False Dawn by John Gray

Author:John Gray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781783782598
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2015-05-05T04:30:00+00:00

For all crimes of violence apart from homicide American levels are considerably higher than those of post-communist Russia. In 1993, for every 100,000 people there were 264 robberies (as against 124 in Russia), 442 assaults (compared with 27 in Russia) and 43 rapes (by comparison with 9.7 in Russia).34 However, in an ominous development, levels of property crime in Britain have recently surpassed those in the US, though the US remains far ahead of all other advanced western countries in its levels of lethal violence.

Murders of children are especially common in the United States. Nearly three-quarters of all murders of children in the industrialized world occur in the US. The US has by far the highest rates of childhood suicide, homicide and firearms-related deaths of any of the world’s twenty-six richest countries.35

Part of the explanation lies in America’s incorrigible gun culture. Part comes from the fact that the economic redundancy of the family has left more children unsupervised than in other countries. In 1987 infant mortality in East Harlem and Washington DC was roughly the same as that in Malaysia, Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union.36 A baby born in Shanghai in 1995 was less likely to die in its first year of life, more likely to learn how to read, and could expect to live two years longer (seventy-six years) than an infant born in New York.37

High rates of crime and incarceration in the US go in tandem with equally exceptional levels of litigation and numbers of lawyers. America has at least one-third of the world’s practising lawyers. In 1991 there were around 700,000 lawyers in the United States, with a figure of around 850,000 being projected for the turn of the century. At present there are over 300 lawyers per 100,000 Americans, as compared with 12 per 100,000 in Japan, just over a hundred per 100,000 in Britain and just under a hundred per 100,000 in Germany.38 Tort liability payments accounted for about 2.5 per cent of American GNP in 1987, and for about eight times less (0.3) in Japan.39

These figures on incarceration, violent crime and litigation portray a society in which the law has become almost the only functioning social institution and prisons among the few remaining means of social control.

The private, gated communities whose high walls and electronic security devices protect their inmates from the dangers of the society they have deserted are a mirror image of America’s prisons. They stand as a symbol of the hollowing-out of other social institutions – the family, the neighbourhood, even the business corporation – that in the past supported a functioning society. The combination of high-tech prisons, walled-off proprietary communities and virtual corporations may come to be recognized as an emblem of early twenty-first-century America.

In late twentieth-century America, the free market has become the engine of a perverse modernity. The prophet of today’s America is not Jefferson or Madison. Still less is it Burke. It is Jeremy Bentham, the nineteenth-century British Enlightenment thinker who dreamed of a hyper-modern society that had been reconstructed on the model of an ideal prison.

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