Transcript Slide 1

Week 7: Mass Incarceration in the United States
Outline
1. An epicentral institution of the neoliberal
age
2. 1973-2008: the grotesque prison boom
3. The crime-incarceration disconnection
4. From the plantation to the penitentiary:
the “War on Drugs”
5. Neoliberal policy transfer
1. An epicentral institution of the neoliberal age
There is a structural and functional relationship
between:
the ascendancy of neoliberalism
and
the deployment of the prison to stem the
consequences of rising destitution caused by the
shrinkage of welfare support.
“Reduced welfare expenditures are not indicative of a
shift towards reduced government intervention in social
life….but rather a shift toward a more exclusionary and
punitive approach to the regulation of social marginality.”
Beckett and Western (2001) p.47
“The contemporary neoliberal state….adopts an ever
more aggressive, invasive, and neopaternalist attitude
towards the regulation of the poor.”
Tickell and Peck (2003) p.178.
Jamie Peck (2003) “Geography
and Public Policy: Mapping the
Penal State” Progress in Human
Geography 27(2)
“Distinctively new forms of policy
reconstruction and regulatory
rollout are in evidence...” (p.223)
“…an emergent process of
‘carceralization,’ suggesting
perhaps that the prison system can
be understood as one of the
epicentral institutions of these
neoliberalized times.”
(p.226)
2. 1973-2008: the grotesque prison boom
1973
President Richard Nixon’s
National Advisory Commission
on Criminal Justice Standards
and Goals
“The prison, the reformatory,
and the jail have achieved
nothing but a shocking record
of failure. There is
overwhelming evidence that
these institutions create crime
rather than prevent it.”
In the mid-1970s, a broad consensus had
formed among politicians, social scientists
and radical critics: the future of the prison
in America was anything but bright.
Prisons were viewed as stagnant,
ineffective, and perhaps institutions that
were on the way out.
2008
The Guardian, Saturday 1st March
Currently, 2,308,430 people are incarcerated in America’s jails
and prisons
The amount of women incarcerated (c.203,000) is a figure
higher than the total imprisoned population of any one major
western European country
Over 250,000 mentally ill persons are behind bars
11 year-old children can be sentenced to terms of life without
parole
In 4 states (Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Virginia) all formerly
incarcerated persons are disenfranchised for life, whereas in
other states such persons face long bans from voting.
Incarceration has overtaken the two main programmes of
assistance to the poor in the nation’s budget (TANF and food
stamps).
3. The crime-incarceration disconnection
The official doctrine on prisons is that they are a necessary
response to the relentless growth of crime, esp. violent
crime
BUT:
Crime rates have stagnated then declined over the last
three decades.
The vast majority of convicts have been small-time, non
violent offenders
In contrast to hysterical speculation, most Americans live
far apart from neighbourhoods where physical
aggression is likely to occur
The rising murder rates of the 1985-1990 period were
geographically and racially circumscribed, and directly
connected to staggering unemployment, welfare
retrenchment and the lucrative crack cocaine economy
Incarceration rates went up as crime rates went down
because of the attitude of American society (and the
responses of the authorities) toward street delinquency
and its principal source: urban poverty
Conservatives (who have dominated American politics
since 1973) have at all times viewed that the function of
prison should be to punish, not to rehabilitate.
Being ‘tough on crime’ became an electoral platform,
underpinned by hysterical media portraits of demonic
(black) ‘underclass’ characters prowling the streets
The “prison-industrial complex”
Private prisons: why?
The state cannot cope with the costs of the
prison boom. They can pay the private sector to
build prisons more cheaply, operate them more
cheaply (furniture, food, maintenance, health
care, communication, plus pay low wages to its
staff) and locate them in economically
depressed rural communities (prisons do not lay
off workers during recessions!!)
California Department
Of Corrections and
Rehabilitation
Calipatria State Prison
“The primary mission of Calipatria State Prison is to provide for the
confinement of general population Level I (minimum custody) and Level IV
(maximum custody) inmates who are willing to participate in vocational
and/or academic programs, prison industries or support services.”
