The Trickle-Down Legacy, cont'd

THE LATEST ISSUE OF THE NEW YORKER is worthy of your attention, for an article, "Hellhole" by Atul Gawande, who looks at the problem of solitary confinement in US prisons, and asks, "The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?" While solitary has always been in use, its modern growth is a Reagan by-product.  The next time you hear Stevie ranting about sending everybody to prison for ever, consider Atul's take on crime and punishment.

In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence.

Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.