The ‘Other’ Country: America’s Forgotten Citizens

By Pierce K. Kozlowski

Introduction

America is a beautiful, prosperous nation that has been dubbed as the “greatest country in the world,” by foreign and domestic alike. From the rights that citizens have against government tyranny, the duties citizens have to each other, to the capacity citizens possess to pursue happiness in a Republic rooted in both reason and virtue; all of these are an “expression of the American mind,” as Thomas Jefferson famously put it. And while the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence have prompted abolitionist Frederick Douglass to endorse its principles of freedom, roused presidents like Lincoln to call the constitution an “apple of gold,” and inspired heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. to deliver his I Have a Dream speech, it does not excuse the fact that America and her citizens have still suffered tremendous catastrophes as a result of the government’s choices.

Like writer Edwidge Danticat’s essay “Another Country” – in which she likens the government’s treatment of hurricane Katrina victims to ‘another country’ – I propose that there is not only one or two groups of American people who are mistreated or neglected by the federal government, but that there is a multitude of groups which constitute a much larger class of downtrodden. Therefore, I levy a threefold charge against the American government: neglecting the societal disparities in the lower-income minorities of inner cities; disregarding the American prison population, and engaging in unjust wars that have needlessly killed our soldiers and further bankrupted our country. These three things have been one great catastrophe for millions of Americans, to the point where the downtrodden are so great in number and so crushed under pressure that they have become the “other country.”

The Problem of Housing

To the first point, the racial minorities of America’s blue inner cities face some of the worst housing problems in part because they’ve been neglected by the federal government, and have been subject to the ineffective policies of states and localities. During the Jim Crow regime, black Americans experienced restrictive housing and couldn’t equitably develop property ownership for generations. This practice may have been overturned since 1964, but the effects are still felt today and account for much of the modern wealth disparities between racial groups (Racial Wealth). To counter these disparities, politicians ranging from Senator Elizabeth Warren to the Biden administration have proposed policy prescriptions that exclusively fund neighborhoods based on their historical status of redlining. (Biden-Harris; Harshbarger). However, those historically redlined neighborhoods remain disproportionately under-resourced and economically disadvantaged today as they were during Jim Crow despite counter efforts. Why is this? According to the Brookings Institute, democratic policy proposals that “base their remedies primarily on formerly redlined areas paradoxically do not redress the main racial group that was explicitly targeted, exclude important Black neighborhoods and communities, and would skew impact toward a handful of large cities” (Harshbarger). In other words, those policies won’t redress the black community because Brookings in the same report found that blacks have moved away from previously redlined urban areas and account for only 8% of those populations. Furthermore, it would skew impact toward other communities because directing funding toward a historically oppressed neighborhood that doesn’t seat the historically oppressed group doesn't help that group except for the group currently living there.

Moreover, this point of neglectful housing policy is emphasized by journalist Johnny Harris in an interview with New York Times Editor Binyamin Appelbaum, in which Harris cited California as the “quintessential liberal state,” with more Democratic politicians and even their 2020 Party Platform asserting that affordable housing is a human right (2020). And yet, the asserted vision of these politicians and the reality of their policies are at odds, and it's to this that Appelbaum says:

In California, the cost of housing is so high that for many people that it's simply unaffordable. The state has simply for the most part stopped building housing. I mean, there are cranes. There’s housing going up. But it has slowed down over time really, really sharply. And it is nowhere near sufficient to keep pace with California’s population. So what you have is not enough housing and too many people trying to get it. (Harris)

This is a problem amongst blue states but remains an American problem more broadly. Just before COVID, 23 million Americans lived in unaffordable housing and paid above 50% of their income for rent (Peggy). On a federal front, neither the efforts of Biden nor his predecessors have been successful in lowering racial disparities in a significant way directly, nor have the state or local politicians of states like California helped encourage the construction of affordable housing. Politicians, whether federal, state, or local – who are seemingly in favor of affordable housing – are in fact contributing to the broader problem of housing inequality as both Harshbarger and Appelbaum pointed out – subsequently, disproportionately impacting the families of financially disadvantaged racial minorities. Considering the millions of people that the issue of affordable housing affects, especially in the age of inflation, these people have become (or may have always been) victims of neglectful housing policy. This lends credence to the idea of there being more than one downtrodden group of citizens who feel both forgotten and left behind. This is shocking considering how much the American government – which has the world’s most progressive tax system (yes, that’s right!) – likes to spend money (Opportunity). Yet in a first-world country nicknamed the “best country in the world,” we have no respectable and well-funded welfare programs to speak of to address such issues.

