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| Activist academia |
| By Sarah Etter, News Reporter |
| Published: 12/11/2006 |
Corrections.com reporter Sarah Etter follows up on Punishment: The US Record conference, presented by the New School's Social Research magazine and the ACLU.  The New School's conference, Punishment: The US Record, brought 500 attendees and speakers together to tackle the issue of punishment in the United States. This week, Corrections.com caught up with Bernard Harcourt, University of Chicago professor and the author of Against Prediction, who presented his paper Postmodern Meditations on Punishment, attendees Chloe Cockburn, a Harvard Law student, and City University of New York fellow, Vivienne Nixon for their response to the concepts presented. Corrections.com: What did you like the most about the conference? Nixon: Most of the presenters are people that I respect and appreciate. It's wonderful that they participated in this conference. Their work is very well known. Cockburn: I really liked Elizabeth Gaynes' presentation on the way incarceration impacts children. I wasn't shocked by the issues for children, but I hadn't really thought about it. When you study criminal justice, you usually focus on the defendant and the communities focus on the victims. [Gaynes] talked about re-contextualizing defendants without doing so in a negative way. I also liked the suggestion that we could give money to inmate families to support them [upon release] rather than putting those funds into halfway houses. I thought that was an interesting concept. Harcourt: I thought Lorna Rhodes's presentation on Supermax prisons was remarkable. I've been into Supermax facilities, but I think that it's always shocking to experience what it's really like inside of one. It was also interesting how [that presentation] related to David Garland's work on capital punishment. In some sense, it seems as if there is a similar trajectory with Supermax and the way in which we execute people today. It has something to do with the fact that we don't want to touch or physically hurt, in a direct way, their bodies. There was this stark similarity between the fact that you never actually touch the body of the inmate in a Supermax or during execution. Bruce Western's meticulous two-hundred slide presentation of the gross disparities in the effects and consequences of our punishment practices, and racial inequalities, was also incredibly valuable. His new book Punishment and Inequality in America is something that everyone should have in their toolkit. CC: Was there anything about the conference you didn't like? Nixon: There was a harsh absence of the people that are usually in the criminal justice system. I loved the work of the speakers, but women and minorities were severely lacking on these panels. I find it hard to believe that not one African American scholar was available to speak or present research at this conference. There was also a divide between the panels and the audience. One of the ways academics separate themselves is through language. “They” are offenders, “they” are inmates. Why can't we just call them people? Cockburn: I think the most shocking thing about this conference is that all of the speakers were white. I would have liked to see more diversity on the panel. I also thought there was a misconception about what the conference was supposed to be about. If it was an activism conference, it would have been designed differently. You can certainly have a conference for activists with different tones. But a conference like this is an offspring of academia. The audience wanted more practical talks about action, but this was an academic conference. Harcourt: I think it's important for people to understand that this was a conference put together by the journal of Social Research. For some reason, I have the impression that people didn't understand that. These papers will be published in Social Research in 2007, as research papers. This conference was all about academic papers, and it's not as if it was a hidden agenda. This is a different conference than one organized with the intention of being an activist or more political conference. I think there was a slight disconnect as to what some of the audience was expecting to hear. CC: How can a conference like this impact prison reform? Harcourt:When you present research, you are presenting the collective view of all of the effects of the prison system. It is a very different experience than hearing the voices of inmates, for example. I was surprised there was animosity between the activist community and the research community. Bruce Western presented 300 facts [on inequality in the prison system] that are crucial and useful for an activist. Clearly this was a conference for research at a research university by a research journal. But this information can be used for change. CC: Mr. Harcourt, your presentation, Postmodern Meditations on Punishment, was pretty controversial because you suggested using a lottery system to decide on punishments for offenders. Can you expand a little bit on this idea? Many members of the audience seemed to think it was ironic. Harcourt: Someone asked me whether I was being ironic in my proposal to actually use sentencing lotteries within ranges, but I'm being dead serious. This isn't at all ironic. The point is that we have, over the course of the last two centuries, developed the most bizarre and unfounded theories about how to change people and whether we can change people or deter people [from criminal behavior]. I think we would really be better off if we stopped trying to use punishment practices as an instrumental way to achieve these ends for which we really don't have any good evidence. The only way really to do that is to stop and say “Wait a minute; we've done this for too long with a devastating effect.” There would be no better way than to simply turn more to randomization. It's not that randomization works better than these other theories [we have on punishment] but we should learn from our mistakes. I think this proposal could potentially get people to stop and think a little bit more about what they are doing when it comes to sentencing. The most controversial element is using randomization in the punishment process. We have detection lotteries; some people are stopped for searches, some aren't. We're a little more comfortable with that. But it gets more controversial when you introduce randomness into sentencing. I'm not suggesting that you get convicted of pick-pocketing or murder and you pull the punishment out of the same urn, but we have a basis of Felony I, Felony II, and Felony III etc. We have scales and proportions; robbery should be three or five years in prison [depending on the lottery]. |
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