Dateline: Siena, Italy: It lends distance to be spending the Fourth of July in another country. It’s a chance to proportionately celebrate much that is genuinely great about America (to adopt a sadly sullied phrase), but also to reflect on its failures. It sharpens my critical faculties to be temporarily resident in a rightward-tending nation that only this week was making a nuisance of itself in the European Union to which it belongs (by blocking the confirmation of new, quite enlightened transnational leadership). And perhaps worse, it has even sought to imprison a maritime heroine for her ‘crime’ of saving asylum-seekers from drowning.
By comparison, are our American standards and principles always exemplary – especially in our so-called ‘justice’ system? Of course not.
To our nation’s credit, a long-overdue bipartisan push by politicians, jurists and administrators has begun to produce a welcome, though still insufficient, decline in the number of people we incarcerate. (It has come, of course, after decades of a ballooning prison-industrial complex.) But before anyone gets carried away with self-congratulation on this our national day of celebration – we should consider this unwelcome fact. While the number of men we send to jail is going down – that doesn’t apply to women.
And I literally mean jail. Women are becoming a rising proportion of those incarcerated in city and county facilities that are intended for only pre-trial custody and shorter-term sentences, although jail-terms can often turn out to be long – multiple years in some cases. I’ve been looking into this phenomenon, which has been going largely unreported in our country’s mass media, for the PBS NewsHour Weekend. It was broadcast earlier this week.
I was grateful for much revealing research and analysis conducted at the Vera Institute of Justice, by the incisive team of Jacob Kang-Brown and Olive Lu. Their work was first published online at the New York Review of Books’ daily website.
For my report I went to California, where Los Angeles County happens to run the country’s biggest jail for women – the Century Regional Detention Facility, which holds more than 2,000 female inmates on any given day, well over the population it was originally built for. California also has, aptly enough, an especially assiduous set of justice-reform advocates with women prominently to the fore.
The neatly acronymed organization CURB (Californians United for a Responsible Budget) has for its main focus a reduction in jails and state prisons, while its name rightly highlights the skewed public spending priorities that a massive incarceration program exemplifies. Its state-wide coordinator Amber Rose Howard (above, right of picture), who emphasized to me the disproportionate degree of mental illness suffered by women in jail compared with men.
Susan Burton founded an alternative program to California’s jails for women, A New Way of Life, which comprises a network of re-entry homes to house previously incarcerated women, often with children and with addiction problems. She rounds out our TV report with some astringent comment on the widespread effort across the nation to engineer more jail-space in response to the rising proportion of women inmates. She refers to the multi-layering of bunk-beds, sometimes triple-bunked as well as double-bunked – which in some jails are given a grim nickname, denoting the stacking of corpses.
“I’d like to see people being able to sleep in a real bed instead of a bunk-bed they call a ‘coffin’. There’s a lot of things that I’d like to see, but we can start with alternatives to incarceration. Pre-trial releases … investments in our school systems … and investments in our communities.”
