Penal Geography: America's Internal Exile System

BOULDER, Colorado -- It is well known that the United States has the proud distinction of having the world's largest prison population, which currently stands at 2.29 million (as of 2007, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics). The US also leads the world in the proportion of the population in prison - 738 out of every 100,000 people are incarcerated, outstripping the nearest competitors Rwanda (691) and Russia (611). If all people under the supervision of the corrections authorities are included (people on parole or probation), the total population swells 7.3 million, or one in every 31 adults.

America's penchant for incarcerating its citizens (and non-citizens) is well documented, but what is less well understood is the exile component of the prison system. "Transportation" has long been a part of criminal justice, when inmates were sent to serve their term in a distant land, like British prisoners sent to Australia. In Russia, criminals were exiled to the remote reaches of the country long before the Soviets turned internal exile into a grotesque science. Whereas Great Britain eventually abandoned exile, the Soviets continued to use it as a means of making criminals and political opponents disappear, sending them off to vast areas of exclusion like the Kolyma Valley and the northern Ural Mountains. The group Memorial, which was founded to document the crimes of the Soviet state, has a great interactive map of the whole gulag system.

At least American prisoners aren't like Russian political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is imprisoned 3,774 miles from Mosocw; his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, is a bit luckier, sent 1,193 miles to a prison above the Arctic Circle.

We like to think that we are above this barbaric practice, but America's geography of incarceration bears some small, though troubling, similarities to the "Gulag Archipelago." This analogy is not limited to usual spaces of exclusion, like Guantanamo Bay and CIA secret prisons, but can be found throughout the state and federal penal systems.

Imprisonment serves three basic purposes for society: incapacitation, retribution, and rehabilitation. The first of these is the simplest - the offender is removed from society for a period of time because they are perceived to be a threat to commit future crimes. The latter two are less straightforward. Society obviously demands that people pay for their crimes, but calculating the "just deserts" for every offender and offense is an inexact science. Rehabilitation was the primary motivation behind the establishment of the penitentiary system (before prisons appeared in the early 19th century, the state's options for punishment were limited to fines, torture, and execution), but it has since become a much lesser priority, though the terms "corrections" and "penitentiary" (as in, to be penitent for your crimes) persist. Rehabilitation was also found to be arbitary and unfair, as prisoners were subject to indeterminate sentences, and unaccountable parole boards determined whether or not a prisoner was "reformed" and therefore eligible for release.

Okay, being sent to Attica is probably still better than this.

We accept that inmates should be removed from society, but we also know that the vast majority of them will need to be reintegrated back into that same society. Therefore, they need to maintain bonds with the outside world, but there are many structural features of the prison system that prevent them from doing so, the most obvious being the location of corrections facilities. When sent hundreds of miles from home, prisoners lose all links with their former lives, and family and friends are unable to visit them. According to a study by the BJS, 60% of state inmates with children reported being incarcerated more than 100 miles from their last place of residence. In the federal system, prisoners are transported all over the country, far from their last residence or the place in which they committed their crime. But even in state systems, prisoners are sent to remote corners, far from the bonds of home. Beyond the unpleasantness of it all, there are consequences to society for isolating prisoners - several studies have linked long distances from inmates' homes to higher rates of recidivism.

New York offers one of the most glaring examples of this exile system. According to the state's department of corrections, 52% of inmates come from New York City, yet only 25% of the prison population is housed within 100 miles of the city. The vast majority of the state's prisons are located in the northern and western parts of the state, and of the total prison population of 62,599 in 2008, 44.6% of were housed in prisons in rural counties, outside of any metropolitan area, be that New York City, Buffalo, Rochester, or Albany. Prisoners are sent off to areas that are not only remote and rural, but also overwhelmingly white. The result is a system in which a predominantly white guard staff supervises a prison population that is 76% black or Hispanic, marooned hundreds of miles away from their homes and families with no reasonable expectation of regular visits.

There is a reason why it's called the Empire State.

