"The United States is more punitive than any other advanced democratic society. We stand alone among such nations in putting people to death. We have 'three strikes' policies that can send people to jail for life for petty theft. We are uniquely tough with the poor and the unemployed, cutting off benefits to the jobless whether the economy has improved or not. We mete out long prison terms for drug offenses that are treated as personal health problems in Western Europe or Canada. We expel children from our schools for misbehavior under 'zero tolerance' policies. For a while, we even had a speaker of the House (Newt Gingrich) who advocated forcing unwed mothers to give up their children to orphanages.
"Toughness runs deep in the veins of American culture. We imagine ourselves as a country where everyone is responsible for themselves and if you don't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, something must be wrong with you. . . . Over the past quarter century, get-tough notions have spread in step with other values associated with the market and have helped usher in big changes in our politics. Conservatives brought the curtain down on an era of liberal dominance in large part by caricaturing liberals as breeders of social pathology — as the indulgent political parents to violent criminals, lazy welfare moms, and thieving drug addicts. To save the day, and America's soul, conservatives have promoted a society that is harsher, more punitive, and less forgiving — assuring that these steps are for everyone's good.
"And yet this toughness does not extend to everyone. While a punitive morality increasingly governs the lives of those in America with little wealth or power — the poor, minorities, immigrants — better-off Americans are actually coddled and nurtured more than ever, whatever their sins. Big-time white-collar criminals are untouched by prosecutors. SAT cheats go to Harvard, famous wrongdoers are feted by the media and paid six figures for their 'confessions,' ex-cons emerge from country-club prisons with healthy tans and go on to make millions of dollars through insider business dealings.
"These second chances aren't doled out in Appalachia or Harlem or Roxbury. Indulgent morality thrives the most where the prerogatives of class privilege rule, big profits are at stake, and government enforcers have been disarmed.
"And that is a lot of places."
