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From Mass Imprisonment to Abolition (USP)

Version vom 13. Dezember 2017, 17:56 Uhr von Sebastian (Diskussion | Beiträge) (→‎Open Prisons)

Prison Research

Protagonists

John Howard (1726-1790): Travelling some 80,000 km during the late 18th century and visiting hundreds of jails in Britain and numerous European countries including Russia, John Howard published the first edition of The State of the Prisons in 1777. It gave very detailed accounts of the prisons he had visited, including plans and maps, together with detailed instructions on the necessary improvements, especially regarding hygiene and cleanliness, the lack of which was causing many deaths. It is this work that has been credited as establishing the practice of single-celling in the United Kingdom and, by extension, in the United States.

Frank Tannenbaum (1893-1969), ex-prisoner turned professor of criminology and author of Wall Shadows (1922) as well as Crime and the Community (1938) , can be seen as the founding father of what later was to be named convict criminology - today associated with names like John Irwin, Jeremy Ross and Stephen Richards, but in a way also with Angela Davis

Donald Clemmer (1903-1965): Donald Clemmer coined the word "prisonization" in his work The Prison Community (1940; 1958). The term refers to the process by which the psyches and behaviors of convicts are molded by the social and structural hallmarks of prison life. Clemmer suggested that prisonization not only thwarts attempts to rehabilitate convicts but also inspires behavior contrary to accepted standards of social conduct. He was neither the first nor the last to describe this philosophical flaw in the concept of legal incarceration. (His later counter-term correctionalization did not catch on.) .

Gresham Sykes (1922-1990): His 1958 book on "The Society of Captives. A Study of a Maximum Security Prison" and his description of the Pains of Imprisonment made him a modern classic.

James B. Jacobs (*1947): James Jacobs' analysis of Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society (1977) contends that modern mass society extended citizenship rights to disadvantaged groups like prisoners, resulting in changes in the structure of authority in prisons.

Loïc Wacquant (*1960): In his book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009), the author argues that the tough on crime ideology does not correspond to any crisis in criminality, but rather responds to the attempt to control socially and economically marginalized populations.

Michelle Alexander (*1967): in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) this legal scholar discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States.

Sacha Darke publishes about Brazilian prisons

David Scott publishes about punishment and the abolition of imprisonment


Internet Sites

History

Jails

 

The term "jail" refers to places of (legal) custody or detention, usually for a shorter period of time, especially for minor offenses or with reference to some future judicial proceeding. The earliest proto-states already had their lock-ups for these purposes, and the carcer Tullianum (built in the 7th century B.C.) - today known as the Mamertinum - was a good example of jails in antiquity. In the Middle Ages, jails were often integrated in city walls or towers or cellars of castle-keeps. Since punishment usually was physical (mutilation flagellation, branding, public shaming in the stocks, decapitation), jails were used for people awaiting trial or punishment. As a matter of fact, the largest element in jails often had nothing to do with criminal justice. In England, e.g., before the advent of the modern prison, debtors were the majority of inmates. Legal action taken against them by creditors kept them in overcrowded jails until they paid their debts. In Europe, the same held true for the houses of correction in the 16th and 17th centuries that were modelled after the London Bridewell and/or the Amsterdam Rasphuis. While they also held petty offenders, their focus was not on criminal punishment, but on teaching discipline to vagrants and the disorderly local poor, and they were only absorbed into the local jail facilities under the control of the local justice of the peace at the end of the 17th century.

In 1776, the same year that America declared its independence from Britain, Philadelphia's jailhouse in the Walnut Street received its first inmates, because conditions in the old High Street Jail had become untenable. The building was neat from the outside, but less attractive inside, and at first nothing indicated that it should soon serve as a turning point in the history of punishment.

Birth of the Prison: Penitentiaries

This turning point was the construction of an additional building in the very yard of the U-shaped Jail, a small house called the "penitentiary house" by those who approved its construction in 1790 at the initiative of the Philadelphia Society for the Alleviation of the Miseries of Public Prisons.

What follows now is a short history of prisons by Brooke S. Biggs (2009):

"Prisons were a relatively new concept in the early 1800s. Punishment for crimes had been a matter for communities until then. Some took the Hammurabian approach of an eye for an eye, and public hangings in town squares were the price for murder, rape, or even horse thievery. As a more nuanced judicial system evolved, civic leaders sought a more civilized method of punishment, and even began entertaining the idea of rehabilitation.

