Imprisoning the American poor

From: "KD Weber" Imprisoning the American poor

FROM WELFARE STATE TO PRISON STATE
Imprisoning the American poor
by LOIC WACQUANT
Prisons in the "free world" are full to bursting point, and fullest of all
are US jails. Over the past twenty years, exacerbated by ever increasing
inequalities, pre-occu-pation with the virtues of law and order has led to a
toughening of penalties. Worst hit have been those excluded from the "American
dream". The US is con-stantly tight-ening its social welfare budget, but its
generosity knows no bounds when it comes to controlling and incarcerating those
whom it has deigned neither to educate and care for, nor provide with housing
and an adequate diet.
"Realism" and "combating insecurity" are the reasons cited by those who now call
for "an eye for an eye" in an attempt to justify criminalising the poor. This US
model is now taking hold internationally, and in some countries in Europe it
even seems to be attracting a number of leaders on the left - despite the fact
that prison is not the only method of punishment.
Just as in those heady post-war days, Europe's political elites, bosses and
opinion-formers are looking to the United States with fascination and envy,
largely because of the performance of the US economy. Allegedly, the key to US
prosperity and the supposed solution to mass unemployment is simple: less
intervention by the state. It is true that the United States - and in its wake,
the United Kingdom and New Zealand - has slashed social welfare spending and
pared down the rules on hiring and - above all - firing so as to establish
"flexible" working as the norm in relation to employment and indeed citizenship.

It is easy for advocates of neoliberal policies that involve stifling the
welfare state to claim that introducing "flexibility" has stimulated an increase
in wealth and job creation, but they are more reticent about discussing the
consequences of wage dumping: in this instance widespread social and physical
insecurity and a spiralling in inequality leading to segregation, crime and the
decay of public institutions. But it is not enough to measure the direct social
and human costs of the system of social insecurity that the US is proffering as
a model to the rest of the world. (1)

There is also its sociological counterpart: a boom in the institutions that
compensate for the failures of social protection (the safety net) by casting
over the lower strata of society a police and criminal dragnet that gets harder
and harder to escape. As the social state is deliberately allowed to wither, the
police state flourishes: the direct and inevitable effect of impoverishing and
weakening social protection. The increase in the prison population, control of
increasing numbers of people on the margins of the prison system, the
spectacular boom in the penal sector at both federal and state level and the
continuing rise in the number of black prisoners are the four significant
factors defining penal trends in the United States since the complete change in
social and racial attitudes that began in the 1970s.
That change was triggered by the democratic progress secured as a result
of Black protest and the popular protest movements that surged in its wake
(students, women, opponents of the Vietnam war and environmentalists) (2)
Prisoner numbers have risen dramatically at all three tiers of the prison
system: in the town and county jails, in the central penitentiaries of the fifty
states and in the federal penitentiaries. During the 1960s the US prison
population was shrinking, so much so that by 1975 it had fallen to 380,000,
having declined slowly but consistently (by about 1% a year over a ten year
period). The talk at the time was of emptying the prisons, of alternatives to
imprisonment and of reserving jail sentences for criminals who posed a serious
threat (between 10% and 15% of the prison population); there were even those who
ventured to predict that there would soon be no prisons at all. (3)

But that trend was rapidly and dramatically to be reversed: ten years later the
prison population had soared to 740,000 and, by 1995, it was in excess of 1.6
million. During the 1990s, prisoner numbers have been increasing by 8% annually.
A tripling of the prison population in fifteen years is unprecedented in a
democratic society. It leaves the United States far outstripping the other
developed countries since in its rate of imprisonment - 645 detainees per
100,000 of the population in 1997, that is five times the 1973 level - is
between six to ten times higher than that of the countries of the European Union
(see table (4). Not even South Africa in the days of the apartheid regime was
throwing as many of its citizens into jail as does the US currently.

Justice "by race"

5.4 million US citizens somewhere in the prison system
In California, not so long ago the national champion of education and public
health but now a believer in prison across-the-board, the number of prisoners
held in its state jails alone rose from 17,300 in 1975 to 48,300 in 1985 and, by
1995, had passed the 130,000 mark. If we add to that the number of prisoners
held in the county jails (Los Angeles alone holds 20,000 prisoners), the total
is a staggering 200,000, equivalent to the population of a large French
provincial town. But the extraordinary expansion of the US penal empire extends
beyond the great "lock-up" as the century draws to a close.

