The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) has declared this week to be National Crime Victims' Rights Week. To mark the occasion, OVC has published a helpful resource guide for crime victims. But if we truly want to respect crime victims, we need to raise two key issues that OVC avoids: how so many crime victims become perpetrators, and how we can prevent future crime by changing our policies.
National Crime Victims' Rights Week ignores the places in the nation with the greatest concentration of crime victims: prison. Most female federal prisoners have been the victims of physical or sexual abuse. Over 60 percent of those who committed drug crimes to fund their own addiction suffered abuse as children. Most women who murdered their husband or boyfriend acted in self-defense, and nine in ten had been abused by their partner.
Yet prison furthers these abuses. Rape in prison is so common that, after decades of Americans joking about it, the federal government finally started trying to stop it. Inmates live in constant fear of victimization, retaliating for the slightest insult to avoid becoming an "easy target" for abuse. The research is clear that abuse victims are more likely to commit abuse, yet America puts abuse victims in an environment guaranteed to reopen their scars. Prisons are not "teaching perpetrators a lesson," they are generating trauma and instability that ripple across our society.
It should be a national priority to keep prisons from traumatizing more people, yet we incarcerate over a million people--more than the population of eight U.S. states--for nonviolent offenses. Almost no one with political power has the courage to point out that trying to "teach them a lesson" in fact hurts all of us.
Most nonviolent offenders are incarcerated for drug offenses, and yet drugs are easily available on street corners and in schools across the country. While 80 percent of Americans know that the War on Drugs has failed and President Obama calls it a public health problem that can't be solved through the criminal justice system, the Obama administration still treats it as a criminal justice problem. We arrest 1.5 million Americans every year for drug crimes, and we incarcerate hundreds of thousands.
In fact, the War on Drugs generates crime. As we learned during alcohol prohibition, handing a lucrative market over to criminal organizations causes turf wars and routine violence to settle debts. Since prohibition greatly increases prices, people addicted to drugs steal, sell drugs and sell their bodies to pay for their habit.
If we were serious about supporting crime victims, we would offer more than a hotline for the latest round of victims--we would change policies that we know to be creating more victims. We would recognize that prisons spread violence and trauma, and we would become a world leader in decarceration. We would stop repeating "we can't arrest our way out of the drug problem" while arresting 1.5 million Americans for drug crimes every year. We would decriminalize all drugs, support diversion programs that keep people out of prison, and expand treatment for addiction, violence, and abuse. If we wanted to help victims, we would stop fueling the cycles of abuse that create them.