A fascinating study about imprisonment in our country appeared in the August issue of the Jesuits’ America magazine, overturning many commonly held ideas about the subject. It is timely, given the upsurge after the George Floyd debacle across the nation. Calls to defund police show the rising dissatisfaction toward jailing protesters who object to Black oppression.
Consider that we have 2.2 million people in prisons and jails, almost one out of a hundred citizens. This rate of incarceration is the world’s highest, with the U.S. population being 5 percent of the world’s but its incarcerations account for 25 percent of the world’s jailed population. Our use of the death penalty makes us one of the world’s few nations to resort to something condemned by Pope Francis and many like-thinking people of all faiths. In comparison to other nations we use solitary confinement more, with less rehabilitation, education, home leaves and re-entry aid.
You might object that such frivolous luxuries cost taxpayer money. Other less affluent nations provide them, but of course they do not indulge in our kind of outrageous military spending. That’s where the money goes. Our military budget exceeds that of Russia, China and most other countries, devouring fully two thirds of every year’s discretionary federal spending since World War II. We are fixated on it. It even makes us move defense expenditures to other cabinet departments to hide them. Energy gets something like an annual $50 billion to care for our nuclear arsenal. Tens of billions for the survivors of our militarism are covered by Veterans Affairs. And the national debt, exploded by our military adventurism, is inestimable.
Ronald Reagan, no pacifist snowflake, spent $77 billion on the Pentagon budget in one of his earlier years. We just approved $740 billion for the next fiscal year’s military. Building an aircraft carrier takes a meager $13 billion even though it is a sitting target for a cruise missile. Once again we are fighting the next war with weapons from the last one.
Those other countries, even those who do not have the standard of living that we enjoy — and 17 others enjoy one superior to ours — do not have to misappropriate so much money on weaponry. What do they know that we do not? For one thing, they know they can count on us for their defense. But they also know that negotiating settles many international grievances with adroit diplomacy. Trade is the global language. Such fiscal conduct does not make for glorious cinematic entertainment but it is the way of civilized, bloodless life.
Big — or rather humongous — defense business lobbies for and enjoys this perennially unbalanced budgeting. It is no accident that every congressional district in America has some defense contractor or subcontractor. We have long since taken it for granted that we must continually manufacture war machines as though we were still fighting Germany or Japan. Otherwise our labor force will be laid off. Making solar panels and other progressive, 21st century innovations to better the lives of all will keep many people employed. Studies have shown that social expenditures employ far more people than does weapon making.
Why do so many people approve the continual bloating of our military spending? Psychologists think it has to do with personal feelings of inadequacy. More testosterone evident in our government programs will make us safer, we think. This might have made some sense back during the Cold War, when we feared an insurgence of Soviet troops pouring through Germany’s Fulda Pass. That never happened. But as economy-minded California Sen. Arthur Vandenburg told Harry Truman, “Mr. President, we have to scare the hell out of the American people.” So it has been lucrative theater for 75 years and we still have not yet caught on.
There would be plenty of money for prison reform and for the social workers needed to unburden overworked police officers if we redirected defense funds there. Other countries have been doing it successfully for decades. And, unlike us, they have been doing it without civilian handguns, but that’s another column. Reformers who want to defund police are calling for hiring social workers trained to do what we should not expect police to do. Many beat cops like the idea. Demonstrators do not want to shut down police forces. They want to spend the money more wisely.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky remarked that you will know the caliber of a people by the way they treat their prisoners.
at the bottom and then tap “Add to Home Screen”