 

In 1790, Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia (built in 1773, but expanded later under a state act) was built by the Quakers and was the first institution in the United States designed to punish and rehabilitate criminals. It is considered the birthplace of the modern prison system. Newgate Prison in New York City followed shortly after, in 1797, and was joined 19 years later by the larger Auburn Prison, built in western New York state. All three were perhaps naive experiments in the very new concept of modern penology. They all began as, essentially, warehouses of torture. The gallows and stocks were moved inside, but little else changed. Those who survived generally came out as better-trained thieves and killers.

Between Philadelphia and New York, a schism in philosophies emerged: The Philadelphia system used isolation and total silence as a means to control, punish, and rehabilitate inmates; the Auburn or “congregate” system—although still requiring total silence—permitted inmates to mingle, but only while working at hard labor. At Walnut Street, each cell block had 16 one-man cells. In the wing known as the “Penitentiary House,” inmates spent all day every day in their cells. Felons would serve their entire sentences in isolation, not just as punishment, but as an opportunity to seek forgiveness from God. It was a revolutionary idea—no penal method had ever before considered that criminals might be reformed. In 1829, Quakers and Anglicans expanded on the idea born at Walnut Street, constructing a prison called Eastern State Penitentiary, which was made up entirely of solitary cells along corridors that radiated out from a central guard area.

At Eastern State, every day of every sentence was carried out primarily in solitude, though the law required the warden to visit each prisoner daily and prisoners were able to see reverends and guards. The theory had it that the solitude would bring penitence; thus the prison—now abandoned—gave our language the term “penitentiary.”

Ironically, solitary confinement had been conceived by the Quakers and Anglicans as humane reform of a penal system with overcrowded jails, squalid conditions, brutal labor chain gangs, stockades, public humiliation, and systemic hopelessness. Instead, it drove many men mad.

Auburn Prison

The Auburn system, conversely, gave birth to America’s first maximum-security prison, known as Sing Sing. Built on the Hudson River 30 miles north of New York City, it spawned the phrase “sent up the river,” meaning doomed. Although far different from Walnut Street, Eastern State, and Auburn, in that inmates were permitted to speak to one another, in many ways it was the most brutal prison ever built. Various means of torture—being strung upside down with arms and legs trussed, or fitted with a bowl at the neck and having it gradually filled with dripping water from a tank above until the mouth and nose were submerged—replaced isolation and silence. Sing Sing also held the distinction of being home to America’s first electric chair.

 


Europe’s eyes were on the curious competing theories at Sing Sing and Eastern State. A celebrity at the time, Charles Dickens visited Eastern State to have a look for himself at this radical new social invention. Rather than impressed, he was shocked at the state of the sensory-deprived, ashen inmates with wild eyes he observed. He wrote that they were “dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair…The first man…answered…with a strange kind of pause…fell into a strange stare as if he had forgotten something…” Of another prisoner, Dickens wrote, “Why does he stare at his hands and pick the flesh open…and raise his eyes for an instant…to those bare walls?”

“The system here, is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement,” Dickens concluded. “I believe it…to be cruel and wrong…I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”

In the late 1800s, the Supreme Court of the United States began looking at growing clinical evidence emanating from Europe that showed that the psychological effects of solitary were in fact dire. In Germany, which had emulated the isolationist Pennsylvania model, doctors had documented a spike in psychosis among inmates. In 1890, the High Court condemned the use of long-term solitary confinement, noting “a considerable number of prisoners…fell into a semi-fatuous condition…and others became violently insane.”

 

Prisons built after this period—including Angola—were designed more as secure dormitories for captive laborers, as envisioned in the Auburn system. Inmates were required to work together at prison industries, which not only kept them occupied; it helped the institutions support themselves. Sing Sing, for example was built on a mine and constructed entirely of the rock beneath it by inmate labor.

