Repeal absurdly punitive drug laws? Fine. But “if all drug cases were eliminated, the U.S. imprisonment rate would still have quadrupled over the past thirty-five years.” Reduce the appalling disparities in how different races are treated by the law? Fine. But even the rate at which white Americans are locked up is more than four times that of all prisoners in multiethnic France. Far more lenient penalties for nonviolent offenses? Fine. But nearly half of those behind bars in America are there for violent crimes. Get rid of private prisons? Fine. But they contain less than 10 percent of Americans behind bars.
Few officeholders, Gottschalk explains, are willing to take two uncomfortable steps, each of which means reversing decades of political rhetoric. One is to admit that as punishment for a wide variety of crimes, prison sentences accomplish little. They do not undo a crime or make it certain that the same person won’t commit the same crime again. Communities ranging from Brooklyn, New York, to Oakland, California, have made encouraging experiments in “restorative justice,” in which convicted criminals are sentenced to apologize to those they hurt, repay people they robbed, and do community service in the neighborhoods they have harmed. But, for most prosecutors, promoting such programs is not a promising path to election.
The other urgent task, according to Gottschalk, is to ensure that when we do send people to prison, they have much shorter sentences. It used to be that a life sentence meant that a well-behaved American inmate was likely to be released after ten to fifteen years—a recognition that merely growing older has far more influence than length of time served on the likelihood that someone might commit another crime. But U.S. prisons are now full of people serving several consecutive life sentences or life without parole—a punishment that virtually did not exist half a century ago and is almost unknown in the rest of the world.
“The total life-sentenced population in the United States is approximately 160,000,” she writes, “or roughly twice the size of the entire incarcerated population in Japan.” And some so-called reforms are meaningless: “The governor of Iowa commuted all the mandatory life sentences of his state’s juvenile offenders but declared that they would be eligible for parole only after serving sixty years.” This reminds me of a similar act of clemency under King George IV of Britain in 1820, when five members of the revolutionary Cato Street Conspiracy were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, and the last two parts of the sentence were remitted to mere beheading.
Breaking the pattern that has so many men, women, and teenagers wasting their lives in custody also demands bettering their opportunities for education, jobs, and much more on the outside. It is telling that the Nordic countries, with some of the world’s lowest imprisonment rates, are highly developed welfare states far more egalitarian than the United States. Programs that promise inmates “a second chance” on release, Gottschalk declares, mean little when “many of the people cycling in and out of prison and jail were never really given a first chance.”
This is all too true. But much as I prefer Nordic social democracy to our own wildly unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity, that change is not likely to arrive any time soon. We cannot wait until then to drastically reduce the number of people we have in prison. Even counting white prisoners alone, the United States has well over twice as many people, per capita, locked up as Spain, where 20 percent of the population is out of work and the welfare state is weaker than in Scandinavia. And we have more people per capita of any single race in prison than South Africa, where the unemployment rate for the black majority is catastrophic and the welfare state is fragile at best.
• • •
Was there ever a country that was once as enthusiastic about imprisoning people as we are but changed its ways dramatically? There was—and it was Finland.
In 1950, with a prison system and criminal code that had changed little from their origins under the Russia of the tsars, Finland had a higher incarceration rate than we then had in the United States. In Finland, 187 people out of every 100,000 were behind bars, as against only 175 here. A long series of reforms—not without their hard-line opponents—brought the Finnish rate of incarceration far down, just as our own soared. Today, we have 710 people per 100,000 in prison in the United States, compared to 58 in Finland. “One important idea that emerged,” write two scholars of Finland’s changes, “was that prison cures nobody. As a result policies were enacted that prison sentences should rarely be used in smaller crimes and other penalty systems should be developed instead.”
Although the prisons I saw in Finland certainly isolated inmates from the outside world, much that happened inside them was directed toward making sure that released prisoners could return to society. If you had half your sentence completed and had permission, you could leave Kerava Prison on weekends. Everything possible was done to ease that transition. The diploma you get on completing one of the classes I saw, for instance, is certified by an outside organization; it doesn’t say you received your training in prison.
A host of offerings within the walls addressed the problems that landed men in trouble in the first place. There were programs for anger management and drug rehabilitation, as well as both individual and group psychotherapy. Prisoners could also take part in a twelve-step program similar to that of Alcoholics Anonymous and a class in life skills that met three times a week. And, in an idea copied from Sweden, the prison hosted a series of speakers: former convicts who shared their experiences of readjusting to the world.
A released prisoner in the United States is frequently barred from voting, public housing, pensions, and disability benefits, and is lucky if he receives anything more than bus fare and, according to Jeff Smith, a routine farewell from a guard: “You’ll be back, shitbird.” At Kerava prison in Finland, before an inmate is released, a social worker travels to his hometown to make sure that he will have a job and a safe place to live.
2016
* * *
* Since this article was written, of course, Donald Trump has carried this kind of demagoguery to new depths.
Africa
FIGURE 3. Gold miners in eastern Congo.
