The Road To a Solution - Breaking the Chain

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.

Robert G. Ingersoll

The purpose of this page is to propose a path to an answer to the question “Are prisons a necessary component of a just and healthy society?” We will begin with a brief review of the history of prisons and the development of the carceral state that today holds in detention over 2 million persons resulting in the United States leading the world in per capita incarcerated population.

It is a paradox that the establishment of prisons within the United States began as a response to the developing insights provided by the age of enlightenment philosophers. In a world governed by the traditional monarchies and structured social courts that provided a world view dominated by a social hierarchy of unequals, a radicalized nation could be founded upon the principal that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Indeed, the founding arguments for the creation of prisons within the colonial United States were to replace the extremes of capital punishments for crimes less severe than murder with sentences to penitentiaries, a place where penitents could be held as punishment and provided an opportunity to repent within the monastic solitude of the prison cell.

But in a nation blinded by racial stereotypes and xenophobic reactions to anyone outside the comfort and familiarity of English and Northern European ancestry, even a system based upon the best of intentions of a reasoned and rational population unfortunately led to the creation of a carceral state where the imprisoned population skewed unfavorably to the detention of people of color and in particular to those who traced back to African, Asian, and Latin American origin.

The fact that the occurrence of slavery itself contradicted the opening to the Declaration of Independence quoted above remains an unacceptable contradiction of American ideals. But this historical paradox remains as the only explanation for the historic precedence of continuing racial bias and xenophobic reactions which has led to the unjust condition of the carceral state of today’s America. The more recent expansion of the definition of crime to include the population of those individuals who either came into this country without examination at the borders, i.e. crossed illegally into this country, or those who overstayed properly obtained visas also reflects upon the sad history of racial bias. Even those who established permanent resident status who may have been involved in minor crimes can find themselves caught up in the incarcerated statistics within immigration holding cells and prisons until their final disposition concerning legal residency is resolved which more often than not leads to deportation.

In Angela Davis’s “Are Prisons Obsolete” a case is made that the experience of slavery and the rise of the carceral state share an inseparable connection. Indeed, the legacy of slavery, lynchings and segregation particularly manifested within the southern states betrays a national shame of structural bias within the experience of crime and punishment in the United States. But Angela Davis is not alone in connecting the two. More importantly, a recurring theme when studying the rise of the carceral state is the ability to capitalize and monetize the unjust suffering of the incarcerated population from the early incorporation of prison labor and the rise of convict leasing to generate the funds necessary to support and maintain the prison system. We now find ourselves with what Davis and people within the prison abolitionist movement define as a capitalistic inspired "prison industrial complex". A quote from Davis's book attributed to Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg states

"To private business prison labor is a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits,unemployment insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No language barriers as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards , limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria Secret, all at a fraction of a cost for free labor." Angela Davis, "Are Prisons Obsolete?" pg 84.

To quote Davis herself :

"The term 'prison industrial complex' was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies has been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit." Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? pg 84.

It is quite fitting for Davis and other prison abolitionists to use the industrial complex terminology for two reasons. The first is that like the military industrial complex the system is constructed to be self fulfilling. When you are a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. When you are the prison industrial complex, the system is optimized for utilization and growth. The second and as Davis points out in her book, these complexes form symbiotic connections to where the Military Industrial Complex has expanded and diversified to provide military proven hardware and solutions to the police and carceral institutions including weapons, devices of crowd control, intelligence gathering and monitoring and surveillance.

The suggestion of racial and xenophobic bias is nothing new within scholarly studies on the subject. We have continued to fail to provide prison systems free from racial bias. In "Punishment after Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865-1890" Christopher R Adamson argues that the prison population of the post civil war south was primarily a replacement of the plantation based slavery system with the convict leasing system that primarily targeted the now freed slaves with newly defined vagrancy laws and other minor offenses. As Alex Lichtenstein points out in "Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: 'The Negro Convict is a Slave'" the use of convict leasing in the South continued to disproportionately target the African American population and provided an inexpensive means to invest in the transportation infrastructure of the south which was still dealing with the devastation of the civil war.

The freed slave population were not alone in being unfairly targeted. Issues dealing with immigration law criminalized the sheer act of coming to America for those in communities that were outside our European heritage. In "Deportability and the Carceral State" Torrie Hester points out the targeting of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. Specifically, the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882 became the first case of national law that targeted at first people from China but was later expanded to include those from South East Asia and Japan. Soon Immigration law was targeting Mexicans and others from Latin America a well culminating in Operation Wetback of 1954 that deported over 1 million Mexicans. In "American Gulag" Mark Dow reinforces the intrinsic and abusive racism within the immigration detention centers of the United States. This is reinforced by the choice in the title of the book to suggest much similarities to the deprivation of legal and civil rights within the Russian forced labor camp systems mostly reserved for political prisoners and described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 book "The Gulag Archipelago".

The unfair treatment of minority groups by police and prosecutors were not just limited to racial and xenophobic tendencies. As Timothy Stewart-Winter shows us in "Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States" homophobia contributed to the cases of unjust treatment. Here we see cases such as the killing of James Clay Jr in Chicago in November 1970 who was shot for no more reason than "impersonating the opposite sex". Stewart-Winter states "America’s gay rights movement began as a response to criminalization and escalating police harassment after World War II." The Stonewall uprising of 1969 where a raid by New York police led to a rowdy standoff lasting days and became a key event that galvanized protest. Soon after we saw more cooperation between the gay rights movement and the black freedom struggle. Stewart-Winters argues "how antigay policing changed in the 1960s and 1970s, as big-city police departments adopted a more aggressive approach to black insurgency." This reactionary mobilization of police hostility towards African Americans began to sweep up members of the gay community in aggressive vice raids.

