Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison

Chapter 3. The Conditions That Produce Catastrophic Penal Institutions

CHAPTER 3 The Conditions That Produce Catastrophic Penal Institutions The most in›uential work that provided policymakers of the late twentieth century with a clear conception and rationale for a newly invigorated strategy of law and order was conservative political scientist James Q. Wilson’s Thinking about Crime. According to Wilson, the only realistic policy response was for government to address crime in terms of a cost-bene‹t analysis that emphasized crime control and the rational choices of criminals. As Malcolm Feeley describes it, Wilson’s work became the “bible of the new criminology” and “shaped thinking about crime prevention at every level, from the White House to local police chiefs.”1 While Wilson’s ideas were obviously very in›uential, it is critical to note that what ultimately led to the funding of harsh sentencing policies—and thus, in large measure, to their implementation—was the larger economic program that ‹scally conservative legislatures from across the United States had begun to implement in the decades before the publication of Thinking about Crime. If Wilson’s Thinking about Crime was the new “criminology bible,” economist Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom was the bible of the new economy. Friedman’s central thesis was that government’s mismanagement of the U.S. economy was the chief cause behind the 43 Great Depression of the 1930s. But Friedman was hardly antigovernment . In fact, he vigorously argued for a centralized bureaucracy that would manage all economic activity through private entities and free markets. Friedman’s neoliberal approach viewed the free market as the only viable response to addressing a slew of societal ills, from education to poverty—problems that Friedman argued government was not well suited to address. Especially since the Reagan era, when Friedman served as a primary economic advisor, the privatization of government services in the United States has been widespread.2 Military defense had been privatized long before. Since the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Defense had increasingly begun to rely on for-pro‹t defense ‹rms and contractors, in what President Eisenhower famously described as the rise of a “military industrial complex.”3 But it was not until the 1980s that Friedman’s neoliberal strategy would have its most felt impact on everything from education to welfare and health care.4 At that time, America’s new war on crime and its aggressive incarceration policies would result in widespread state deregulation and, subsequently, in contracts to private companies involved especially in jail and prison construction, prison laundry, catering, and numerous other services utilized within penal institutions.5 Ironically, Friedman himself was no advocate of mass incarceration policies. In 1972, he wrote a Newsweek editorial calling for the legalization of drugs, and twenty years later, he criticized harsh sentencing laws as counterproductive.6 But in a perverse irony, Friedman’s call for aggressive privatization has endured as a driving force for sustaining the incarceration boom in the wake of policies of especially punitive drug sentencing and ending welfare as we know it. Indeed, in the last three decades, government-funded programs for poor, racially aggrieved citizens have been aggressively turned over to for-pro‹t companies.7 In the decade since the initiation of the welfare reform policy ushered in by Clinton-era U.S. Treasury secretary and neoliberal zealot Robert Ruben, economic inequalities in the United States have deepened, and incarceration rates have continued to skyrocket. By contrast to Friedman’s vision of improved social welfare driven by aggressive private markets, moral objectives of helping marginalized communities through privatization have largely been undercut by the bottom-line cost-cutting mentalities of the for-pro‹t companies that 44 dying inside the U.S. government has increasingly relied on for running many of its crucial, traditionally public functions.8 This chapter demonstrates how recent policies of law and order and of economics converged with a politics of racial hysteria in ways that produced overcrowded, underfunded, and thus dangerously dysfunctional penal institutions in the contemporary United States. First, the chapter explores important shifts in crime and economic policy in the last three decades. I argue that to understand the rise of catastrophic penal institutions in the United States, one must consider the rise of mass imprisonment and the spread of the so-called market panacea concurrently. Next, the chapter examines the important link between race and the hyperpunitive turn, in the context of the passage of sweepingly...