Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes* This is the edited text of an article that originally appeared in Daedalus, vol. 140, no. 3, summer 2010.1. See Smith (Citation1996: 42) for a stimulating discussion of the notion of revanche as an extended and multiform “visceral reaction in the public discourse against the liberalism of the post-1960s period and an all-out attack on the social policy structure that emanated from the New Deal and the immediate postwar era,” and Flamm (Citation2005) for a painstaking account of how the conflation of racial tumult, anti-war protest, civil disorder and street crime laid the social foundation for the political demand for “law and order” in the wake of the class and racial dislocations of the sixties.2. The spiteful tenor of Giuliani's campaign of “class cleansing” of the streets and its strident racial overtones are captured by Neil Smith's (Citation1998) “Giuliani Time”.3. The sheer scale of American jails puts them in a class of their own. In 2000, the three largest custodial complexes in the Western world were the jails of Los Angeles (23,000 inmates), New York (18,000) and Chicago (10,000). By contrast, the largest penitentiary center in Europe, the Fleury-Mérogis prison just south of Paris, held 3900 and is considered grotesquely oversized by European standards.4. The last close-up study of the daily functioning of a big-city jail and its impact on the urban poor, John Irwin's (Citation1985) fine ethnography of San Francisco's jail, dates from 30 years ago.5. The national DNA database from crime scenes, persons “known-to-the-police,” and (former) convicts compiled by the FBI (under the Combined DNA Index System CODIS program) more than doubled over the past five years alone to reach eight million offender profiles. Its explosive expansion, fed by technological innovation and organizational imperatives, is springing a new “racialized dragnet” thrown primarily at lower-class black men due to their massive overrepresentation among persons stopped by police (Duster Citation2010).6. See Comfort (Citation2007) for an extended analysis of ramifying penal disabilities outside of prison walls.7. “The war on crime – with its constituent imagery that melded the burning cities of the 1960s urban riots with the face of Willie Horton as (every) black man, murderer, rapist of a white woman – remade party affiliations and then remade the parties themselves, as the war came to be embraced and stridently promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike.” (Frampton et al. Citation2008: 7)8. Ironically, the generalized notion was first broached, not in the US prison debate, but in Western Europe by the justice official and scholar Jean-Paul Jean (Citation1995) in a discussion of the “mass incarceration of drug addicts” in French jails. (I used the term myself in several publications between 1997 and 2005, so this conceptual revision is in part a self-critique).9. To be sure, Garland (Citation2001) singles out two “essential features” that define mass incarceration: “sheer numbers” (that is, “a rate of imprisonment and a size of prison population that is markedly above the historical and comparative norm for societies of this type”) and “the social concentration of mass imprisonment's effects” (“when it becomes the imprisonment of whole groups of the population,” in this case “young black males in large urban centers”). But it is not clear why the first property would not suffice to characterize the phenomenon and what “markedly above” entails. Next, there is a logical contradiction between the two features of mass reach and concentrated impact. Lastly, Harcourt (Citation2006) has pointed out that the US, between 1938 and 1962, sported rates of forcible custody exceeding 600 per 100,000 residents – almost as high as the present rate of incarceration – if one merges statistics on penal confinement and mental asylums.10. The martial trope of the “War on crime” has similarly hindered analysis of the transformation and workings of criminal policy. This belligerent designation – espoused alike by advocates and critics of expanded incarceration – is triply misleading: it presents civilian measures aimed at citizens as a military campaign against foreign foes; it purports to fight “crime” generically when it targets a narrow strand of illegalities (street offenses in the segregated lower-class districts of the city); and it abstracts the criminal justice wing from the broader revamping of the state in which the expansion of prisonfare was accompanied by the cutting back of welfare.11. The only exception to this class rule turns up in those countries and periods where the prison is used extensively as an instrument of political repression (Neier Citation1995).12. Lower-class black women come next as the category with the fastest increase in incarceration over the past two decades, leading to more African American females being under lock than there are total women confined in all of Western Europe. But their capture comes largely as a by-product of the aggressive rolling out of penal policies aimed primarily at their lovers, kin and neighbors (men make up 94% of all convicts in the nation). In any case, the number of female inmates pales before the ranks of the millions of girlfriends and wives of convicts who are subjected to “secondary prisonization” due to the judicial status of their partner (Comfort Citation2008).13. The increase of this index of punitiveness is 299% for “violent crimes” as against 495% for “index crimes” (aggregating violent crime and the major categories of property crime), confirming that the penal state has grown especially more severe towards lesser offenses and thus confines many more marginal delinquents than in the past.14. In media and policy debates leading to the 1996 termination of welfare, three racialized figures offered lurid incarnations of “dependency”: the flamboyant and wily “welfare queen,” the immature and irresponsible “teenage mother,” and the aimless and jobless “deadbeat dad.” All three were stereotypically portrayed as black residents of the dilapidated inner city.15. Contrary to the dominant public vision, research has consistently shown the superiority of rehabilitation over retribution: “Supervision and sanctions, at best, show modest mean reductions in recidivism and, in some instances, have the opposite effect and increase reoffense rates. The mean recidivism effects found in studies of rehabilitation treatment, by comparison, are consistently positive and relatively large” (Lipsey and Cullen Citation2007: 297). That hardened criminals do change and turn their lives around is shown by Maruna (Citation2001); that even “lifers” imprisoned for homicide find pathways to redemption is demonstrated by Irwin (Citation2009).16. See the powerful arguments of Pattillo (Citation2008) for immediately “investing in poor black neighborhoods ‘as is',” instead of pursuing long-term strategies of dispersal or mixing that are both inefficient and detrimental to the pressing needs and distinct interests of the urban minority poor.