So, Why Does Nashville Have Such a High Incarceration Rate?
So, here we sit with the second largest population-in-jail per capita in the country and the question is why. Looking at the Justice Policy Institute study, it’s not hard to see how our local issues and these national trends intersect.
First, our community, like others, has been hard hit both by drug abuse and then the War on Drugs, which turns people who have a pastime or an addiction into criminals (according to the study, one quarter of people in jail nationally are in jail on drug charges). Second, judges seem to be setting higher bails, which makes it hard for a person to get out of jail pre-trial. Third, many people who need mental health help are ending up in our jails instead. We see how this can happen here in Nashville, knowing, as we do, how many homeless people have mental illnesses and seeing the rise of measures that funnel the homeless population into our jail system. Fourth is, of course, the incarceration of people who don’t have permission to be here. In Memphis, only 2-3% of people in jail are illegal immigrants. In Nashville, that number is 25%.
I’ve been dwelling on this all morning. We know how folks here in Nashville get swept up–it’s illegal to drive without a license and illegal immigrants can’t get licenses and so, when they get pulled over, they get arrested.
But it’s also illegal for illegal immigrants in Memphis to drive without licenses. So, why is our jail a quarter full of illegal immigrants and Memphis’s jail not?
I suspect, deeply suspect, that this has to do with where the anxieties in each community are. In Memphis, the “problem” people are young African American men and so measures that round them up and get them into the penal system are supported by the community. Over here, we’re so worried about the brown people in our midst we’ve even petitioned the feds–through the 287(g) program–to help us round them up and find an excuse to keep them in our jails.
Plus, our undocumented workers are spread out through the city in all kinds of industry, employed by all kinds of businesses, small and large. But I can’t think of one mega-business that employs a lot of undocumented workers that could work to keep the pressure off these folks.
But you can bet that, if the rumors coming out of Memphis are true about how many folks are employed directly or tangentially at a large company that will get you things overnight, unless Tom Hanks gets his hands on them, there’s no way the city of Memphis is going to “crack down” on illegal immigrants. Memphis has it bad enough; they don’t need that company setting off for friendlier climes.
So, we focus on finding and jailing illegal immigrants.
…eh, I don’t know… I felt like I had something more “round things up and finish with a flourish” to say, but all I can wonder is about how many legitimate calls get responded to late or not at all because our police force is busy finding folks for deportation
Filed under: About Town
I bet that your public transportation system sucks, right? How does it compare to the bus system in Memphis? Maybe Memphis workers don’t have to drive w/o a license so much because the bus system is better.
And yeah, people around here refer to the Memphis hub as Fed Mex. If it’s sufficiently rumor that our local store knows about it, it’s a very strong rumor indeed.
I do think Memphis’s public transportation system is better than ours (it would be impossible to be much worse). But I also think it has to do with the police not feeling like they have a mandate to arrest brown people.
Our drug enforcement laws don’t “turn people…into criminals.” People who break these laws turn themselves into criminals
Oh, please, Steve. Whatever. I’m sure you speed. Are you a criminal?
It is important to remember, Steve, that our drug prohibition laws are neither written equitably nor applied equitably. Almost invariably these laws (and the widely applied enforcement patterns) seem designed to sweep up poor and working class folks, and disproportionately non-white folks.
So, as Aunt B. points out, we criminalize specific behaviors, behaviors which have been around in some form as long as human beings have been around. We insist that our government structures ‘crack down’ on specific populations that are engaged in those criminalized behaviors. So while it is easy and partially accurate to try and shove all the blame for this issue onto the shoulders of those getting hurt most directly by the criminalization paradigm, it is a dangerous and self-destructive cop-out.
In other words, we can turn our nose up and say that the niggers, spics, and white trash are bringing on themselves. And we can pretend that our exploding prison population and devastated urban communities are problems that aren’t going to hurt the rest of us.* I don’t want to be here when that short-sighted smugness really comes back to bite us all in the ass.
*of course, we could grow up as a society and reject the draconian moralizing in favor of more constructive and compassionate measures. But as long as our public discourse is dominated by hypocritical buck-passing and racist scapegoating, I won’t hold my breath on that.
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