Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past several years, you are undoubtedly aware of conversations around the issues of incarceration in the United States; including mass incarceration and bail reform.
The U.S. has the dubious distinction of being among the top handful of countries in the world in terms of both the absolute number of people now imprisoned and the rate of incarceration (as a percentage of the population). Statistics will vary depending on the time period covered and the political leanings of the observer, but there is no denying the enormous increase over the past few decades.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/
“The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration.“
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-the-most-prisoners/
as of December 2022.
All of this sits in stark contrast with some of our other national values. The final line of the national anthem, sung at baseball games and other patriotic occasions, celebrates “the land of the free.”
The Sons of Liberty (the original Tea Party) dressed up as Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) warriors in carrying out the Boston Tea Party and other similar protests up and down the East Coast. They admired not just the Mohawks’ reputation as fighters, but their claim to being a people free of any strictures on their personal liberty.
Claims like this were often made by Natives, who were mocking the complex legal system of the newcomers. Native cultures in North America did not feature incarceration in any form.
Our current draconian incarceration culture is an import, and is not Native to our land. It is time that we reclaimed the heritage of personal freedom, or at a minimum started moving in that direction, with zero incarceration as a goal.
I am very well aware of the dangers of “cultural appropriation” — a concept which refers to the unacknowledged or inappropriate use of elements borrowed from another culture. It was, however, long a practice among the peoples Native to this continent to learn and borrow from each other. In fact, at least around here {the Northeast), there was an active interest in benefiting from the wisdom of neighbors. The practice of cultivating the Three Sisters, for example. passed from Nation to Nation from its origins in Central America up to the north country, and there were also many other ongoing cultural exchanges. We could benefit from learning and adopting concepts of justice that were practiced in these parts for many years before Europeans arrived.
I was inspired to write this note after reading Covered With Night, a recent Pulitzer-Prize-winning book that I highly recommend.
The author is an excellent storyteller, and has done meticulous original research to draw on for her narratives.
I cited extensively from the book in a recent talk I gave on gender roles in Native culture. For a video of that talk, you can click here.
For my accompanying slides you can click here.
Although the Native practices did not include incarceration, that does not mean that our society would suddenly be made better by eliminating the practice of confining sinners. Native culture was also steeped in community values, and alternatives to imprisonment; including condolence ceremonies (with the offender expressing remorse, and the victims being comforted and supported), as well as restitution. All of this is what is termed in Covered With Night as restorative justice.
… Native peoples were far more interested in restoration than revenge. [page 11]
Our society would benefit by moving away from an ethic that praises individual achievement above all else, and move toward a culture that values the common good. That means caring for our environment, in the broadest sense of that word.