The Caging of America
Why do we lock up so many people?
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik
This is a really long article by ‘net standards, but I suggest that anyone who either doesn’t understand how punitive our incarceratative society is or wants to understand it better to read it in full. There are many excellent statements in there and I found myself wanting to embed quotes from almost the entire thing. I had to force myself to pick just a few in the hopes that by teasing you a bit you will go read the whole article.
For me, this quote is really the key to the whole thing:
No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
Scary indeed!
The article pretty well debunks the idea that our astronomical incarceration rate has anything to do with the decrease in crime that has been happening the last couple of decades. Instead, it seems that the solution was the idea that ‘hot spot’ policing and ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy caused a feedback loop that by discouraging crime, crime became less socially acceptable, leading to less crime, etc.:
Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
As damning evidence for this conclusion…
One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
This bit sort of goes with my idea of how prisons should be managed:
Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime.
As for recidivism, there is this…
Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.
I have read several articles in the New Yorker in the past and been impressed with the writing and this one is no exception. I like well-written articles that appear to be well researched, I get a chance to feel like I am learning something. While much of the article was in line with what I had already read in the past, the way it was packaged helps to focus things. Go ahead, read the thing. Don’t be such a twitter head that you can’t read articles lasting more than a paragraph or twain!