Eastern State was a grand failure, and it was closed in 1971, 100 years after the concept of total isolation was abandoned. But what it revealed about the torturous effects of solitary may have made the practice attractive to those less concerned with rehabilitation and more interested in retribution. Solitary in the 20th century became a purely punitive tool used to break the spirits of inmates considered disruptive, violent, or disobedient. But even the most retributive wardens have rarely used it for more than brief periods. After all, a broken spirit theoretically eliminates danger; a broken mind creates it.

But in the past 25 years, the penal pendulum has swung back toward the practices—absent the theories—that governed the “Philadelphia system” invented at Eastern State. We no longer seem to have faith in the “penitent” part of “penitentiary,” and our “corrections” system no longer “corrects” anti-social behavior but inevitably breeds it. It can be argued that today, almost all maximum-security prisoners in America are kept in a kind of solitary for a large portion of their sentences. The advent of “supermax” and “control unit” prisons in the early 1970s has led to the construction of pod-based prisons and “security housing units” in which all inmates are isolated one to a cell for most of every day. They are generally allowed out for an hour each day for exercise or a shower, and are permitted limited personal possessions and visits. Many of the newer prisons enforce the “solitary” aspect by keeping some prisoners in soundproof cells, so they cannot even talk or shout at one another. The lack of regular human contact is still considered inhumane by many rights advocates who have taken to the state legislatures and courts to challenge its constitutionality. Ironically, one of the loudest advocate groups is the National Coalition to Stop Control Unit Prisons—a project of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group."

Prison Varieties

Resort Prisons

Imagine you are a prisoner convicted of murdering a loved one, you are sentenced and sent to a prison that resides on an island, without being handcuffed, without cameras or weapons, with wooden cottages instead of jail cells, and dinner ranging from chicken to salmon prepared by inmates themselves. At first glance that may seem like a criminal’s distant fantasy, but in Oslo, Bastøy prison—which sits on an island 80 kilometres from Norway—offers a new perspective on how to treat criminals.

 

Max and Supermax

Gitmo and CMU

Black Sites

Destitute-Malignant Prisons

 

The Black Beach Prison in Bioko, Equatorial Guinea is being described as follows: "Brutal and systematic torture are common at one of Africa's most infamous prisons, all for the purpose of breaking the spirits of inmates. Prisoners are often savagely beaten, then denied medical attention. They're provided with laughable excuses for meals; some inmates starve to death. Disease spreads easily because prisoners are not given the opportunity to properly clean themselves. Prisoners are kept inside of their cells, shackles and all, for most of the day, another form of psychological and physical torture. A number of the prisoners kept at Black Beach were members of a 2004 failed coup d'état attempt against the President of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, former Governor of Black Beach."

Prison as Hell: Early Critique and Demand for Abolition

Tannenbaum

Quakers

Problem: clawback (dangerousness, resocialization)

Mass Incarceration

 

Whether called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment, the prison boom, the carceral state, or hyperincarceration, this phenomenon refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment. Mass incarceration is a term used to describe the substantial increase in the number of incarcerated people in the United States' prisons over the past forty years. The prison population of the United States dwarfs the prison populations of every other developed country in the world. In the U.S., every speech, every op-ed, every white paper about criminal justice starts with the same data points: The U.S. has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world prisoners, more prisoners than soldiers, more correction officers than marines, more prisons than Walmarts.

Comparing Countries

  1. Seychelles 799 - Some 70% of inmates are there for drug-related offenses; Seychelles prisons also serve as a depository for Somalian pirates
  2. United States of America 693 - The U.S. incarceration rate fell from 690 to 670 per 100,000 people, which is still higher than that of any country except Seychelles. Drug offenders accounted for half of federal prisoners and 16 percent of state prisoners in 2015. The decrease in the federal prison population was largely due to shorter drug sentences
  3. St. Kitts and Nevis 607 - The islands serve as a transhipment point in the transnational drug trade
  4. Turkmenistan 583
  5. Virgin Islands (U.S.) 542
  6. El Salvador 541
  7. Cuba 510
  8. Guam (U.S.) 469
  9. Russian Federation 450
  10. Thailand 445

Comparing Minorities

Sources:

  1. World Prison Brief], List of countries by incarceration rate, en.wikipedia
  2. Country Reports of the UN Subcommittee on the Prevention of Torture (SPT)
  3. Academic Research, NGO-Research, Investigative Journalism

Imprisonment on the Rise

Incarceration Rates in the USA (graph and information).

