Incarceration as a Political Institution (original) (raw)
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This essay reviews trends since the early 1980s in the number of inmates confined in American prisons as well as possible factors contributing to the massive increase in prison admissions (ranging from highly functionalist structural accounts to more culturally embedded midrange ones). Defining features of the late twentieth century imprisonment boom are discussed, encompassing global notoriety; persistent racial disparities; the role of felony drug filings, convictions and sentences in fueling both the scale and racial disparities of imprisonment; and regional and jurisdictional variations in trends across three planes: federal-state, interstate, and intrastate. Finally, the recent “stabilization” of incarceration rates in the United States is described and possible implications considered.
Critical Criminology, 2004
This article employs a convict perspective to examine the evolving nature of imprisonment in the United States. Drawing from the prison literature, and placed within the political economy of the wider society, it utilizes personal accounts of the author (an ex-convict) and his interactions with prisoners to provide a critical look at the changing structures, inequities, and hierarchical social relations of the prison system and their effect on the lives of people behind bars.
From Rehabilitation to Punishment: American Corrections After 1945
The incarceration rate in the United States has increased dramatically in the period since 1945. How did the United States move from having stable incarceration rates in line with global norms to the largest system of incarceration in the world? This study examines the political and intellectual aspects of incarceration and theories of criminal justice by looking at the contributions of journalists, intellectuals and policy makers to the debate on whether the purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation, vengeance, deterrence or incapacitation. This thesis finds that justice and the institution of the prison itself are not immutable facts of modern civilization, but are human institutions vulnerable to the influence of politics, culture and current events.
Over the past 20 years, the United States has experienced a massive increase in imprisonment. The number of people incarcerated and the clustering of that incarceration in the inner-city black population raise the prospect that incarceration may be undermining less coercive institutions of social control such as families or communities. The long-term result of this incarceration policy, then, would be increases, rather than the expected decreases, in crime. There is some empirical evidence to support this position. Increases in incarceration have been clustered in groups and places and have been of the magnitude that could affect less coercive institutions in those areas. Large proportions of the imprisoned population are involved in families and communities at the time of their imprisonment. Incarceration has been shown to reduce family formation for blacks but not for whites.
Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 2019
Western academia has shown an increased interest in the question of incarceration throughout the late 20 th century and the early 21 st century. Michel Foucault's Surveiller et punir (1975) sparked renewed discussions of carceral institutions as key to the political architecture of western modernity and as phenomena which demand critical and theoretical attention in genealogical as well as in structural and infra -structural terms. Since the book's publication, many scholars across different areas of inquiry have engaged in historical, sociological, political and cultural analysis of the carceral. Emerging from what was the burgeoning field of cultural studies, during the seventies Stuart Hall's co -authored book, Policing the Crisis (1978), with its focus on the political manipulation of anxieties regarding small crime in Britain and its denunciation of the highly mediatized hegemonic constructs which underpinned the criminalization of working -class racialized subjects, was a pioneering work which opened new paths to those studying security and punitive systems. Gilles Deleuze's short essay on control societies (1992) 1 proved to be an important theoretical reference for anyone working on security and punitive systems: a historical successor to the disciplinary societies presented by Foucault, the logic of control drafted by Deleuze has been highly suggestive as a means of articulating a range of shifts in the organization of power, conveying the new mechanisms of control as a broader, highly diffuse and technologically supported system of security and surveillance upheld by corporate interests.
Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned, from 1989 to 2009
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2009
Dostoevsky, Mandela, and others have long noted that prisons expose social realities, often hidden, particularly inequality and gaps between policy and practice. Prisons symbolize, mirror, and shape the communities and countries in which they exist. Although prisons informed and were intertwined with many of the defining moments of 1989, in the 20 years since, societies often failed to recognize the important role prison and punishment play in relationship to democracy. By not recognizing that "prison matters" in relationship to democracy, polities (whether in transition to democracy or established democracies) failed to adequately learn "prison lessons." Starting with a case study of South Africa, this paper considers prisons during apartheid and under democratic governance. This case is connected to other comparative and international examples (including Russia, Brazil, and the USA) to identify five lessons learned and not learned concerning prison and democracy. First, policies and practices of imprisonment reflect social orders, especially structures of inequality and understandings of legitimate power and opposition. Second, countries transitioning to democracy seldom anticipate rising crime and invariably neglect the relevance of prisons. Third, nations do not adequately grapple with the role of prison in the past, especially the nondemocratic past. Fourth, in established and recent democracies, penal populism resulted as politicians defined prison as a solution to a host of social ills, ignoring the consequences of expanded punishment. Fifth, prisons shaped key substantive realities beyond their walls, from leadership to recidivism, scandals, fiscal deficits, and crises of legitimacy.
This paper explores how sociological research helps us to understand prisons in contemporary societies. Although numerous studies exist which investigate prisons, and others which analyse the experience of imprisonment, there are few which examine the role of sociological research in this field. Through critically analysing a number of key texts in this area of criminology, this paper attempts to articulate the role sociological research plays in bringing attention to imprisonment in contemporary society.
U.S. Social Structure and Imprisonment. A Comment
Criminology, 1983
An article by Joubert, Picon and McIntosh (1981) is found to contain several serious methodological flaws. A second analysis using a similar data set suggests that t h e methodological problems may have caused them to draw e r r o n e m conclusions regarding the effects of social structural variables on prison admission and release rates.
Imprisonment and Political Equality
The paper outlines a democratic theory of imprisonment called democratic retributive abolitionism. The paper first briefly reviews the dominant liberal theories of punishment, and examines the conceptual limitation that prevents these theories offering much restraint on the rapid rises in prison populations over recent decades. It then explores an alternative democratic theory by setting out: i) the limited conditions in which the citizen-rulers of a democratic state would authorise the state to deprive them of liberty; ii) the still more limited conditions in which a democratic state would have good reason to act on that authorisation; iii) the inherent decremental and abolitionist tendency of a penal system justified by the conditions of democratic self-government; iv) the reasons why non-citizens would be subject to equal treatment by the penal law of a democracy; v) how a democratic penal system mitigates the inherent social injustice of criminal justice. The paper argues that this democratic theory offers more than a normative aspiration for the practice of state punishment by showing how it can also explain the recent experience of rising prison populations as one consequence of the 'post-democratic' political tendencies of the same period.