Class, race & hyperincarceration in revanchist America

Daedalus

Volumn 139, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 74-90

  Wacquant, Loïc ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77956653177     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00024     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Michael B. Katz, ed., The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
2. See Neil Smith for a stimulating discussion of the notion of revanche as an extended and multiform "visceral reaction in the public discourse against the liberalism of the post-1960s period and an all-out attack on the social policy structure that emanated from the New Deal and the immediate postwar era"; Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentri-cation and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 42. See also Michael Flamm for a painstaking account of how the conflation of racial tumult, antiwar protest, civil disorder, and street crime laid the social foundation for the political demand for "law and order" in the wake of the class and racial dislocations of the 1960s; Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
3. Loïc Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
4. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).
5. Glenn C. Loury, "Racial Stigma, Mass Incarceration, and American Values," Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Stanford University, April 4-6, 2007. A revised version is included in Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loïc Wacquant, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2008).
6. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, chap. 4-5.
7. Frieder Dünkel and Sonja Snacken, Les Prisons en Europe (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005).
8. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 262-263, 121-125. The spiteful tenor of Giuliani's campaign of "class cleansing" of the streets and its strident racial overtones are captured by Neil Smith, "Giuliani Time: The Revanchist 1990s," Social Text 57 (Winter 1998): 1-20.
9. The sheer scale of American jails puts them in a class of their own. In 2000, the three largest custodial complexes in the Western world were the jails of Los Angeles (23,000 inmates), New York (18,000), and Chicago (10,000). By contrast, the largest penitentiary center in Europe, the Fleury-Mérogis prison just south of Paris, held 3,900 and is considered grotesquely oversized by European standards.
10. The last close-up study of the daily functioning of a big-city jail and its impact on the urban poor, John Irwin's ne ethnography of San Francisco's jail, dates from thirty years ago. See John Irwin, The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
11. Joan Petersilia, When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
12. The national dna database from crime scenes, persons "known to the police," and (former) convicts compiled by the fbi (under the Combined dna Index System [codis] program) more than doubled over the past ve years alone to reach eight million offender proles. Its explosive expansion, fed by technological innovation and organizational imperatives, is springing a new "racialized dragnet" thrown primarily at lower-class African American men due to their massive overrepresentation among persons stopped by police; Troy Duster, "The Exponential Growth of National and State dna Databases: 'Cold Hits' and a Newly Combustible Intersection of Genomics, Forensics and Race," paper presented to the cssi, University of California, Berkeley, February 24, 2010.
13. Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); David Thacher, "The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing," Law & Social Inquiry 31 (1) (2008): 5-30; Richard Tewksbury and Matthew B. Lees, "Sex Offenders on Campus: University-Based Sex Offender Registries and the Collateral Consequences of Registration," Federal Probation 70 (3) (2006): 50-57. For an extended analysis of ramifying penal disabilities outside of prison walls, see Megan L. Comfort, "Punishment Beyond the Legal Offender," Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3 (2007): 271-296.
14. Kathleen M. Olivares, Velmer S. Burton, Jr., and Francis T. Cullen, "Collateral Consequences of a Felony Conviction: A National Study of State Legal Codes Ten Year Later," Federal Probation 60 (3) (1996): 10-17.
15. Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, The Scale of Imprisonment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Michael Tonry, "Fragmentation of Sentencing and Corrections in America," Alternatives to Incarceration 6 (2): 9-13.
16. Vanessa Barker, The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
17. David F. Greenberg and Valerie West, "State Prison Populations and Their Growth, 1971-1991," Criminology 39 (1) (2001): 615-654; David Jacobs and Jason T. Carmichael, "Politics of Punishment across Time and Space: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis of Imprisonment Rates," Social Forces 80 (1) (2001): 61-89. But see Kevin B. Smith, "The Politics of Punishment: Evaluating Political Explanations of Incarceration Rates," The Journal of Politics 66 (3) (2004): 925-938.
18. Franklin E. Zimring and David T. Johnson, "Public Opinion and the Governance of Punishment in Democratic Political Systems," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605 (2006): 265-280.
19. Nancy E. Marion and Willard M. Oliver, "Congress, Crime, and Budgetary Responsiveness: A Study in Symbolic Politics," Criminal Justice Policy Review 20 (2) (2009): 115-135.
