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| Research and punishment |
| By Sarah Etter, News Reporter |
| Published: 12/04/2006 |
Last week, academia took on corrections at The New School's conference, Punishment: The US Record co-sponsored by Social Research , a quarterly magazine, and the ACLU. The conference focused on the theories, etymology, and history of incarceration, and displayed graphs and charts that showed America descending down a slippery slope into too much punishment for smaller and smaller crimes. 
During two days of sessions, renowned academics from universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton presented research and retrospectives on who, what and why we punish in our society. Richard Gere and his wife, Carey Lowell, also read inmate writings to a packed auditorium that brought the voice of offenders to the forefront of the conference.
The hottest topics at the conference were the difference between punishment in the U.S. and Europe, the use of mass imprisonment, the disparate number of minority offenders serving time in U.S. prisons, and the rise of the carceral state. James Whitman, a professor at the Yale School of Law, argued that the United States has deviated from the rest of the world by focusing on punitive justice and harsh punishment, a shift that began in the 1970s. According to him, this shift was the result of the Reagan administration, and a greater advocacy of U.S. values. He also focused on the issue of democracy in punishment. "Criminal law in the U.S. is made through democratic practice," he says. "Democratic politics is almost always a practice of harsh justice. In other parts of the world, officials are bureaucratic. They do not run for election and [criminal justice] is not used as a stepping stone to higher positions. But in America, that happens. In America, the people decide. And they decide badly." Whitman closed his presentation by saying that our culture needs to reflect long and hard on our values and traditions when it comes to how we punish criminals. Jonathan Simon from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law offered a presentation on the rise of the prison state and examined the "direct relationship between executive political authority and the prison population". Simon began with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which created a deep change in the prison system because universities and research stations began investing in prisoners, like George Jackson, author of Soledad Brother, as an example that prisoner education could work. The next era was the Reagan-induced warehouse prison era, in which the United States transitioned into a period of fear and pessimism. "The carceral state presupposed pervasive public fear. This was the anti-New Deal," Simon explains. "We began using media communication to sell a message of fear. We began to focus on a specialty government that physically contains them [prisoners], keeps them away from us [free citizens]." According to Simon, this progression eventually made supermax prisons necessary. Since the U.S. began imposing long sentences on criminals, states needed to create prisons within prisons to induce more fear in criminals. "This is much more than a prison problem," he says. "This is a problem of governance. But there are three hopeful things: re-entry, the rise of other fears, and civil displays like immigration rallies, proving that the people can still have an impact." Bruce Western, a researcher from Princeton, focused on this country's use of mass imprisonment and the disparate number of minorities imprisoned. Mass imprisonment is defined as a rate that is markedly above the historical and comparative norms for societies of this type. Western's research showed that 60 percent of young black male dropouts will serve time at some point in their lives, and 20 percent of black men overall will end up incarcerated. Another set of numbers was presented by David Weiman, a researcher of economics at Barnard College. Weiman examined the effect of prisons records on employment prospects. "The effect of prison time on total earnings is about a 35 percent drop," Weiman found. "Going to prison, regardless of the conditions of confinement, leads to more criminal activity." Weiman added that work release programs are critical to post-prison success in the work place, and that one solution to avoid imprisoning marginal offenders and instead divert them to alternatives. A number of other researchers presented theories on the early creation and current state of the prison system. After each session, audience members reacted to the research and suggested changes to the prison system. With all of the numbers and theories presented, however, researchers were quick to point out that only a major upheaval would change the prison system as we know it today. Presenters and audience members, many of whom ran non-profit organizations across the country, agreed that only a grass-roots civil movement would reform current prison practices. "We're not going to get rid of a major oppressive institution by economic arguments alone," said Marie Gottschalk, a University of Pennsylvania professor, during a round-table discussion that wrapped up the conference. "We must argue along moral and civil rights lines to make a difference." |
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