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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- Do Not Pass Go ============== By Jerome S. Brunerfrom the New York Review of Books Volume 50, Number 14 September 25, 2003 "The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society" by David Garland University of Chicago Press, 307 pp., $30.00; $20.00 (paper) 1. David Garland's disturbing new book addresses the question why there are so many more people in jail in America and Britain than anywhere else. That, in any case, is its specific focus. Its broader concern is with "cultures of control," how societies treat deviance and violence and whom they single out for what treatment. He deals with this politically sensitive subject less dramatically than Michel Foucault did in Discipline and Punish, which brought the subject into public debate in the 1970s.[1] Garland brings a larger amount of factual information to bear, but Foucault's influence shows in his account. His argument is that by 1980, both countries established a new system of crime control, a system based almost exclusively on imprisonment. This system has continued unabated ever since, the current decade being the most punitive in US history. The new approach to managing crime, in Garland's account, was an expression of the triumph of free-market political conservatism over the protest-generating upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s. What finally emerged in both countries was a highly efficient and technically controlled system of crime management directed almost exclusively at protecting crime's potential victims instead of coping with its causes. Its principal instruments, inevitably, were swift arrest, tough sentencing, and extensive incarceration. Penal welfare and rehabilitation got lost in the process. Moreover, the transformation took place with scarcely a murmur of public protest. It seemed to escape attention, except among those it affected personally. Here are some facts about skyrocketing imprisonment. There are approximately two million people in jail in America today, 2,166,260 at last count: more than four times as many people as thirty years ago.[2] It is the largest number in our history. More than 500 in every 100,000 Americans are behind bars, between four and ten times the incarceration rate of any civilized country in the world. In Britain, the country with the second- steepest rise in the rate of imprisonment, the number of prisoners has climbed from about 70 per 100,000 in 1966 to 136 per 100,000 in 1998. Italy, by comparison, had 57 per 100,000 in jail in 1990, down from 79 in 1960, while Japan had halved its imprisonment rate over those same years from 66 to 32. And our incarceration practices are becoming well known, if not notorious, abroad. As witness a recent feature article in The Irish Times of Dublin (August 8, 2003): "Applying the US incarceration rate to Ireland would result in 27,500 people behind bars instead of 3,200 as at present." But gross numbers are only part of the story. The other part is racial imbalance. Twelve percent of African- American men between twenty and thirty-four are currently behind bars (the highest figure ever recorded by the Justice Department) compared to 1.6 percent of white men of comparable ages. And according to the same source, 28 percent of black men will be sent to jail in their lifetime. ------------------------ What has caused this drastic rise in imprisonment? Is it an increase in crime, as one might assume? This explanation doesn't adequately fit the facts. Something else has been going on as well. For crime rates in America, after rising sharply through the 1960s into the early 1970s, began leveling off in 1972 and stayed level for the two decades following--nobody quite knows why. It was not until crime rates had already leveled off that incarceration rates began their steady, year- by-year climb. Between 1972 and 1992, while the population of America's prisons grew and grew, the crime rate as a whole continued at the same level, unchanged. The incidence of violent crimes during that tell-tale period is revealing. The homicide rate in the US remained steady at around 10 per 100,000 from 1972 to 1992, in spite of the four-fold increase in incarceration (from about 100 to 400 per 100,000), while the rates of robbery, rape, and aggravated assault actually went up by more than 50 percent.[3] One might say, of course, that quadrupling the imprisonment rate was part of a largely failed effort to reduce the steady rate of crime, especially the violent crimes about which we're most concerned. But twenty years of steadily increasing imprisonment with, at best, few results? It should also be remarked, by the way, that there has never been much substantial evidence that raising imprisonment rates reduces crime. Starting around 1992 violent crime in America began declining and it is still going down--again, nobody is quite sure why. The homicide rate, for example, dropped from its two-decades-long 10 per 100,000 in 1992 to 6 per 100,000 in 2000. But despite that decline in violent crime over those years, the number of people in jail continued to rise steadily: from some 350 in 1992 to nearly 500 per 100,000 at the end of the millennium--an increment that adds up to tens of millions more days in prison. Can we conclude, then, that the dramatic increase in imprisonment that began in 1972 belatedly began deterring violent crime in 1992, twenty years later, when crime rates started dropping?[4] If this is the case, then why did the rate of imprisonment continue to increase after crime had begun declining? for the rest of this review, go to http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16559 __________________________________________________________________ McAfee VirusScan Online from the Netscape Network. Comprehensive protection for your entire computer. Get your free trial today! http://channels.netscape.com/ns/computing/mcafee/index.jsp?promo=393397 Get AOL Instant Messenger 5.1 free of charge. Download Now! http://aim.aol.com/aimnew/Aim/register.adp?promo=380455 portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. Post : mail to '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subscribe : mail to '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Unsubscribe : mail to '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Faq : http://www.portside.org List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web address : <http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/portside> Digest mode : visit Web site Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
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