Mike Davis (1999) Ecology of Fear
“..four thousand inmates, most of them from the ghettos and barrios
of Los Angeles County….. Their lives are entirely absorbed in the
daily struggle to survive soul-destroying claustrophobia and everthreatening racial violence. Like the rest of the system, Calipatria
operates at almost double its design capacity*…. A second inmate
has simply been shoehorned into each of the tiny, six-by-ten-foot
one-man cells… Now inmates can routinely expect to spend
decades or even lifetimes (40 percent of Calipatria’s population are
lifers) locked in unnatural, and often unbearable, intimacy with
another person… As behavioural psychologists have testified in
court, rats confined in such circumstances invariably go berserk and
eat each other.” (p.413)
*On the prison’s website, 4,168 prisoners fit into a prison designed for
2,208
You might be forgiven for arguing that vicious murderers, rapists etc. deserve
such cruel treatment BUT:
Prison in the United States purports to be about correction and rehabilitation
“superincarceration has had a negligible impact on the overall crime rate,
and…a majority of new inmates are either non-violent drug offenders
(including parolees flunking mandatory urinalysis) or the mentally ill
(28,000 inmates [in California] by official estimate).” (Davis, p.416)
California now has the third largest penal system in the world
While the state’s colleges/universities were shedding 8,000 jobs, the
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation hired 26,000 new employees
(to guard 112,000 new inmates)
It costs twice as much to send an 18 year old to prison than to university. In
1995, former California Governor Pete Wilson replied: “If these additional
costs have to be absorbed, I guess we’ll have to reduce other services.
We’ll have to change our priorities.”
In 1994, California introduced a “three-strikes” law – double sentences for
2nd time “serious” felonies and 25 years to life (with no possibility of parole)
for the 3rd time, whatever the felony
African Americans (10% of the state’s population) made up 57% of the early
three strikes cases, 17 times the rate of whites – yet whites commit at least
60% of rapes, robberies and assaults in California.
“The collective portrait of prisoners is very telling. Threequarters have a history of drug or alcohol abuse, onesixth a history of mental illness, and more than half the
women inmates a history of sexual or physical abuse.
Most prisoners are from poor or working-class
communities, and two-thirds are racial and ethnic
minorities.”
Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (2002) Invisible
Punishment p.4
4. From the plantation to the penitentiary
Approximately 62% of America’s prison
population are Black and Hispanic.
If current trends continue, one in every
three black men born in America today
will go to prison
Across the US, there are more young
(under 30) black men in prison than in
college
“War on Drugs”
The astounding rise in African-American incarceration is
due to the preferential enforcement of laws most likely to
lead to the arrest and prosecution of poor AfricanAmericans.
Public concern about the drug problem followed, rather
than instigated, policymaker initiatives re: punishment.
The War on Drugs, launched by Reagan and amplified
by his successors, has served as a cover for a brutal
clampdown on drug dealers and their clients in the
dispossessed black urban neighbourhoods where they
congregate (even though drug consumption in white
neighbourhoods is the same)
Poverty as a crime
If you force people into ‘slave jobs’ with pathetic wages
and no chance of upward mobility, and then you remove
the social protection that allows people to survive outside
the labour market, you create incentives for people to join
the criminal (drug) economy.
The reaction of the American government is to roll-out the
penal apparatus (police, courts, jails, prisons)…..and then
blame the problems on the pathological behaviour of the
‘underclass’ (i.e. “they’re lazy and don’t want to work, and
would rather risk going to prison”)
Behavioural explanations absolve the state of any
responsibility for creating the hopeless conditions which
force people to do desperate things
The human costs of
mass incarceration
Elaine Bartlett’s
treatment under
the “Rockefeller
Drug Laws” of New
York State
1973 - New York State’s “Rockefeller Drug
Laws”, a mandatory minimum 15 year to
life prison term for anyone convicted of
selling 2 ounces or possessing 4 ounces
of heroin or cocaine, regardless of the
offender’s criminal history.
“One would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that the
goal of policy has been to stem drug abuse among all
Americans rather than to wage a war on communities of
color, with nearly 80 percent of inmates in state prison
for drug offenses being African-American or Latino.”