The Problem of Prisons

While the housing problem contains much more that could be discussed further, the disadvantageous policies turned problems that the government is behind don’t stop there. Another failure of the American government is the state of our prison population and how the prison system treats its inmates. To understand why prisons have become a problem, beginning especially with their deterioration in the late 1990s, we have to look at the 1997 Litigation Reform Act (LRA). Briefly stated, this policy made it extraordinarily more difficult for inmates to both file and win civil lawsuits in the court system, whilst also doing away with the court's oversight of jail systems (Booker). Since the passage of this policy, both the services and environment of correctional facilities, prisons, and jails across the country have radically declined. Additionally, there have been severe upticks in abuse between inmates, increases in rape & murder between inmates, and more numerous instances of power abuse from facility officials against inmates all within the last three decades (Capitalizing). What’s more, there has been less oversight after the passage of the LRA, meaning that many of those upticks can be linked to terrible understaffing and widespread corruption among facility workers. This is especially true in states like Alabama, St. Clair’s Correctional facility, which has mishandled inmates who need psychiatric treatment, and persecuted inmates who need rehabilitation (Ford).

The most sickening aspect of this issue – while arguably being the high rates of rape between inmates going untreated – would be facility workers’ abuse against inmates. Not only did the Department of Justice find that correctional facilities such as the one in Alabama purported a low number of homicides that occurred in their prison and lied about the causes behind them (Admin), but the Equal Justice Initiative found that the Alabama Department of Corrections failed to address the prevalent sexual misconduct and assault between male guards and female inmates at the Julia Tutweiler Prison for women. Despite six guards being formally convicted of sexual assault and multiple women inmates getting pregnant after being raped, only one of those guards faced jail time and got away with no more than a five-day jail sentence (EJI). These facts are not only a referendum on our prison system, but more so on both the authorities overseeing these correctional institutions and the federal justice system under-sentencing guard staff for extreme, sexually violent crimes. Policies like the LRA, which has had profoundly calamitous ramifications on American prison inmates, have led to falsely sentencing the innocent, under-sentencing the guilty, mistreating the mentally ill, and neglecting the sexually abused in prisons. The repulsive and cruel treatment of inmates and policies such as the LRA have formed a toxic prison system that led to three things: first, the United States having the world’s highest rates of recidivism at 76.6% compared to Norway’s astoundingly 20% (Benecchi); second, the United States possessing the highest number of inmates at roughly 2.1 million out of the world’s prison population of 11 million (Statista); and third, precipitating a practice amongst prisons to use incapacitation rather than rehabilitation for deprived inmates (Eason).

These correctional facilities and their methods are atrocious and opposed to decency. Yet this toxic prison culture of guards abusing inmates has become common practice in facilities across the country. One of the biggest problems is that this abusive treatment has increased rates of both incarceration and recidivism, and has deteriorated inmates rather than rehabilitated them. Leo Tolstoy interestingly exposits this very idea with stunning clarity. In his book Resurrection, Tolstoy cuttingly describes the corruption of a 19th-century Russian prison, which bears a likeness to the injuries that modern prisons have waged against prisoners:

All the evil he had witnessed in the prisons and at the halting stations . . . all stemmed from one thing: people were trying to do something that is impossible – to correct evil while being evil. Sinful people tried to correct sinful people and thought this could be achieved mechanically. The only result was that people needing and wanting money have made a profession out of imaginary punishment and coercion of others, and they have become corrupt themselves even as they have gone on ceaselessly corrupting their victims. (Tolstoy 507)

Tolstoy is attempting to demonstrate the impossibility of correcting a criminal by committing a crime of equal measure against them. After all, how can prisoners rehabilitate themselves if their guards incapacitate them, using punitive methods which are “not only useless but pernicious, as well as callous and immoral” (p.508)? By hurting those who are already guilty, not only are the guards made worse but so much more so are the prisoners. And this is made manifest by the fact that crime has only increased in conjunction with incarceration rates, with correctional institutions using punitive measures that have also increased recidivism rates. All these consequences, being both unnecessary and avoidable, have been the fault of poorly written and neglectful government policy. And in turn, the government has thoroughly withheld justice from prison victims, rehabilitation from the impaired, and treatment for the mentally ill.

