Struggle on Their Minds by Alex Zamalin

Author:Alex Zamalin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

PUNISHMENT AND RACE

Very few thinkers have, like Davis, so eloquently countered the view that state-enacted punishment is nothing but a race-neutral, strategic response meant to deter individuals from crime.21 Central to this criminological position was a theory of individual behavior, which, as famously expressed by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker as early as 1968, viewed people as rational actors—as economic man, homo economicus. Becker’s rational subject could choose when to commit a crime and would calculate whether punishment was a cost worth incurring for the gain of succeeding. “A person commits an offence,” he wrote, “if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could get by using his time and other resources at his activities.”22 If Becker was right—as many Democrats and Republicans believed him to be—then a spirit of fairness seemed to animate both President Richard Nixon’s “law-and-order” rhetoric in the early 1970s and James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s theory of “broken-windows” policing, which argued in the 1980s that low-level criminal offenders such as petty drug dealers, drug addicts, burglars, and the homeless population needed to be swept off the streets. “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree,” they wrote, “that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.”23 In their own estimate, neither Nixon’s nor Wilson and Kelling’s defense of punishment was discriminatory—that is, neither was based on gender, race, sexuality, or class background. After all, crime was an equal-opportunity endeavor enacted by profit maximizers who thought it was simply in their self-interest. Punishment, like crime, was thus also something of an equal-opportunity practice.

Davis saw things differently. “The prison,” she claimed, “reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operate in clandestine ways,” but “they are rarely recognized as racist.”24 Like Newton, Davis experienced punishment firsthand when she spent over a year in jail for criminal conspiracy after purchasing a firearm that was used by Jonathan Jackson, a seventeen-year-old African American radical who initiated a tense hostage situation in a California courtroom that led to a confrontation with police, leaving several people wounded and one dead. Although eventually acquitted of these charges, Davis came to understand that punishment disproportionately centered its attention upon and affected certain social groups. She agreed with Michel Foucault that the modern penitentiary had a history—that it was produced through eighteenth-century liberal-humanitarian discourses of rehabilitation and minimizing suffering.25 But she criticized Foucault for overlooking the way that prisons were built upon and were extensions of racial orders. “A genealogy of imprisonment that would differ significantly from Foucault’s,” she explained, would “accentuate the links between confinement, punishment and race.”26 Even if one were to concede that there was something “race free” about Becker’s notion of the criminal as rational actor, nothing was “race free” about a state-sanctioned system of punishment—informed by a network of policing and prisons—that had long treated acts committed by people of color as criminal offences in ways not identical to how it treated similar acts by white Americans.

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