I Voted… Now What? (3)

To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.

I envision a nation in which the jails and prisons are emptied of those who 1) are awaiting trial, 2) have untreated mental illnesses, and 3) have untreated substance use disorders. In this nation, only those who represent a risk of direct harm to others would he detained.

The facts:

• One of every five people incarcerated on this planet, are incarcerated in the United States. (About 4% of the world’s population lives in the USA).
• Of those incarcerated, half have some form of mental illness.
• Of those incarcerted, 60% suffer from a substance use disorder.
• Fully 70% of those being held in local jails are awaiting trial. They have not been convicted of a crime.

As our local Public Defender recently told a class of Masters of Public Health students: “Our jails and prisons are the largest mental health treatment centers in the world.”

And, as any 4th grader who has taken a US civics class can recite: “In our system, you are innocent until proven guilty.”

Many others have written about how this has come to be. The now generation-long war on drugs, and “reforms” that led to mandatory sentencing for drug-related crimes are high on the list. The retreat from insitutionalized treatment of mental illness, followed by decades of severe underfunding for community-based treatment is also there. Lack of access to affordable treatment for mental illness and fundamental misunderstandings about and undertreatment of substance use disorders are also high on the list.

But there is more, and much of it is insidious and, evil.

There is money to be made in incarcerating large numbers of people. From building and running jails and prisons, to providing services to them, to benefitting from cheap prison labor (see below), to the issuance of bail, incarceration means fantastic profits for far too many people (we will return to this reality later when we discuss the military).

Rural prisons are also the lifeblood of myriad small communities across our nation.

But… there’s more.

The same amendment to the US Constitution that abolished slavery permitted involuntary servitude for those convicted of a crime. Slavery by another name continues to this day.

Indeed, in the election in which I just voted, California has a ballot measure—Prop 6–that, if passed

Amends the California Constitution to remove current provision that allows jails and prisons to impose involuntary servitude to punish crime (i.e., forcing incarcerated persons to work).

This is where we are.

Unwinding all of this will be quite a task, and moneyed interests will fight it.

But beyond the money, we, the people of this nation need to examine ourselves and ask why we allow this to happen.

I have often reflected that we seem to want to hide society’s ugliness. When I was mayor, I faced many enraged (yes, that is what I would call them) citizens of my seemingly liberal community who were angry at the way I proposed handling the challenges of our unhoused community members. I often heard some variation on the comment: “Your job is to make our city unwelcoming to them so they will leave.” In other words—we don’t want solutions. We just don’t want to see the problem.

We seem unwilling to deal with our brokenness—to look directly into the challenges of mental illness and substance use disorder. We can’t seem to acknowledge how devasting pre-trial detention is for families and individuals who lose jobs, housing, and a future.

Why can’t we investigate the causes of this and attack them at their root? Why can’t we look “upstream” from jail and prison and deal with the factors that end with a locked cell?

I think we are afraid that if we look, we will realize we are gazing into a mirror.

My vision comes with a price tag—they all do. But like so much else, we are already paying a high price. The price we pay for over-incarceration is millions upon millions of destroyed lives and families, lost hope, and intergenerational trauma.

Installment 2

Installment 4