Conditions Worsening

  • Supermax Prisons
  • Dark Sites
  • Torture

Bruce Jessen

Reasons and Causes

Research by The Sentencing Project (Mauer, 1991) observed that America's high rate of incarceration was due to both a high admission rate (the percentage of convicted offenders who receive a prison sentence) and longer length of stay (resulting from longer sentences).

Popularity of excessive sentence: see List of longest prison sentences

Drugs

Just Deserts

Economically Useless Masses

Destitute Prison Conditions

Power Structures and Conflicts

Massacres

Torture

How Can a Public Tolerate It? Normative Preponderance

Clawback

Violence

Future of Imprisonment

Alternatives

Overcoming the cell prison - and punitive deprivation of liberty altogether

Voices of Abolition

Overcoming punishment

Return to the Times of John Howard: Wheelbarrow Men, Torture, Death, Camps, Overcrowding, Disease

Harari: 379 "In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution created a huge new class of urben proletariats, and socialism spread because no other creed managed to answer the unprecedented needs, hopes and fears of this new working class. Liberalism eventually defeated socialism only by adopting the best parts of the socialist programme. In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity power and glory of society. This 'useless class' will not be merely unemployed - it will be unemployable.

Bibliography

  • Alexander, Michelle (2012), The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York.
  • Ayers, Edward L. (1984), Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South, New York.
  • Blackmon, Douglas A. (2008), Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, New York.
  • Christianson, Scott (1998), With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America, Boston.
  • Clemmer, Donald (1940), The Prison Community.
  • Gottschalk, Marie (2006), The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, Cambridge.
  • Harari, Yuval N. (2016) Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Vintage.
  • Hirsch, Adam J. (1992), The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America, New Haven.
  • Howard, John (1777), The State of the Prisons ....
  • Ignatieff, Michael (1978), A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850, New York.
  • Jacobs, James B. (1997), Stateville.
  • Lewis, O. F. (1922), The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs, 1776–1845, New York.
  • McLennan, Rebecca (2008), The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941, Cambridge.
  • Prisons. Chapter 7. The State of Prisons - Transgender and useful weblinks
  • Sykes, G.M. (1958) Society of Captives. ...
  • Wacquant, Loïc (2009), Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press

Weblinks


Video

Magazines and Newspapers

See also

Materials

What do we see when we look at the prison system in the world as it developed over time? A gradual humanization and improvement? Eternal recurrence of the same? A moral, social, and/or organizational success story or an abject failure in their own terms?

Maybe we see something of all of this in different parts and from different perspectives.

For one thing, there is the organizational success of the prison itself. The first modern prison was a modest structure in the yard of the Walnut Street Jail, housing 16 prisoners in 1796. Today, prison buildings have spread all over the world and the number of prisoners worldwide has gone beyond the 10 million mark. The U.S.’ combined incarceration rate for jails and prisons has climbed steeply and ranks exceedingly high today, but other countries' rates are climbing to similarly astronomical heights. Never before have there been so many people imprisoned as today (2018).

There is something unique about the situation. As the drug war rages and stiffer sentencing has its effect, incarceration rates spiral past any semblance of control. As a consequence, though spending has steadily, and steeply, climbed over the last several years in many countries, it is nearly impossible for most states to meet the needs for decent prisons. So they do not. As a consequence, the experience of imprisonment is shaped by shortages.

Shortages, on the other hand, have always characterized the prison system. While it has become axiomatic to say that jails and prisons are overcrowded, underfunded, and unfocused these days, this has always been somewhat true. Cases in point, almost immediately after the first American prisons were built, the Walnut Street Jail (1790), the Auburn Prison (1819), the Western Pennsylvania Prison (1826), and the Eastern Pennsylvania Prison (1829) were full, and within a few years, they were expanded or new prisons were under construction.To say that crowding and corrections have always been linked, of course, is not to dismiss the negative effects of overfilling institutions or to argue that it might not be worse than ever now.

Then there is the eternal topic of the prison system suffering from some basic philosophical contradictions that make it virtually impossible for it to achieve its aims (abject failure). On the other hand, this inability to function properly suggests that there might be latent functions (Merton) that are being fulfilled quite well by the prison, and that keep the system alive.

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