Last week we drove through Arizona and southern California.
Rolling fields. Cacti. Tumbleweed. Palms. Desert. And prisons. The highways of America are littered with prisons. Extraordinary numbers of them.
Over 1.3 million Americans will spend this Christmas in jail. The ripple effect on families probably affects more than 12 million citizens.
The average jail sentence in America now is 27 months. Half the prison population changes every year. That leaves millions of people disenfranchised forever by virtue of having a felony on their records. A massive voiceless, hopeless constituency of people.
On Thursday night we listened to Bill Bradley debating with Al Gore in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bradley used a phrase he likes: the risk of leadership.
Bill hadn't been driving where we had. When it comes to prisons and crimes there are very few people in America taking the risk of leadership. It is an issue freckled with casual cruelties.
There is a bitter irony in, for instance, George W. Bush running for the presidency masquerading as a "compassionate conservative" who as governor has presided over 100 executions in Texas while also running a prison system notorious for its brutal excesses.
It is George W's father who takes much of the credit for kick-starting the current boom in the lock 'em up and throw away the key business. Bush senior degraded himself and the political process with his cynical use of the Willie Horton case against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Horton was the murderer who raped a woman and wounded a companion of hers while on weekend release from a Massachusetts prison during Dukakis's governorship. It later transpired that the furlough system in question was a Republican invention, and that worse tragedy had happened under a halfway house system founded in Texas with Bush's help. None of that undermined the overall validity of the system. The facts emerged too late for Dukakis.
THE DIE was cast. Politicians have come to fear pathologically denunciation for being "soft" on crime. Parole and clemency hearings have become the arena of tough-guy posturing. Rehabilitation is a dirty word.
Federal correction facilities have filled with the victims of dumb platitudes such as "Three strikes and you're Out" and "Zero Tolerance." All evidence suggests that people have been gulled by shallow politicians and easy headlines. The risk of leadership? In Arizona prison gangs were working the median strips of highways in the winter sun. In California the road signs warned of the looming presence of a federal detention centre and advised not to stop and offer lifts.
There in the distance would be the floodlit presence of one of California's 33 state prisons, home to the state's 163,000 inmates. That system is running at 193 per cent of capacity.
The culture of prisons in California, Texas and many other states is America's hidden shame. In California and 34 other states, prisoners work at minimum wage for commercial companies. Meanwhile the US continues (rightly but hypocritically) to chastise China for the use of prison labour.
The jewel in the crown of Californian prison brutality is Corcoran. It is worth the while of any reader to call up on the LA Times site on the Internet Mark Arax's remarkable journalism on Corcoran.
Corcoran has become California's human equivalent of a toxic dump. It houses Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan and the drug-addicted actor, Robert Downey Jnr. Those are just the big names.
The prison is famous for so much else. In November, to nobody's surprise, the state dismissed the case of Eddie Dillard, who had been placed at Corcoran in the cell of an inmate twice his weight. The cellmate, known within the prison as the Booty Bandit because of his molestation habits, repeatedly raped Dillard for three days.
In the new year the trial will begin of eight officers accused of running the prison's legendary "gladiator days", when rival gang members were pitted against each other in fights which wardens would then break up with gunfire. In the seven years before 1995, seven inmates died and 43 were wounded in such circumstances.
IN one year alone the prison noted 1,500 fights, the discharge of gas rounds on 662 occasions, 47 rifle shots and 204 injuries among inmates, plus one death.
Corcoran represents politicians declining the risk of leadership. It festered because the prison officers' union, which grew from a 1,600-strong force to a 28,000-strong army in 18 years, has made it its business to fund the campaigns of politicians who are "strong" on crime.
Since 1987 the union has pumped $5.2 million into political campaigns. Beneficiaries include current Governor Gray Davis, who received $2.3 million in campaign funding.
Corcoran is not the only prison within the Californian system at which deaths have occurred, merely the most notorious.
The penal system has deteriorated into savagery. Even US Justice Department statistics released last summer concede that 15 per cent of inmates suffer some mental illness. When prisoners are released half are illiterate, 10 per cent are homeless, 85 per cent are addicts and 75 per cent have no job whatsoever (a job being, for statistical purposes, an endeavour which yields $100 over three months).
Recidivism is chronic and rehabilitation loses the argument before it gets a chance to clear its throat. Somewhere down the line it will cost. The average cost of keeping a person in prison for a year is $21,243. The three-strikes mantra increases by three times the possibility of a life sentence for shoplifting. Thus the state will pay $500,000 to incarcerate you over a quarter of a century.
All this when statistics show that $7,000 per annum on rehabilitation, education and addiction treatment gives an almost 70 per cent chance of producing a productive, non-recidivist ex-con. All this in the face of an ageing institutionalised prison population.
The risk of leadership. Some of the people who need it most will never vote again.
e-mail: thumphries@irish-times.ie