SIX
The Listening House
AS IF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC of Congo had not already suffered enough, in 2002, nature dealt it a stunning blow. Mount Nyiragongo, the volcano whose blue-green bulk looms above the dusty, lakeside city of Goma in the country’s east, erupted, sending a smoking river of lava several hundred yards wide through the center of town and sizzling into the waters of Lake Kivu. More than 10,000 homes were engulfed. Parts of the city, packed with people displaced by the country’s civil war, are still covered by a layer of purplish rock up to twelve feet thick. In the two- or three-story buildings that survived, the second floor has become the first.
Far greater destruction has come from more than a decade of bewilderingly complex civil war. No one knows the full death toll, but it may well be in the millions, if you count those who died because fleeing their homes to disease-ridden refugee camps cut them off from adequate food and medical care. This has not been a conflict driven by ideology but rather a multisided free-for-all seeking plunder. No fewer than two dozen armed groups signed the most recent of several shaky peace deals. Among the warring parties have been the ineffectual national government, an array of feuding local ethnic warlords, and nearby African countries hungering for a share of Congo’s great natural wealth. First, neighboring Uganda and Rwanda supported a rebel force that overthrew the longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. Soon afterward, the new government fell out with its backers, and later Uganda and Rwanda fell out with each other. Before long, they and five other nearby nations had troops on Congo’s soil, in alliance either with the national government in the capital, Kinshasa, or with a mushrooming number of rival warlords, particularly here in the mineral-rich east. Those foreign soldiers are almost all gone now, but fighting between the government and remaining rebel groups continues. For several weeks, I had the chance to observe the war’s
effects with the best possible traveling companion, Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, whose reports have been an authoritative source of information on the country for years.
No one has been harder hit by the fighting than Congo’s women, for almost all the warring factions have used rape as a method of sowing terror. An hour and a half southwest of Goma, on a bone-jolting road up a valley, stand several low buildings of planks and adobe; small goats wander about bleating, and a cooking fire burns on one dirt floor. Above us loom steep-sided hills where maize, beans, and cassava grow in a patchwork of fields of brown and dazzling green. There is no electricity. A sign reads Maison d’Écoute, Listening House. The office of the 42-year-old director, Rebecca Masika Katsuva, known to all as Mama Masika, extends from the side of one of the buildings; its other three walls are thin green tarpaulin, through which daylight filters. The floor is gravel. Masika pulls out a hand-written ledger to show to Anneke, her colleague Ida Sawyer, and me. Ruled columns spread across the page: date, name, age of the victim, and details. Almost all are gang rapes, by three to five armed men. Since the Maison d’Écoute started, it has registered 5,973 cases of rape in the surrounding district. The ages of the victims just in the past six months range from two to sixty-five. On the ledger’s most recent page, the perpetrators listed include three different armed rebel groups, plus the Congolese national army.
“What pushed me into this work,” says Masika, speaking softly in a mixture of Swahili and hesitant French, “is that I am also one who was raped.” This first happened a decade ago; the rapists were from the militia of a local warlord backed by Uganda. “Their main purpose was to kill my husband. They took everything. They cut up his body like you would cut up meat, with knives. He was alive. They began cutting off his fingers. Then they cut off his sex. They opened his stomach and took out his intestines. When they stabbed his heart, he died. They were holding a gun to my head.” She fought her captors, and shows a scar across the left side of her face that was the result. “They ordered me to collect all his body parts and to lie on top of them and there they raped me—twelve soldiers. I lost consciousness. Then I heard someone cry out in the next room, and I realized they were raping my daughters.”
The daughters, the two oldest of four girls, were twelve and fifteen. Masika spent months in the hospital and temporarily lost her short-term memory. “When I got out I found these two daughters were pregnant. I fainted. After this, the family [of her husband] chased me away. They sold my house and land, because I had had no male children.” From time to time Masika stops, her worn face crinkles into a sob, and she dabs her eyes with a corner of her apron.
“Both girls tried to kill their children. I had to stop them. I had more difficulties. I was raped three more times when I went into the hills to look for other raped women.” Part of her work is to go to villages and talk to husbands and families, because rape survivors are so often shunned. In one recent case, for instance, a woman was kidnapped and held ten months as a sex slave by the FDLR (Forces démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda), the Hutu perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide and their followers, long the most intransigent rebel group here. After she returned to her village with a newborn baby, her husband agreed to take her back, but only if the baby were killed. Masika intervened and took in the child at the Listening House. Living here now are six women and seventeen children—some of whom keep scampering up to an opening in the tarpaulin to giggle and look in at us.
At one point Masika has to break off talking with us because a new victim walks in off the road, a 47-year-old woman who says she was raped just three days ago by three Congolese army soldiers who barged into her house after she came home from church. For twenty minutes, Masika takes down her story and then quickly sends her to a nearby clinic: if anti-retroviral drug treatment is begun within seventy-two hours of a rape, it can usually prevent HIV/AIDS.
