Prison

     Here's a depressing thing:

U.S. Prison Population Sets Record

Associated Press Friday, December 1, 2006

A record 7 million people -- one in every 32 U.S. adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, a Justice Department report released yesterday shows.

Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to the report.

More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.

    The story did not have comparisons with other countries but the US is generally known as the "world's leading jailer."   The question is: why?

     The good news is that some portion of this is due to what we might call the failings of Legalism, which here refers to the ancient Chinese school of thought that believed that society could be held together, and political rule maintained, only through the articulation of many, very specific and intrusive laws that are strictly enforced with harsh punishments.  US rates of incarceration are pushed up by draconian drug laws and mandatory sentencing - which resonate with older Legalist ideas - as this statement (taken from the first linked article above) suggests:

"Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails," Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that supports criminal justice reform, said in a statement.

From 1995 to 2003, inmates incarcerated in federal prisons for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

     Changes in drug policy would likely bring prison populations down.  But we need to ask whether there are social and cultural factors beyond policy that propel the US to the top of the prison list.

     Taoists might say - after they, too, criticized the ineffectiveness of Legalist prescriptions - that there is something in US life that permits or maybe even encourages the selfish and dishonest and mean side of human nature.  The Tao Te Ching tells us that "people adore twisty paths;" that is, people are susceptible to doing things, bad things, that push against the natural unfolding of Way.  So, the Taoist question would be: are Americans more adoring of "twisty paths" than people elsewhere?  I will not hazard an answer here - it is a big topic, but would be interested to hear comments from readers.

     Confucians might take a somewhat different tack.  Mencius, who assumes human nature is basically good, would say that people learn how to be bad.  The problem is one of education, moral education, and the responsibility would first fall to parents, to teach their children better, and then to society at large, to do better at engendering humane and civil behavior.  Xun Zi (Hsun Tzu), another great pre-Qin Confucian, who I have not really dealt with much on this blog, would be a bit tougher:

Xunzi is known for his belief that ritual is crucial for reforming humanity’s original nature. Human nature lacks an innate moral compass, and left to itself falls into contention and disorder, which is why Xunzi characterizes human nature as bad. Ritual is thus an integral part of a stable society. He focused on humanity's part in creating the roles and practices of an orderly society, and gave a much smaller role to Heaven or Nature as a source of order or morality than most other thinkers of the time.

 His dimmer view of human nature (though not so dim as the Legalists) leads him to a belief that education - by which I mean instruction and leading by example - is not enough.  Rather, people must perform (that is what is suggested by "ritual") their morality.  There should be regular compulsory (though "compulsory" could be open to debate) enactment of humane and civil behavior.  It is not enough to hear lessons on morality, or to see moral people behave; actual physical performance of morality is necessary to create a civil society (which here takes on a particularly Confucian meaning!).

       Thus, Xun Zi might say that, if we want to reduce our prison population, we must demand that we routinely enact their closest social responsibilities in physical ways, to inscribe ethics into our behavior.   What might that look like in a contemporary American context?