That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.

Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care.

Source: The New Yorker
Author: Adam Gopnik

Rwanda, which suffered a brutal genocide in 1994, is the only Sub-Saharan African country on track with its Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of people lacking in water and sanitation services by 2015. In Liberia, plagued by civil wars, the Nobel Prize winning President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, an international Water and Sanitation Ambassador used her first speech following her re-election last year to address the importance of improving these services.

Rwanda and Liberia are showing that providing water, improved hygiene and sanitation has the potential to transform lives, reduce illness and ill health, and help rebuild and drive forward economies. Support – both from foreign governments including the UK, and from WaterAid and other NGOs – to provide these essential services represents a common sense low risk investment that makes a huge difference to developing countries.

As we said in a recent report submitted to the International Development Committee, “WaterAid believes that ensuring the provision of basic services – health, education, water and sanitation – is self-evidently a public good but also underpins the legitimacy and stability of nation states.”

In supporting the development of these services in developing communities, nation building occurs and supporters of this work will provide a truly enduring legacy.

In recognition of this, I’m pleased to see that the UK Department for International Development (DFID) is refocusing more of its resources on supporting fragile and post conflict states.

Countries with a history of violence are more likely to fall back into conflict and instability. DFID believes that if it supports and helps these countries to stay peaceful and stable, the costs both for the countries themselves and donors will be far smaller than having to deal with the consequences of a new conflict.

WaterAid provided evidence to the UK House of Commons International Development Committee (IDC) report, on this change in the UK’s aid policy, entitled Working Effectively in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States: DRC and Rwanda. While broadly supportive and welcoming of the new DFID policy it raised the issue of ensuring that UK money is not lost to fraud and corruption, something that in particular the Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell MP, is rightly focused on.

WaterAid’s written evidence to the IDC enquiry, called on our experience of working in Rwanda as well as other fragile and post-conflict states such as Liberia and Sierra Leone. In particular we noted four strategies that we felt are important :

build on the strengths of fragile states–which are not necessarily fragile in all areas;
provide leadership with examples of the transition to development in other previously fragile states;
bring together the ministries responsible for water and sanitation services and those managing finance, planning and local government; and promote better links between the water and sanitation services sector and other country infrastructure systems to develop capacity.
Rwanda and Liberia – which UK aid has helped to stabilise and transform following emergence from conflict – are leading the field in bringing basic services like water and sanitation to their people and are virtually unrecognisable from their recent bitter pasts. Both countries have made an important start can serve as important examples to other countries about how development can foster both peace and progress.

Author: Barbara Frost

Source: Huffington Post

It was through his nonviolent campaigns that after decades of marginalization Black Americans gained acceptance as equal members of society in the United States. Beginning in 1965, his campaign to ensure that Black communities registered to vote gave millions a voice, paved the way to the ending of discrimination before the ballot box, and ultimately changed American politics forever.

Martin Luther King was an outstanding man to say the least. Through life-long activism and deep beliefs in peace and freedom, he became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, an involvement that tragically cost him his life. He inspired and still inspires millions of people throughout the world. If the man has become a legend, it is his ideals and precepts that one should also honor today.

Indeed, all over the world countless nations and peoples are still walking in his footsteps and that of other prominent leaders such as Mahatama Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. From the Degar-Montagnards in Vietnam to the Uyghurs in East Turkestan, from the Haratin in Mauritania to the Mapuche in Chile, countless people around the world are still pressing for their right to live free from oppression and persecution while engaging in peaceful activism.

So today, as we celebrate the accomplishments and ideals of a truly great man, let us not forget about people whose existence is the object of a relentless struggle. Let us praise the values of freedom, equality and peace while remembering Martin Luther King’s words: “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle”.

Source: UNPO

1. SIPRI Military Expenditure Database 2011
2. SIPRI Yearbook 2011.
3. SIPRI: nin.tl/v1bj70
4. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garret-Peltier, ‘The US Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities’, PERI, 2009.
5. William D Hartung, ‘Military Spending: A poor job creator’, Center for International Policy,
6. September 2011: nin.tl/vbLmlJ
7. Mike Ludwig, ‘US Military Paid $1.1 Trillion to Contractors That Defrauded the Government’, Truthout, 20 October 2011:truth-out.org

Source: New Internationalist

In 2011, the world was witness to mass citizen mobilisation. From Tahrir square to the Puerta del Sol, from the streets of Tunis to the avenues of New Delhi, calls for more social and economic justice, political participation and openness have resounded. These aspirations for greater social cohesion, with fair chances for everybody in society, are rooted in profound global economic transformations that have taken place over the last two decades. The new geography of growth brings new financial resources to fast growing countries while at the same time uncovering new challenges which require action and long-term commitment from governments, underlining an opportunity that is too good to be missed.

