A fascinating article by Adam Gopnik in New Yorker magazine on the American penal system, including some scary facts and figures – like, that the population of the US prison system, if residing in a single city, would make that the second largest city in the US. It covers, very articulately, a lot of ground, including the historical, philosophical and political drivers of penal policies, relationship to crime rates, and what could help reduce the incarceration rate. Some of the last are really simple, like reducing the opportunities for crimes to be committed.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a few of my favourite quotes:
“Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes … Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.”
“Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures … Merely chipping away at the problem round the edges is usually the best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently, and, eventually, you get to its heart.”
“A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.”
2 comments
February 4, 2012 at 19:11
How We Lived On It (46) – “The Caging Of America”
[...] The Caging of America (eaudenil.wordpress.com) [...]
February 22, 2012 at 04:28
Brie
In reading the essay “The Caging of America” by Adam Gopnik, our group had an overall response of concern to the commercialization of America’s prison system. Through the essay, the for-profit private company Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) was brought to our attention. CCA is paid by each state to manage assigned prisons, and increases their profits by maximizing prison space and minimizing funds spent per prisoner. While Gopnik touches on this in the essay, further research introduced the contract CCA recently proposed to 48 states to purchase and manage their prisons. This proposal outlined a 20-year management contract, on the premise that states would maintain a minimum occupancy of 90%, thus turning incarceration into a mere business transaction.
Gopnik’s essay made an excellent case for concern over the current structure of America’s prison system. The issue of CCA’s involvement leads us to also question the shift in methods of imprisonment. The substandard quality of life brought on by CCA’s severe cost cuts strongly reflects the shift to what Gopnik described as a “Southern” approach to punishment as opposed to the reform-based methods traditional of the “Northern” penitentiaries. It is in this Southern approach that Gopnik suggests that our current prison system is a direct reflection of the structuralist oppression that was previously demonstrated through slavery and is now hidden within our methods of incarceration.
A good deal of the information discussed by Gopnik regarding CCA and the privatization of our prison systems can be easily found amongst other informational sources, offering support for his arguments. Most notably, the article that introduced the recent contract proposed between the states and CCA provides tremendous credibility to Gopnik’s arguments regarding the current state of our prison system and the opportunities for monetary gain, as opposed to a focus on punishment or rehabilitation. After thorough discussion surrounding this article, we were able to utilize critical thinking methods as we pursued further research on the topic and found information that corroborated Gopnik’s essay.
The article can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/14/private-prisons-buying-state-prisons_n_1272143.html