Week 7: Mass Incarceration in the United States

1. Week 7: Mass Incarceration in the United States

2. Outline • An epicentral institution of the neoliberal age • 1973-2008: the grotesque prison boom • The crime-incarceration disconnection • From the plantation to the penitentiary: the “War on Drugs” • Neoliberal policy transfer

3. 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.

4. “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.

5. 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)

6. 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.”

7. 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.

8. 2008 The Guardian, Saturday 1st March

10. 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).

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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!!)

14. 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.”

15. 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 ever-threatening 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

16. 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.

17. “The collective portrait of prisoners is very telling. Three-quarters have a history of drug or alcohol abuse, one-sixth 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

18. 4. From the plantation to the penitentiary

19. 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

20. “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 African-Americans. 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)

22. 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

23. The human costs of mass incarceration Elaine Bartlett’s treatment under the “Rockefeller Drug Laws” of New York State

24. 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.

25. “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!

26. 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.

27. 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!

28. “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 African-Americans 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.

29. “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

30. “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

31. 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

33. “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.

34. “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

35. 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.