Locked In by John Pfaff

Author:John Pfaff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

Defect 3: Geography

Another defect in the politics of punishment, one we have seen time and again in this book, is the complicated interaction of race, geography, and punishment.26 In general, people are pulled in two directions: they want to see those who offend punished to ensure their own safety, but they don’t want to see their friends, neighbors, and family members suffer the costs of avoidable or unjust punishment. One partial explanation, then, for why prison populations remained stable prior to the 1960s is that those who lived in high-crime urban neighborhoods—Irish, Italians, and other white immigrant communities—also tended to have political control over them, or at least over the local police and prosecutors. Those in charge of enforcement felt both the costs of unprevented crime and the costs of unnecessary punishment. In the postwar era, however, the Irish, Italians, and other whites began moving to the suburbs, while blacks—who were excluded from the suburbs—continued moving to northern cities as part of the tail end of the Great Migration. These shifting demographics, however, were not reflected in the criminal justice system, which continued to be dominated by whites.27 Those who exerted power in the criminal justice system were no longer bearing the brunt of the costs associated with either crime or enforcement. At first, the new suburbanites were indifferent to urban crime, and enforcement actually declined even as crime rose in the 1960s. The urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s, however, galvanized suburban voters. And because those suburban voters didn’t feel the costs of enforcement, they overreacted, at times strongly.

This situation persists today. The suburbs remain disproportionately white, continue to face substantially lower crime rates than cities, and still exert undue influence on who is elected to prosecute disproportionately urban crime. The result, predictably, is overly aggressive prosecutorial behavior. Although we have little data on how prosecutors make their decisions, it’s reasonable to assume that when they are deciding whether to file charges, they will put more weight on the benefits of safety (as desired by white suburbanites) than on the costs of wrongful convictions or excessive punishment (which is more of a concern for black urbanites—who obviously value and campaign for safety, but who are also more aware of the costs of enforcement).28

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