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Is it surprising that
prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble
prisons? —Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (1995)
Over a million and a
half human beings arise daily in American cages.
These people
constitute "invisible populations" living in "invisible worlds" whose lives have
become cheap fodder for what scholar/activist Angela Y. Davis has termed, the
"punishment industry".
Although the formal
penitentiary can be traced to the ill-fated "Philadelphia System" and the
infamous Walnut Street Jail of the late 18th century that spawned it, the
earliest uses of imprisonment on American shores had a nakedly political
objective. After the slaughter and betrayal that was King Philips War
(1675-1676) thousands of ‘Indians’ (actually Wampanoags), including those
‘loyal’ ‘Christian’ Wampanoags who helped the whites, were imprisoned on barren
island of the New England coast where they died of cold and hunger.
Those who survived
were shipped to a savage and short life as slaves (merely another form of
imprisonment) in the West Indies. One of the early sites of imprisonment became
Deer Island Jail (recently vacated because of its dilapidated condition) in
Winthrop, Massachusetts.
These nameless men
and women were truly prisoners of war, encaged in early American concentration
camps, not for what they did, but because of what they were—so-called Indians.
Those who survived that harrowing hell became prisoners of the political order
(political prisoners) for life-slaves.
This early nefarious
usage of imprisonment by the English settlers of Massachusetts, would influence
and mark the subtextual usages of imprisonment down through American history,
and each newly entering ethnic group found itself thrown into American gulags
for what are economic, social and political reasons, as noted by Richard Quinney,
thusly:
Prisons in this
country are used mainly for those who commit a select group of crimes, primarily
burglary, robbery, larceny, and assault. Excluded are the criminals of the
capitalist class, who cause more of an economic and social loss to the country
and the society, but who are not often given prison sentences. This means that
prisons are institutions of control for the working class, especially the
surplus population of the working class. (Quinney, R. "The Political Economy of
Criminal Justice" Class, State and Crime, Longman, 1977).
While Quinney is
undoubtedly correct, he doesn’t go far enough, for at the time he was writing
those words, the Black Liberation Movement was on the wane, after years of state
and societal attacks. The American prison system, back in the 1920s, showed a
Black population that did not outrageously outpace it’s population percentage.
The numbers of Black imprisonment show a marked, dramatic, and increasingly
precipitous rise in the 1970s, far outstripping the African-American population
percentage.
As a Black Judge in
Memphis notes, Black youth are caught up in a "containment system" that serves
white economic interests. Judge Joseph B. Bowen, Jr., of Shelby County,
Tennessee notes:
The criminal justice
system makes a lot of money for everybody, from the judge to the bailiff, from
the bail bondsmen to the police, the sheriffs deputies, everybody. The neoslave,
the young Black male, becomes the fodder, the raw material, for this
industry-like profit-making system.
The fodder is Black,
and the beneficiaries–those who profit from the system–are white. [Washington,
Linn, Black Judges on Justice (New York:New Press, 1994), 60]
As Black youth were
becoming increasingly radical in their struggle against the white power
structure, the "containment system" was moved into place, to bottle up, and
encage the rage of an oppressed, damned people beginning to come to grips with
living in the midst of a white supremacist domain.
Studies have
consistently borne out the view that one’s race, and secondarily, one’s class,
is a powerful aggravating circumstance when it comes to judgments and
sentencings. Even on the unconscious level, these powerful predictors are
present, and active:
Where unconscious
racism works in the law, it perpetrates racist harms. More than this, however,
it serves to reinforce unexamined racial beliefs, working as a sort of
self-fulfilling prophecy that maintains races by confirming the validity of
racial biases. Consider the sentencing of convicted criminals. A number of
studies document large disparities in sentencing that correlate only to the race
of the defendant and the race of the victim. Having committed the same crime in
the same jurisdiction, with the same record of prior convictions, one is likely
to receive a higher sentence if one is non-White or if one’s victim is White.
These disparities are particularly evident in capital cases. One study shows
that in otherwise similar situations prosecutors seek the death penalty against
Latinos four times more often than against Whites, and are fourteen times more
likely to seek the death penalty against those who murder Whites than against
those who murder Latinos. [Haney- Lopez, Ian F., White By Law: The Legal
Construction of Race (NY:NYU Press, 1996), 138-9.]
Professor Haney
argues that this is so, not only at trial, but at plea bargains, at probation
and parole, and at every stop in between.
To these arguments
there will no doubt be many who suggest it be dismissed, for those in prison
surely deserve to be there. But prisons are political constructions, built to
meet political ends and objectives, such as the containment of the oppressed.
They are thus agents of a legalized form of violence, and warped beneficiaries
of violence. This is seen clearest in the context of what is laughable called
the ‘War on Drugs’, which as former Massachusetts Prison Psychiatrist, Dr. James
Gilligan, M.D. explained, is anything but;
In short—and this is
by far the most important finding of all that is known on the subject: "For
illegal psychoactive drugs, the illegal market itself accounts for far more
violence than pharmacological effects." Thus, the "war on drugs" appears to be a
self-generating war. Outlawing drugs, with the consequent decrease in their
supply, followed by the increase in their cost, generates the illegal market—and
all the violence that follows from that.
Since the war on
drugs victimizes mostly those who are young, poor and/or black, and benefits
mostly organized crime, it might be said to be a war on the young, the poor, and
on blacks, a method of stimulating violence, and a very expensive means of
subsidizing organized crime, boosting the employment of police and correction
officers and border guards, and subsidizing the construction industry by
promoting the building of more prisons. One could also wonder whether it is not,
wittingly or unwittingly, a means of distracting the white middle class voting
public from recognizing and ameliorating the real poverty and misery that are
epidemic in the central-city ghettos. [Gilligan, J., Violence: Reflections On a
National Epidemic (New York:Vintage, 1996), 220-21.]
Across a nation that
claims to be the ‘Land of the Free’, over a million souls sleep tonight in
cages, consigned there by an improper process, kept there by political
expediency, and destined to do so tomorrow because of the willing blindness of a
sated and jaded citizenry.
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