Reforming a Prison Nation

[Joanne98]

Reforming a Prison Nation

Two students of mass incarceration in America discuss the current political moment and the prospects for rolling back the carceral state.

Sasha Abramsky and Marie Gottschalk | August 9, 2007
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=reforming_a_prison_nation

Sasha Abramsky is the author of American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment and a senior fellow at Demos. Marie Gottschalk is the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America and associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In the e-mail exchange below, they discuss the current political climate surrounding issues of crime and imprisonment and the prospects for changing American criminal justice policies.

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ABRAMSKY: Marie, one of the common themes in both of our books is the notion that the past always haunts the present. Political, racial, and economic divisions from bygone eras influence contemporary social attitudes toward crime and punishment and affect which individuals and groups are most likely to fall under the control of one or another criminal justice agency. Institutional legacies also matter. Today's experiment with wholesale incarceration in the United States is only really possible because of a series of bureaucracies, federal, state, and local institutions, law enforcement tools, sentencing laws, and so on that we have inherited from the past and that, with some modification, can be used in today's climate to incapacitate a growing percentage of the country's population.

It's too tempting, sometimes, to only deal with the past superficially, given that today we seem to be at an entirely anomalous moment in terms of the numbers we imprison and the amount of money we spend on our criminal justice systems (plural) around the country. What do you think the past tells us about the prospects for significantly reducing America’s unprecedented incarceration rate in the near future?


GOTTSCHALK: First, a closer look at the past should indeed disabuse us of the simplistic notion that the origins of the carceral state rest with one man, Barry Goldwater, who caught the law-and-order fever in 1964 that then infected the Republican Party and, after that, fearful Democratic leaders playing catch-up. The construction of the carceral state was a bipartisan project with complex political, institutional, and deeply historical roots. Leading Democrats played a key role from early on, as did certain social movements -- some of which are not usually associated with conservative causes, like the women’s movement.

This understanding of the past should dampen some recent speculation that fiscally conservative Republicans, troubled by the economic burden of the country’s jails and prisons, are ready to roll back the carceral state in a Nixon-to-China scenario. It was mistakenly assumed three decades ago, in fact, that shared disillusionment on the right and left with the rehabilitative ideal would shrink the prison population. Instead, it exploded.

While some of the recent economic arguments against the carceral state are compelling and politically useful, opponents of the prison boom need to resist the temptation to reduce this mainly to a question of dollars and cents. Historically, penal reform movements, like many other successful social movements in the United States, have had strong moral and religious overtones.


ABRAMSKY: Yes, that's true. We need to keep in mind that earlier penal reformers, such as the journalist George Washington Cable who helped expose (and ultimately reform) the appalling conditions in Southern convict-leasing camps in the late 19th century, did not cast their arguments primarily in economic terms. Going back even earlier, the early 19th century prison-builders in Philadelphia and elsewhere stressed moral arguments as they built the first real penitentiaries anywhere on earth, to replace wholesale corporal punishments. A few generations later, reformers devised probation and parole to divert some offenders out of those prisons, and later established a juvenile justice system to remove teenage delinquents from the harsh environs of adult correctional facilities.


GOTTSCHALK: Likewise, today some prominent conservatives associated with the religious right are starting to embrace the cause of prison reform for non-economic reasons. Their conversion to this cause does raise some disquieting questions about the separation of church and state. Nonetheless, the right’s newfound interest in penal reform cannot be dismissed merely as a cynical gesture strategically designed to further the broader conservative evangelical political agenda. Dollars-and-cents arguments against the carceral state may not be enough to mobilize this potentially important constituency for penal reform.


ABRAMSKY: I think you're absolutely right -- that to get a meaningful critique of current incarceration trends and criminal justice strategies off the ground, there has to be a moral component, and also an understanding that both major political parties are, to a large degree, implicated in the current prison buildup. But economic arguments can't be entirely dismissed either.

There are some people who will respond to powerful moral claims. These claims can be based around, for example, statements about the immorality of sweeping up vastly disproportionate numbers of African Americans for drug using and dealing, despite the fact that most studies indicate blacks don't use or deal drugs at a greater rate than do whites. Or they can tackle the issue from the standpoint of felon disenfranchisement. My previous book, Conned, tackled the fact that there are currently about five million Americans left voteless because they live in states that disenfranchise former felons and people on parole or probation. Or they can say there's something wrong with a system that has lost sight of punishing people in a way proportionate to the severity of their crime -- hence the disturbing spectacle of the U.S. Supreme Court upholding California's right to put shoplifters in prison for the rest of their lives via three-strikes convictions.

Then there are other people who are comfortable
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=reforming_a_prison_nation