very threatening to him. “You read too much!” he cried, as he stabbed me. (This is the child who has 14 siblings and arguably may not have learned to read yet, 10 years later. Drug dealing, addiction, and violence, are part of the family culture.) This was the most overt example of my family being a drag on each other, but certainly not the only one I could roll out. The family that I have that is still living in poverty is in a constant cycle of dragging each other down like this, and I have seen this in most other poor families that I’ve been around– but not all.
Okay, lastly. So I talked a lot about how much nothing there is to do when you’re so broke you can’t afford to sit in a cafe and smell the coffee. But that’s not entirely true– in a city, there are almost ALWAYS drugs to do. And with that comes, “people to hang out with,” like “friends.” The drug culture of the deeply poor, as I experienced it, is rather egalitarian. When someone breaks out whatever they’ve got, they share it with whoever they’re hanging out with. If anyone else has some to throw in, then they do. The general idea seems to be that no-one wants to feel this isolated and shitty, so it’s just courtesy to pass the pipe/bottle/cigarette/whatever. Once in the culture, all you really have to do to get high is walk up to a group of people who are clearly in the culture and ask– or just join the conversation, and eventually someone will bust something out, and as it goes around the circle you get some. The assumption is, that when –you– have some, you also will be generous. Acquiring drugs becomes more democratic too, with groups sharing in to afford such and such. Throw in when you can, and we’ll cover you when you can’t, because the karma keeps on coming round and around. Almost everyone’s a dealer, and almost everyone’s a beggar– it just depends on the day. This sharing behavior also a way that people will start out smoking cigarettes and end up on heroin– because that’s what was being shared around, and “getting high together is way better than being sober alone.”
Being into drug culture reinforces and deepens disenfranchisement, which means even less desire to interface with what “everyone else” is doing– and more fear of “the system” the farther and farther they get away from it. This can even lead people to create their own personal or local moral codes that don’t always jive with the law of the land, which is where I think a lot of crime comes from, the crime that isn’t just straight up “striking back” at the thing that seems to be punishing them at every turn. (Which reminds me of another illustrative example: How many times, when you are unable to pay something on time, do you get fined? Mis-park your car, pay a ticket. Can’t pay the ticket? Go to collection. Collect enough tickets? Lose your car. Lose your car, lose your job. Can’t guarantee that you’re pulling in so many dollars a month to your bank account? Get a monthly maintenance charge! Overdraw your account? Pay a fee, or lose your account! Lose your account… etc. “Punishment for being poor” is what these things very quickly end up feeling like!)
There are hundreds of other ways to illustrate poverty, and how trapping and punishing it can feel. I could write a book, if I were so inclined (which I’m not). Other people HAVE written books. But to say that people HAVE escaped poverty is to gloss over the ugly reality that most people DON’T. It’s like saying that SOME people have climbed Mount Everest. Yes, SOME people have climbed Mount Everest, but most people DON’T. Escape from poverty seems to be a combination of incredibly hard work, deeply pragmatic intelligence, willingness to not go with the crowd, and luck– and how many people are honestly blessed with all of that?
There aren’t easy answers to any of these things, but I do know that punitive measures are making things worse, and that treating people with dignity makes them WAY more likely to seek help and reinfranchise. Studies have shown this. Recidivism rates in the US are around 60%, I looked this up this time, and around 50% in our culture neighbor, the UK. The UK has a greater focus on rehabilitation and education, and they are doing way better than we are, with a way lower prison population. Not ALL other countries have scarier punishments than we do– many other first-world countries are ahead of the US curve when it comes to effectively dealing with social ills, using evidence-based practices.
This information, and these experiences, are what leads me to believe that decriminalization of drugs would actually HELP. Having seen what I’ve seen and been where I’ve been, I genuinely believe that addressing social ills by punishing them just makes things worse. Punishing doing drugs just makes doing drugs something that people can do to lash out. Punishing doing drugs, when doing drugs by definition is part of some peoples’ culture, is attacking their culture, which makes them not only unlikely to reform, but to get martyr complexes about their habits. This kind of behavior cycle shows up all over the human map, not just with drugs, but we’re taking drugs here mostly. I am a huge fan of treatment over punishment, especially in the case of drugs, but more broadly in the case of antisocial behavior as well. Programs to help people become enfranchised are far more effective than prisons in reducing recidivism. People who end up in prison often need extensive social outreach to give them the skills necessary to participate in a helpful way with the rest of society. I say, skip the prison for most offenses and get much more intensive with the social outreach… which is where Tom’s idea fits in brilliantly, since that social outreach has to come from SOMEWHERE. (And by the way, suggesting that using taxes that come from drugs for the treatment programs “creates a cycle”… I disagree. People take drugs. People will always take drugs. I think taxing that reality is just sound fiscal sense, and isn’t in any way creating a cycle– unless, taxing alcohol creates a cycle? Does taxing cigarettes make a cycle? Does taxing porn make a cycle?) As a final thought on prisons… I don’t advocate ditching them– there are some people who are deeply antisocial, and that’s a reality in any population. But I really, deeply doubt that the proportion of psychopathic people in our current prisons matches the proportion of people in our society who are antisocial _by culture and circumstance_.
