Who needs fate? Our draconian legal system will determine your life for you

Photo courtesy of the California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation

I don’t believe in fate. Sure, it’s nice when, say, you meet that special someone, to believe it was something larger like “fate” that brought you together. How cosmic and kooky.

It’s also nice when things don’t work out to believe it simply wasn’t “meant to be” — as though some dude with a beard up in the clouds was against the arrangement all along, but, like any good friend who knows you’ll turn on him as soon as he starts bagging on your girl, figured it was better to keep his mouth shut and stick to talking about sports.

Personally, I call bullshit. The idea that the course of our lives is predetermined (read: that we have no ability to choose) is depressing to me at best. And, anyway, how much more special is it to find someone you actually get along with when you realize you could have just as easily wound up with any of a billion other asshole partners who might have made you totally miserable?

I feel pretty strongly about that. But I’ll admit I’ve got a relative high freedom quotient in my life.  If I were in prison, chances are I’d change my tune rather quickly. You probably couldn’t get me to shut up about fate because my ability to choose would have been almost totally taken away. And the idea that the choices I actually did make had landed me in prison would be too much for me to bear.

How much more so if you were in prison for life without parole? Even worse, what if your LWP sentence had come as a result of something you had done as a juvenile?

Imagine for a moment also that it wasn’t only the bad choices you had made, but the bad choices of a draconian legal system that had unfairly placed you in prison for the rest of your life, without any chance of getting out, ever.

Apparently that scenario describes that of more inmates than ever these days. Lewis Beale writes in Miller-McCune:

A new study by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform, notes that one out of every 11 prisoners in state and federal lockups is serving a life sentence, and of those, nearly one-third, more than 41,000 convicts, have been sentenced to life without parole. The report notes that life without parole judgments have tripled since 1992, and nearly two-thirds of prisoners serving these sentences are ethnic and racial minorities.

As noted in my recent Miller-McCune.com piece — “Should Minors Ever Face Life Without Parole?” — the U.S. already has more than 1,700 juveniles serving life without parole. The U.S., according to The Sentencing Project report, “No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences In America,” is the only country that hands out such judgments. The organization, as you might expect, opposes life without parole.

Major reasons for these harsh verdicts include “three strikes laws and other overly punitive sentences,” says The Sentencing Project’s Ashley Nellis. “California has 24 percent of all the nation’s lifers, and they have this excessively punitive three strikes law in place. Also, the abandonment of parole has had a huge impact, as has the limiting of judicial discretion in sentencing and the expansion of prosecutorial discretion.”

via News Blog Articles | Study: Life Without Parole Sentences Increasing | Miller-McCune Online Magazine.

Now before anyone jumps down my throat, I’m not saying that every prisoner serving life without parole got a bum rap. Like many a good humanist, I posess a certain Social Darwinist strain in my thinking when it comes to these matters, which allows me to accept that there are just some people who should never be allowed back into society ever. But I reserve those feelings for the true monsters of our society — the Ted Bundys, the Charles Mansons, or anyone who molests and kills little kids.

But as the sheer number of LWP prisoners, and the California correlation indicates, that’s clearly not who we’re talking about most of the time. I know that a kid can go pretty rotten, perhaps even irretrevably so. Some may even spray gun fire all over their schools, and I can’t say if there’s really any helping them. But 1,700 of them?

Something tells me more than a few of these guys got a raw deal.

The bigger picture tells it all. If there’s any doubt that our legal system is exorbitantly punitive (generally speaking, not necessarily on a case-by-case basis) just take a look at the statistics. John Pfaff at Slate summed it up nicely in an article about prison crowding earlier this year:

The United States has a prison population like nowhere else. With one out of every 100 adults behind bars, our incarceration rate is the highest in the entire world. Our inmates—1.5 million in prison, with another 800,000 in jail—comprise one-third of the world’s total. This is a surprisingly recent development. After barely budging for 50 years, our incarceration rate increased sevenfold (to 738 per 100,000 people) between 1978 and 2008.

via Five myths about prison growth. – By John Pfaff – Slate Magazine.

Are people fundamentally worse now than they were before 1978? Of course not. There’s absolutely no reason that a third of the world’s inmates should be in the United States. That’s insanity.

Here at American Crossroads, once and a while a news item surfaces that has deeper implications than most. This is one of them. I’m currently working on a documentary about a brutal septuple homicide that went down in Indianapolis three years ago, and it has repeatedly struck me what a significant role the legal system has played in having helped create that perfect storm that led to these people’s deaths.

I spoke recently with a local public defender whose job is defending felony drug arrests. Aside from being a very passionate, conscientious and articulate man — a man who, despite his claims to an increasing nihilism welled up with tears at several points in the conversation — he was also a realist, who saw through to the root issues of his clients’ troubles. Time and again, he said, he saw the same young guys popping up in his queue, the crimes for which they were accused increasing in gravity each time they got hauled in.

He put it to me simply: the kids he was defending now were part of a third generation of young men who, since the seventies have grown up without fathers — often times because those fathers were in prison. The lack of fathers, in his observations, was the common thread.

Notice anything about that statement? It’s no coincidence that the seventies were exactly when the country’s incarceration rate started skyrocketing.

Our inner cities — neighborhoods like the Near East Side of Indianapolis, where these septuple homicides happened — have been dying a slow death for at least three generations. It’s a process of decay and neglect that feeds itself perennially, and is changing the content of middle American cities bit by bit, every day, one street-level drug bust at a time. The short-sighted methods of our legal system, which so overwhelming privilege incarceration over reform, punition over prevention, are at least partially to blame. Let’s start by decriminalizing minor drug offenses and getting rid of the three-strike rule in places that still cling to them (despite woefully strained budgets — I’m looking at you, California).

Maybe a few more kids will grow up with fathers in our inner cities, and we can finally begin to reverse this cycle. And maybe then, a few more kids can grow up believing they actually have some control over their own destinies — that they aren’t fated to repeat the mistakes of their fathers.

Screw fate.