There are also those individuals placed on probation or parole. It has not been
possible to expand prison capacity fast enough to absorb the growing stream of
convicts, with the result that the numbers kept on the margins of the prison
system have increased even more quickly than the number held inside. In 1995,
3.1 million people were on parole and 700,000 on probation, a total of nearly 4
million, representing more or less a fourfold increase over 16 years.
Consequently, in 1995, there were 5.4 million Americans in prison or within the
prison system, accounting for 5% of men aged 18 and over and one in five black
males (and the reason for that will become clear below).
What is more, in addition to intermediate penalties available to it, such
as house arrest or confinement in a boot camp (disciplinary detention centre),
intensive probation and telephonic or electronic surveillance (using bracelets
or other technical gadgetry, the penal system has been able to spread its
tentacles considerably fur-ther as a result of the increase in the number of
data banks that have provided many new ways and centers of distance monitoring.

During the 1970s and the 1980s, the Law Enforcement Administration Agency (the
federal body responsible for crime prevention) encouraged the police, courts and
prison authorities to set up centralised and computerised data banks, and they
have since proliferated. The new synergy between the penal system's "capture"
and "observation" functions. (5) means that there are now more than 250 million
"rap sheets" (as against 35 million ten years ago) covering some 30 million
individuals: close on one third of all adult males! The data banks can be
accessed not only by the FBI and the INS (responsible for policing foreigners)
and the social services, but also by individuals and private bodies. Employers
commonly use data banks to sift out ex-prisoners trying to find work. And so
what if the data is frequently incorrect, out-of-date, trivial or indeed
illegal?

The fact that it is available leaves not only criminals and crime suspects, but
also their families, friends, neighbours and neighbourhoods, targets of the
police and prison system (6). The lust for prisons is both dependent on and
triggers a spectacular expansion in the penal sector at federal and local level.
All the more remarkable because it comes at a time when the public sector is
having to tighten its belt. Between 1979 and 1990, the states increased their
spending on prisons by 325% on operational costs and 612% on buildings - that is
to say three times more rapidly than national military spending, even though the
latter enjoyed a privileged position under the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Since 1992, four states have allocated more than a billion dollars to prison
spending: California ($3.2 billion), New York State ($2.1 billion), Texas ($1.3
billion) and Florida ($1.1 billion). All in all, in 1993, the United States
spent 50% more on its prisons than on the judiciary ($32 billion as compared
with $21 billion), whereas ten years earlier, budget levels were the same for
both (in the region of $7 billion). The policy of prison expansion is not,
however, a Republican prerogative. Over the past five years, President Bill
Clinton has been declaring just how proud he is to have put an end to to "big
government" and the commission for reform of the federal state, chaired by his
would-be successor, Vice President Ali Gore, has been busy pruning public sector
programs and jobs.

Meanwhile, 213 new prisons have been built - a figure that does not include the
private institutions that have proliferated as a lucrative market in the sector
has been opened up (see A boom in private penitentiaries
http://mondediplo.com/1998/07/17prison ). At the same time, the number of
employees in federal and state penitentiaries alone has risen from 264,000 to
347,000. Consequently, according to the office of census, the training and
hiring of prison officials is the area of government activity that has seen the
most rapid growth over the past decade. The money has to come from somewhere,
and when there is a fiscal squeeze, the only way of increasing spending on
prisons and prison staff is to cut the resources allocated to social welfare,
health and education.
De facto, the United States has opted to construct detention centres and
prisons for its poor, rather than clinics, day nurseries and schools 7). Since
1994, for instance, the annual budget of the California Department of Correction
(responsible for state detention centres in which prisoners serving more than a
year are held) has been higher than that allocated to the University of
California. The budget that Governor Pete Wilson proposed in 1995 was actually
designed to get rid of a thousand jobs in higher education in order to fund jobs
for 3,000 prison warders. That is a decision that weighs heavily on the public
purse because in California a "screw" earns 30% more than a lecturer because of
the political influence wielded by the prisoner officers' trade union.

