The Caging of America - The New Yorker. Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U. S. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in . The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock. That. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high- school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today. Telegraph Promotions provides great offers, competitions, discounts, prizes and free giveaways for readers, from free DVDs to 2 for 1 discounts to discount cinema and. Life's Greatest Miracle Medical Photography Lennart Nilsson Narrated by John Lithgow Written by Julia Cort Director of Photography Sven Nykvist Produced for NOVA by. CBC Digital Archives has an extensive amount of content from Radio and Television, covering a wide range of topics. The place for everything in Oprah's world. Get health, beauty, recipes, money, decorating and relationship advice to live your best life on Oprah.com. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal- justice system. Over all, there are now more people under . That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States. The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1. Americans; by 2. 01. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.
Ours is, bottom to top, a . Every day, at least fifty thousand men. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an unco. The normalization of prison rape. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen- agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country. How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract . Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, . He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post- Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; . But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on . The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment- inspired America that the taste for long- term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1. American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. Not roused up to stay. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors. Nor is this merely a historian. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel. In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime. The other argument. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment- era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers . In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of . The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2. Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men: Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them. Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery. Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it. For those too young to recall the big- city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo- con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super- predators; now it isn. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all- purpose explanations, like broken- window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don?
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