Big Prisons, Big Dreams: Crime and the Failure of America's Penal System

Chapter 4: Raising Questions About America’s Big Prison System

82 Chapter 4 Raising Questions About America’s Big Prison System In the previous chapter, the growth and size of the American prison system was examined in detail. That examination brought numerous facts to light, but it did not attempt to explain any of these facts in any detail. In this chapter, several questions are raised about America’s prison system with the intention of exploring what lies behind American’s big prison model. Why Did Prisons Grow So Fast? There are numerous reasons that can be forwarded to explain the rapid rate of prison growth in contemporary America. For any of these explanations to be viable, they must not only explain the pattern in imprisonment , but must also explain why policy makers and politicians have helped to carry out a plan of action that continually increased the size of America’s prison system. To be sure, policy makers’ obsession with incapacitation and deterrent approaches—the idea that locking up offenders prevents them from committing crimes while incarcerated, or deters others from committing crime by example, is the most apparent explanation. Most assuredly, as Sutton (2004) noted, prisons could not expand unless their expansion was supported by government officials. But asserting that prisons expanded because of the decisions of policy makers is a less than useful or adequate explanation. Sutton’s assertion does not, for example, help us understand the expansion of prisons because it fails to describe why policy makers decided that it was the right time to expand America’s prison system, and why the expansion should be so dramatic and so long-lived. Thus, while it may be impossible to explain prison growth Raising Questions About America’s Big Prison System 83 without reference to the preferences of and decisions made by policy makers (Clear, 1996), this explanation, when taken alone, is lacking to the extent that it fails to describe the forces that drive policy makers to endorse prison growth. Why, for instance, didn’t policy makers choose some alternative mechanism to reduce crime? Thus, the first question that needs to be addressed is: why did policy makers endorse the big prison model of crime control that characterized American prison policy since 1973? There are related questions that need to be addressed as well, such as: what forces act on politicians and policy makers that might explain their support for prison expansion? Again, there are numerous answers to this question, such as changing political agendas of Congress and the White House; the selection of crime policy agency heads who have staunch crime control positions; complex economic factors and interactions; increased economic inequality and class conflict; the greater visibility of the poor; (re)election pressures; increased racial segregation; crime rates; pressure from interest groups, entrepreneurs and lobbyists, and public opinion, to name a few. Each of these forces probably has had some impact on the growth of America’s prison system. Economic factors, conditions, and influences probably play a much larger role than is generally acknowledged.These issues will be examined in a later chapter that lays out a materialist or economic argument to explains prison growth. The decisions rendered by politicians are important, but so too are other factors.To address these factors,we must first explain why the expansive prison growth experienced in the United States might be a problem. Why Is America’s Prison Growth Rate a Problem? There are numerous factors that may affect prison growth. These factors include, but are not limited to, political conditions, economic factors and cycles, and public policy and opinion. It is unclear exactly how these forces work together to influence the growth of prisons.What we do know is that these factors most certainly appear to affect prison growth in America. Which of these factors is most important for predicting prison growth? How much does each factor contribute? There are no unequivocal answers to these questions in criminological or public policy literature .That is, we cannot say with any degree of certitude that we know 84 B i g P r i s o n s , B i g D r e am s which factors drive prison rates. But, while it is unclear why imprisonment rates have grown so rapidly during the last thirty years, it is more obvious that the rate of prison growth that has characterized the last three decades is problematic.The recent tendency of the U...