Abu Juwairiya
Junior Member
"Over the past three decades, this 'black flower' [Prison] has proliferated in the United States as the country has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in U.S. history.
Three features distinguish the U.S. carceral state: the sheer size of its prison and jail population; its reliance on harsh, degrading sanctions; and the persistence and centrality of the death penalty.
Nearly one in fifty people in the United States, excluding children and the elderly, is behind bars today.
In a period dominated by calls to roll back the state in all areas of social and economic policy,
we have witnessed a massive expansion of the state in the realm of penal policy.
The U.S incarceration rate has accelerated dramatically, increasing more than fivefold since 1973. Today a higher proportion of the adult population in the United States is behind bars than anywhere else in the world.
The United States, with 5 per cent of the world’s population, has nearly a quarter of its prisoners. America’s incarceration rate of 714 per 100,000 is five to twelve times the rate of Western European countries and Japan.
Even after taking into account important qualifications in the use of the standard 100, 000 yardstick to compare incarceration rates cross-nationally, the United States is still off the charts.
The reach of the U.S. penal state extends far beyond the 2.2 million men and women who are now serving time in prison or jail in America.
On any given day, nearly seven million people are under the supervision of the correctional system, including jail, prison, parole, probation, and other community supervision sanctions.
This constitutes 3.2 per cent of the US adult population, or one in every thirty-two adults, a rate of state supervision that is unprecedented in U.S history.
If one adds up the total number of people in prison, plus paroles, probationers, employees of correctional institutions, close relatives of prisoners and correctional employees, and residents in communities where jails and prisons are major employers, tens of millions of people are directly affected each day by the carceral state.
These overall figures on incarceration belie the enormous and disproportionate impact that this bold and unprecedented social experiment has had on certain groups in U.S. society, especially young African Americans, Hispanics, and the growing number of incarcerated women who are parents of young children.
Blacks, who make up less than 13 per cent of the U.S population, now comprise more than half of all people in prison, up from a third twenty years ago and from a quarter in the late 1930s.
The number of black men in prison or jail has grown so rapidly over the past quarter-century that today more black men are behind bars than are enrolled in colleges and universities.
Unlike other major state-building exercises like the New Deal and the Great Society, the construction of the carceral state was not presented as a package of policies for public debate. The carceral state was built up rapidly over the past thirty years largely outside of the public eye and not necessarily planned out. While the explosion in the size of the prison population and the retributive turn in U.S. penal policy are well documented, the underlying political causes of this massive expansion are not well understood.
Clearly, why the United States created such an extensive and punitive penal state is a complex question. Penal policies and institutions are formed not from a single factor, but instead by a whole range of converging forces. Still, it is important to sort out the more important from the less important factors....
Specifically, why didn’t the rise of the carceral state face more political opposition? The absence of such opposition, as will be shown, provided permissive conditions for political elites to construct a massive penal system.
Explanations for the rise of the carceral state vary enormously, but many of them do have one thing in common. They adopt a relatively short time frame as they try to identify what changed in the United States over the past thirty to forty years to disrupt its relatively stable and unexceptional incarceration rate and to bring back capital punishment with a vengeance.
The half-dozen major explanations – an escalating crime rate, shifts in public opinion, the war on drugs, the emergence of the prison-industrial complex, changes in American political culture, and politicians exploiting the law-and-order issue for electoral gain – concentrate on developments since the 1960s,"
(Source: "The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America' By Marie Gottschalk, P 1-2, 2006)
Three features distinguish the U.S. carceral state: the sheer size of its prison and jail population; its reliance on harsh, degrading sanctions; and the persistence and centrality of the death penalty.
Nearly one in fifty people in the United States, excluding children and the elderly, is behind bars today.
In a period dominated by calls to roll back the state in all areas of social and economic policy,
we have witnessed a massive expansion of the state in the realm of penal policy.
The U.S incarceration rate has accelerated dramatically, increasing more than fivefold since 1973. Today a higher proportion of the adult population in the United States is behind bars than anywhere else in the world.
The United States, with 5 per cent of the world’s population, has nearly a quarter of its prisoners. America’s incarceration rate of 714 per 100,000 is five to twelve times the rate of Western European countries and Japan.
Even after taking into account important qualifications in the use of the standard 100, 000 yardstick to compare incarceration rates cross-nationally, the United States is still off the charts.
The reach of the U.S. penal state extends far beyond the 2.2 million men and women who are now serving time in prison or jail in America.
On any given day, nearly seven million people are under the supervision of the correctional system, including jail, prison, parole, probation, and other community supervision sanctions.
This constitutes 3.2 per cent of the US adult population, or one in every thirty-two adults, a rate of state supervision that is unprecedented in U.S history.
If one adds up the total number of people in prison, plus paroles, probationers, employees of correctional institutions, close relatives of prisoners and correctional employees, and residents in communities where jails and prisons are major employers, tens of millions of people are directly affected each day by the carceral state.
These overall figures on incarceration belie the enormous and disproportionate impact that this bold and unprecedented social experiment has had on certain groups in U.S. society, especially young African Americans, Hispanics, and the growing number of incarcerated women who are parents of young children.
Blacks, who make up less than 13 per cent of the U.S population, now comprise more than half of all people in prison, up from a third twenty years ago and from a quarter in the late 1930s.
The number of black men in prison or jail has grown so rapidly over the past quarter-century that today more black men are behind bars than are enrolled in colleges and universities.
Unlike other major state-building exercises like the New Deal and the Great Society, the construction of the carceral state was not presented as a package of policies for public debate. The carceral state was built up rapidly over the past thirty years largely outside of the public eye and not necessarily planned out. While the explosion in the size of the prison population and the retributive turn in U.S. penal policy are well documented, the underlying political causes of this massive expansion are not well understood.
Clearly, why the United States created such an extensive and punitive penal state is a complex question. Penal policies and institutions are formed not from a single factor, but instead by a whole range of converging forces. Still, it is important to sort out the more important from the less important factors....
Specifically, why didn’t the rise of the carceral state face more political opposition? The absence of such opposition, as will be shown, provided permissive conditions for political elites to construct a massive penal system.
Explanations for the rise of the carceral state vary enormously, but many of them do have one thing in common. They adopt a relatively short time frame as they try to identify what changed in the United States over the past thirty to forty years to disrupt its relatively stable and unexceptional incarceration rate and to bring back capital punishment with a vengeance.
The half-dozen major explanations – an escalating crime rate, shifts in public opinion, the war on drugs, the emergence of the prison-industrial complex, changes in American political culture, and politicians exploiting the law-and-order issue for electoral gain – concentrate on developments since the 1960s,"
(Source: "The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America' By Marie Gottschalk, P 1-2, 2006)