Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Long-disgusted with America's prisonmania, Dawn was struck by Justice Policy Institute President Vincent Schiraldi's recent letter to the New York Times: "The divergent paths taken by New York and Texas in the 1990s illustrate the futility of over-reliance on prisons as a cure-all for crime. Texas added more people to prisons in the 1990s (98,081) than New York's entire prison population (73,233). If prisons are a cure for crime, Texas should have mightily outperformed New York, from a crime-control standpoint. But from 1990 to 1998, the decline in New York's crime rate exceeded the decline in Texas's crime rate by 26 percent. As we plot our crime-control course for the new century, it is important to remember that the goal of the criminal justice system should be to have fewer victims, not just more prisoners."

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(Though he'd face a mandatory multi-year prison term if poor and black, Texas's coke-sniffing Governor Bush is not included in the Texas prison stats.)

Of course, Mr. Schiraldi presumes that politicians and other prison construction advocates are interested in dealing with crime. It seems obvious to Dawn that they are not; the war on drugs is a way to vent and exploit racist impulses (and line police pockets with RICO money and other graft), and privatized prisons are little more than slave labor camps wherein the work force is paid pennies an hour and not likely to be unionized any time soon.