How can governments best respond to these new expectations? What policy reforms can contribute to strengthening social cohesion? How can we learn from past experiences and existing practices? These are the questions that will be raised on the occasion of the launch of the Perspectives on Global Development 2012.

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We need citizen-based organizations for multi-track diplomacy for preventing conflict of any kind at any level of operation in any economy of the world (South Korea or India) with the Global Peace Index based on 23 indicators. The measurement of the level of peace as an index of progress and happiness in every nation, state, district, village and city is the call of the day.

We need to place peace above everything which is the sermon of all religions in the world. The calm, unselfish and compassionate peace with vision of sustainable human development is necessary.

Peace can be positive as well as negative based on different means. “Peace by Peaceful Means” by Johan Galtung defines positive peace as a process of life enhancement. According to Betty Reardon, peace is the wholeness created by a right relationship with oneself, others and cultures, Earth and the larger whole of which all are a part.

Peace in every head and heart is essential in present world of stress and tensions caused by commercialization and spiritual bankruptcy. The domain of peace starts from an individual to family, city or village, district, state, nation and the world levels.

There is a direct correlation between peace and performance of any economy at all levels of operation. The peaceful societies ensure intra-generation, inter-generation equity and wellbeing freedoms with high level of per capita income.

The price and value of peace in the present scenario of inflation is more than anything else which is capable of reducing costs and expanding markets with strategic planning for investment leading to inclusive growth in India.

The dynamic peace dividend is accrued in the form of additional economic output made possible through proper, productive and practical (3Ps) use of human capital (hands, head and heart), social capital and physical capital in the form of infrastructure.

To serve the people, we need transformation (change in the mindset) in a big manner with higher investments in education and health which is capable of reducing other expenditures on police and prison personnel and to be called static peace.

We need to identify, understand, analyze, interpret and implement the 10 fundamental drivers of peace provided by the Institute for Economics and Peace of Australia (2009).

It is an established reality that the cost of conflict is higher to the cost of peace initiatives by any one at any level.

Peace is a necessary and sufficient condition for sustainable development in general and sustainable human development in particular which is conducive to happiness and progress of all.

Peace has multiplier effects on the various sectors of the economy including agriculture, industry, trade and services. There is a strong case for proper redistribution of wealth for ensuring peace at all levels. There is always a threat to peace due to inequalities of various kinds and the gap between rich and poor.

To ensure peace and discourage conflicts, we need voluntary efforts at all levels by individuals who can join hands to get things done. Let military farms be encouraged to reduce the mental agonies of the poor farmers who are ready to commit suicide for failing to pay off their debts.

Let us encourage peace as an essential input of growth in various sectors of the economy. Let peace economics be identified as a separate branch of economics which justified the Nobel Prize for Peace for an economist like Mohammad Yunus (2006) of Bangladesh providing microfinance with empathy (not sympathy) for the vulnerable segments of society consisting of women and beggars.

Source: Korea Times

Author: M.M Goel, Professor of economics and dean/faculty of social sciences, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, India.

Arresting violent conflict is simply one of the first steps of many on the path from conflict to sustainable peace. After the end of violence, war-ravaged infrastructure must be rebuilt, security and rule of law reestablished all over the country, citizens’ basic needs met, and the economy restructured or revitalized in order to support long-lasting peace.

One of the key actors in post-conflict economies are endogenous entrepreneurs, or local actors who- either through necessity or opportunity -undertake new financial ventures, often creating and applying innovations in the process. Capital flight during conflict results in an economy that has been lacking in investments over a long period of time.  Not surprisingly, most private economic agents are unwilling to invest in politically uncertain times that are often accompanied by continued physical insecurities in parts of the state, macro-economic instability, pervasive corruption and weak governance and regulatory environments. The degradation of human capital during conflict, due to the lack of investment in education and inability to deliver education services, poor health resulting from a lack of health services, inadequate nutrition and physical and mental trauma sustained from violent conflict, presents further challenges to economic growth.

Entrepreneurs in these contexts can play a key role in the revitalization of the economy. Would-be entrepreneurs are usually plentiful, yet they face many of the same constraints noted above. Moreover, in addition to difficulties in accessing capital, one of the legacies of conflict is that access to business opportunities and to markets can be related to being a member of a particular social group or to political affiliations. Biases may even be found in the regulatory environment and the way in which it is applied, meaning that opportunities are not available, or not applied, equally across all segments of society.

Yet entrepreneurs are also able to overcome many of the post-conflict challenges that other businesses and foreign investors find insurmountable. While investment during conflict and in the period following are low due to the high-level of risk, entrepreneurs in fragile contexts typically have highly liquid investments and assets, and, often due to the nature and smaller scale of operations, tend to be flexible enough to respond to both the volatility and the rapidly changing needs that are characteristic of the period after the end of violent conflict.