The Problem of War

After discussing the neglectful housing policy regarding racial minorities and the abusive mistreatment of prison inmates, we reach the last point. The U.S. government has engaged in unjust wars that have hurt Americans at home and killed our servicemen and women abroad. So if America has engaged in unjust wars, what constitutes a just versus an unjust war? Just war doctrine began in early philosophical thought, beginning with the Romans and early church fathers. But a comprehensive system on the topic wouldn’t be significantly developed nor heavily emphasized until the high to late ages of medieval scholasticism. One of the greatest scholastics, Saint Thomas Aquinas, believed that a war was just if it was waged “on account of some fault” committed by the offender (Aquinas). The Jesuit theologian, Francisco Suarez, more clearly defined Aquinas’s point, positing that a war is just when “a grave wrong which cannot be avenged or repaired in any other way” is committed (Suarez). Dutch polymath Hugo Grotius taught in his second book on war (Grotius) that what qualifies a “grave wrong” and makes a war just are in the cases of a nation’s defense (p. 47), of restoring stolen or destroyed property (p. 73), and of punishing an enemy that has inflicted injury (p. 129). However, it was Murray Rothbard who gave the clearest and simplest definition of just war. Drawing from those who came before, Rothbard asserted that “a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them” (Rothbard). Simply put, lest a nation is under domination or overthrowing a dominating threat, then the war is not just.

Having said this, what war was unjust for America to partake in? The war in Afghanistan was the most unjust of all the other Middle Eastern wars involving America. September 11th, 2001 was a horrifically tragic injury to the nation, and America fully retained the right to take justice against Bin Laden both out of defense for the nation and for the injury inflicted on her people and property. However, America retained no right to stay 11 years after the death of Bin Laden, spend north of $8 trillion in war expenditures, and cost America a death toll of 929,000 soldiers, journalists, humanitarians . . . etc, etc (Kimball). By Grotius’s standard, justice had been restored after Bin Laden’s death. And while Al-Qaeda remained, they were thoroughly handicapped by Bin Laden’s absence and wouldn’t have required us to continue against them in war. By Rothbard’s standard, America rightfully engaged in war with Al-Qaeda for reasons of immediate and necessary defense of the nation. And lastly, by Aquinas and Suarez’s standards, the justice that America sought would’ve been proportionate to the injustice that Al-Qaeda inflicted had America left upon finishing her dealings with Bin Laden. Our government had no right to stress the wallets of Americans, unnecessarily cost more lives of our young, and persist for a decade longer in the land of an enemy we had thoroughly weakened and already justly handled. Ideally, there is no war between any factions. But while the war up to the point of Bin Laden’s fall was just, the American government is fit to be seriously questioned for unjustly extending our time in Afghanistan, vainly murdering more of our soldiers abroad, and bankrupting our citizens at home.

Conclusion

After everything that has been said, it’s fair to say that there are specific instances of the U.S. government failing on key issues and undertaking three terrible courses of action on each: one, they neglected historically oppressed racial groups on issues of modern disparities regarding property ownership; two, they mistreated the prison population on a national scale, from the falsely incarcerated to the criminally and mentally-ill, and undermined the federal justice system; and three, they have maintained a just war to an unjust degree, damaging the economy of our country, the security of our citizenry, and the people in our military. Citizens who are helplessly subject to the whims and levers of callous leadership have been disproportionately affected in the millions. So, there aren’t just the browbeaten Hurricane Katrina victims who have been called another country, as Danticat averred. Those hurricane victims are subsumed under a depressingly larger number of victims. Victims who’ve heard politicians’ empty promises, believing they would be kept; victims who’ve tasted Washington’s poison, hoping it was water; and victims who’ve seen the government’s private yacht, hoping they were lifeboats. Millions of Americans are fully here, but they are completely forgotten. While they are perfectly in view, they are deliberately overlooked. And as it so often happens in history, the ironhand of horrifying political decisions will penetratingly bludgeon the downtrodden, so much so, that these Americans aren’t Americans anymore but “those people,” and those people aren’t just “another country,” but the “other country.”

References:

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