California has a similar gulag archipelago, though the statistics are not as stark as in New York. The state is second in the nation (behind Texas, obviously) with 172,000 inmates; 16% of them are held in prisons in rural counties (though the counties in California are much, much larger, as is the state, meaning some additional prisons may be just as remote as in New York). If ever there was a symbol of exile, it would be the state's super maximum security prison, Pelican Bay (pictured below), located in the northwestern-most corner of the state in Crescent City, 350 miles from San Francisco. Granted, the prison houses some of the state's worst criminals, but only about 5% of them are serving terms of life without parole, meaning the remaining 95% will return to society at some point in their lives.

It would appear as if being incarcerated in a small state would be an advantage, as you could not be transported too far away from your home and family, but that is not the case. There is an increasing trend of states contracting with privately-owned facilities in other states to house their inmates. California currently has 6,538 prisoners housed out of state (about 4% of the total) to deal with its massive overcrowding, even though this practice was ruled illegal by a state court. Vermont, which has only 2,130 inmates in total, sent 529 of them to a facility in Kentucky run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Hawaii sends about a third of its inmates to private prisons in Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Kentucky. This usually does result in cost savings for the sending state, but there can be problems for the receiving state. Virginia last year reversed its policy of accepting out-of-state transfers; its state prison beds were being filled with them, while Virginia inmates were serving terms in overcrowded city and county jails not designed to house long-term prisoners. The New York Times documented the phenomenon of out-of-state transfers in 2007, and they published this map of the prison network.

Maybe America's not better - it is 4,450 miles from Honolulu to Wheelright, KY.

There are many, many other issues at work here that I did not mention, such as the politics of prison location, the growth of private prisons, and the inequities of the federal prison system. As I continue my research on this subject, I hope to post more about this in the future. But we have to keep in mind that prisoners, despite their crimes, remain members of our society who are entitled to basic rights. Very few of them have committed acts that anyone could argue caused them to ever forfeit those rights. They must pay their dues, but they will return to our society, so we must incarcerate them in a way that is humane and just so they can be reintegrated as productive members. Sending them to the far ends of the earth, cut off from the ties of home and family is not a good way to accomplish this goal.

Why We Need a Gas Tax, or Mass-Transit Insane-o Hatred From Congress

NEW YORK, New York -- President Barack Obama today signed orders asking the Environmental Protection Agency to grant California and 13 other states waivers to enact automobile emissions standards tighter than the national standards, drawing plaudits from the Governator and others.

Raining on the progress parade, however, was the noticeably unhappy and reputedly generally backward auto industry.

That much-maligned group of Detroit sneaks, lobbyists, engineers, executives and blue-collar workers may actually be worth listening to, however.

California's emissions standards would force cars sold in the state to cut current emissions levels by roughly 30% by 2016, four years ahead of a similar federal law. Automakers say that the requirement would cause them to build one set of (generally less-profitable and small) cars for California and another set of (generally higher-margin) cars for the rest of the country.

While emissions standards have a noble objective and it would be good for Detroit to produce profitable small cars (i.e., not the Dodge Neon), the Big Three are correct to point out fundamental contradictions in government policy.

The Neon: Not very gangster

On the one hand, Detroit is excoriated for not producing profitable vehicles; on the other, it's scolded for not producing small vehicles. The fact of the matter is that meeting these two demands creates a bind. Big SUVs are very profitable automobiles, and Detroit was actually very, very profitable in the cheap-oil days of the 90s and early 00s. Detroit is only doing the smart thing when it sells people SUVs. So do we want Detroit to be solvent or green? ("Soylent Green" is not the compromise answer.)

The issue is that reducing emissions is best done by giving cars better mileage. To reduce emissions by 1/3, average mileage would have to rise to 36 mpg, from under 30 now. To arrive at that average, an automaker could produce only cars making 36 mpg. Or it could also produce a number of unprofitable, smaller cars that it may fob off on fleet sales (companies, rental agencies, municipalities and others who buy in bulk) while producing a smaller number of what it specializes in -- high-margin, gas-guzzling SUVs.

