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What must the pope think of America’s criminal justice system with its well-documented severity and racial disparities?
We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its incarcerated population, with over two million people in prison and jail. Annually, we spend $80 billion to keep people behind bars, the vast majority are poor and more than 60 percent of people in prison are racial and ethnic minorities. The toll this takes on society goes far beyond the individual. Whole communities are starved of talent and opportunity to thrive, while government investments continue to focus on incarceration rather than education, health, and jobs. For the pope—whose concern with economic justice and opportunity reaches across social and class lines—our $80 billion investment must appear perversely counterproductive.
Of course Pope Francis is not alone in criticizing overreliance on incarceration, and its degradation of society. Two recent publications tease out its brutal economic toll on families—Ta-Nehisi Coates’s cover story for the Atlantic, and Who Pays: The True Cost of Incarceration on Families, by the Ella Baker Center, Forward Together, and Research Action Design. In “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,”
Coates demonstrates how the friends and families of people in the justice system bear extremely high financial, social, and psychological costs.
Coates describes one set of parents who took out a second mortgage to pay for their son’s lawyers, and then a third as they incurred the “expense of having to make long drives to prisons that are commonly built in rural white regions, far from the incarcerated’s family … [and shoulder] the expense of phone calls, and of constantly restocking an inmate’s commissary.”
In Who Pays, we learn that two-thirds of families had trouble meeting basic needs as a result of having a loved one in prison, and that over a third of the survey respondents went into debt to cover the cost of prison visits and phone calls with their incarcerated family member.
At the same time, corporations reap great profits from the system as it currently exists, with very little oversight.
The Philadelphia prison hosting the pope this Sunday pays a private health care company to care for the people incarcerated there.
According to In the Public Interest, that company, Corizon, makes over a billion dollars annually from government contracts in 27 states, despite huge concerns about the care they provide.
In June, New York City ended its contract with Corizon after an investigation found mistakes by its employees had contributed to the deaths of at least two people at Rikers Island.
The pope’s visit reminds us that caging people en masse is more than a bad investment, it’s an immoral one.
Earlier this week, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a conservative who is working with progressives to end mass incarceration, said, “[a] cornerstone of the Catholic faith is that redemption is available to everyone, no matter what they have done.
We are all sinners, and the ground is level at the foot of the Cross.”
America, too, can redeem itself for the sin of mass incarceration.
Instead of investing in cells, our country must invest in what communities need to thrive—housing, health, education, and jobs.
We can invest in alternatives to arrest, like the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion initiative that empowers police to direct people to community-based interventions instead of arresting them.
We can repeal laws imposing lengthy and mandatory sentences, denying employment and voting rights to people with criminal records, and those leading to the incarceration of children.
We can also provide real support to victims and survivors of crime, rather than promoting extreme sentences as their path to recovery and healing.
The pope’s visit places a spotlight on the immorality of our justice system.
Now it’s up to us to repent—and take immediate action to change our culture of mass incarceration.
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Watch a video or read the transcript of the Pope's remarks at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.
Read the Atlantic’s coverage of the Pope's visit to the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.
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