( एक अमेरिकी लेखक हैं , रोबर्ट ए फर्गुसन। उन्होंने एक किताब लिखी है , इन्फर्नो , ऐन एनाटोमी ऑफ़ अमेरिकन पनिशमेंट। इस पुस्तक की समीक्षा संडे में छपी है। इसकी समीक्षा पढ़ने से पुस्तक के बारे में और अमेरिकी दंड विधान तथा आपराधिक प्रशासन के सन्दर्भ में अनेक नए रहस्यों का उदघाटन होता है। अमेरिका पूरी दुनिया में खुद को मानवाधिकारों का सबसे बड़ा सरक्षक मानता है। चाहे , इराक हो, अफगानिस्तान हो , यूक्रेन हो , क्रीमिआ हो या जो भी देश हो वहाँ पर मानवाधिकारों का सवाल उठा कर अक्सर नाक घुसाता रहता है। खुद को दुनिया का दरोगा साबित करता रहता है। उसकी भौगोलिक और आर्थिक स्थिति उसके इस उद्देश्य में सफल भी करती रही है। पर इस किताब से पता चलता है कि वह दुनिया का नेता हो या न हो , लेकिन , बिना किसी वैध कारण के जेलों में निरुद्ध रखने में वह दुनिया में अव्वल है। अमेरिका का विश्व की आबादी में कुल भाग मात्र 5 % का है पर पुरी दुनिया में जो कैदी जेलों में बंद हैं उनमें अमेरिका का प्रतिशत 25 % है। अमेरिका का प्रति व्यक्ति कारागार निरुद्धि अनुपात फ्रांस से 7 गुना , जापान से 14 गुना और भारत से 24 गुना अधिक है।
यही नहीं बल्कि प्रत्येक 9 में से 1 कैदी आजीवन कारावास की सज़ा भुगत रहा है। 10,000 ऐसे कैदी हैं जिन पर कोई हिंसा का अपराध नहीं है। 50,000 ऐसे कैदी हैं जो तनहाई की कैद में हैं। जब की संयुक्त राष्ट्र संघ की यातना और पुनर्वास पर गठित संगठन ने 15 दिनों से अधिक की तनहाई कैद को क्रूरता और अमानवीयता की सज्ञा दी है। इसके अतिरिक्त भी ऐसे कई कैदियों को सज़ा से मुक्त होने पर भी कतिपय सरकारी सुविधा और मताधिकार नहीं उपलब्ध होता है। यह प्रतिशत 67. 5 % है।
इस पुस्तक के लेखक कोलंबिया विश्वविद्यालय में क़ानून के प्रोफेसर हैं और उन्होंने इस विषय पर लम्बे शोध के बाद यह पुस्तक लिखी है। )
As
freedom advances, the severity of the penal law decreases. Or so argued
Montesquieu, an Enlightenment philosopher whose work profoundly influenced the
drafters of our Constitution. Were he alive today, Montesquieu might need to
reconsider. The United States may or may not be the leader of the free world,
but it is indisputably the world leader in locking up human beings behind bars.
We are less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but we warehouse 25
percent of the world’s incarcerated population. Our per capita incarceration
rate is seven times greater than France’s, 14 times greater than Japan’s and 24
times greater than India’s.
Life
behind bars is invisible to most of us, but if one bothers to look, it’s
unremittingly grim. About one of every nine American prisoners are serving a
life sentence, many of them without the chance of parole, some 10,000 of them
for wholly nonviolent offenses. More than 50,000 prisoners are held in
long-term solitary confinement, even though the United Nations special
rapporteur on torture has determined that solitary confinement for longer than 15
days amounts to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” Prisons offer little
in the way of rehabilitation or training for life after incarceration. And even
after release, many ex-convicts are barred from public housing, food stamps,
certain kinds of jobs and voting. Should we be surprised that the recidivism rate
is 67.5 percent ?
Our
proclivity for incarceration costs American taxpayers about $ 80 billion a
year. And that doesn’t count the vast indirect costs visited upon the
incarcerated, their families and communities. In 2007, there were 1.7 million
children in the United States with a parent in prison. Like so much else in
American society, the burdens are not evenly distributed. If current trends
hold, one in three black baby boys born in the United States can expect to
serve time in prison.
What
makes the United States so punitive, and how can we make it less so? Robert A.
Ferguson, a professor of law and literature at Columbia University, notes that
a dozen or more studies have been written denouncing the situation in recent
years, with little noticeable effect. Speculating that these studies failed
because they were too narrowly pitched to the legal profession, Ferguson argues
that “the desire for change must come from outside the invested framework.” In
“Inferno,” he brings to the subject “the disciplines of philosophy, history and
imaginative literature.”