And if a handful of states demand the 36 mpg standard while others don't, it means you can still produce lots of SUVs because some people can buy them -- but it's a mess to do so. So while you'd be an idiot for not producing profitable SUVs and trucks, you'd be forced to sell them only in certain places. A bit of a mutant case of government regulation.

Here's the bind: We want to be serious about reducing emissions. But we try to do it by saying this to Detroit: "You can legally produce the SUVs that keep your faltering balance sheets afloat, but we'll hate you for it. Get profitable, you lazy bums, but build unprofitable small cars, even though there will still be a market for high-margin SUVs and your competitors will slide into it."

That's a flawed approach. What we need much, much more than a patchwork of different state laws -- or legislators setting an arbitrary emissions standard even on a national level that would encourage a model of selling loss-leading small cars with enough high-profit SUVs and trucks to stay afloat -- is a gasoline tax.

The best way to ensure people and producers behave in an organic, market-based way is to simply make gasoline too expensive to waste. Every other First World country does it; why don't we? Implementing a gas tax, we would evaporate the market for SUVs as happened this summer. This would push the Big Three to make more fuel-efficient cars, without dangling the ever-enchanting prospect of a hugely profitable SUV market in front of their noses. The resulting tax dollars could be used to repair roads, build mass transit that is so sorely lacking, or even be cycled back into Detroit as loans, rather than putting tax dollars on the hook.

And it needn't even erode purchasing power by causing people to spend all their income on gas. As Dr. Evil prototype and all-around kook Charles Krauthammer suggested, Congress could introduce a $1/gallon gas tax and deduct from everyone's taxes the amount that the average American pays in new gas taxes. (Krauthammer's proposal deducted payroll taxes, likely to bankrupt that bane of neocons, Social Security, but if the money came out of income taxes, it would be pretty ideal in theory, if -- absent electronic gas transactions -- a mess come tax-declaration time.)

Sadly, every time a voter brings up the idea of a gas tax, politicians dismiss it as a "political third rail" that voters can't stand. Oddly, though, more and more voters seem to be pushing for it.

Meanwhile, there is huge demand for public transit as people grow more urban and for various reasons less reliant on automobile commuting, but less and less money for public transit, as the LA Times reports today. Meanwhile, Congress keeps letting us down by refusing to invest in mass transit, despite ever-increasing calls to do so (here's today's token plea). When Congress botches its best chance to turn around mass transit by selling it out to unwanted tax cuts in Obama's stimulus package, let's just hope it comes to its senses and secures funding for transit via a much stronger federal gas tax -- and that it finally stops offering Detroit Catch-22s in doing so.

So why aren't the politicians listening?

Proposition 8: Whodunit? The Mormons? The Blacks? Barack? The Gays???

BOULDER, Colorado -- There is a lot of blame being spread around for the victory of California's Proposition 8, which stripped same-sex couples of the right to marry. The New York Times has blamed the Mormons, who poured all their cash from Coca-Cola shares and Winter Olympics merchandise into the "yes" campaign. Everyone in the press seems to be stuck on the story that black people are responsible, because they don't like gays, or something. My grandfather would be disappointed in me for the amount of blame I have personally heaped on his beloved Knights of Columbus. But what is the real answer?

Well, truth be told, there really isn't one. I will strongly object to this line of argument that "black people did it," because it assumes that blacks and gays are two mutually exclusive groups. If we dig a little deeper into the polling data, it really only makes things murkier, which is exactly the point - we should not be pointing fingers at voters for the way this thing shook out, but rather at the entire ridiculous referendum process, which I will address shortly.

First, let's do a little number crunching of totally dubious exit poll numbers that would make Nate Silver throw his copy of Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract through his computer monitor, but it is the best that we can do.

Here's the data that I will be using from CNN.com. The Los Angeles Times also has some good maps of the voting patterns.