The last time Masika herself was raped was only five months ago. The attackers, members of rebel group that has since been integrated into the Congolese army in a new peace deal, were four soldiers who targeted her because they knew the work she was doing. “After having raped me, they spat in my sex, then shoved a shoe up my vagina. When I arrived home I cried a lot and was at the point of killing myself.”
Shocking as ordeals like Masika’s are, they are all too similar to what Congolese endured more than a century ago. Rape was then also considered the right of armies, and, as now, it was how brutalized and exploited soldiers took out their fury on people of even lower status: women. From 1885 to 1908, when this territory was the personally owned colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, he pioneered a forced labor system that was quickly copied in French, German, and Portuguese colonies nearby. His private army of black conscript soldiers under white officers would hold women hostage in order to force their husbands and sons to go into the rainforest for weeks at a time to harvest lucrative wild rubber. “The women taken during the last raid . . . are causing me no end of trouble,” a Belgian officer named Georges Bricusse wrote in his diary on November 22, 1895. “All the soldiers want one. The sentries who are supposed to watch them unchain the prettiest ones and rape them.”
Like rape, forced labor also continues today. The various armed groups routinely conscript villagers to carry their ammunition, collect water and firewood, and, on occasion, dig for gold. A 2007 survey of more than 2,600 people in eastern Congo found over 50 percent saying that they had been made to carry loads or do other work against their will in the previous decade and a half. A few miles down the road from the Maison d’Écoute, I meet one such person in a camp for people who have fled the fighting; several thousand of them are living here in makeshift shelters of grass thatch, the lucky ones with a tarpaulin over the top. The man is twenty-nine, in T-shirt and sandals, and doesn’t want his real name used. He arrived at the camp two days ago from Remeka, a village a few days’ walk from here that has changed hands several times in recent fighting between the FDLR and the national army. A bandage covers his left eye.
Congolese army soldiers corralled him last week as a porter. The troops then came under fire, and “I took advantage of that to flee. I spent a night in the bush, and when I came back to the village I found the army had pillaged it, and everyone had fled. Other soldiers told me again to carry supplies. When I refused they took a bayonet and jabbed me in the eye.” He can see a little out of the eye, but not clearly. Doctors don’t know if its sight will fully return. His wife and two children, aged two and eight, fled the village, and he thinks they are still in the bush.
• • •
Where does such cruelty come from? Four problems, above all, drive Congo’s unrelenting bloodshed. One is long-standing antagonism between certain ethnic groups, particularly here in the troubled east. A second is the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the two million or so people who flowed across Congo’s border in its aftermath: Hutu killers, innocent Hutu who feared retribution, and a mainly Tutsi army in pursuit, bent on vengeance. A third is that this is the largest nation on earth that has virtually no functioning national government—over sixty-five million people in an area roughly as big as the United States east of the Mississippi. The corrupt and disorganized regime of Joseph Kabila provides few services, especially in the more distant parts of the country, such as Goma, which is more than a thousand miles east of the capital. And, finally, perhaps above all, there is the vast wealth in natural resources—from tungsten to diamonds to copper, and more—that gives ethnic warlords and their backers, especially Rwanda and Uganda, such an incentive to fight.
Evidence of the nation’s natural riches is everywhere. Aging Soviet-era Antonov cargo planes continually descend into Goma airport, filled with tin ore from a big mine in the interior now controlled by Congolese army officers. On a country road, a truck stacked high with timber passes by, heading out of the rainforest toward the Ugandan border. And then one day in Goma, while I am walking with Anneke, Ida, and another foreigner, a man approaches and
asks: Would we like to buy some uranium?
He is perhaps forty, with expensive-looking walking shoes. He claims to have had clients from South Africa, Europe, and Saudi Arabia. This uranium, he tells us, the Belgians left behind when they had to pull out of the territory in a hurry in 1960. (Possible: a major mine, which had supplied most of the material for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, was hastily shut down at that time.) The uranium has been tested with Geiger counters, and it’s de bonne qualité! And safely packed: two kilos inside each seventeen-kilo radiation-proof container. The price? $1.5 million per container. But this is negotiable . . .
Also on all sides is evidence of the lack of an operating national government. One half-finished housing development is composed of empty new cinder-block homes with no doors and no glass in the windows. Kabila promised to build them during his 2006 election campaign, but the funds drained away into various officials’ pockets. Millions of children are not in school; working schools are likely to be those run by aid agencies or churches. Once-paved streets have long since reverted to Africa’s red dirt, and trucks kick up huge clouds of it as they pass.
The absence of a government that works does not mean that there are no government officials; on the contrary, they are everywhere—and are self-supporting. On rural roads where fewer than a dozen vehicles pass in an hour are clusters of yellow-shirted traffic police waving them down; we see three large trucks stopped at one, their drivers negotiating. Even when we fly from one city to another inside the country, we still have to go through customs on arrival; the passport control officer asks me if I have a present for him. On a road into one town, where people are wheeling bicycles piled high with charcoal, bananas, and other goods to a weekly market, blue-uniformed police are stopping them to collect a “tax.”
Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 8