“Inferno”
ranges widely to offer a fascinating “anatomy of American punishment,” drawing
on such diverse sources as Kant, Ursula K. Le Guin and Jack Henry Abbott, among
many others. (In one of Le Guin’s stories, Ferguson writes, a utopian society
“depends for its happiness on one innocent desperate child imprisoned in
horribly cramped, filthy conditions at the center of its city.”) Ferguson
surmises that people have a drive to punish, that we are generally unable to
understand the pain and suffering of others, and that America’s traditions
support an especially virulent “logic of severity.”
Ferguson’s
most successful attempt at explanation dissects the division of authority in
the criminal justice system. Legislators, driven by the mandate to be tough on
crime, address the question of sentencing at a general level, where it may be
easier to insist on long sentences because one isn’t looking a convicted
defendant in the face. The police work the front lines, where they daily
encounter the suffering of crime victims. Prosecutors are assessed by their
win-loss records, not by whether they have furthered the cause of justice.
Judges are constrained by mandatory sentencing laws and inured, by sheer
repetition, to the harshness of the penalties they impose. Juries might play an
ameliorative role, but well over 90 percent of criminal cases are resolved with
guilty pleas, cutting juries out of the process altogether. Prison guards are
poorly educated, under-resourced, ill trained and assigned an extraordinarily
difficult job. Ferguson puts it well: “Everyone in the process of punishing has
the courage of someone else’s convictions to fall back on.”
He
insists that the only way out is to reconceptualize punishment. Invoking the
circles of hell in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Ferguson argues that we need to
reorient our prisons away from punishment and debasement and instead model them
on Purgatorio, where individuals are restored to heaven through the care and
love of others. More prosaically, he calls for decriminalizing drug possession,
expert panels to dole out rewards for good behavior, and serious investment in
rehabilitation.
These
are all good, if not novel, ideas. But the root of the problem — sentence
severity — is not limited to drug laws. From 1973 to 2003, the prison
population increased every year, even though arrests for most crimes fell,
because the average time served almost doubled. Our sentences are frequently
two to three times longer than those in Britain and France for the same
criminal conduct. There is little evidence that the length of a sentence, as
opposed to its certainty, has significant deterrent effects. If we cut
sentences in half across the board, there is no reason to believe we’d see an
appreciable rise in crime, and over time we would most likely see a large drop
in the prison population.
In
an attempt to root mass incarceration in American values, Ferguson includes a
chart listing 14 “abstract concepts” (“distrust of authority,”
“exceptionalism,” “individualism”) and 14 loosely related “concrete scenarios”
(“No one should try to tell us what to do”). But these are so sweeping they
offer little in the way of illumination. Moreover, the very breadth of such
diagnoses may unwittingly imply that any hope of reform is quixotic. Yet
Ferguson’s account fails to grapple with the fact that mass incarceration is
limited to a particular period of American history. Until about 1975, incarceration
rates here were relatively low, and roughly matched those in Europe today. The
incarceration boom began in the mid-1970s, after Nixon declared his “war on
crime”; accelerated in the 1980s with Reagan’s escalation of the “war on
drugs”; and grew consistently through most of the first decade of the 21st
century. It has recently halted and even reversed course. This suggests that
the problem is not intrinsic to punishment itself, nor to retributive theories
of justice, nor even to longstanding American traditions and values.
Altogether
missing from “Inferno” is consideration of how the incarceration rate has begun
to drop for the first time in 30 years. The total United States prison
population has fallen for three years running. The per capita incarceration
rate peaked in 2007, and dropped steadily thereafter. Since 2000, more than
half the states have reformed mandatory sentencing laws, and the trend is
gaining momentum. Thirty-two reform bills have passed in the last five years
alone. New York and New Jersey have reduced their prison populations by nearly
25 percent, without a commensurate increase in crime. And these reforms have
bipartisan appeal, as recent calls for liberalization by Attorney General Eric
Holder and Rand Paul illustrate.
There
is still much to be done. But it is just possible that we have reached a
tipping point, and that the tough-on-crime politics of the 1970s and ’80s have
been replaced by a smart-on-crime approach that recognizes the shameful waste
of resources — human and capital — that our current policy reflects. Crime has
dropped, budgets are strapped and the “war on terror” may have provided a
different “enemy” for politicians to be tough about. Only time will tell, but
we may be on our way out of the inferno. If so, the real question is not so
much what drove us there but what is behind the reversal — and how can we
expedite the correction?
INFERNO
An Anatomy of American Punishment
By Robert A. Ferguson
337 pp. Harvard
University Press. $29.95.
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