Crisis and Criminal Justice
How does the political and economic crisis - both on a national and international level - affect the criminal justice system (legislation, police, prosecution, judiciary, prisons)? How does it, more specifically, affect individual rights, the balance of powers, and the democratic order?
Decline of Democracy Yascha Mounk & Roberto Stefan Foa (2016/2017) The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect. July 2016. Journal of Democracy. And January 2017. The Signs of Deconsolidation. - Political scientists long assumed that “democratic consolidation” was a one-way street, but survey evidence of declining support for democracy from across the established democracies suggests that deconsolidation is a genuine danger. The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect. In recent years, parties and candidates challenging key democratic norms have won unprecedented popular support in liberal democracies across the globe. Drawing on public opinion data from the World Values Survey and various national polls, we show that the success of anti-establishment parties and candidates is not a temporal or geographic aberration, but rather a reflection of growing popular disaffection with liberal-democratic norms and institutions, and of increasing support for authoritarian interpretations of democracy. The record number of anti-system politicians in office raises uncertainty about the strength of supposedly “consolidated” liberal democracies. Guatemala. Italy. Hungary. Greece Tsipras. Turkey. (Wilders. AfD. Denmark, Finland, Norway ...).
The demise of socialist parties in Europe and beyond. France.
Complaints: Gender statt Arbeitsplätze und Wohlfahrt, Pflege, Frieden. Geld für Flüchtlinge statt für Mittelschicht. Es geht uns doch gut bezieht sich auf Statistiken, nicht auf Menschen. Peinliche Versuche der Kommunikation mit dem Volk.
Legislation gives more powers to the police - and in some instances to prosecutors, liberating them from political influence, conferring the potential of an independent political role (PT) to prosecutors and judges. Involvement of military in domestic criminal policy. Estrangement between an ever more outspoken political right (Bolsonaro) and a fragmented "left" and grassroot movements (Marielle Franco).
Police more powerful. But relevance of video.
Prosecution: powerful in Brazil.
Judiciary:
Prisons: Overload. They used to be symbols of state pride and power (Takagi). Today they are the same in the U.S. - a return to old splendor with little humanity. But they are a symbol of the state's absence and impotence in other coutnries. Large rund-down prisons.
Crisis or Crises?
- The Drug Wave of 1968: Implications for Criminal Policy. A second frontline beside the Cold War. The Secret State and the erosion of civil liberties. Punitiveness, Enemy criminal law. Devaluation of marginalized persons. Gropnik.
- The Financial Crisis of 2008: Implications for social cohesion. Growing inequality. Less empathy. Aggravating prior tendencies towards a dual state. Sovereign police. Police killings. Competing forces of order. Extrajudcial killings. Prison as privilege.
- The Global Crisis of 2018: Populism unchained. Belligerence. Destructive malignant narcissism. Desublimation.
Consequences
- Individual rights on the way out
- Balance of powers: increasing powers for the executive branch (state of exception), immunisation of military and police. Legislative branch? Corruption? Brazil: Judiciary thanks to PT policy (Vanessa Ruales 2018).
- Competing powers: problem for democracy and voting. General disillusionment with democracy.
- Prison expansion and overcrowding. Why?
The Prison Crisis
- The State and the Prison
Paul Takagi (1975): Walnut Street served to legitimize the idea of a state prison, which meant the creation of a state apparatus. To put it differently, the transformation that was to occur had implications far beyond the matter of penal reform. The political process toward creating a state prison system re ected in miniature the problems of the Confederation in centralizing the powers of the state. The demand for a strong centralized government was to guarantee the development of a new economic order on the one hand, and on the other, to solve the problem of law and order.
Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) had cost nearly $780,000, one of the most expensive buildings of its day in the United States.
- What does it look like? What does it look like in rich and in poor countries? In ex-slaveholder and ex-convict republics?
- In equal societies and in unequal ones?
In 2003, Finland was second highest and Norway and Sweden were joint fourth highest for age-adjusted public expenditure on educational institutions
- Where does it come from? The role of drug policy. Seychelles.
- Which functions does it fulfill and which not?
- What does the prison crisis signify in terms of social theory and the future for humankind?
The Way Out
- The ethical one: see Gropnik and NO PRISON
The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it. - For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn't. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.
So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.
And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.
- The probable one: see Harari and Helotes
===1. The financial crisis and the divided global village
Equality is happiness, but the real world is polarising
2. It is especially bad in ex-slaveholder societies, where freed slaves turn into the new helotes (Harari)
3. Populism as an instinctive revolt with paradoxical consequences
Lack of education elects clowns and radical rambos with no experience, who are therefore vulnerable to influencers, i.e. lobbies, that turn their policies around
Tendency to elect autocrats (philippines, nativist iran, near east)
4. Affects the criminal justice system at large:
4.1 legislation tends towards measures and decrees, harsher and more unprofessional - Doppelstaat
4.2 StA und Polizei: StA hat weniger Gewicht, außer lava jato. Polizei weitgehend souverän. Militarisierung. PPP
4.3 Strafvollzug: hier finden sich die Überflüssigen, soweit sie nicht außerjustiziellen Exekutionen zum Opfer gefallen sind. Massaker. Heloten werden hier diszipliniert. Israel. BR, weltweit.
5. Demokratischer Prozess: Wahlen, Parteien, Oligarchien - fed up, Burnheim: Losverfahren?
10. Why not abolish prisons? In reichen Ländern ginge das vielleicht - wären da nicht die unsachgemäßen Gründe (falsches Signal etc.).
In armen Ländern sind die Verhältnisse schlimm. Da wäre Abolition noch dringender.
Basic Reading
Further Reading
RATTON, J.L. & DAUDELIN, J. (2018) Construction and Deconstruction of a Homicide Reduction Policy: The Case of Pact for Life in Pernambuco, Brazil. International Journal of Criminology and Sociology,7, 173-183.
SOARES, L. E. A Política Nacional de Segurança Pública: histórico, dilemas e perspectivas, Estudos Avançados, 21 (61), 2007, 77-97.
ZALUAR, A. (2007). “Democratização Inacabada: fracasso da Segurança Pública”, Novos Estudos Cebrap, 21 (61).
See also
Prisons in Krimpedia