Imagining a Greater Justice by Samuel H. Pillsbury

Author:Samuel H. Pillsbury [Pillsbury, Samuel H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9780429756450
Google: YTeDDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-11T03:45:22+00:00

Who Goes to Prison?

I was in Palm Springs [California] a couple of months ago, and this woman was like, “I’m from Texas, I’m the judge in a criminal [court], and I never realized that the people I was sentencing were really people.”

Laverne Cox, actor on Orange is the New Black, on the impact the television series has had on viewers’ view of prisoners3

So who are these people who go to prison? One answer is legal: people convicted of serious crimes. Prisoners are defined by their offenses. This is the public’s predominant view, and to a large extent the perspective of prison authorities as well. Criminal record weighs heavily in determining what facility prisoners will go to and where they will be housed in the facility. It is the predominant perspective of modern parole boards. Certainly I have emphasized the connection between crimes of violence and punishment in this book. To meet the requirements of moral regard, though, we must consider prisoners as human beings with distinct histories who will be affected in different ways by the prison experience.

Visitors entering a prison for the first time are often surprised less by the strange (everyone expects strange) than by the apparently ordinary. The basic interior features of painted concrete block walls, concrete floors and metal doors are reminiscent of schools and other hard-use public buildings. As for the inmates, while they wear prison uniforms and represent a distinct demographic—all of one sex, no children, almost no elderly and a disproportionate number of people of color—they do not otherwise appear exceptional. Prisoners do not wear signs declaring their criminal offenses. With the exception of those who have taken tattooing to extremes, their involvement in wrongdoing is not written on their faces. They are just people. And so, for a moment, let us consider them that way. Do they have any other notable characteristics besides their crimes of conviction? They do, and they are striking. As a group, prison inmates are predominantly males under 40, come from poverty, are poorly educated, have significant histories of trauma and drug and alcohol abuse and as a group have a high rate of mental illness.

Although the numbers of girls and women incarcerated has greatly increased in recent years, and at a quicker rate than for males, the overwhelming majority of prisoners in the United States are still male. Ninety-three percent of inmates in prisons are male; seven percent are female.4

Prison inmates are younger than the general population, with the great majority under the age of 40.5 The number of older inmates has grown considerably, however, a direct result of the increase in life sentences given over the last 30 years.

Nationally, the majority of American prisoners are African-American or Hispanic, even though whites remain the significant majority in the general population of the US. In 2011, 38 percent of state and federal prisoners were African American, 35 percent were White and 21 percent were Hispanic.6 For a sense of how these figures compare with the general population, consider the statistical risk of incarceration by race.

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