Clearing the "troubled assets" of America's punishment bubble

Daedalus

Volumn 139, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 91-101

  Simon, Jonathan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77956691786     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/DAED_a_00025     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
2. David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
3. David Garland, "Introduction: The Meaning of Mass Imprisonment," Punishment & Society 3 (1) (2001): 5; Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).
4. While incarceration rates began to rise in most states in the late 1970s, it was not until the early 1980s that they began to grow at an increasingly faster rate. Most economists would place the real estate bubble in the late 1990s and this decade, but signicant inflation of housing prices in many of the future affected areas-Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and California, for example-began in the 1980s as well. In another recent article, I explore what I take to be important correlations and causal connections between the growth of American homeownership and the salience of crime to the important role of home values in personal wealth. My claim in this essay is not that there is a causal relationship between the housing and prison booms, but rather that we can learn to think differently about how to respond to the crises in the latter from some of the ways we are learning to understand the former.
5. Some may object to my referring to people as "troubled" or "toxic" assets. My goal, however, is precisely to draw on the dynamic set up by the original nancial metaphor to recast the penal setting. While some troubled assets may truly be toxic in the sense that they are simply fraudulent deals with no real value, many other loans reflect real value in their underlying properties. But that value is made inaccessible by the current price uncertainty. The real problem of prison is that it casts the value of the formerly incarcerated into enduring doubt even when many are engaged in conduct valuable to their communities. Furthermore, the practice of incarceration does little to make the imprisoned less troubled.
6. Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
7. Susan Tucker and Eric Cadora, Ideas for an Open Society: Justice Reinvestment (New York: Open Society Institute, 2003).
8. Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
9. Garland, "Introduction: The Meaning of Mass Imprisonment."
10. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).
11. Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
12. William J. Stuntz, "The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law," Michigan Law Review 100 (2001): 505.
13. Both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush strongly supported this path toward capital accumulation for working Americans. President Bush spoke of his vision for an "ownership" society. Both presidents presided over a signicant expansion of incarceration (moderated in effects only by steep secular declines in crime). Under both administrations, the standard explanation of both more prisons and more homeownership was to produce safer and more stable neighborhoods.
14. See John Hagan, "Social Embeddedness of Crime and Unemployment," Criminology 31 (1993): 465; Clear, Imprisoning Communities.
15. Simon, Governing through Crime.
16. Joshua Page, The "Toughest Beat": Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Ofcers' Union in California (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), 2.
17. The problems actually go much deeper than this since the system's heavy reliance on state-of-emergency management techniques like lockdowns makes it nearly impossible to deliver medical care even with the necessary hygienic space and medical professionals.
18. Page, The "Toughest Beat."
19. With an average pay of more than $73,000 (which can jump to more than $100,000 with overtime), California's correctional workforce is the highest paid in the country. However, the of cers are expected to provide only custody, and their required educational quail cation is merely a high school diploma. Joan Petersilia, Understanding California Corrections: A cprc Policy Research Program Report (Berkeley: California Policy Research Center, 2006).
20. Jeremy Travis, Amy L. Solomon, and Michelle Waul, From Prison to Home: The Dimensions and Consequences of Prisoner Reentry (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2001).
21. San Quentin, for example, is the state's oldest prison, dating to the 1850s. It remains the best in terms of programming because of the incredible volunteer community in the Bay Area. While most of the structures ought to be closed and much of the land sold, a modest-sized prison should remain because of the extraordinary advantages of urban prisons and the strong resistance to building on new sites.
22. Editorial, "A Poor Prison Plan for California," Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2010.
23. See Lisa Miller, The Perils of Federalism: Race, Poverty, and the Politics of Crime Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
24. Page, The "Toughest Beat," 200.