20. Lisa L. Miller, The Perils of Federalism: Race, Poverty, and the Politics of Crime Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
21. "The war on crime-with its constituent imagery that melded the burning cities of the 1960s urban riots with the face of [Willie] Horton as (every) black man, murderer, rapist of a white woman-remade party afliations and then remade the parties themselves, as the war came to be embraced and stridently promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike"; Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney-López, and Jonathan Simon, eds., After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 7.
22. See, for example, Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Prots From Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Paul Wright and Tara Herivel, eds., Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor (New York: Routledge, 2003); Michael Jacobson, Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
23. David Garland, ed., Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences (London: Sage, 2001). Ironically, the generalized notion was rst broached, not in the U.S. prison debate, but in Western Europe by the French justice ofcial and scholar Jean-Paul Jean in a discussion of the "mass incarceration of drug addicts" in France's jails; Jean-Paul Jean, "Mettre n à l'incarcération de masse des toxicomanes," Esprit 10 (1995): 130-131. (I used the term myself in several publications between 1997 and 2005, so this conceptual revision is in part a self-critique.)
24. Diane E. Bennett et al., "Prevalence of Tuberculosis Infection in the United States Population: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1999-2000," American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 177 (2008): 348-355; Bridget F. Grant et al., "The 12-month Prevalence and Trends in dsm-iv Alcohol Abuse and Dependence: United States, 1991-1992 and 2001-2002," Alcohol Research & Health 74 (3) (2004): 223-234.
25. To be sure, David Garland singles out two "esssential features" that dene mass incarceration: "sheer numbers" (that is, "a rate of imprisonment and a size of prison population that is markedly above the historical and comparative norm for societies of this type") and "the social concentration of mass imprisonment's effects" ("when it becomes the imprisonment of whole groups of the population," in this case "young black males in large urban centers"); Garland, Mass Imprisonment, 5-6. But it is not clear why the rst property would not sufce to characterize the phenomenon, nor what "markedly above" entails. Next, there is a logical contradiction between the two features of mass reach and concentrated impact (no other mass phenomenon "benets" a narrow and well-bounded population). Lastly, Bernard Harcourt has pointed out that the United States had rates of forcible custody exceeding 600 per 100,000 residents from 1938 to 1962, if statistics on penal connement and mental asylums are merged; Bernard Harcourt, "From the Asylum to the Prison: Rethinking the Incarceration Revolution," Texas Law Review 84 (2006): 1751-1786. These denitional troubles suggest that the mass characterization is an ad hoc designation crafted inductively to suit the peculiarities of U.S. incarceration trends at the twentieth century's close (as Garland observes, "a new name to describe an altogether new phenomenon").
26. The martial trope of the "war on crime" has similarly hindered the analysis of the transformation and workings of criminal policy. This belligerent designation-espoused by advocates and critics of enlarged incarceration alike-is triply misleading: it passes civilian measures aimed at citizens for a military campaign against foreign foes; it purports to ght "crime" generically when it targets a narrow strand of illegalities (street offenses in the segregated lower-class districts of the city); and it abstracts the criminal justice wing from the broader revamping of the state entailing the simultaneous restriction of welfare and expansion of prisonfare.
27. Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
28. David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (New York: Aldine, 1971); Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: Five Hundred Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). The only exceptions to this class rule are the periods and countries in which the prison is used extensively as an instrument of political repression; Aryeh Neier, "Conning Dissent: The Political Prison," in The Oxford History of Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, ed. Norval Morris and David Rothman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 350-380.
29. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, chap. 2.
30. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996); Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
31. Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Class, and Punishment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 17.
32. Michael Tonry and Matthew Melewski, "The Malign Effects of Drug and Crime Control Policies on Black Americans," Crime & Justice 37 (2008): 18.
33. Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 27.
34. Cf. ibid., 17, 27.
35. Lower-class African American women come next as the category with the fastest increase in incarceration over the past two decades, leading to more African American females being under lock than there are total women conned in all of Western Europe. But their capture comes largely as a by-product of the aggressive rolling out of penal policies aimed primarily at their lovers, kin, and neighbors. (Men make up 94 percent of all convicts in the nation.) In any case, the number of female inmates pales before the ranks of the millions of girlfriends and wives of convicts who are subjected to "secondary prisonization" due to the judicial status of their partner; Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
36. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 117-118.
