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US: A lifetime for a spliff
Andrew Stephen New Statesman
Monday 27 Mar 2006 Don't use marijuana in the US unless you want to risk going to prison for the rest of your life. America has the most punitive penal system in the world, writes Andrew Stephen If you are a pregnant British woman visiting America and smoking marijuana, I have one word of advice for you: don't. I say this not just on health grounds, but because of what is likely to happen to you under the US penal system in the 21st century. First, despite your pregnancy, you will, if you get caught, almost certainly go to prison. The number of women in jail in the United States stands at more than 90,000 - 85 per cent of them for non-violent offences - which is more than the entire prison population in Britain, men and women combined, and contrasts with just 7,600 female inmates in the US in 1970. The number of women sent to prison on drug-related charges here - a large proportion of them for being in possession of marijuana - increased by 888 per cent between 1986 and 1995 alone. More people are in prison in the US for marijuana use alone than the entire prison populations in eight different European countries. Partly because of the unthinking importation of American populism into the UK under the Blair government, I increasingly find myself issuing a series of reality checks when it comes to comparing life in the US with that of western Europe. The US penal system is based on Old Testament vengeance, devoid of the notion of forgiveness or rehabilitation. Let us consider the possible fate of our pregnant marijuana user. I am basing this not on hearsay, but on a recent Amnesty International US report. If she is in a US federal government prison or in jail in any one of 23 states, she may well have her wrists handcuffed and ankles shackled during labour, a practice Amnesty calls, with curious understatement, "a violation of international standards". Two thousand babies are born every year in US prisons, but only five states and the District of Columbia prohibit this practice of handcuffing and shackling. Shawanna Nelson, a 30-year-old, seven-stone prisoner serving time in Arkansas for fraud, is suing the state because - having been given nothing stronger than paracetamol during her entire labour - a prison guard refused to release her shackles despite repeated pleas to do so by Ms Nelson herself, a doctor and two nurses. For the very final moment of delivery of what turned out to be a nine-and-a-half-pound baby, the shackles were released at the insistence of the doctor - leaving Ms Nelson with lasting back pain and damage to her sciatic nerve, according to her lawsuit against the prison and the privatised medical company under whose auspices she gave birth, "Correctional Medical Services". Since then, we are told, Arkansas has begun using "softer, more flexible restraints" for women in labour. Well, thank heavens for that. Now let us look at a few of those realities in the penal system of the US today. The International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London says that currently, there are 2,135,901 people in-carcerated in the United States - placing the US way at the top of the world league tables, ahead of China, the Russian Federation and then Brazil. The US figure is also increasing rapidly. Consequently, 726 people out of every 100,000 in the population are currently in prison in the US, compared to 142 in Britain, 91 in France, and 58 in Japan. The system is erratic, too: Texas imprisons at seven times the rate of Maine, to cite just one example. To compound this, there are increasingly disturbing trends in sentencing. Partly as a result of Newt Gingrich's populist, "get tough on crime" Republican uprising in 1994, and partly because of a general tendency since the Nixonian 1970s, sentences in the US are becoming ever more draconian and retrograde - whether they apply to elderly billionaire swindlers or to black youths caught stealing from drugstores. Nearly 10 per cent of America's prison population are now serving life sentences, many of them with little chance of parole; 20 per cent have no chance of parole and know that they will leave prison only in a coffin. American prisons, as a result, increasingly house old men in wheelchairs or using Zimmer frames. If families do not claim the bodies of these prisoners almost immediately they die, they are often buried in prison graves dug by other in-mates, marked by gravestones bearing just the prisoner's name and number. A conservative estimate is that it costs the American taxpayer $3bn just to keep these lifers in prison; about 10,000 are serving life sentences for offences committed as children, 350 of them life without parole for crimes committed when they were 15 or younger. The rituals of sentencing in America, indeed, seem at times almost comically absurd, and comical they would be, were they not so punitive rather than rehabilitative in intention. Dennis Rader, the so-called "BTK" serial killer, was sentenced to no fewer than ten consecutive life sentences in Kansas last August, for example. As it happens, Kansas is one of only three states in the Union that gives every prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment the chance to appear before a parole board - but Rader's punishment ensures that he will have to wait until he is 175 before he gets that chance. It is hard to feel sorry for such a man, a brutal killer of women. However, a survey by the New York Times last year found that between 1988 and 2001 only two-thirds of those given life sentences had even committed murder; some were given them for offences such as burglary and drug dealing (16 per cent of these lifers for the latter, in fact). David Blunkett famously called for a "three strikes and you're out" policy to be adopted in Britain - did he ever understand that this is a baseball analogy, or, in the present climate, did he simply assume that because it is an American phrase it must be the right one for Britain, too? - yet the result in the US is that there are countless miscarriages of justice in the name of being tough on crime. Like a lot of what the Blair government now considers bright ideas that it should import from America, this law has been so grotesquely misused that it is already on the verge of being dropped. It was introduced in California in 1994 in the aftermath of the particularly gruesome killing of a 12-year-old girl by a man out on parole after two felonies. The expectation was that prisoners like him, if they were not freed, would not then be able to commit such terrible crimes as that murder. What happened instead is that large numbers of pathetic misfits rather than hardened criminals began to be sentenced to life imprisonment. A homeless man called Gregory Taylor, for example, used to hang around outside St Joseph's Church in Los Angeles where a priest would usually give him food. In the middle of one night in 1997, Taylor decided he was too hungry to wait and started to pry open the church's kitchen door; the police were called and he was sentenced under the law that Blunkett favoured for Britain, because what was technically only a break-in was Taylor's third offence. He appealed unsuccessfully against his sentence; one of the dissenting judges said his case was "like something from Les Misérables". So, to sum up: don't use marijuana in the United States unless you want to risk being sentenced to prison for the rest of your life. Don't become homeless, because if you then commit three even very minor crimes you might find yourself incarcerated for the rest of your life. Whatever you do, don't do any of these things if you are pregnant. Being chained and shackled from arrest to sentencing even for trivial offences is, after all, routine in this, the most punitive penal system in the world. And it wouldn't be the ideal way for your baby to start life, either, would it?
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