Indeed, even the true and Native Americans were deemed undeserving of the lands that they occupied for thousands of years and were rounded up and forced to live on lands considered inferior by the ever expanding white population as they expanded and migrated west. Native Americans were rounded up and forced to live within the confines of the reservation systems. Even the native population now represents a rate of incarceration disproportionate to their population.

Our most recent "war on crime" and the "war on drugs" that originally rose to prominence in the early 1900s came back with a vengance in the latter part of the century and exacerbated the problem by creating new crimes to be punished and with longer and preset sentences for repeat "offenders". Again, Mathew D. Lassiter argues in "Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs" the continuation of racial bias in the criminalization of drug use among urban African Americans. Not surprisingly, Lassiter presents arguments how the suburban middle class children of mostly white families are portrayed as targets of urban African American drug pushing predators and instead are viewed as victims, and declared "the impossible criminal". Donna Murch points out in "Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs" how African American crack users are again targeted by an increasingly militarized police at the exclusion of mostly white suburban middle class users of powdered cocaine. Surprisingly, the war on crime memes seemed to occur in periods of declines in crime statistics. Jeffery S. Adler points out in "Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America" our most recent war on crime repeats the mantra to get tough on crime during periods of reduction in the rate of crime.

Criminology has traditionally been defined within the context of poorly understood aspects of human psychology and social frameworks. Our current understanding of classical criminology is based on the premise that people have free will in making decisions, and that punishment can be a deterrent for crime, so long as the punishment is proportional, fits the crime, and is carried out promptly. Here crime is viewed in the context of moral choices made by a rational population with hedonistic tendencies in a spiritual context dominated by the Judeo-Christian principals of original sin. This is a simplistic view of antisocial behavior outside the framework of a larger circle of public and private institutions that should provide fair access to education, mental and physical health care, opportunities for employment, and for fair distribution of wealth generated by an economy.

The road to a solution to the problem of mass incarceration must consider and address the following issues:

1) Problem definition: the questions concerning the nature of crime and a basic understanding of the problem to be solved must be clearly understood within the context of social organization, criminology, and a theory of justice. Both analysis of historic precedent as well as the current state of penal systems make it clear that our understandings of criminology are at best incomplete and the high rates of incarceration and recidivism suggest that our current penal system is both inefficient and ineffective.

2) Solution methodology: how can a solution be found within a complex system of human interactions and social institutions that challenge a traditional and simplistic understanding of crime and punishment.

3) Consideration and Incorporation of approaches of current penal solutions that have proven effective and suggest a path to a better solution.

Indeed, the goal of this section is to suggest the need for a new definition of crime which includes the decriminalization of non-crime behaviors including immigration, and medical cases of mental illness and drug addiction.

Davis recognizes the complexity of the problem in her book. She sees recognizes that there is no single silver bullet solution to the Carceral State. As Davis states:

"An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words we would not be looking for prison like substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment -- demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance." Angela Davis, "Are Prisons Obsolete? " pg 107.

The United States is missing the opportunity to lead in helping to define the post carceral world. Already nations such as Sweden are already planning to abolish prisons. Likewise Norway is among the leading nations in prison abolition. Instead, the United States is becoming a major exporter of our private prison system. The export and globalization of crime and punishment by the United States is not just limited to the private prison corporations. As Micol Seigel points out in his paper "Objects of Police History" the Office of Public Safety established in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy trained American police in counter insurgency tactics and methods and shipped them out "to instruct foreign police in modern, professional methods and develop their counterinsurgency capacities." Current government policy seems to be in alignment with the prison industrial complex and the direction seems to be continuing the expansion of private prisons.

When attempting to understand a proper definition of crime and criminal behavior it is important to recognize that not all crimes nor criminals are created equal. At issue is specifically trying to understand how crime itself is defined and what motivates specific individuals to break the law. We soon discover that crime is a multidimensional problem. First, current prison populations can be subdivided using many criteria. You can divide criminals by the nature of their crime, such as violent crime, property crime, drug offenses, and public order or other crimes. Indeed, the statistics on the linked page only covers those "criminals" that have been sent to prisons and jails. People incarcerated within Homeland Security holding facilities for immigration crime are typically excluded and indeed seem to push the definition of criminal beyond reasonable argument. It is a fair question to ask whether undocumented aliens are guilty of crimes at all. Similarly a big question concerns whether a just society would include drug users and mentally ill individuals among the criminal population rather than medical cases requiring treatment rather than punitive rehabilitation.

The attempt to treat our current criminal population with the single solution of incarceration reflects a poor understanding in the nature of motivation and behavioral modification. It is time we move from the simplistic definitions of crime and punishment, to a more apt approach that recognizes criminal behavior as a complex social problem, and addresses it with proper treatment within the context of the larger world of a fair and just judicial system, an effective educational system, and an economy that is both fair and provides for equal opportunity for all as well as a fair and just distribution of generated wealth. It is no longer a case of crime and punishment, but recognition of social ills and the need for effective and proper treatment and to move to a justice system as Angela Davis has succinctly stated and bears repeating "based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance."

In conclusion, the answer to the question of how the post carceral world would look is complicated, but it would be a world that recognizes that life is not simple, to solve the problem of mass incarceration is to want to solve all of the related problems, and we would need to move to a world that does not profit off of the sufferings of others.