Caught by Gottschalk Marie;

Author:Gottschalk, Marie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Bring It On

The Future of Penal Reform, the Carceral State, and American Politics

Life is about transitions and transcending one’s limitations, and sooner or later, for better or for worse, we all make or miss the transition that will define who we are and, most importantly, choose to be. No longer will the state define me.

I will dare to define myself.1

—ROBERT SALEEM HOLBROOK

The carceral state is deeply entangled in the political, economic, and social fabric of the United States. But in plotting a way out, we must guard against succumbing to “dystopian despair.”2 We need to resist the belief that the only way to raze the carceral state is to tackle the “root causes” of crime—massive unemployment, massive poverty, and unconscionable levels of social and economic inequality stratified by race, ethnicity, and gender. Ameliorating the deeper structural problems that foster such high levels of inequality in U.S. society is an admirable goal. But if the aim is to slash the country’s incarceration rate and undo its harmful collateral consequences over the next few years, not the next few decades, the root causes approach to progressive penal reform, however well intentioned, is shortsighted.

Four decades ago, the United States had many of the same structural problems it has today—though not to the same degree—but it did not have such an expansive penal system. Since then, the United States has embarked on a war on drugs and a broader war on crime characterized by penal policies unprecedented in modern U.S. history and unheard of or disdained in other industrialized democracies. Experts on crime and punishment now generally agree that changes in public policies—not dramatic changes in criminal behavior—propelled the decades-long prison boom in the United States.3 In short, it was about the time, not about the crime. The focus on structural problems overshadows the fact that numerous people are serving time today for nonviolent offenses, many of them property or petty drug offenses, that would not warrant a sentence in many other countries. Many others are serving savagely long sentences for violent offenses even though they no longer pose serious threats to public safety.

If we designate structural problems the centerpiece of any plan to dismantle the carceral state, we are essentially accepting that the extensive U.S. penal system is here to stay for a very long time to come. After all, structural problems call for comprehensive, often expensive, long-term solutions and commitments. Long-term fixes are problematic not just because they take a long time, but also because they are harder to sustain from one change of administration to the next (especially in the United States, which lacks a respected, expert, and politically insulated civil service). Furthermore, as elaborated in this chapter, a focus on structural problems conflates two problems that are actually quite distinct—the problem of mass incarceration and the problem of crime.

Major decarcerations that have occurred in other places and at other times came about primarily as a result of comprehensive changes in penal policy rather than by mounting a sustained attack on structural problems and the root causes of crime.

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