In April 2007 Ciudad Juarez-the sprawling Mexican border city girding El Paso, Texas-won a Foreign Direct Investment magazine award for "North American large cities of the future." With an automotive workforce rivaling Detroit's and hundreds of export-processing plants, businesses in Juarez employed 250,000 factory workers, and were responsible for nearly one-fifth of the value of U.S.-Mexican trade. The trans-border region of 2.4 million people had one of the hemisphere's highest growth rates. [continues 5058 words]
In March 1965, at the height of his popularity and power, President Johnson launched a major offensive against crime, which he called a "malignant enemy in America." Although violent crime had declined markedly since the Great Depression, it was starting to surge under Johnson's watch, and his conservative critics-following the lead of Barry Goldwater, who had made fighting crime a centerpiece of his failed but galvanizing presidential bid-were eager to pounce. To outflank them, LBJ ordered his attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach to chair a blue-ribbon commission to draft a national crime strategy. "I will not be satisfied," the President warned, borrowing from Goldwater's paternalistic playbook, "until every woman and child in this Nation can walk any street, enjoy any park . . . and live in any community at any time of the day or night without fear of being harmed." He declared "a thorough and effective war against crime." [continues 4686 words]
The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the "basic human equality associated with full membership in a community." By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting. For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, "With the world's largest prison population," he said, "our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity." Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison's significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb's hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics. [continues 6116 words]
More than 1.5 million children currently have a parent in prison; for 94 percent of these children, that parent is the father. In 1999 an estimated half of men incarcerated in federal prisons and 55 percent in state prisons had children under age eighteen. Sixty-two percent reported monthly contact with their children by letter, phone, or visit; a majority, however, have never been visited by their children since entering prison. There are strong temptations to overlook or dismiss the parental interests of incarcerated fathers: they are often not married to the mothers of their children, they cannot financially support their children, and their criminal activity makes them bad role models. Moreover, children grow and develop rapidly, and extended lack of contact may foreclose the possibility of resuming a prior relationship after prison. Maintaining one's role as a father in prison, thus, is deeply vexed. [continues 4041 words]
