Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation

Sasha Abramsky, 29, is a New York-based journalist whose work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. He has covered crime issues for the last five years, and was awarded a Soros Foundation fellowship to write "Hard Time Blues" (Thomas Dunne Press/St. Martin's, $25.95 HB). "Hard Time Blues" tells the story of the growth of the American prison system in the past quarter-century, focusing on the petty criminals who fill it as well as on the politicians who created that growth and the broader social conditions that laid the groundwork for it.

WOL: "Hard Time Blues" starts out with Billy Ochoa going to court in Los Angeles. Will you tell our readers what you're doing with "Hard Time Blues" and how Billy Ochoa fits in?

Sasha Abramsky: I wanted to explore some of the social and political forces that led to a prison system tripling in size in 25 years, and I wanted to humanize the consequences. The best way to do that was to write about inmates and their families, but I intersperse that with material on the politicians and the victims' rights people. Billy Ochoa is 58, a heroin addict since he was 17, and a career petty criminal. Not a particularly nice guy, but not violent. He was arrested for welfare fraud of about $2000, but had priors for burglary and got three-striked, got the book thrown at him. The judge gave him 25 years for each of 13 counts of perjury in the welfare fraud, and threw in an extra year, sentencing him to 326 years. I wanted to show who is going to prison, who are those 1.2 million people behind bars for nonviolent offenses, those hundreds of thousands doing time for drug possession or dealing or crimes associated with drug addiction. I wanted to see who was serving those draconian sentences.

WOL: This is a pretty grim topic. How did you become interested in it?

Abramsky: I'm a journalist and I'm interested in politics and economics and how political and social changes intersect with people's lives. I was doing articles about life in New York City and I began to realize that prison and the criminal justice system was a huge unreported topic. I guess it really began to take off when City magazine assigned me a piece on juvenile justice in New York state. I've been at it for five years now.

WOL: What is it about illicit drugs that makes it possible for our society to imprison for decades or even for life someone who has neither harmed someone else nor damaged or stolen someone else's property? Or what is it about our society? Early on, you wrote about the Puritans and their belief that crime was sin and vice versa. Is that still playing out?

Abramsky: For a hundred years, America has had a war on drugs, a very punitive response to what is primarily a medical problem. Its origins are tied into the prohibitionist movement against alcohol. This combination of morality and legality has created a uniquely American framework of laws to deal with millions of drug users. It also has to do with when America was founded, and by whom. The Puritans brought harsh moral and political views with them across the Atlantic, ironically at the very time Europe was throwing off that harsh, pre-Enlightenment politics. That powerful interplay of morality and law was a unifying force for a young culture with certain hopes and fears, and one of the main arenas of fear was crime and punishment. You have both liberty and puritanical repression historically coexisting in America. You have the language and trappings of liberty and political structures that deliver liberty for the vast majority, but at the same time laws that imprison an increasing minority. This is a country moving in two directions: For the majority, a free country; but for the minority, an increasingly coercive country. I wanted to explore what happens to the minority when they run up against a coercive criminal justice agenda imposed by the majority. Not everyone is innocent, of course, but when the criminal justice system is used instead of investment in the inner cities or adequate job training, when it is used as the front line tool for social policy, that's when it starts to go wrong.