The Dannemora Dilemma
NOT
many small American towns stick in your memory 10 years after you last
drove through them. But New York’s Dannemora, site of last weekend’s
remarkable prison break, is a vivid exception.
Dannemora
is way up north — north of Albany, north of the Saratoga races, north
of Lake George and Lake Placid, barely inside the northern
border of the Adirondack Park. You drive through emptiness to get there,
and what you find when you arrive is schizophrenic. Coming down the
main street, to your left is a normal upstate town — the car dealer, the
post office, the Stewart’s market, a lot of shingled storefronts in the
shadow of mountains.
.
But
to your right, block after block, there’s just a prison wall — looming,
pressing, dominating, like a glacier inching down from Canada, or
something out of “Game of Thrones.”
I was there in high summer, and my first thought was “Siberia.” And “Little Siberia” turned out to be the prison’s nickname.
.
We’ve
been debating criminal justice reform in earnest ever since Ferguson
exploded last summer, with policing as the focal point. But our
archipelago of prisons, the Dannemora-like places spread around the
country, are as much the issue as any abuses by the police.
.
All
told, our prisons house around 2.2 million Americans, leaving the land
of the free with the world’s highest incarceration rate. And they house
them, often, in conditions that make a mockery of our supposed ban on
“cruel and unusual” punishment: gang-dominated, rife with rape, ruled by
disciplinary measures (particularly the use of solitary confinement)
that meet a reasonable definition of torture.
.
When
Americans debate which feature of our contemporary life will look most
morally scandalous in hindsight, the answers usually break down along
left-right lines. But there’s increasing agreement across ideological
lines — uniting conservative evangelicals and civil rights leaders, the
Koch brothers and Eric Holder — that our prison system has become a
particularly obvious moral stain.
This agreement has borne fruit: Amid a bipartisan, multistate push,
the incarceration rate has fallen since 2007. And the crime rate has
stayed low, at least till now, which has both helped the trend along
(low crime rates mean fewer new prisoners) and sustained political space
for pushing further.
The
as-yet-unanswered question, though, is how far the push can go. And if
the Siberian strangeness of Dannemora makes the case for reform, the
escape there last week is a reminder of the dilemma for reformers.
.
Richard
Matt and David Sweat, the escapees, may have imitated Andy Dufresne in
“The Shawshank Redemption.” But no sane person would root for them —
both murderers, Matt a charismatic psychopath — to end up free and clear in Zihuatanejo.
.
And while evil geniuses are pretty rare in our prisons, murderers are not.
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