Tom’s idea of sending young people in to help disenfranchised populations is brilliant, because college kids are way more likely to genuinely want to help, to genuinely connect, than people who have been burnt out by their careers. There are also more of them than there are professionals, since they are, in his vision, doing mandatory community service. This means more people’s needs are getting attended to. They are also way more likely to listen, to see, and to take that information away and DO something with it through the rest of their lives as voting members of the public. Reaching out for help is way more appetizing when the person you’re reaching out to doesn’t act like you’re a leper, or a hopeless case. More people will go to get help, when “help” isn’t about making you feel like a bad person– “help” has to be about treating one like a dignified being who just needs some assistance. Assumption of good intentions, assumption of desire to grow, assumption of desire to participate. Who would YOU rather get help from?: The person who treats you like an asshole for screwing up, or the person who treats you like a person who needs dignified assistance after making a mistake? Who would you rather reach out to?
As for decriminalizing specifically… Decriminalizing means taking the stigma away. Taking the stigma away means that more people will be willing and able to help the addicts who really need help– in the forms of both professional help AND community help. Taking the stigma away means providing better information to those of us who are not addicts, that we can make our own adult choices about altering our consciousness – there’s that enlightened self-interest! (Most people, given adequate and accurate information, will make good choices.) Decriminalizing means better quality drugs that are safer to take, with reliable dosage ratios, which means fewer serious health issues and deaths. Decriminalizing means being able to study drugs from a scientific perspective, increasing knowledge as well as effective treatment techniques. Taking the stigma away means less black market access, which means fewer poverty-stricken drug addicts– Decriminalization means changing the landscape of the culture among the poverty-stricken. Taking the stigma away means less disenfranchisement among poor drug users, which puts them closer to help on a number of fronts. Taking the stigma away takes away the “taboo” factor that makes drugs so fun for some people, thus removing a major societal motivation to take drugs. Taking the stigma away means one less reason to throw scared and confused people in jail. Taking the stigma away means, finally, that we’re one step further down the road of treating each other with as much dignity and grace as we each deserve as human beings– each of us flawed, each of us deserving dignity nonetheless.
Namaste, I hope this was helpful.
I spent ten years living life a few hours away from eviction. All that was needed was one days lost pay and I was done. I lived and worked in a poor neighborhood. Men routinely asked why I didn’t take a sugar daddy or turn a couple tricks. I spent my time at work serving plates of food to people but only ate once every couple days. If it weren’t for the fact that I grew up middle class, I think the prostitution solution would have been the road I took. However, my privileged upbringing gave me a sense of pride I wouldn’t be able to afford had I been that poor all my life. Instead, I spent hours cleaning rooms and ironing clothes to scrape together a little extra cash.
You’ve had a very fortunate life, and I won’t diminish what you are going through now. The difference is that you have a lifetime of good food and medical care, a decent education and the real knowledge of how to put together a good life and what it feels like. For many people raised from birth in dire poverty, they are so lacking in these things they don’t even know where to begin.
I don’t think harsh punishments are why other countries have smaller prison populations.
For the record, I’m against decriminalization because I don’t think it would work.
The US has a hugely bigger percentage of people in prison compared to any other country, including places that are very liberal. It’s because we have mandatory sentencing for drug offenses. So a judge can’t look at a case and decide that someone wasn’t the ringleader and should get a shorter sentence. Then the law is set up so that if the ringleader was selling $50,000 worth of drugs, everyone involved in any way is facing a sentence based on the $50,000 number and the sentence is set at that level.
Actually, very few prisons offer any kind of educational opportunities. The Clinton crime bill in the 90′s did away with almost all GED and higher ed in prisons and made inmates ineligible for grants or other educational funding. Another way to keep the undercaste securely in their place.
Tom, your idea of having college students, like your niece, develop projects that would bring them behind prison walls is outstanding—no, not to punish young people pursuing an elite education, but to put them in touch with a reality few people in our country comprehend. Whether it would be producing theater or helping improve reading/writing skills, the idea of getting course credit for becoming immersed in the inmate world is as solid—and perhaps unattainable—as legalizing drugs.
And if not every post-secondary program, at least the those that centre around law-making, policing and a number of social sciences. That way, by providing firsthand knowledge of the social issues impacting the country, your future lawmakers will act more prudently in addressing the issues surrounding crime and poverty.
While I don’t live in the U.S., my country is quickly going the way of the police-state. This Crime & Punishment standard fails to solve the problem (NB: I am aware that there are many facets to crime, and some aren’t solveable). Why not put funding into solving the root causes (poverty, addiction, deinitions of real versus perceived criminality), instead of punishing a good percentage of people that, with a little bit of help, might not be there in the first place?
And @ Daddy Files: I agree that people who conciously choose to commit crimes should be punished for the most part, I do also believe in the idea of victims of circumstance.
I love this article, Tom. Good for you! Thank you.
