“Prisons and Crime” (Jack):
- Becky Pettit and Bruce Western. 2004. “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in US Incarceration”. American sociological review (69: 151-169).
- Franklin E. Zimring. 2001. “Imprisonment Rates and the New Politics of Criminal Punishment”. David Garland, ed. Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences (145-149).
- Joel Dyer. 2000.. From “Manufacturing Fear” (chapter 4) and “The Politics of Public Opinion” (chapter 5). The Perpetual Prisoner Machine (103-107 & 142-151). Westview Press.
“Currency Crises” (Jorge):
Entries (RSS)
May 30th, 2007 at 12:25 am
The prevalence of positive feedback loops in the prison readings were almost overwhelming.
A few I noticed:
*Building prisons on speculation of course encourages an increase in mass incarceration, therefore increasing the profitability of the private prison industry and encouraging the construction of more and more prisons.
*The lack of trust in the prison system appears to cause people to push for stronger laws, which in turn appears to have made our system in actuality less fair, and thus has increased distrust in the system.
*Our war on drugs and crime has caused police to profile areas that already have high arrest rates, leading to continued high arrest rates. This point is particularly important in the reading’s discussion of African American and low-income areas.
*The media’s coverage of crime leads to increased ratings generating even more coverage of crime. Tangentially, the media’s coverage of crime fosters a negative outlook about our treatment of crime in this country, necessitating more stringent laws.
*Because a criminal record erodes one’s future employment opportunities, ex-prisoners are often forced to repeat a vicious cycle of crime and imprisonment.
A few points in the reading that I think need to be made/discussed:
*According to the Zimring reading, only 90% of schools are considered “safe”–how does the media’s coverage of crime impact what is considered safe, and is anything being done to improve the other 10% of schools? Or are these students being fed into the prison system?
*I thought the discussion of the zero-sum mentally was extremely interesting, but a lot of policy analysts (and lawyers) do recognize the fact that prison sentences do create a vicious cycle likely to increase crime. How much is incarcerating mass numbers of people benefitting society? I would argue that mass incarceration is undermining civic engagement and our ability to function as a democratic society.
*I would argue that not only does the sensationalization of crime in the media create a fearful and negative impression of society, but it also desensitizes people to crime. I think, too, that popularizing crime as normative makes people more likely to resort to crime/violence as a potential solution to problems.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
To begin, I’d like to take issue with Siobhan’s last point, which doesn’t seem to be consistent with the data presented in the readings, which said that crime rates have been decreasing, not increasing, indicating that there has not be a shift toward accepting crime as normative. In fact, it seems that violent crimes (those most often portrayed on television) are the ones that seem to be plummeting fastest. Cop-killings are down 50% over 1970’s, according to the article. That is, it seems that portraying crimes may desensitize people to crimes, but somehow it has no effect on establishing crime as a “potential solution.”
In fact, I’m not sure how much I buy the desensitization towards the act of crime itself. While images of violence may bother us a lot less than they used to, it seems that our reaction to the act of crime is just as angry as it once was, if not more so. This is why we have the 3 strikes rule and all that fun stuff. We’re not saying, “Oh I just saw Arnold kill 3 people in cold blood in the movies, i guess that when Joe Murderer does it, it’s not so bad either and he can just get community service.” Violent movies almost always result in justice being done to the bad guys. That’s why we see them, so we can feel better about ourselves and reinforce our faith in the system. And that bad guys pay, and they pay hard. So in our society, the bad guys should pay as well.
I managed to read a lot of Jorge’s article, and I’m sure I have a lot to say on the issue, mostly because i don’t know econ. The author discusses the concept of a self-fulfilling crisis, in which people’s own actions trigger the crisis, and not something wrong in the economy of the “attacked” nation. (What a strange term, by the way.) He then discusses warnings from the IMF about Thailand before Thailand collapsed. Is it possible that this was the cause of a currency crisis as well, that even economists can be responsible for self-fulfilling crises?
May 30th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
What I found most interesting about the prison system articles is that there seemed to be little to no discussion of the actual efficacy of the prison system. Is it working or not? There was a suggestion that being indicted once increasing one’s propensity for further crime. I wonder how much this has to do with the sentence received, and in general I wonder what reformative power the prison system has. There were discussions of trends in legislation and incarceration practices, but the feedbacks that most influenced these types of decisions seem to be either completely unrelated to their effectiveness (e.g. various profit motives), or seem to be related to the perception of current crime, rather than an understanding of the consequences of indictment. And the readings showed, as David brought up, that public opinions regarding the “crime state” are (1) inaccurate and (2) do not necessarily correlate with anything to do with the prison system.
