There is a lot to be said about Rand Paul’s unique positioning in the 2016 presidential race, and most of it is pretty bad. Believe it or not, he has some jewels of wisdom buried beneath his incoherent foreign policy views, his incompatible stances on government interference and gay marriage, his sympathies for the anti-vaccination crowd and his various conspiracy theories.
Paul deserves some credit for championing criminal justice reform and helping to make it a bipartisan issue. He’s broken ranks with the rest of the GOP to try to attract minority voters with his views on reducing sentences and decriminalizing some drug offenses.
While Paul probably will not win the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency (thankfully), it’s crucial that criminal justice reform does not fade away along with him. It is the most important issue in U.S. domestic policy and yet it rarely receives the national attention it deserves.
The statistics alone should be enough to make criminal justice reform a priority. With only about 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. houses a quarter of the world’s prisoners. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 716 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The second highest rate among NATO members belongs to the United Kingdom with 147 per 100,000. No country in the world even comes close to the U.S.; Cuba is a distant second with 510.
The numbers get even more shocking when accounting for race. In 2010, the incarceration rate for African-American men was 4,347 per 100,000. While black people make up just 12 percent of the population, and are less likely to use drugs than white people, they comprise 62 percent of those imprisoned for drug offenses.
The worst outcomes of our broken system are not as easy to measure. This is because our government does not keep track of how many citizens are killed by officers sworn to protect them. Police brutality and mass incarceration have the same roots: We rely on force and punishment to solve all of our social issues.
These problems are systematic and require drastic measures to address them. True reform is not going to come about by attaching body cameras to police officers.
As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
"Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors. One of the great hallmarks of the past forty years of American domestic policy is a broad disinterest in that difference. The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer."
We consider it normal to send police officers to deal with people who suffer from drug addiction or mental illness; we send men with the legal authority to kill to deal with people who sell loose cigarettes. Then we wonder why so many are killed at the hands of police officers.
Our approach to criminal justice is the result of years of politicians promising to keep us safe by being “tough on crime.” These problems are pervasive but they are not unsolvable. Mass incarceration, the war on drugs and stop-and-frisk have been propped up by those in power playing on our racial fears. When disadvantaged communities are subjected to heavy-handed policing, we perceive that we are safer.
In 2016 the best candidate won’t be someone who warns us of potential dangers that only they can keep us safe from — they will recognize that justice is what faces the real danger, and it needs more than a hammer.
Reach the columnist at hneidig@asu.edu or follow @hneidig on Twitter.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
Want to join the conversation? Send an email to opiniondesk.statepress@gmail.com. Keep letters under 300 words and be sure to include your university affiliation. Anonymity will not be granted.
Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter.
