America Incarcerated

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

This new system of punitive ideas is aided by a new relationship between the media, the politicians, and the public. A handful of cases in which a predator does an awful thing to an innocent get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. This attention typically bears no relation to the frequency of the particular type of crime, yet laws—such as three-strikes laws that can give mandatory life sentences to nonviolent drug offenders—and political careers are made on the basis of the public’s reaction to media coverage of such crimes.

Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?

The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start. The punitive turn in the nation’s social policy—intimately connected with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order—can be fully grasped only when it is viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history. There is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism.

This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues—persuasively, I think—that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents (consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin) shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime:

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print