A lot of thinking went into this piece; it really shows how much thought and ideas churned in your mind to have come up such detailed solutions to these ever growing problems and further backed up by factual information. This is one example of many, how I really love and appreciate that GMP tackles a wide spectrum of topics and how boldly you guys go where few lack the courage, tenacity and passion; to bring serious issues to the forefront and tell it like it is. Good on you all!
The problems you’ve outlined are systemic, and the effects are bottom-up…touching every level of society and even economically, and goes as far as being a national security threat. I agree that there need to be a more rational, practical and broader approach to addressing these problems – for the BIG picture.
I think every politician and educator should read this article.
Is this a site for and about men’s issues, or is it a spin-off of the Huffington Post, disguised as “male centric”? Do we really need yet another leftist blog?
Left? Right? Who cares? This “left-right” paradigm is only useful for name-calling. Besides, most inmates do happen to be male, no? So it does have to do with the theme of learning to be a good man. Understanding the world around you and looking for ways to improvement is all part of being a good man.
I have seen the US drug wars and the West African blood diamond funded wars. They have the same causes and same solutions. Legalizing drugs would cut down on drug dealer’s profits but would likely enable even more drug use, which wouldn’t be good. Furthermore, the crime would simply shift to something else. The drug trade is a symptom of problem but not the problem itself.
It can’t hurt to work with inmates but, the horse is out of the barn already. From what I know from the the drug wars in the US and West African wars, people end up involved for the same reasons:
1) Economic hopelessness/desperation
2) Social/familial instability
I’ve seen this first hand in the US and in West Africa. People who are without hope escape to selling and using drugs far more often than those with hope. I saw many young men who went to fight for war lords because that was the only place they could get a job. Now those same men are driving taxis and reasonably content. The never really wanted to be fighters but felt they had no other options. Similarly, in poor neighborhoods, young men find it easy to get involved in the drug trade and don’t see many other options.
People use drugs to escape. If they have much to do and look forward to; if they have hope, they are far less likely to feel the need to escape from their lives.
So, what to do? The keys are to ensure that these people have hope, real hope. A second key is to ensure that they have stable families. These two issues are related. The absence of fathers in the home creates a cascade of social problems. It’s simply not true that fathers (or mothers) are dispensable. The practice of tearing down men tears down our society and creates instability in the family and throughout society. (Nuff said about that)
All of these things are related. There is no quick fix but the first step is to acknowledge the source of the problems, not just the symptoms – and to start when people are young. Once they are locked, up, it’s much harder to reclaim them – not that we shouldn’t try, but rather we must treat the problem, not just the symptom. Starting with 25 year olds who are already locked up is way too late in the game.
I think rather than decriminalization, we should get rid of mandatory sentencing and racketeering laws. Decriminalization wouldn’t solve the problem of drugs and what they do to people.
Mandatory sentencing makes it impossible for judges to use their wisdom – justice without mercy is tyranny. The only way to get out of a sentence is to tell on someone else; this turns out to be easier for the big bosses than the little people who didn’t do much. Then they get prosecuted for the full value of a crime when they weren’t involved in it all.
Throw in for-profit prisons and you’ve got a huge industry that doesn’t want our prison population to decrease. Then they campaign for these laws and who’s going to lobby for the prisoners?
Tom Matlack Tom Matlack Tom Matlack – hope this comes up on your Google Search. You’re a typical Liberal ignoramous. Read this by someone who has a serious article on the subject, and get an education:
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_criminal_justice_system.html
Oh, and by the way, if you really want to advocate something that will help the poor, especially the black poor, why don’t you get behind cutting legal immigration way down and eliminating illegal immigration? You know, something that would really work? Eliminate the Liberal policies that actually cause the problems Liberals whine about.
Tom, I like that you think about controversial subjects and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo. I also believe that you are not a hardened ideologue but are following a path of understanding much like the rest of us.
If you’re going to mention the racial disparity in prison population then you should also mention the gender disparities which are even more pronounced.
Whites receive the lowest average sentence of 32.1 months. In sharp contrast, Hispanics receive a sentence of 54.1 months and blacks receive 64.1 months, which are 68.5 percent and 99.6 percent larger than the average sentence for whites. Even more pronounced is the difference between males and females. The average sentence for males is 278.4 percent greater than that of females (51.5 versus 18.5 months).
http://www.terry.uga.edu/~mustard/sentencing.pdf
Aside from that, rehabilitation is barely on the radar and hundreds of thousands of prison rapes are officially neglected each year. Any genuine human interaction or teaching of empathy would be beneficial to them, but I really doubt that parents would support an official program of students visiting prisoners, unless it were directly applicable to their career choice.
Hardcore
If I was president I’d just pardon everyone already in prison or jail.
You know, before the CIA shots me.
Although often euphemistically called “the parable of the sheep and the goats” it’s not a parable but a commandment with a dire warning and despite that it seems like visiting prisoners (or freeing them according to Isaiah) is something churches don’t do.
How do you start doing that?
Seriously what did you do? Just wander up to the jail and ask to see someone at random?
How about Occupy gets into visiting prisons? They’ve done some good stuff with approaching the homeless.