Consider the following from a 2006 Fact Sheet from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency:
1. The U.S incarcerates the largest number of people in the world.
2. The incarceration rate in the U.S. is four times the world average.
3. Some individual U.S. states imprison up to six times as many people as do nations of comparable population.
4. The U.S. imprisons the most women in the world.
5. Crime rates do not account for incarceration rates.
6. The U.S. has less than 5% of the world's population but over 23% of the world's incarcerated people.
This post was prompted upon learning that the "criminal turned criminologist," John Irwin, died last month. Having served time in Soledad Prison for armed robbery, Irwin "became one of the nation's foremost advocates for compassionate reform of the prison system, the author of six heralded books dissecting criminal justice, and a tenured sociology professor at San Francisco State University." Among Professor Irwin's works was Prisons in Turmoil (1980), a book that moved me to devote more of my discretionary time as an undergraduate at university to autodidactic research on crime and punishment. I still recall the day I came across a used copy of his book when browsing through our town's best used bookstore: seeing the title on the spine, I was curious, but after pulling the book from the shelf, it was what I learned from the back cover that intrigued me. The author was described as a “former prisoner at Soledad” with a “Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley,” a “leader in the prisoners’ union movement” and a “tenured Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State College.” And the book's contents did not disappoint. The following in particular left a lasting impression:
When we return to the search for a more humane and rational response to crime, we must keep in mind that the prison is tied to other social and political arrangements that limit what changes are possible. The criminal justice system in general is at least partially involved, directly and indirectly, advertently and inadvertently, in repressing groups and classes of people and in maintaining unfair social, political, and economic relationships. Fundamental changes in its operation are impossible unless some higher degree of social justice has been achieved and the criminal justice system is relieved of these tasks.[….]
One of the important obstacles that must be removed is the public conception of the prisoner. Presently, this conception is formed from the rare, but celebrated and horrendous crimes, such as mass murders by the Manson cult, Juan Carona, or the 'Hillside Strangler.' Whereas prisoners like George Jackson, viewed as a heroic revolutionary fighting back from years of excessive punishment for a minor crime (an eighty-dollar robbery), shaped the conception of the prisoner in the early 1970s, persons like 'Son of Sam' do so today. These extraordinary cases distort the reality. Most prisoners are still in prison for relatively petty crimes, and even those convicted of the more serious crimes must be understood in the context of society in the United States. What we need is a new theory of crime and penology, one that is quite simple. It is based on the assumption that prisoners are human beings and not a different species from free citizens. Prisoners are special only because they have been convicted of a serious crime. But they did so in a society that produces a lot of crime, a society, in fact, in which a high percentage of the population commits serious crime. Those convicted of serious crimes must be punished and imprisoned, because it is the only option that satisfies the retributive need and is sufficiently humane. Knowing that imprisonment itself if very punitive, we need not punish above and beyond imprisonment. This means that we need not and must not degrade, provoke, nor excessively deprive the human beings we have placed in prison. It also means that we must not operate discriminatory systems that select which individuals should be sent to prison and, once incarcerated, who should be given different levels of punishment.
Since we assume that convicts are humans like us and are capable of myriad courses of action, honorable and dishonorable, we also assume that they will act honorably, given a real choice. This means that we provide them with the resources to achieve self-determination, dignity, and self-respect. This theory continues to be rejected not because it is invalid, but because it challenges beliefs and values to which large segments of the population comfortably cling. [….] In pushing this theory, I admit that many prisoners, like many free citizens, act like monsters. But they are not monsters and often choose to act like monsters when their only other real option is to be totally disrespected or completely ignored, while being deprived, degraded, abused, or harassed.” [emphasis added]
In honor of Irwin, I want to suggest a fairly manageable list of titles that illustrate the ongoing practice of "cruel and unusual punishments" in our prison system as well as a concern with some of the issues relevant to "the search for a more humane and rational response to crime:"
Abramsky, Sasha. American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The Free Press, 2010. Barry, Brian. "The Making of the Black Gulag," from his Why Social Justice Matters. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005, Chapter 7, pp. 95-105. Brook, Daniel. "History of Hard Time: Solitary Confinement, Then and Now," Legal Affairs (January/February 2003). Brook, Daniel. "The Problem of Prison Rape," Legal Affairs (March/April 2004). Cole, David. No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System. New York: The Free Press, 1999. Dayan, Colin. The Story of Cruel & Unusual. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (A Boston Review Book), 2007. Garland, David, ed. Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences. London: Sage, 2001. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Human Rights Watch (2001) "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons." http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/ Human Rights Watch (2003) "Ill-Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness." http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1003/ Irwin, John. The Felon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990 ed. Irwin, John. The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury. Lynch, Mona. Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Rhodes, Lorna A. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. Santos, Michael G. Inside: Life Behind Bars in America. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006. Simon, Jonathan. Governing Through Crime.... New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Western, Bruce. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006.
See too, "Criminal Law, Punishment & Prisons: A Selected Bibliography." (Thanks to Jim Chen for making this compilation available for download.)
And last but not least, Sara Mayeux, "a joint JD-American History PhD candidate at Stanford University, who focuses on the history of criminal law, procedure, and punishment," maintains the superlative Prison Law Blog.
Update: I've just learned of this article in the latest NYRB (March 11, 2010) by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow: "The Rape of American Prisoners."
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