37. The increase of this index of punitiveness is 299 percent for "violent crimes" as compared with 495 percent for "index crimes" (aggregating violent crime and the major categories of property crime), conrming that the penal state has grown especially more severe toward lesser offenses and thus connes many more marginal delinquents than in the past.
38. Georg Rusche and Otto Kirscheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 2003); Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979); Spierenburg, The Prison Experience.
39. Loïc Wacquant, "Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare and Social Insecurity," Sociological Forum 25 (2) (2010): 197-220.
40. Loïc Wacquant, "Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh," Punishment & Society 3 (1) (2001): 95-133.
41. Wilson, When Work Disappears; Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
42. Smith, The New Urban Frontier.
43. Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis, chap. 3.
44. Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study in a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958).
45. Loïc Wacquant, "Race as Civic Felony," International Social Science Journal 181 (Spring 2005): 127-142.
46. John Irwin, Prisons in Turmoil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980).
47. Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, eds., Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
48. In the media and policy debates leading up to the 1996 termination of welfare, three racialized gures offered lurid incarnations of "dependency": the flamboyant and wily "welfare queen," the immature and irresponsible "teenage mother," and the aimless and jobless "deadbeat dad." All three were stereotypically portrayed as African American residents of the dilapidated inner city.
49. Yeheskel Hasenfeld, "People Processing Organizations: An Exchange Approach," American Sociological Review 37 (3) (1972): 256-263.
50. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, expanded edition (New York: Vintage, 1993; rst published in 1971).
51. This is well illustrated by the current predicament of California, a state that employs more prison guards than it does social workers: it just slashed its higher education budgets and increased college tuition by 30 percent in response to a decit of $20 billion in 2009, when it spends an extravagant $10 billion on corrections (more than its yearly outlay for universities for fteen years running). The state now faces a stark choice between sending its children to college or continuing to throw masses of minor offenders behind bars for brutally long terms.
52. Dorothy E. Roberts, "Criminal Justice and Black Families: The Collateral Damage of Overenforcement," U.C. Davis Law Review 34 (2000): 1005-1028.
53. Paul J. Hirscheld, "Preparing for Prison? The Criminalization of School Discipline in the usa," Theoretical Criminology 12 (1) (February 2008): 79-101.
54. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 69-91, 280-287.
55. Michael Tonry, ed., Penal Reform in Overcrowded Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Dorothy E. Roberts, "The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities," Stanford Law Review 56 (5) (2004): 1271-1305; Jacobson, Downsizing Prisons; Marie Gottschalk, "Dismantling the Carceral State: The Future of Penal Policy Reform," Texas Law Review 84 (2005): 1693-1750; Marc Mauer and the Sentencing Project, Race to Incarcerate, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2006); James Austin and Todd R. Clear, "Reducing Mass Incarceration: Implications of the Iron Law of Prison Populations," Harvard Law & Policy Review 3 (2007): 307-324.
56. Contrary to the dominant public vision, research has consistently shown the superiority of rehabilitation over retribution. "Supervision and sanctions, at best, show modest mean reductions in recidivism and, in some instances, have the opposite effect and increase reoffense rates. The mean recidivism effects found in studies of rehabilitation treatment, by comparison, are consistently positive and relatively large"; Mark W. Lipsey and Francis T. Cullen, "The Effectiveness of Correctional Rehabilitation: A Review of Systematic Reviews," Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3 (2007): 297-320. That hardened criminals do change and turn their lives around is shown by Shadd Maruna, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001); that even "lifers" imprisoned for homicide nd pathways to redemption is demonstrated by John Irwin, Lifers: Seeking Redemption in Prison (New York: Routledge, 2009).
57. See the powerful arguments of Mary Pattillo for immediately 'investing in poor black neighborhoods'as is, instead of pursuing long-term strategies of dispersal or mixing that are both inefcient and detrimental to the pressing needs and distinct interests of the urban minority poor; Mary Pattillo, "Investing in Poor Black Neighborhoods 'As Is,'" in Legacy of Racial Discrimination and Segregation in Public Housing, ed. Margery Turner, Susan Popkin, and Lynette Rawlings (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2008), 31-46.