Reforming a Prison Nation

[marmar]

from the American Prospect:


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 | web only



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. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=reforming_a_prison_nation