Proposition 8 passed by a margin of 52-48%, with a total of 11,970,000 votes cast. According to exit polls, blacks made up 10% of the electorate, and the split among them yes/no was 70/30. Political scientists and the media always treat black people as a homogeneous voting block, so maybe we should consider a 70/30 split as a step forward. But they are not the only group that sticks out in this data set - they just happen to be one of the groups that you can pick out if see them walking down the street. But people with graduate degrees make up 17% of the electorate, and their split was 60/40 against the ban - why isn't anyone talking about that? Or that 82% of Republicans, who make up 29% of the electorate, voted in favor? 61% of people over the age of 65 - 15% of the electorate - voted "yes" as well.

Many people have claimed that the fact that Barack Obama was on the ballot caused a surge in black voter turnout, and that is what carried Prop 8. Firstly, regardless of the outcome, I think that we should be happy that a larger number of blacks turned out to vote, as they are generally an underrepresented group. By my calculations, black voters made up (very, very) roughly 40% of the Democrats who voted "yes," which is disproportionate; but even if every single black Democrat voted "no" (a ridiculous assumption), the proportion of Democrats against the measure would only be 79% (in reality, 63% of self-idenitifed Democrats voted "no"), still lower than Republicans in favor (though the measure would have been defeated in this scenario). In other words, lots and lots of people in California, including some white Democrats, voted for this measure. Even if turnout was lower among blacks - say, instead of 10% of the votes were cast by blacks, 6.7% were, which is their share of California's population - and they still voted by the same margin, it would have, at best, made this an even contest.

But we shouldn't even be talking about who voted for it or against it - we should be talking about how absurd it is that a constitutional right can be stripped by a slim majority in a referendum. This shows that the whole ballot initiative process is bonkers, and California, like many other western states, is essentially subject to mob rule. If something is a right, it cannot be taken away, and the supreme court in California ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. If gay marriage were a privilege granted by legislation, as states like Vermont argue a civil union is, then a case can be made for its revocation. The court's decision was not "legislating from the bench," and in the end, we allowed simple majority voting to be used to strip a minority of its rights, thus abrogating the very protections our democracy is meant to guarantee. This is a pattern that can be seen across the country (see map at right), but in all those other circumstances, voters preemptively banned same-sex marriage before the right was even granted, and who knows if it ever would have been.

Finally, I will object to the notion that this is in some way Barack Obama's fault. No Democratic politician really wants to touch this issue, and I don't think Obama's silence on the issue had anything to do with the fact that he didn't want to upset fellow black people. Politicians rarely talk about state ballot issues when running for national office - I didn't hear him talk about Colorado's measures to weaken unions, or Massachusetts' referendum to eliminate the state income tax, both of which are issues he talked about extensively in the federal context. Additionally, Obama barely even campaigned in California, so why spend money on an issue that he has no vested interest in, that he believes should be left to the states to decide (though in a more sensible manner than referendums), and in a state he is going to win handily anyway? Presidential campaign money should not be spent on state ballot issues; if the DNC wants to spend money on it, that's another story, but it was not Obama's call.

So we should all stop encouraging this Republican wet dream of Democratic internecine warfare of blacks vs. gays.

UPDATE: Nate Silver does the math for real, this time including the ever-important first-time voter demographic, something I neglected to do. This is why he is really, really good at his job(s), and we have a totally unknown and schizophrenic blog.

I would also recommend reading some of Ta-Nehisi Coates' commentary on Prop 8 in the Atlantic online (thanks, Peter, for both links).

Retro-Transport: Trains, Zeppelins and Canal Barges

BOULDER, Colorado -- Several years of oil prices surging above $100 a barrel and concerns over the effect of human activity on the climate have indicated that our current transportation infrastructure is not sustainable. Serious changes are likely on the horizon for the automobile industry, but what about other aspects of transportation, like shipping and air travel?

Trucking, especially in the United States, will likely undergo some serious changes as companies turn to alternatives like rail and waterborne transport. The jet engine is truly a climate killer - will people be willing to sacrifice the speed and convenience of the jet airliner for an alternative, perhaps a reborn Zeppelin? What will a post-hydrocarbon transportation network look like? Will it really materialize in our lifetime?

