We believe that America’s criminal justice system should keep communities safe, treat people fairly, and use fiscal resources wisely. But more Americans are deprived of their liberty than ever before - unfairly and unnecessarily, with no benefit to public safety. It’s a problem that affects people of color most of all. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik tackles the subject of mass incarceration in America, and takes on questions many of us in the criminal justice world as every day: how did we get here, and where do we go now?

As Gopnik explains:

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some point in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today — perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal justice system — in prison, on probation, or on parole — than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America — more than six million — than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

That’s right: If all the people under “correctional supervision” were a city, it would be the second largest city in the U.S.

As more people find themselves locked up, more people face the culture of violence and inhumanity that persists in many of America’s prisons. Many prisoners are kept in solitary confinement — “at least fifty thousand men — a full house at Yankee Stadium,” says Gopnik — where they are confined to a bathroom-sized cell for 23 hours a day with little or no human contact. It is literally enough to make the sane go crazy. In our own work to end the overuse of solitary, we argue that the practice is not only a waste of taxpayer dollars, but threatens public safety and is fundamentally inhumane. A U.N. expert has called solitary confinement torture. The Washington Post has called for its use only as a last resort.

Those not in solitary endure brutal conditions as well, including the constant threat of guard brutality and rape.

How did we get here? Gopnik’s piece explores two theories. Those who subscribe to the “Northern” theory point to the American justice system’s emphasis on process and procedure over principles, arguing that we tend to accept brutal conditions when we think of them as regular and systematic, imposed after a measure of due process has landed someone in prison. In other words, “The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people.” The “Southern” theory holds that prisons are a modern-day extension of plantations; that, as legal scholar Michelle Alexander has argued, mass imprisonment is the “new Jim Crow.” Blacks face police harassment as youths, are incarcerated at a far greater rate than whites, and are released often stripped of their right to vote — a cycle of legal discrimination and disempowerment.

These schools of thought converge to conclude, most basically, that there are too many people in prison and for all the wrong reasons. Overcrowded prisons, in turn, only worsen the conditions of confinement, as we have seen in California where the Supreme Court recently ordered a reduction in prisoner population.

Inflated prison populations have also fueled the for-profit prison industry. As a recent ACLU report shows, mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for this special interest group, which includes businesses like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) — even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole. Says Gopnik, “the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.” By CCA’s own admission, anything that would decrease the prison population would be bad for business. In a 2005 annual report, the company wrote:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities… The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relocation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Private prison corporations, then, have a self-preservation motive to push for an increase in incarceration. And there are others, too, who argue for the continued detention of more and more Americans, pointing to a decline in crime over the same period that incarceration skyrocketed. But there is little proof of a direct causation, and we must not simply accept that overincarceration cured crime. In fact, Gopnik’s piece argues and we agree, this culture of mass incarceration has actually had little effect on crime levels. A better explanation might be that there is no one reason for the decline but rather several smaller pieces of the puzzle that have slowly chipped away at the problem; that there are more effective policies that are also more fair and cost less. As we wrote in another recent report, many states have already begun to show that smart reform is possible, introducing policies that reduce their dependence on incarceration while protecting communities.

And if that’s true — if, indeed, mass incarceration plays a small role in reducing crime — then, Gopnik concludes, “very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for nonviolent crime.”

Like Gopnik, we believe it’s time for a change. It’s time to improve our criminal justice system, by reducing the number of people who needlessly enter prison in the first place, by shrinking the existing prison population by allowing prisoners who have proven they are ready to re-enter society the opportunity to transition out of confinement, and by investing in alternative solutions that are more effective than lengthy sentences.

We can and must be both safe and fair.

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The overuse of solitary confinement concerns some members of the Virginia legislature. According to Senator Adam Ebbin and Delegates Charniele Herring and Patrick Hope, there are simply too many prisoners in solitary for too long.

The three visited Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison over the summer and were moved to write an opinion piece in the Washington Post calling for reform of the system. They describe witnessing prisoners “confined in an 80-square-foot cell 23 hours a day, seven days a week.” As the legislators go on to explain, many of the 1800 prisoners kept in such conditions “have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses.” Often they are isolated for years on end, including one prisoner the legislators spoke with who had been in solitary for more than 12 years.

As the Post wrote in an editorial last week, “prolonged solitary confinement can lead to devastating consequences, including psychosis, reduced brain function, debilitating depression and increased rates of suicide.” And as we’ve written before, the overuse of solitary to isolate people, especially the mentally ill, for years at a time actually makes us all less safe. Many prisoners are released directly from solitary confinement into the community when their prison sentences are up, completely unprepared for the outside world. Unsurprisingly, these folks return to prison at incredibly high rates, leading many to question these costly policy choices that create more harm than good.

