Incarceration

One of the challenges of framing the safety net is how to ground policy that directly benefits a minority of folks in univeralist terms and values. The safety net can't be special policy for "them," but in practice, it won't make an impact on most people. Taking a stab at solving this problem in the Boston Review, Bruce Western frames the growth of mass incarceration as an issue of citizenship. He argues that social inequality is a violation of the rights guaranteed by common humanity and community.

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

In the conclusion, he fleshes this idea out more.

Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral significance of the prison. “Your Honor,” he said, “years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’s vision was radically egalitarian. Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all.

Be it health care, education, or job opportunities, universal provision in any domain of public policy—and the bonds of citizenship on which that sense of universality is built—joins us to a common destiny, and might be the best chance for the redevelopment of urban schools and labor markets. If the duty of the citizen is to stay in school and go to work, then the political will to maintain good schools and promote employment is woven into the social fabric. This political logic implies that special projects targeting special populations will not do the job. If poor schools are to improve, it is more likely they will do so as a result of an effort to improve educational opportunity nationwide. If we are to promote jobs for unskilled men in the inner-city, the attempt will receive its greatest impetus from a national employment policy that aims to improve the working lives of all citizens.

He goes on to acknowledge that the day when our common citizenship and humanity is widely recognized seems far off. But every policy victory that ties our fates together will expand who's included in the mainstream community. By the same token, more special policy for special populations could make it harder to achieve larger scale change. Tactics that make sense in the short term can weaken the beliefs that favor major policy shifts.

I'm not so sure that language that explicitly addresses citizenship is the ticket- it's a bit abstract. But the basic idea seems sound. What do you think? Is this a good way to frame the safety net?

Terence Samuel's piece on Jim Webb in the current issue of TAP features some great quotes from Webb on the importance of reducing inequality, like this one:

"It's simply not healthy for a democracy like ours to have such a wide gulf between the rich, the poor and the vast majority of hard-working, productive people in between," he said. "I am determined to do everything I can to advance a progressive agenda that addresses the issues surrounding economic fairness and social justice. I believe we can work toward solutions that keep the United States economy strong and engaged in the rest of the world, but which also safeguard the right of workers and the environment."

But the most interesting and unexpected part for me was what Webb has to say about the sky-high incarceration rates in the United States:

"This is not something that fits into political campaigns, but I have long been concerned about the staggering prison incarceration rates in the United States, which are the highest in the world," he declared.

As a reminder, Webb is the junior senator from Virginia.

"We want to keep bad people off our streets. We want to break the backs of gangs, and we want to cut down on violent behavior," he said, "But there is something else going on when we are locking up such a high percentage of our people, marking them at an early age and in many cases eliminating their chances for a productive life as citizens."

He says the high incarceration is a "trajectory" issue. "It will take years of energy to sort it out, but I am committed to working on a solution that is both responsive to our need for law and order, and fairer to those who become entangled in this system."

Needless to say, not a lot of people are talking about the mind-boggling number of black men in jail and what to do about it -- and certainly not a lot of people in the United States Senate.

Along these lines, Jason DeParle has an excellent piece in the current New York Review of Books reviewing two new books and a report on punishment and prisons in the United States. Based on what DeParle writes, Princeton sociologist Bruce Western's recent book sounds like a must read:

Bruce Western makes a crucial point at the start of his important book, Punishment and Inequality in America: "If prisons affected no one except the criminals on the inside, they would matter less." But with more than two million Americans behind bars, the impact of mass incarceration is impossible to contain. Their fate affects the taxpayers who support them, the guards who guard them, the families they leave behind, and the communities to which they return. Not even the war in Iraq escapes the reach of prison culture; Sergeant Charles Graner, the villain of Abu Ghraib, worked as a Pennsylvania prison guard.

Everyone is affected, but not equally. Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites in the same age group. Whites with only a high school education get locked up twenty times as often as those with college degrees. Among the many impediments to reform has been the gap between the people who make criminal justice policy—mostly educated whites who favor imprisonment, especially during twelve years of Republican congressional control—and those who live with the consequences.

....

Western's achievement—a large one—is to make them less vague. He identifies mass incarceration as a major cause of modern inequality, with large and uncounted collateral effects. Imprisonment does more than reflect the divides of race and class. It deepens those divides—walling off the disadvantaged, especially unskilled black men, from the promise of American life. While violent criminals belong in jail, more than half of state and federal inmates are in for nonviolent crimes, especially selling drugs. Their long sentences deprive women of potential husbands, children of fathers, and convicts of a later chance at a decent job. Similar arguments have been made before, but Western, a Princeton sociologist, makes a quantitative case. Along the way, his revisionist account of the late 1990s detracts from its reputation as an era of good news for the poor. Its appearance coincides with several other instructive new studies of American incarceration.