A new batch of articles appeared recently recycling data from last year’s Pew study on incarceration.  Depending on how you work the numbers (and which numbers you work) it is possible to conclude that either Louisiana, Georgia or Texas has the nation’s highest incarceration rate.   If you sift through the data carefully you will notice that the Deep South states are in a category by themselves.  Those who believe that the Jim Crow past casts no shadow should take a second look.

Readers of this blog know that I rarely belabor the empirical date of incarceration.  The statistical work is important, but it has little lasting impact in the public arena.  Scholars and legal experts love charts and numbers; ordinary Americans respond to stories. 

When a statistician goes up against a storyteller, the storyteller will win every time. 

This might not be the way it ought to be; but it’s the way it is. 

Unfortunately, the progressive establishment fails to grasp the importance of narrative.  Barack Obama is president because, thanks to people like Marshall Ganz, he gets the power of story and appreciates the value of community organizing.  Unfortunately, the academic, political, legal and philanthropic communities continue to rely on empirical studies and use stories, if they use them at all, as tacked on illustrations.

Friends of Justice has been successful because we tell good stories and we tell them right. 

Judges and prosecutors like to Google themselves.   When they realize their actions are being  scrutinized (even if it’s just a single blog) they get nervous.  Behavior changes.  The system works differently.   It doesn’t always happen quickly; but it happens.

Narratives are effective because the legal system is driven by narrative.  The common sense story of self-reliance, individual responsibility and the virtue of hard work hangs in the courtroom like a dense fog (for those with eyes to see such things).  Prosecutors win cases simply by painting defendants as sketchy, shiftless, scumbags who have opted out of the American dream through sheer malice or laziness.   This simple narrative, largely assumed, will control the trial from beginning to end unless an alternative narrative is placed on the table.

Again, nothing against scholarly studies (I sometimes allude to them in public presentations myself) but they won’t get us where we need to go.  Notice the dramatic spike  in the chart below and ask yourself why America suddenly embraced mass incarceration with such fervent enthusiasm.  The damage reflected in the numbers was been driven by a shift in narrative from a belief in the goodness of all people and a preference for rehabilitation over incarceration to a culture war narrative about personal responsibility, family values and a just war on drugs, gangs, illegal immigrants and terrorists.

The narrative shift was carefully and thoughtfully orchestrated by people trying to counter the impact of the Civil Rights Movement.  It was successful because it tapped into public narratives that have circulated in America since the earliest days of the Republic.  Only by telling different stories appealing to a different set of virtues can we hope to prevail in the courts (or anywhere else).

The fight in Tulia shifted powerfully when Freddie Brookins Sr. looked into a camera held by Sarah Kunstler and said, “I told my son, ‘Don’t plead to something you didn’t do.  You stand to be right, even if they give you 100 years.  You stand to be right.”

Average Americans, conservative, moderate or liberal, understand that kind of language.  Lets hope the reform community catches on.