This flexibility and responsiveness could allow entrepreneurs to play a critical role in the delivery of public goods and services essential in the post-conflict period.  Government institutions, due to capacity and revenue constraints are often unable to deliver effectively and flexibly during the transition from war to peace, and while donor relief initiatives may be able to rapidly meet the basic needs of people affected by conflict, they often inadvertently distort private sector markets and create vulnerability and dependency.

Entrepreneurs on the other hand, driven by both necessity and opportunity, can be found filling the gap left by weak government institutions during conflict, for example in the delivery of basic goods and services. Government managed ‘fees for services’ (or contracting-out, as it is also referred to) in the short-term or public-private partnerships in the longer-term, may be a solutions to effective delivery of basic services without undermining the restoration of public confidence in the capacity and legitimacy of the state. The flexibility and demand-driven nature of entrepreneurial businesses also means that they may make a sustainable contribution to the productive reallocation of resources, especially compared with donor supply-driven approaches which are often divorced from market realities.  Innovations applied by entrepreneurs often generate creative solutions which governments promote or adopt – such as the mobile money services in Kenya- and which may be crucial in the restructuring and growth of post-conflict economies.

Despite the temptation to see endogenous entrepreneurship as a panacea for fostering economic growth, there are also many negative effects of entrepreneurial activity on post-conflict recovery.  Entrepreneurs are invariably actors in conflict dynamics, often exploiting and sustaining war economies. The immense opportunities for profits and rents in the post-conflict economy are also leveraged by entrepreneurs- often the same individuals who supported economic power during or before conflict. In many states this has led to the criminalization of the economy and or the establishment of strong patronage systems.  As we have seen in Afghanistan, entrepreneurs with links to the Taliban organize themselves in such a way as to capture and control trade at the community and even at the import level. They exercise control over markets in entire regions and along entire value-chains, and are linked to illicit activities such as the illegal trade in high-value natural resources and opium growing and smuggling.

The impact of the activities of such entrepreneurs are not only economic in nature but are felt even in the political realm, undermining the restoration of confidence in the capacity and authority of the state, and reinforcing the political power of select social group(s). The disruption of vital social processes such as the rebuilding of social cohesion and inclusive growth patterns are also potential impacts of entrepreneurial activities which contribute to continued state fragility.

It is clear that entrepreneurs play a strong, complex, role in conflict dynamics; they also have the potential to be key actors in economic recovery after the end of violent conflict. What is less clear is how development actors can not only foster and nourish the talents of entrepreneurs towards the restructuring and growth of the economy, but also ensure that their activities contribute to peacebuilding rather than to fragility of the state.

Source: International Network for Economics and Conflict

Author: Sadaf Lakhani

New thinking about aid and development in conflict-affected countries

No conflict affected country has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal (MDG). This failure has stimulated much reflection over the past few years, for example:

• The World Development Report 2011 outlined a new paradigm for development assistance in conflict-affected countries – where a total of 1.5 billion people live
• A renewed focus on the need to show concrete results will help citizens in donor and recipient countries to hold their governments more accountable for aid effectiveness
• An increased recognition that development is about more than economic growth, health and education; it is also about how people are governed, the relationship between people and state, access to justice, and whether people are kept safe from danger
• Emerging economies like China, Brazil and India are providing increasing slices of the aid pie, bringing different approaches that are not part of the aid orthodoxy
• Some aid is being used in creative ways, in line with the new thinking.

The way ahead is unclear: we’ve learned enough to know how little we know

As our understanding of the complexity of development has grown, so we have better grasped the difficulty of programming aid effectively. The very purpose of aid has changed, to embrace the unfamiliar language of statebuilding and peacebuilding. It has become far more ambitious, and rightly so. Twenty years ago an aid programme might have built schools and trained teachers. Ten years ago, it might have strengthened the capacity of the government to plan, provide and oversee education, including a grant for school building, operating costs and teacher training, while increasing tax revenue to pay recurrent costs. Now some donors want to foster better relations between the state and the people, increasing the sense of responsibility, responsiveness and citizenship. This requires change in some of the institutions at the heart of governance and society.