What I find interesting about all these various observations is that all these factors might be related or unrelated in complex ways. This is why, I think, I was unsatisfied that the articles did not talk more about the real consequences of the trends in incarceration practices, and specifically their effects on crime and public perception. It seems like there may be more direct feedbacks in play into the trends being analyzed. For example, the decrease in crime rates is probably due, in part, to the stunning increase in prisoners taken. The public perception of crime may be influenced by the media (as when it generates an inflated fear of crimes occuring), but there may be other factors, like those which determine the public’s perception of the prison system itself, and it’s efficacy. One article mentioned in passing the shift in general mentality from the instantiation of a “reformative” justice system versus a “punitive” justice system. In fact, this general mentality tends to oscillate over, as society wavers between the opinion that people are ultimately a product of either their environment, or their nature. Underlying opinions such as these may have a very strong effect on all of the symptoms being discussed in these articles.
I look forward to talking about this in class because it is such a mindbogglingly complex and nuanced issue. Hopefully Jack will have more to say about specific feedbacks and phenomenons that occur, and how the influences of all these different factors come into play.
May 30th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
“Freakonomics” immediately sprang to mind as I started looking through the reading. The Pettit and Western article was especially reminiscent of the book when they start evaluating the social factors that play into higher incarceration rates for blacks than for whites. Specifically the article states that “Crime rates may explain as much as 80 percent of the disparity in imprisonment,” implicitly questioning what factors play into the other 20 percent. The rest of the article details possible causes – police who view poor people as a threat to authority, a delinquent culture of low academic performers, etc. Freakonomics takes a different approach, indeed embracing one of Pettit and Western’s final hypotheses – that drugs and dealing play a larger role than we would expect in racial disparity of both income and crime. According to Freakonomics, socioeconomic disparity between blacks and whites was narrowing rapidly up until the mid 70’s when crack cocaine was introduced as a lower cost, lower quality, highly addictive drug. Complexly structured gangs sprang up around the new job opportunity of selling drugs. It allowed street culture to gain a kind of permanence in lower class people’s lives, meaning that blacks could stay in gangs when they used to have to seek some kind of way to earn money and support a family. Furthermore, its addictiveness makes its potential to create feedback enormous – if children are exposed to cocaine at all, it becomes extraordinarily difficult for them to break free of the lower education, lower class life that they have been born into. I think the effect that this had on all the social factors mentioned in the articles that Jack gave us to read is perhaps understated. If you’re interested, you should definitely check out Chapter 3 of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics. Sustentativeh
On a related note, the sheer volume of people who are committed to prison is astounding to me. The idea that prison could be an accepted life stage for approximately 9% of the male population means, in essence, that prison has lost its rhetorical evocative power. Ironically, this merely lowers the inhibition to commit crimes and thus increases the need for jail sentence – one of the many feedback loops inherent in the imprisonment system.
In terms of pure numbers, this website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm has the statistics for all imprisonments in the past 25 or so years, and it’s incredible to me to watch the numbers rise. Interestingly, I also noted that all the articles we read cited male imprisonment rates; apparently females are incarcerated at less than 1/5 the rate of males. However, that gap is narrowing in a similar kind of feedback process, supporting the idea that our society is becoming more stringent in its sentencing in general. However, viewed through the lens of the first article, this is a more than unsettling trend. As both articles indicate, prison is increasingly viewed as recompense to the victims – the idea being that human welfare can be viewed as a zero-sum game. However, as focus is driven away from rehabilitation, there comes a time when we must ask ourselves where this need for vindictiveness comes from. Indeed, punishing offenders does not help victims of crime unless we subscribe to the compelling rhetoric that the first article alludes to.
To conclude my comment, the more I write, the more I realize how complex the issue is. It seems difficult to synthesize the various factors at play into a single coherent explanation for rising imprisonment rates (despite reasonably stable crime rates). However, from these articles, it is clear that they are somehow coalescing to produce a result that is spiraling out of control. I think this week’s readings show, once again, how dangerous feedback loops can be when they become dissociated from their original causes and take on sustentative powers of their own.
May 30th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I found that the graphs on the explosion of the prison population in the US particularly fascinating. Graphs of world prison populations show that the US has more prisoners than any other country in the world, as well as more percentage of it’s population in prison (nearly 1%!).
See, for example:
news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2page1.stm
I also found the discusion of the “zero sum fallacy” to be very insightful. In previous research I’ve done on the death penalty, I came across many cases where a guilty verdict had been issued and sentencing came down to life imprisonment or the death penalty. I found it very suprising that in many cases, the victim or the victim’s relatives had a deep emotional involvement in the outcome of the sentence. You would think that, either way (life imprisonment or death sentence), justice has been served and the criminal will be prevented from ever comitting a crime again. And yet, many victims and their relatives felt relief when a death setence was handed out, or anger when the punishment was “merely” life imprisonment. Under this “zero sum” logic, anything that hurts the criminal will help the victim, and yet in actual consequences for the victim, the two possible outcomes are indistinguishable.
While this is merely anecdotal, I haven’t encountered such extreme and wide-spread examples of the “zero sum fallacy” in other countries. Combined with the statistics on world prison populations, I wonder whether there is something in particular about American attitudes towards crime and punishment that has led to such racial unequal and high prison populations.