Mean World Syndrome

By Samuel Conti

Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia), sponsor of the national prison reform bill, S.714, has been asking why the United States, which comprises less than 5% of the world’s population, currently warehouses over 30% of the known prisoners on the planet.  The Senator muses, “Either we are the most evil people on earth or we are doing something terribly wrong.”  Webb also calls our criminal justice system “a leviathan, unparallel in human history.”

Part of the answer is what Prof. George Gerbner of Temple University calls “Mean World Syndrome,” a deliberate attempt by the media to frighten people into believing that things are much worse than they are, for financial and political reasons. We are, Gerbner insists, being “cultivated.”

For example, with dozens of television shows like CSI, NCIS, SVU and Law & Order, the networks are saturating prime time with violence, a level of violence which statistics say does not reflect reality – at least not according to published crime rates.  In addition, the evening news programs ignore the fact that on most days 299,999,999 people in this country did not commit a violent crime, instead focusing only on the one person who did.  The “news” has become a daily parade of crimes.

Decades of tough-on-crime policy have focused not on reality but on the mindset of legislating by the lowest common denominator.  In truth, the crime rate is not much different from what it was in the 1970s.  Yet voters are convinced they are living in a war zone and this, more than anything else, has fed the prison-industrial complex.

No one disputes that there is crime or that it needs to be dealt with. What is in dispute is why so little time, money and energy are spent on education and prevention, and so much is spent on warehousing. Criminal justice policy should be set by need and facts, not false images or political rhetoric.

Samuel Conti is incarcerated at the North Central Correctional Institution in Gardner, Massachusetts.