Along with this boom in the prison sector has come "lateral" expansion of the
penal system and thus a huge increase in its capacity to hold and neutralise.
But the main "beneficiaries" of this additional capacity are poor families and
districts, and particularly black enclaves in the cities. That much is clear
from the fourth major trend in the US prison system: a continuing rise in the
numbers of Black prisoners, so much so that since 1989 and for the first time in
history, Black Americans make up the bulk of prisoners, even though they account
for barely 12% of the total US population. Discriminatory police practices In
1995, of 22 million black adults, 767,000 were held in prison, 990,000 were on
probation and 325,000 others on parole - a total of 9.4% caught somewhere in the
grip of the prison system.
As far as Whites are concerned, an estimate that is on the high side puts
the figure at 1.9% for a population of 163 million adults (8). In terms of
prisoner numbers alone, the disparity between the two population groups is
1:7.5, and it has been steadily worsening over the past ten years: 528 compared
with 3,544 for every 100,000 adults in 1985, and 919 compared with 6,926 ten
years later (see table 2). Over a lifetime, a Black male has a one-in-three
chance of spending at least a year in prison and an Hispanic a one-in-six
chance, whereas a White has just a one-in-twenty-three chance. This phenomenon -
that criminologists tactfully refer to as "racial disproportionality" - is even
more marked among young people, prime targets of the criminalisation of poverty.

More than a third of Blacks aged between 20 and 29 years are either in prison,
under the authority of a judge responsible for the execution of sentences, or
awaiting trial. In the big cities, the figure is substantially higher than 50%,
and in some places, in the heart of the ghetto, in excess of 80%. So much so
that, to take an expression borrowed from the tragic memory of the Vietnam War,
the operation of the US justice system could be described as a "search and
destroy" mission targeted on young Blacks (9).

Europe "lagging behind"

Rates of imprisonment in the United States and Europe in 1993 (table 2)
(number of prisoners per 100,000 of population)
United States 546, Georgia 730, Texas 700, California 607, Florida 637,
Michigan 550, New York 519, Italy 89, United Kingdom 86, France 84, Germany
80, Holland 51

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Correctional Populations in the United
States, Washington 1996, and Council of Europe, Penological Information Bulletin
No 19-20, December 1995.
A predisposition to crime only partly explains the huge disparity between
Whites and Blacks in the prison population. Mainly, it reflects the
fundamentally discriminatory nature of police, court and prison practice. The
proof is that Blacks account for 13% of drug users (more or less equivalent to
the proportion of Blacks in the population) but a third of those arrested and
three-quarters of those imprisoned for drug offences. The policy of a "war on
drugs", along with abandonment of the goal of rehabilitation and an increase in
ultra-repressive penalties (the widespread application of a system of
irreducible fixed penalties, automatic life imprisonment for a third offence and
more severe penalties for public order offences), is one of the main causes of
the rise in the prison population (10).

In 1995 six out of ten of those newly convicted were put in jail for possessing
or dealing in drugs. Imprisonment is one area in which Blacks benefit from
"positive discrimination", in itself an irony at a time when the United States
is turning its back on the affirmative action programmes that were designed to
reduce the most glaring racial inequalities in access to education and jobs. But
what matters more than all the statistics is the rationale underlying the shift
from social welfare to a toughening in penal policy. Far from being inconsistent
with the neoliberal programme of deregu-lation and decline of the public sector,
the rise in prominence of the US penal system reveals the true picture,
reflecting a policy of criminalising poverty which inevitably goes hand-in-hand
with the imposition of insecure and underpaid jobs, as well as the restructuring
of social welfare programmes to make them more restrictive and punitive.
When imprisonment was institutionalised in America in the mid-19th
century, it was primarily conceived as a method of controlling deviant and
dependent population groups, and the majority of those imprisoned were the poor
and immigrant workers newly arrived in the New World (11). Nowadays, the US
prison system performs a similar role in regard to those groups who have been
rendered superfluous or who no longer fit in as a result of the restructuring of
both employment relations and public welfare: the shrinking working class and
the Blacks. As a result, it has become a vital instrument of government by
poverty, used to underpin the principle of flexible working at the point where
the market in unskilled labour, the urban ghetto and the "reformed" social
services meet.

Unemployment under wraps

To begin with, the prison system makes a direct contribution to regulating the
lower segments of the labour market - and does so in infinitely more coercive
fashion than any social charge or administrative rule. Its effect here is
artificially to compress unemployment levels both by forcibly abstracting
millions of males from the job-seeking population, and also by boosting
employment in the prison goods and service sector. It is, for example, estimated
that during the 1990s US prisons brought down US unemployment figures by two
percentage points.
According to Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, taking into account the
differences in levels of imprisonment in the two continents, and contrary to the
idea commonly accepted and actively disseminated by the advocates of
neoliberalism, for 18 of the past 20 years US unemployment rates have been
higher than those of the European Union (12). However, Western and Beckett show
that the jump in the prison population is a two-edged weapon: while in the short
term it makes the employment picture look rosier by cutting labour supply, in
the longer term it will inevitably worsen the employment situation by making
millions of people more or less unemployable.