International Alert has been arguing for these kinds of changes for almost a decade. Progress has been made, but many challenges remain, for example:

• Building responsive and responsible citizen-state relations is key to peace and prosperity, but little is known about how to do so at a speed and scale commensurate with people’s expectations; how to get the balance between progress and stability right?
• The lack of decent work for young people is often a major threat to stability. Aid orthodoxy says the private sector should create jobs But it will not do so at the scale and speed, nor with the dependability and stability, needed in countries emerging from civil war (e.g. Sierra Leone), or from years of repression (Burma or Guinea), when people’s expectations are raised. Should we ignore the orthodoxy, and consider externally funded 30-year public works programmes, to provide employment, inject cash into the economy and provide breathing space?
• Climate change brings new challenges – of pressure on resources such as land and water, of the collision between growth and green priorities, and of adaptation – together with huge additional budgets. These are largely being managed separately from other aid, bringing a risk of increased incoherence, which can be a destabilising factor in fragile contexts.
• The practice of aid organisations in fragile contexts has not kept pace with the learning, and the new purpose of aid. Without urgent change, they risk being unfit for purpose.
• Getting the right metrics for assessing progress towards stability in fragile contexts is a task that is far from complete. It cannot be done with the same metrics that suffice for health or education and it is increasingly tiresome that agencies seem pulled towards inappropriate indicators by the results agenda. Rigorous qualitative indicators and a time-frame appropriate to the task are key components.
• The behaviour of governments continues to hinder development. The foreign policy of some donors undermines their own aid goals, while some recipient governments use aid to strengthen their hold on power, undermining democratic accountability and holding back development.

Busan, the first step on a new road

The wording of the Busan Outcomes Document is largely agreed, and reflects much of the new thinking on aid: statebuilding and peacebuilding; human security; transparency and results. But it fails to reflect the challenge, scale and complexity of promoting and supporting development in conflict-affected countries in a changing world. Busan should be seen as the final High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, and the beginning of a new debate and discourse. A successful Forum will be recognisable by evidence of four critical factors in the speeches made at and documents emanating from Busan:

1. Change and uncertainty. A recognition that the framing of aid and development has fundamentally changed. It has become more complex and more political. We need new tools and methods to achieve and measure success. Good work has been done, but we don’t yet have the tools with which to meet expectations. Participants at a successful HLF4 will define this challenge and set out a process for meeting it.

1. A balanced combination of agreement and disagreement. Beneath the technical language of aid, development is a highly political, ideological and contentious idea: it speaks to different theories of progress and change. International forums about aid in the past have glossed over this, focusing instead on agreements about process. That way consensus is achieved – but only a shallow and artificial one that often leaves aid practitioners in difficult positions, trapped by official niceties into policies they know are flawed, targets they know are unreal and actions they know are ineffective. Participants at a successful HLF4 will recognise that their different interests and perspectives lead to quite different views about how development happens, and how aid can be applied to promote it. This will allow the issue to be debated more openly as the international community begins defining the set of measures which will replace the MDGs after 2015. Nevertheless, international agencies, governments and civil society do need to collaborate much more effectively, based on the comparative advantages of each. Thus participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to promote and mandate a more selective but deeper collaboration among agencies at national level.

1. Development, not aid. Aid is important, and the way it is planned and used matters. But the time for meetings about aid effectiveness is over; future meetings and processes should instead be about development strategies. They should debate what constitutes development, identify the policies and behaviours of governments, businesses, NGOs, IGOs and citizens which are most likely to promote progress, and how they can be encouraged and supported. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree that future international forums should be defined in terms of promoting effective development progress, not just best practice in aid.

1. Operationalisation. Getting global agreement on critical issues is hard, and results in a watering-down of commitments. So it is critical to recognise that some of the most important progress over the next few years will be made at the level of specific organisations, projects, countries, etc. This implies a need for individual countries and organisations to push through the operationalization of some of the new development thinking associated with the World Development Report 2011 and the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and State-building. Participants at a successful HLF4 will agree to prioritise the operationalization of new approaches to promoting development in conflict affected countries, and to share the results of these.

Featuring narrators Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard,Women, War & Peace is the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the roles of women in war and peace. The series will present its groundbreaking message across the globe by utilizing all forms of media, including U.S. and international primetime television, radio, print, web, and worldwide community screenings, and will be accompanied by an educational and outreach initiative designed to advance international accountability in regard to women and security. Women, War & Peace is a co-production of THIRTEEN and Fork Films.

The five episodes in the series:

I Came to Testify is the moving story of how a group of 16 women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Their remarkable courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the astonishing story of the Liberian women who took on the warlords and regime of dictator Charles Taylor in the midst of a brutal civil war, and won a once unimaginable peace for their shattered country in 2003.

When the U.S. troop surge was announced in late 2009, women in Afghanistan knew that the ground was being laid for peace talks with the Taliban. Peace Unveiled follows three women in Afghanistan who are risking their lives to make sure that women’s rights don’t get traded away in the deal.

The War We Are Living travels to Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, where two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women are braving a violent struggle over their gold-rich lands. They are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war.

War Redefined, the capstone of Women, War & Peace, challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain through incisive interviews with leading thinkers, Secretaries of State and seasoned survivors of war and peace-making. Interviewees include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee; Bosnian war crimes investigator Fadila Memisevic; and globalization expert Moisés Naím.