Punishment and Inequality in America

Introduction

Introduction In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were dispatched to America to study the penitentiary, a novel institution generating great discussion among the social reformers of Europe. At that time, two institutions —Auburn State Prison in New York and the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia—offered leading examples of a new approach to the public management of criminals. The institutions were devised for moral correction . Rigorous programs of work and isolation would remedy the moral defects of criminal offenders so they might safely return to society. The penitentiary was billed as a triumph of progressive thinking that provided a humane and rational alternative to the disorderly prisons and houses of correction in Europe. Tocqueville and Beaumont were just two of many official visitors from Europe who toured the prisons in the 1830s, eager to view the leading edge of social reform. Grand projects in crime control often spring from deep fissures in the social order. Tocqueville and Beaumont saw this clearly, despairing of “a state of disquiet” in French society. Writing in 1833, they traced the need for prison reform to a restless energy in the minds of men “that consumes society for want of other prey.”1 This moral decline was compounded by the material deprivation of the French working class, “whose corruption, beginning in misery, is completed in prison.” Instead of deflecting vice and poverty, the French prisons made things worse—aggravating immiseration and immorality .2 America offered a fresh alternative. Although the prisons that provided the pretext for Tocqueville’s American tour did not figure in his observations on American democracy, democratic aspirations were faintly inscribed on the Auburn and Pennsylvania penitentiaries . The project of rehabilitation assumed an innate moral equality among men that could be restored to criminals through penal discipline. Rehabilitative institutions comprised part of a primitive social democracy that conferred not just the vote and freedom of association but also a minimal equality of life chances. Despite curtailing freedom (and applying corporal punishment), the prison posed no basic threat to democracy because the official ideology of rehabilitation promised to reestablish the social membership of those who had fallen into poverty and crime. In practice, of course, the rehabilitative ideal was regularly compromised and in the South it barely took hold at all. In conception at least, and sometimes in practice, the prison sat comfortably alongside an array of welfare institutions that included not only reformatories and asylums but also public schools, hospitals, and rudimentary schemes for social insurance. Like other welfare institutions, the prison was conceived to rescue the citizenship of the unfortunate, the poor, and the deviant. The story of this book begins one hundred and forty years later, in the 1970s, when the American penal system embarked on another journey of institutional change. The latest revolution in criminal punishment followed some of the logic of its nineteenth-century predecessor. Shifts in the structure of society and politics forced changes in criminal justice, with large consequences for the quality of American democracy. Through the last decades of the twentieth century, the patchwork system of American criminal justice turned away from the rehabilitative project first attempted in New York and Pennsylvania. By the 1970s, policy experts were skeptical that prisons could prevent crime by reforming their inmates. Incarceration would be used less for rehabilitation than for incapacitation, deterrence, and punishment. Politicians vowed to get tough on crime. State lawmakers abandoned the rehabilitative ideals etched in the law of criminal sentencing and opted for mandatory prison terms, the abolition of parole, and long sentences for felons on their second and third convictions. Tough new sentences were attached to narcotics offenses as the federal government waged first a war on crime, then a war on drugs. Locked facilities proliferated around the country 2 PUNISHMENT AND INEQUALITY IN AMERICA to cope with the burgeoning penal population. Prison construction became an instrument for regional development as small towns lobbied for correctional facilities and resisted prison closure. Prisons themselves changed as a result of the punitive turn in criminal justice . Budgets tightened for education and work programs. But some social service function remained as the penal system assumed new responsibilities for public health, delivering treatment on a large scale for mental illness, tuberculosis , HIV/AIDS, and hepatitis C. High-risk inmates were gathered in supermax facilities that placed entire prison populations in solitary confinement . In a thousand ways, large and small...