America, to me, is a land of dreams and a playground for the human imagination. When I was growing up in London, England, son to a British father and an American mother, I was always drawn to the world across the Atlantic; to a place that in almost every way seemed to me to be larger than life and fuller of spirit than the old, somewhat staid universe of Western Europe. I loved America, I longed to spend more than just my summers there, and -- when I turned twenty-one -- I realized that dream by moving to America and living as a newcomer in that ultimate city of newcomers, New York.

For someone interested in politics and history, what could be more wonderful than a young country pledged to democracy? What could be more inspiring than a land that has welcomed tens of millions of immigrants, including four of my eight great-grandparents, to its shores in the brief centuries of its existence? A place that considers happiness a right, freedom a necessity and political participation -- from the PTA to the town council all the way through to the presidential elections -- a festive civic virtue.

And yet, while America might seem to represent all that is good and noble in the human soul, over the years I have lived here and practiced journalism here, it has struck me that part of the American experience also represents something darker, more untamed and brutal that exists deep within the human psyche.

Hard Time Blues is my attempt to understand the flip side of the American Dream. It is an exploration of the popular forces and cultural trends that have helped institutionalize the largest prison system on earth -- larger than the Russian and Chinese gulags we read so much about, more pervasive than the prison system in South Africa during the worst days of Apartheid oppression in the 1970s and 1980s. And it is a saga of how the ballot box itself -- that most potent and elementary symbol of democracy -- has, in the past quarter century, been used by electoral majorities to imprison an ever larger proportion of the country's population, and an ever greater number of people from within the Black and Latino minorities in that population.

Throughout its history, America has created for itself two unique intertwinings: the first being the use of the criminal justice system, and the sanction of punishment, to maintain its racial hierarchies; and the second being a conflation of the issues of drugs and crime -- social problems that in many other countries are treated as separate issues demanding distinct political responses. In recent decades, despite the civil rights movement's massive strides toward a promise of equality, the prison population of America has not only ballooned, but its face has also gotten blacker and browner. How has a country usually so full of optimism, so committed to the rhetoric of equality, allowed this to happen? And what political trends made the recent expansion of the prison population, brought into being with a few legislative spasms in the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, such a tempting proposition?

Twenty-five years ago, under half a million people were imprisoned in the United States. In the year 2000, with crime rates roughly the same as they were in the mid-1970s -- the result of a rise in crime being followed by a drastic fall in the 1990s -- four times that number are doing hard time in the thousand-plus state and more than one hundred federal prisons dotted around the fifty states. In California alone, over 160,000 people live in the Golden State's burgeoning prison system. In Texas, with a prison population now above 163,000, close to 10 percent of adult African American men are now behind bars. In almost all states, those in prison cannot vote. And in twelve others, those convicted of a felony can never vote again. Thus in states such as Alabama and Florida, upwards of one quarter of Black men are now permanently denied that most basic right of citizenry: the right to vote.

Two thoughts strike me here: the first is that if crime rates fell throughout the 1990s, why the need to double, and then double again, the prison population? The second thought: if incarceration is so effective, why is the crime rate today still as high as it was twenty-five years ago, despite the soaring numbers behind bars?

Paradoxes abound in politics, and as a new century gets underway, I can think of nothing more paradoxical than the phenomenon of a populace reared on democratic values and committed to self-expression vociferously stamping its approval on changing approaches to crime and punishment that have resulted in two million fellow Americans being locked up behind bars and millions more being disenfranchised, oftentimes for minor crimes that other democracies would never deal with through the use of incarceration. True, a democracy degenerates into anarchy if nobody obeys the laws of the land. But, conversely, at some point a democracy collapses in on itself if a significant percentage of the population are imprisoned for crimes committed because of economic want and the lack of legitimate jobs.

Faced with a spiraling violent crime rate in the 1970s and 1980s, and arguably more important with a public fed ever more images of crime by the media and hence increasingly fearful of the perceived threat of a criminal underclass, politicians of all stripes rushed to become ever more "tough-on-crime." Only in the last few years have the broader political and cultural consequences of this strategy become visible.

In part, the toughening up of the criminal justice system was an understandable response to the violence and terror that racked America during the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic, during the latter part of the 1980s and the early 1990s. Yet, the carnage associated with this particular societal disaster only partly explains why so many people ended up behind bars. For the rush to incarcerate predated the influx of crack cocaine into inner city communities in the mid-1980s and it has continued for many years after the worst gang atrocities associated with the struggle for crack distribution rights abated.