Although imprisonment has cut US unemployment levels, the prison system will
have to be constantly increased to keep those levels down. The fact that Blacks
are massively and increasingly over-represented at all levels of the prison
system highlights its second function in this new form of government by poverty:
it is to replace the ghetto as a means of containing population groups
considered deviant and dangerous, hot to mention superfluos from both an
economic and political point of view - Mexican and Asian immirgrants are far
more docile. Poor blacks hardly ever bother to vote, and the country's electoral
centre of gravity has in any event shifted towards the white suburbs.
To that extent, prison is merely the ultimate manifestation of a policy of
exclusion of which the ghetto has been a means and an end since it first
appeared in history. The penal institutions are now directly tuned into the
bodies and prog-rammes responsible for "assisting" marginal groups. While the
ethos of punishment inherent in the penal system tends to contaminate and then
redefine the aims and machinery of social welfare, prisons have, like it or not,
to deal urgently - and with the resources available to them - with the social
and medical ills that their "clientele" has been unable to remedy elsewhere.

Finally, the effect of budgetary constraints and the political philosophy of
decreasing state intervention has been to open up both social assistance and
prisons to the market. Many states, like Texas and Tennessee, are already
keeping substantial numbers of prisoners in private jails and subcontracting to
specialist companies responsibility for administrative follow-up of recipients
of welfare benefits. One way of earning a buck from the poor and criminals, both
ideologically and economically. What then we are witnessing is the establishment
of a commercial socio-penal complex designed to monitor and penalise those
population groups that refuse to submit to the new economic order (13) with a
gender-based division of labour: the penal element covers males in the main,
while the welfare component supervises the women and children.
And the same people shuffle around within this more or less closed circle.
The American experience shows that today, just as at the end of the last
century, rigidly separating social policy and penal policy - or, to take it one
further, the labour market, social welfare (if you can still call it that) and
prison - means that we are left understanding neither (14). Wherever it becomes
a reality, the neoliberal utopia brings with it, for the poorest in society and
also for all who find themselves excluded from what remains of protected
employment, not more, but less freedom, or indeed no freedom at all. It does
this by taking us back to the repressive paternalism of another age when
capitalism was rampant, now bolstered by an omniscient and omnipotent punitive
state.

* Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
(1) See articles on "Eternel retour du 'miracle' am?cain", Le Monde
Diplomatique, January 1997, and Lo?Wacquant, "La g?ralisation de
l'ins?rit?ociale en Am?que", Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales,
December 1996.
(2) David Chalmers, And the Crooked Places Made Straight: The Struggle for
Social Change in the 1960s, Temple University Press, Philadephia, 1991, and
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974, Oxford
University Press, 1996.
(3) On those debates, see Norval Morris, The Future of Imprisonment, The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1974.
(4) Unless stated otherwise, all of these statistics are drawn from various
publications of the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the Federal Department of
Justice (in particular its periodic reports on Correctional Populations in the
United States, Washington, Government Printing Office).
(5) Diana Gordon gives an excellent description of that synergy in The Justice
Juggernaut: Fighting Street Crime, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick,
1991.
(6) The State of Illinois has put on the Internet the description and a summary
of the criminal record of all of its prisoners, so that anyone can find out
about a prisoner's previous offences just by clicking the mouse.
(7) See the data compiled by Steve Gold, Trends in State Spending, Center for
the Study of the States, Rockefeller Institute of Government, Albany (New York),
1991.
(8) That estimate actually makes no distinction between Whites of Anglosaxon
origin and people of Hispanic origin, thereby automatically pushing up the level
of Whites of European origin. The effect is being compounded as time goes by
with rates of imprisonment rising most rapidly among Hispanics in recent times.
(9) Title of Jerome Miller's authoritative work, Search and Destroy:
African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1997.
(10) For a discussion of these various points, see Lo?Wacquant, "Crime et
ch?ment en Am?que de Nixon ?linton", Archives de politique criminelle, Paris, No
20, Spring 1998.
(11) David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in
the New Republic, Little, Brown, Boston, 1971, pp 239-240.
(12) Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, "How Unregulated is the US Labor
Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution", presentation to the
annual congress of the American Sociological Association, 39 pages, 1997, p. 31.
(13) Lo?Wacquant, "Les pauvres en p?re: la nouvelle politique de la mis? en
Am?que", H?dote, Paris, No 85, Spring 1997.
(14) As shown by David Garland in Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal
Strategies, Gower, Aldershot, 1985, in regard to the paradigm case of Victorian
England.