"Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens," writes professor Glenn C. Loury. "Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring that it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?"
Answering this question is the heart of Loury's thought-provoking book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values. Loury begins with some jaw-dropping statistics. These include the fact that our corrections system employs more people than General Motors, Ford and Wal-Mart combined; with five percent of the world's population, we house 25 percent of its inmates; and that our incarceration rate is forty-times our nearest competitors, including Russia.
Loury argues that these statistics represent a choice America has made to shift from rehabilitation to punishment. This shift is due to the association in the minds of many of criminality with blackness. Loury notes that since the mid-'60s a similar association has emerged related to the welfare state which has also become more punitive. Indeed, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, poverty itself is becoming criminalized. As crime has become synonymous with blackness policy has become colored by racial animus and racial indifference. The effects have been devastating. Citing one example, Loury refers to the research of Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western who found that the racial disparity in incarceration rates is greater than another other social arena, including unemployment, non-marital child rearing, infant mortality, and net worth.
Loury's agenda of course is not to provide a litany of complaints about the current system. As the title of his book implies, his goal is to raise moral questions: "We ought to ask ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens — even those who break our laws?"
Loury approaches these questions by drawing on John Rawls' concept of justice. He demands that we consider what policies we would endorse if we did not first know our own chances of being on the wrong end of such policies. How would the criminal justice regime look if "we" were "them"? While Loury discusses justice in secular terms, his approach has echoes of the "Golden Rule." Simply put, we should treat criminals the way we would want to be treated if we were in their shoes. This conceptualization of justice is akin to the way it is conceptualized by 'Abdu'l-Baha (1844-1921) Head of the Baha'i Faith from 1892-1921: "The second attribute of perfection is justice and impartiality... It means, in brief, to regard humanity as a single individual, and one's own self as a member of that corporeal form, and to know of a certainty that if pain or injury afflicts any member of that body, it must inevitably result in suffering for all the rest."
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