Partly, I believe, the prison boom can be explained by a transformation in the political rhetoric away from a language of inclusion and hope and toward one of cynicism and fear. But I also believe it to be at least in part a deeply unfortunate by-product of America's greatest, most treasured, asset: its democratic culture. In a dictatorship, leaders can order their subordinates to imprison "enemies of the state," even to kill them, instantly and on a whim. In a democracy, due process must be observed. To change laws in response to something as intangible as "the fear of crime," bills must be crafted, popular support must be courted, debates must be enjoined, and committees of experts queried. By the time these bills become law, oftentimes the circumstances necessitating their existence have changed. Hence the peculiar spectacle, detailed in the pages to come, of the United States dramatically toughening up its criminal justice code in the mid-1990s, just at the moment when crime rates had actually begun falling.

Whatever the reasons, the result of a ratcheted-up political rhetoric has been a quarter century of domestic war -- War on Crime and War on Drugs -- and the remolding of America as a penal state, even as the crime rate stabilized and then fell.

What could be stranger than a country that continues to take in the world's beaten and brutalized at the same time imprisoning its own impoverished teenagers for ten, fifteen, even twenty or thirty years, for small-time drug crimes? And yet America has done so at the behest of its own populace. Mass imprisonment was born out of the popular will and has continued through popular demand.

Distract the mob with the blood of the gladiators, the Roman Caesars knew, and you could control an empire. Two thousand years later, our Supermax prisons should, perhaps, be considered the amphitheaters of a more complicated, more democratic age, the lives destroyed inside them serving largely to fuel the ambitions of demagogic politicians appealing to that which is base in the American soul.

There are three main characters in Hard Time Blues. The first is Billy Ochoa, a repeat offender caught up in the web of history. Ochoa's crimes are numerous but nonviolent. However, in the new schema, Ochoa's actions are treated at least as severely as those of the murderers and rapists he shares a prison with. My second main protagonist is former California Governor Pete Wilson, a man who rode the crest of a wave -- a large wave of popular fear based on an impression that the country was besieged by criminals -- into the upper echelons of the United States' political elite. Wilson, and politicians like him, helped to create this wave of fear in the first place; and once the swell of wrath arose, they made sure that they were the ones who benefited. The third subject is more amorphous. It is that great phenomenon known as "the American public." It is the citizenry of this country, men and women who have themselves been victimized by criminals, or who have been bombarded, for decades, with sensational images of violent crime by a ratings-hungry media; who have been told by a generation of politicians that drugs and crime are larger social problems than poverty, unemployment, and despair; and who have reacted by battening down the hatches and supporting the building of ever-more prisons to house prisoners sentenced to ever-longer terms during a decade when those who studied the statistics knew that crime rates were actually falling.

Although most people I contacted during the writing of this book were gracious with their time and readily shared with me their memories, personal correspondence, and thoughts, one major character refused to participate. Despite repeated requests for interviews, delivered both over the telephone and in faxed correspondence with his office, and despite a cover letter from St. Martin's Press explaining the nature of the book and asking for cooperation, former Governor Pete Wilson never responded.

As a practical note to readers, a word on the structure of the book is in order. Rather than attempting a constant single narrative, I have chosen to create somewhat self-contained chapters. The book opens with Ochoa's story and then moves on to Pete Wilson. It expands to create an overview of America's prison population and then contracts again to the more particular narrative of Billy Ochoa's life. The alternation between characters and themes continues throughout the ten chapters. In this way, I have tried to paint vivid pictures without burdening my readers with too many areas on which to have to concentrate simultaneously.

I focus primarily on California because it is in California that so many of the nation's policies and attitudes coalesce, and because it is California -- along with Southern states such as Texas -- that has most visibly embraced the goals of punishment over rehabilitation, and imprisonment over alternatives to incarceration. The old adage, "where California goes, the nation follows," is particularly true in the area of contemporary crime and punishment. Nevertheless, because of the national scope of the subject, I have also included in my book the stories of prisoners incarcerated around the country. Their tales, gathered over the past four years during the course of face-to-face interviews in prisons, through telephone conversations and letters, and through meetings with family members on the outside, illustrate far better than mere statistics ever could how destructive America's prison policy has become.

It is my hope that in telling this story, in showing the faces behind the numbers, in showing prisoners in all their complex, often pathetic, often tragic, entirety, Hard Time Blues will help to stem the tide of incarceration. Perhaps the next generation will live in a country that not only fights crime, but also one that has learnt how to tackle social problems without imprisoning almost one percent of its entire population and a staggering ten percent of its young African American male population.