Mauer and Chesney-Lind, p.6
Furthemore, a convicted armed robber or a rapist can
apply for parole, higher education or welfare benefits, but
a drug offender cannot!
WHY?
It is easier for those in power to impose punishment on
those with whom they have little in common or do not
encounter on a daily basis
It is easier to target a uniquely dispossessed and
dishonoured population:
Imagine an American society which is historically even,
and there is no pre-existing social division. Would this
punitive shift have been possible?
Then imagine a highly divided American society, with
one group in particular having a profound ethnic stigma
attached to it. A devastating punitive shift becomes
possible because it is seen as their problem – black
crime in the black ghetto by the black underclass.
Consider this:
If the incarceration rate was the
same for whites as it is currently
for blacks, over 17 million people
would be locked up!
“The astronomical overrepresentation of
blacks in houses of penal confinement and
the increasingly tight meshing of the
hyperghetto with the carceral system
suggests that….lower-class AfricanAmericans now dwell, not in society with
prisons as their white compatriots do, but
in the first genuine prison society in
history.”
Wacquant, 2002, p.60.
“The United States correctional system costs more than
60 billion dollars annually. Over the course of a year, an
estimated 13.5 million people will spend time in prison or
jail, and, on any given day, 750,000 men and women
work in correctional facilities. Despite these numbers
and some compelling evidence of abuse and safety
failures inside prisons and jails, there is little public
knowledge about the nature and extent of the problems
and how to solve them. Instead, we seem to have a gap
between our cherished ideals about justice and the
realities of the prison environment.”
Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, co-Chair of the Commission
on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, March 2005.
See www.prisoncommission.org
“Rather than asking the policy question of
how to heal the impact of crime and
prevent future crime, we instead become
focused on how much we can punish the
offender.”
Mauer and Chesney-Lind, 2002, p.7
5. Neoliberal Policy Transfer
While there is no question that the USA represents an extreme
case of the ‘carceral society’, there is every sign that it has
become the model for the neoliberal mantra that “prison works”:
“During the last 10-15 years, the USA has emerged as the
principal exporter of policy ideologies, governance systems and
program routines in the field of postwelfarist social and penal
policy. Although processes of policy transfer and emulation are
hardly new, what seems to be distinctive about the current
(neoliberalized) conjuncture is the apparent speed-up of this
process.”
Peck, J. (2003) “Geography and public policy: mapping the
penal state”, Progress in Human Geography 27 (2) p.228
“Most importantly, America has dealt with its crime problem. The
crime rate has dropped by about one-third since the early 1990s. It
has dropped even more in the better parts of town. People walk the
streets of New York and Chicago without taking the precautions they
used to take. Triple-locked doors and bars on the windows are not
as necessary as they used to be. People feel safer and are safer.
We didn’t solve the crime problem by learning how to get tough on
the causes of crime nor by rehabilitating criminals. We just took
them off the streets. As of 2005, more than 2m Americans are
incarcerated. That number is inefficiently large - it includes many
minor drug offenders - but it responds to the question “Does prison
work?”.
If you are willing to pay the price - a price that would amount to a
British prison population of roughly 250,000 if your sentencing
followed the American model - you can reduce crime dramatically.
Charles Murray (2005) “The advantages of social apartheid”, The
Sunday Times, April 3rd.
“America may continue to lead the world in incarceration,
but it comes at a terrible social cost, and increasingly
isolates us from the rest of the world.”
Mauer and Chesney-Lind, p.12
“Our politicians, of all complexions, flit across the Atlantic to
learn about this gross carceral experiment. But to attempt
to learn crime control from the United States is rather like
travelling to Saudi Arabia to learn about women’s rights.”
Jock Young (1999) The Exclusive Society
3rd March 2008 (today!!)
Conservatives’ “Green Paper”
on prisons:
Prison work should be oriented
towards inmates making
reparation directly to the
victims of their crimes
Increase prison capacity to
100,000 (5,000 more than the
current government has
pledged)
Ending automatic release for
all time-limited or determinate
sentences and replacing such
sentences with no possibility
of parole until the minimum
term has been served.