During this COVID-19 outbreak I’ve developed a habit I haven’t had since my mid-twenties: staying up until 3am. As with many people, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and worrying. As with many people, I’ve drawn inspiration and influence from social media, and gotten in my share of arguments online. I’ve gone hard for my people this past week, and by Sunday I admit I was just too tired and depressed to write or battle or do anything active. Instead, I just sat and listened to John Prine (whose wife reports he’s now recovering from his bout with COVID-19!) early into Monday morning and allowed the hopelessness, just for this one night, to wash over me.
As I sat with myself and the world, I thought about Junior Wilson, who has now been moved to solitary confinement after the DOC discovered all the news stories about him from last week, and Michael Goodman, the 72-year-old artist whose 53-year-old daughter is one of 80,000 children of people currently incarcerated in New York State alone. I thought about Iran, which last week released 88,000 prisoners to contain this outbreak and keep down deaths. I thought about this and more, and one conclusion crystallized for me.
The United States is addicted to incarceration.
Like many Americans, I come from a family in which addiction is rampant. I’m an Alateen kid myself, and I know the 12 Steps as well as I know the Serenity Prayer. My father, a good man, was incarcerated for the earliest years of my life for distribution, and many of my aunts and uncles have struggled with addiction for much of their lives. My favorite uncle, the man who was as much a father to me as anyone, died in 2005 on this very day fifteen years ago, when his heart gave out after his addictions had shifted from cocaine to OxyContin. I know the marks of addiction. And this nation is collectively addicted to incarcerating our own.
One mark of addiction, perhaps the primary marker, is valuing the addiction over everything else. I see this most plainly now as we see and hear reports from New York to Chicago to California of our incarcerated people, most if not all of whom are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 due to the effects of months, years, even decades of systemic degradation of their bodies, and I look for a response from our public institutions—the mayor’s office, the governor, the federal government—and mostly what I see is excuses and obfuscations. And I know that they are responding to what they think the public wants, terrified of even one person to whom they show mercy and compassion going out on release and committing a crime that our for-profit media institutions are just waiting to publish a story on and continue the national myth that we are safer by keeping millions of people locked up, even if that means sacrificing their lives to a pandemic.
I read one particularly horrible comment to the Buzzfeed article on Junior Wilson that said, “And the Great Cleansing continues.” This comes from someone, judging from his Facebook page, who loves guns, particularly pointing his gun at the camera and posting that as his profile pic. The less obviously hypocritical but no less disturbing response which is invoked much more frequently is some variation on, “Well, they’re in there for a reason so they deserve what they get.” This response is one of the addict’s most obvious defenses when an intervention is attempted into their addiction: justification.
Addicts defend their addictions at the steep price of everything else. We’re seeing that at an institutional level with the governor’s office, the mayor’s office, and the DOC just refusing to even interface with the idea of simply letting old and immunocompromised people go from prison. If ever there were a time to practice mercy and grant clemency to save thousands of lives, it’s now. And our “compassionate” governor—America’s Governor—has not issued even one. If ever there were a time to suspend technical parole violations to make the jail population—including inmates, officers, and staff—safer, it’s now. The governor has issued a demand to release 1,100 of these cases—a small fraction of the total statewide—but it’s gone thus far unenforced. We as a society are sacrificing family, friends, work, relationships, even our own humanity, just so we can keep locking up our own at historically unprecedented rates, all at the altar of our national addiction.
Like many of our most addictive substances, the addiction many times begins as treatment for a malady. Our addiction to incarceration becomes doubly ironic when we consider that we began increasing our incarceration rates exponentially largely in response to the drug trade. Much as the drug trade morphed in the time since the War on Drugs was declared, assuming a legality and a whiteness with the rise of prescription opioids and crystal methamphetamine, our addiction to incarceration has been naturalized as our body politic has become inured to its effects. We no longer sufficiently ponder the decision to subject people to the horrors of our carceral state; on the contrary, we wring our hands at the idea of freeing them, even in the face of a deadly pandemic sweeping through the apparatus.
I think perhaps this has to do with another national obsession: purity. To speak of a pandemic as a cleansing, one has to think of one’s fellow people as a sickness to be scoured away. To justify leaving people to die when we could easily save them through an act of mercy, we have to think that their lives have no meaning or value. Every life has meaning, and every life has value, even if we don’t see it. And that’s the true evil of incarceration: It hides people from us, so we don’t see their value. We only see their crimes. Especially in a country that induces pleas in over 90% of criminal cases, our crimes should never define us. And neither should our addictions.
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