Earlier I discussed the project in California to build a high-speed train system, so I thought I would add a couple other alternative transportation ideas to the conversation. The first item, from a recent issue of the New York Times, is about the potential rebirth of New York's Erie Canal. If speed is not a concern, canal transport is a cheap and clean way to move goods in certain areas if the old infrastructure is still in place, as it is in Upstate New York.

"Hints of a Comeback for Nation's First Superhighway"

The second item concerns a glamorous old conveyance that met a fiery end - the Zeppelin. The largest one ever built, the ill-fated Hindenburg, could carry 72 passengers from Berlin to New York in approximately three days - it is a far cry from the 500 passengers that can make the crossing in eight hours aboard a Boeing 747, but it also expends far less fuel. There are not yet any serious plans to reintroduce the airships for passenger travel; personally, I think I would enjoy a luxury transatlantic cruise aboard one of these floating behemoths, but I doubt it will ever occupy a major niche in the commercial air travel market again. Instead, the blimp's boosters argue it could be used for heavy-lift transport to remote areas with poor access to roads or even airstrips. As the Economist states, dirigibles could carry large components for construction of things like oil and gas pipelines, which often cross rather dodgy stretches of the planet, or transport military hardware when aircraft capacity is in short supply.

"Pipe in the sky"

If you have any other thoughts or articles about retro transportation alternatives, send them along, and I will include them in this ongoing discussion.

Creating the New Locomotive Economy

BOULDER, Colorado -- The United States' passenger rail system totally sucks. This is an irrefutable fact. With the exception of a few areas of the country (just the Northeast, really), there is no reliable, high-volume train service. Take a look at this route map of our beleaguered national carrier, Amtrak. Vast swaths of the county are unserved, and the network still essentially follows the major trunk lines that were constructed not long after the Civil War. Those green lines on the map are bus routes that hold this patwork together. There are no north-south routes outside of the coasts and the Chicago-New Orleans line. The few improvements that have been made - like the "high-speed" Acela in the Northeast corridor - are overpriced, unprofitable, and deliver only marginally better service than what preceded them.



I happen to like trains. I also like to drive my car. Nobody is saying that you have to give up your automobile and ride your bike to the train station like some Dutchman. But there are so many things happening in this country and across the globe that make rail a viable growth industry. It is cleaner and cheaper than relying on the interstate highway system for passenger transport and shipping. While less flexible, an expanded network would easily make it competitive with trucking and air travel. Most importantly, a carbon tax, in some form or another, is coming, making gasoline, diesel and jet fuel-powered transport more expensive than it already is. Trains can be the great infrastructure project of this generation that will put Americans back to work, restore our manufacturing base, grow green technology, and make America the best place in the world to do business again. This may sound like a tall order for the humble locomotive, but it has the potential to be a powerful engine of growth in the future.

The voters of California got at least one thing right on election day. Though they repealed the rights of their gay citizens to get gay married, Californians approved a $9.95 billion dollar bond issue to construct an 800-mile high-speed rail network connecting all the state's major cities. The six-hour journey by car from San Francisco to Los Angeles will be cut to 2 hours 38 minutes. The 588-mile journey from Sacramento to San Diego will take only 3 hours 35 minutes, with a projected ticket price of just $68. Check out more about the system here, including the interactive map.


The project will cost $40 billion in total, and construction is tentatively slated to begin in 2011. California is hoping to secure $10-12 billion in federal funds, and the remainder of the cost will be covered by private investment or some sort of public-private partnership agreement that has yet to be hammered out. $1 billion of the bond will be spent on improving regional rail systems and linking them to the high-speed network.

There are still a lot of question marks about the funding scheme for this project, and the optimistic projections about the cost and time of construction will likely not be met. But California has taken a giant step toward creating an efficient and reliable passenger rail system.

Hopefully, other states - and the federal government - will follow their lead.