The movement to reform solitary confinement is gaining steam, in Virginia and across the nation. States as diverse as Mississippi, Maine and Colorado have dramatically reduced their solitary populations in recent years, saving those states money and ultimately making them safer by ensuring that prisoners who re-enter society are better equipped to do so.

Now, Ebbin, Herring and Hope have introduced a bill to study the feasibility of limiting the widespread use of segregation for long periods of time in Virginia. We hope the state will follow in the footsteps of other states that have moved in the right direction and begun to reduce their reliance on solitary.

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The Washington Post had this important editorial on the overuse of solitary confinement in Virginia prison. The Post calls on Virginia to follow in the footsteps of other states that have moved in the right direction and begun to reduce their reliance on solitary confinement.

As we wrote last week, Department of Corrections (DOC) officials laud 23-hour-a-day lockdown as a necessary measure for handling the “worst of the worst.” Unfortunately, this supposed “worst of the worst” includes the mentally ill — the Virginia DOC admits that almost 30% of those in solitary in Red Onion State Prison have been diagnosed as mentally ill. Even worse, prisoners are sometimes kept in solitary for years, regardless of their mental health status.

As the Post correctly points out, “prolonged solitary confinement can lead to devastating consequences, including psychosis, reduced brain function, debilitating depression and increased rates of suicide.”

Three legislators have finally introduced a bill to investigate the practice of long-term solitary confinement in Virginia. The ACLU of Virginia writes, “whether or not the bill will pass in 2012 is up in the air, but now that the issue has garnered some attention, it will at the very least be an important part of the legislative discussion this year… Solitary confinement is no longer off the radar. Other states have begun to pass laws limiting its use, and Virginia should do the same.”

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John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, considered caring for those imprisoned to be one of the highest priorities in his ministry. That legacy has been carried forward by the many passionate United Methodists today who are committed to ministries of healing and restoration for the millions impacted by the U.S. criminal justice system.

So, it was horrifying to realize last year that the United Methodist Church owned nearly one million dollars in stock in private prisons corporations Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group. Dispensing justice not as a public trust, but rather as an item for sale in the marketplace has dramatically accelerated the incarceration of mass numbers of people, particularly people of color. While United Methodists have been caring for those imprisoned and fighting to lessen the number of people incarcerated, our church has been profiting from corporations making billions of dollars from the incarceration of people of color. It was a sickening realization. Profiting from stock in CCA and GEO Group is a betrayal of all that we stand for and believe in as United Methodists and followers of Jesus.

As many are today, Jesus also was wrongly accused and convicted, abused by his captors while in custody, and put to death even though he was innocent. Jesus’ death was the result of collusion between religious and political leaders who wanted to maintain societal control, who feared the subversive movement Jesus had started. As the ACLU’s David Shapiro tells us in his excellent report, “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,” private prison companies like CCA and GEO Group are raking in massive profits and, in order to do so, dramatically increasing the population of those imprisoned. To secure those profits, private prison companies often hire lobbyists to ensure that incarceration rates continue to rise. The sad truth is that the same collusion between religious, economic and political forces that killed Jesus to maintain the status quo is alive and well today.

But we were determined to end the collusion of which our church was a part.

We decided that in addition to conversations between leaders in the church, we wanted to alert United Methodists about our profiteering from private prisons and provide a means of making their voice heard. We started a petition calling for immediate divestment of stocks in CCA and GEO Group. The response was quick and intense. United Methodists were outraged because they knew that private prisons corporations represent values that are antithetical to the values of compassion and justice that Jesus lived and taught.

Though the response by church members has been powerful, I know how slow a large institutional bureaucracy works and I was afraid it would take years to achieve divestment. Religious collusion with destructive forces is a horrible thing to openly confess and even more difficult to break.

So, it was stunning to begin 2012 learning that the United Methodist Board of Pensions, the board that controls the investments of the United Methodist Church, decided not only to divest from CCA and GEO Group entirely, but to permanently put into place a screen that will not allow us to invest in the future into any corporation that has gross revenues of 10% or more from private prisons.

What I have heard from the many United Methodists celebrating this move is that our joy emanates from the realization that once again we can say that what we believe in — healing and restoration for those impacted by the criminal justice system — is actually what we are doing. Just from this victory, I sense already a renewed passion among United Methodists to end mass incarceration and to make the U.S. criminal justice system truly just and fair. And a major step towards that reality is to ensure that incarceration ceases to be a money-making affair for corporations like CCA and GEO Group.

Bill Mefford (pictured above with his family) is the Director of Civil and Human Rights for the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church

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