July/August 2001
Volume 53, Number 3
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July/August 2001 |
Volume 53, Number 3 |
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OF THE MONTH The prison is so prominent an institution in present-day society that it is difficult to remember that the prison as a place of punishment is only a little more than two hundred years old. It emerged first in the United States and soon after in Europe, and its early phase of development was that of 1789-1848, conforming to what historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed The Age of Revolution. It was thus a product of the dual revolution that formed the basis for modern capitalism: the industrial revolution centered in Britain and the political revolution that took place in the United States and France. The “New” Criminal Justice System:
State Repression from 1968 to 2001 Consider again the numbers: in the last twenty years the Justice Department's budget grew by 900 percent; over 60 percent of all prisoners are in for non-violent drug crimes; an estimated one-in-three black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under some type of criminal justice control or sought on a warrant; nationwide some 6.5 million people are in prison, on parole or probation. From the left it is clear that the United States is an over-policed, surveillance society that uses prison as one of its central social institutions. Lawyers, Jails, and
the Law’s Fake Bargains Assume that Canada and the Western European countries have about the right number of people in jail. Assume that the social problem of crime is not terribly different in those countries than in the United States. Understand that our incarceration rate is five to eight times that of those other countries. If these assumptions, and this understanding, are even nearly valid, 80 percent of the people in American jails should not be there. After years of neglect, the issue of women in prison has begun to receive attention in this country. Media accounts of overcrowding, lengthening sentences, and horrendous medical care in women's prisons appear regularly. Amnesty International-long known for ignoring human rights abuses inside United States prisons and jails-issued a report, two days shy of International Women's Day 2001, documenting over 1,000 cases of sexual abuse of U.S. women prisoners by their jailers. However, we seldom hear from these women themselves. And we never hear from women incarcerated for their political actions. Prisoners of War For you are prisoners of war, in an enemy's country-of a war, too, that is unrivaled for its injustice, cruelty, meanness… --Frederick Douglass(1850)1 While the revered creator and abolitionist was doubtless addressing the barbaric treatment of four million of his people held in thralldom in the U.S. slave states, his voice resonates down through the corridors of time, touching and informing us as a new century dawns. At first blush, it may seem that Douglass was making reference to the horrific Civil War, but the dating sets his trenchant observation at fully a decade before the Confederates fired upon Fort Sumter, South Carolina, considered the opening salvo in the ensuing four years of armed conflict. What the astute Douglass was referring to, then, was an unofficial, undeclared, yet "unrivaled" conflict: a war against a people. His people. Black people. Disablement,
Prison, and Historical Segregation The story of disablement and the prison industrial complex must begin with a trail of telling numbers: a disproportionate number of persons incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails are disabled. Though Census Bureau data suggest that disabled persons represent roughly one-fifth of the total population, prevalence of disability among prisoners is startlingly higher, for reasons we will examine later. While no reliable cross- disability demographics have been compiled nationwide, numerous studies now enable us to make educated estimates regarding the incidence of various disability categories among incarcerated persons. Hearing loss, for example, is estimated to occur in 30 percent of the prison population, while estimates of the prevalence of mental retardation among prisoners range from 3 to 9.5 percent. Prisoners are Citizens It's an ugly place. Even with subtle hints of spring in the atmosphere and the early-morning sun highlighting houses in the distance across the Hudson, there's something thick and rancid in the aura of the place. It's as if the colors of the few trees and struggling grass plots and stolid buildings have all been crushed and melded together to form a soupy, lifeless gray. Stone and rusted iron, shiny, razored concertina metal rolling across all the perimeters give the place an air of cruelty and constant suffering. Reflections from This Side of the Razor
Wire I looked up at the sky, the Seminole sky, the sky of the young chief Osceola, the sky that today looks down on this federal prison in Coleman, Florida. Contemplating the irony that history posed before me, I imagined Seminole villages where African slaves in search of freedom sought refuge and lived peacefully with the indigenous folk, often marrying with them and forming productive villages of the mixed peoples. Yet, here too, in central Florida, Andrew Jackson forced the indigenous off their lands, keeping for himself and his what lands he wished. These were the lands of the Seminole War of 1818, benignly taught in schools as the Florida Purchase of 1819. The Death Penalty and Globalization in
Nigeria, the United States, and Europe The most ominous social phenomena shaping the U.S. political economy in the 1980s and 1990s have undoubtedly been: (1) the mass incarceration of young proletarian men and women, mostly black and Hispanic, and (2) not only the return to the death penalty (after the moratorium of the 1972-1976 period) but the constant escalation in the number of executions. Teaching in Prison If prisons were places people who have committed serious crimes were sent to pay a debt to society, and to be rehabilitated to return to society as healthy members of it, then at least the following things would be true. First, people who had not committed serious crimes would not be in prison at all. Drug users and persons with mental illnesses would receive treatment and would live in their communities, either at home or in safe and hospitable facilities run as public entities. Those who had committed minor criminal offences, such as shoplifting, would be given non-prison sentences involving counseling and community service. As much as possible, communities would be involved in both setting the penalties and organizing and participating in the treatment. Ironically, this was typically the case in American Indian communities, now so ravaged by the U.S. criminal injustice system. Prison Advocacy in a Time of Capital
Disaccumulation Any analysis of contemporary U.S. society must seek to explain the trends in the last two decades toward the confinement of more and more persons behind bars, toward harsher conditions of incarceration, toward indiscriminate use of the death penalty, and toward the disproportionate incidence of all of the above on blacks and Hispanics. In Ohio, for example, African Americans constitute about half of the 45,000 persons imprisoned, about half of the two hundred men on death row, and about two-thirds of the four-hundred-plus prisoners at the Youngstown supermax (a supermax prison is one in which prisoners are allowed virtually no contact with one another, and are subjected to constant and very sophisticated surveillance). |
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About the Editors: Paul M. Sweezy · Harry Magdoff If you have any questions or comments |
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