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Reconsidering the Assumptions of the United States Penal System

-- By SamanthaWilliams - 19 Feb 2008

Introduction

Several dichotomies are useful in characterizing the function(s) of incarceration within the United States penal system. There is a distinction and separation between civil society and prison, between the citizen and the criminal, between free and unfree persons. What does it mean, though, when other dichotomies emerge that appear wholly inconsistent with the supposed democratic ideals of the United States? The state repeatedly commits acts of violence and other crimes against the imprisoned. These actions establish an opposition between order and justice. Although clearly immoral, the state can maintain such a stance by reinforcing those dichotomies that distinguish its constituency from those who “must” be imprisoned. But what happens when these dichotomies break down? What if the prisoner no longer seems criminal and civil society no longer a free space? Questioning these constructed oppositions challenges not only the effectiveness and even legitimacy of our penal system, but also of larger US society.

Free Citizens versus Criminals

United States society is largely based on the idea that the system that governs it is beneficial to its members. This principle underlies the concept of the American Dream itself. As a result, free citizens have been conditioned to believe that those who rebel against the system must be policed and imprisoned; in order to keep us free, we must be protected against the criminal, the disloyal, even the person of suspect phenotype. Civil society has also come to accept, and perhaps even expect, that in order to maintain law and order, the loyal, law-abiding person must sometimes be sacrificed to get to the rebel. This policing mechanism also acts to display the state’s power over an entire space. This demonstration reinforces the free person’s fear of the policed or imprisoned individual and willingness to abandon him, since any kind of association with him could threaten the free citizen’s life. However, not all prisoners are criminal. Even those who break the law may not do so out of self-interest, but in the interest of fighting oppression expressed either through that law or its administration. It seems that those individuals would more rightfully be characterized as reformists or even political prisoners rather than criminals. Framing certain prisoners in this way works against the notion that they are dangerous to or even in opposition with free citizens, undermining the original dichotomy set forth by the state.

Defining Crime to Maintain the Class Structure

The US penal system can be described in terms of economic use and gain. The crackdown on crime has, intentionally or otherwise, become a means of managing surplus populations and class inequalities. Economics and wealth have become increasingly important when defining what a crime is and who the criminals are. Poor people and people of color have been targeted to make up an economic deficit and now compose an inordinate amount of the prison population, although they are not exclusively or even mostly responsible for the criminal acts committed in this country. Crime is big business in America. Those who commit the most serious crimes often are not imprisoned and also belong to the same class that determines the laws and continues to benefit from the incarceration of the poor. (Take, for example, the sentencing policy that punishes crimes involving “crack” at a 100-to-1 ratio compared to those that involve cocaine). The state very obviously sets justice and order in opposition to one another, criminalizing a particular class of people and permitting another to break the law to maintain the hierarchical structure of race and class in the US.

Reconsidering Crimes of the State and their Assumptions

The state’s offenses are hardly limited to its selective assent to drug use or white collar crimes. The US government has murdered and tortured its prisoners and political dissidents for centuries. Americans are now familiar with state violence. In fact, such a considerable amount have come to support its use that a number of 2008 presidential hopefuls have either taken an ambiguous position on torture or an explicit stance for the practice in addition to supporting the death penalty. Perhaps this is because since state violence is often directed against racially or politically suspect minorities, most Americans assume that such brutality is not reserved for the obedient or law-abiding. This acceptance of state violence is based on the assumption that dichotomies between civil society and prisons, citizens and criminals, and free and unfree persons are constant. However, we have already seen how free citizens can also be criminals and certain citizens criminalized. Because these dichotomies are unstable and these categories can easily be distorted, any citizen has the potential to change places. If the criminals are only sometimes imprisoned, while other times non-criminals are jailed, can it be assumed that one exists as a free individual in free space and is opposite of a prisoner in a jail cell?

Although prisons exist, there is a promise that if one works hard enough, he can cross from captivity to freedom. This same notion motivates Capitalist America. However, America was developed as a stratified society, not designed with the success of all in mind. Slavery, for example, did not allow for the success of blacks, and unemployment is still highest for blacks at every level of education. With the myth of the American Dream in mind, how realistic is the existence of a free space for certain individuals? Even outside of prison walls, monitoring and self-policing still occurs, particularly for those who have been pre-coded as criminal. In addition, the existence of free acts – acts that can be engaged in without fear of surveillance or reprisal – continues to diminish, and along with it, free democratic spaces. Redefining crimes and criminals, as well as reexamining freedom and imprisonment seize the power to construct these notions from the state and are necessary to affect social change.

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