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>> 47 3 The Punishment Imperative as a Grand Social Experiment It’s a government program whose impact rivals the New Deal. It pushes whole communities out of society’s mainstream. It costs tens of billions of dollars a year. . . . What if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed. And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multi-billion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American mainstream? That’s how America should think about its growing prison system. —Christopher Shea, 20071 A Grand Social Experiment In the previous chapter we reviewed some of the major trends in prison population growth over the past several decades and introduced some of the most influential explanations for that growth. We showed that the growthofpunishment—especiallyimprisonment—overthelastfortyyears hasbeenunprecedentedinU.S.historyandoutstripsothernations’experiences . We have made the case that this shift in U.S. policy for the most part came about not as a consequence of changes in rates of crime but rather as a consequence of changes in our orientation to crime and in the policies thatwereusedtodealwithcrimeasasocialproblem.Inaveryrealsense,it maybesaidthatwhenitcametotheproblemofcrime,Americaengagedin something of a grand social policy experiment of dramatic proportions. In this chapter, we consider this metaphor of grand social experiments. There has, in U.S. history, been a tradition of grand experiments to confront vexingsocialissues .Wearguethatitisusefultothinkofpunishmentinthelate twentiethcenturyasoneofthosegrandsocialexperiments,andwecallthe grandpenalexperimentofourtime“ThePunishmentImperative.” 48 > 49 Second, there is a coalescence of political will and public enthusiasm for a “new approach.” What makes a grand experiment possible is not the mere fact of an overarching problem, but the companion fact that public frustration with the problem opens the door to new possibilities for tackling the problem—a “window of opportunity” in the policy arena.5 The status quo—the old way of doing business—comes to be widely seen as a failure. This, in turn, suggests that new strategies are called for. Those with political agendas offer new definitions of the underlying nature of the problem, and these new definitions promote changes in action, often calling for radical change. Third, there is an idea that gains momentum as a widely accepted new way of addressing the pressing problem. Coming out of the shift in the way the problem is perceived by the broad public—the way the problem is socially “defined”—is a logical strategy for attacking the problem. The “grand social experiment” is thus the adoption of a new, largely unproven strategy for a high-priority social problem based on a reformulated understanding of that problem. By these criteria, it is an “experiment.” Grand social experiments gain momentum from three facts. First, the immensity of the problem, at least as it is present in the public consciousness , creates a sense that “something must be done.” Second, constituencies that often oppose one another in other political contexts become aligned in this one, enabling a wide acceptance of the need not just for a new strategy but for a particular type of strategy. The ordinary kinds of compromises required for political change are diminished, as the potential opposition to the “grand idea” is suppressed in the face of the coalesced forces. Third, the action itself is the solution to the problem . That is, merely passing laws that enact the new strategy abates the pressure for action. This implies that “grand” social experiments are evaluated less by their accomplishments in the long-term alleviation of the problem than they are by their ability, in the short run, to address the public demand for action. Grand social experiments do not just calm public anxieties—they also have “results,” or, perhaps more precisely, consequences. Because the experiments are grand, the results and consequences are often 50 > 51 for the New Deal can only be described as a broad-based social movement . Through social protest, the poor, the unemployed, the working and middle classes were able to exert considerable political pressure on the government to get something done.10 The New Deal was not simply a response to an economy in crisis; it was a response to an economy in crisis and a growing and increasingly vocal class of unemployed citizens demanding an immediate and far-reaching response. Tackling a problem as enormous as the one that Americans faced at the beginning of the 1930s required a radical rethinking of the structure of the U.S. economy. By most historical accounts, the New Deal, a series of economic recovery programs launched between 1933 and 1940, actually involved two New Deals...

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