In Wisconsin and across the United States, minorities make up a disproportionate number of those arrested and ultimately sent to prison. As hotheaded liberals and intolerant conservatives fight it out in a rhetorical battle that solves little, governments continuously fail to successfully address the issue.
Fortunately, that appears to be changing in this state. Last week, Gov. Jim Doyle's office released a report recommending changes in the way government works for minorities living on the margins of legality. Perhaps more importantly, the report stands as an official declaration that society at large cannot be excused from the current realities of minority incarceration.
It is still acceptable on the right wing to place the blame squarely on low-income communities and poorly educated individuals. They are lazy, delinquent, amoral and so forth go the arguments of the arch-conservatives, barely concealing the racism that has created such a distressing environment in the first place. Such thinking should be easily dismissed, given that the crippling economic isolation and deep-seated prejudices from the wealthy establishment clearly have a powerful effect on the behavior of those on the losing end of this argument.
As James Balwdin once wrote, the ghetto in America emerged as a way of confining and oppressing blacks and other minorities. It should hardly be surprising, then, that escaping such a predicament, built and cemented for several generations, has proven difficult.
The recommendations offered by Doyle's commission are good and would certainly go a long way toward altering the course of a growingly disparate society. Much of the report serves as a call for more studies, more examination of data. It also demands more programs designed to reduce prison recidivism, juvenile behavioral problems and isolation from mainstream society - each of which leads to increased crime.
Of course, all of those recommendations cost money, placing Wisconsin in a difficult position. Are we willing to pay for the benefit of all people, even those who have been abandoned in the wake of white flight and the slow death of American industry?
What the report does not note, and what conservatives refuse to admit, is that drug offenses are simply the ugliest outgrowth of our take no prisoners capitalist economy. That is not to defend the practice, though, as hard drug dealing is also one of the most destructive forces at work in America, killing people with poisons that are ultimately color blind.
Until lawmakers and comfortable, middle-class citizens realize that economic hopelessness is a real motivation for much of the state's criminal behavior, especially the bulk of its drug offenses, we are doomed to a vicious cycle in which minorities seemed destined to suffer unrightfully.
