SOME 2.3-MILLION PEOPLE are incarcerated in the United States. From the 1920s to 1975, the imprisonment rate hov- ered around 110 per 100,000 U.S. residents; it has since rock- eted to 760—proportionally five to 12 times as high as any other industrialized nations.
The annual bill: $64-billion.
Reacting to that scale and to increasingly harsh methods of imprison-
ment, scholars across the social sciences and humanities are energetically
studying incarceration, reviving a research interest of the 1960s and
1970s that was inspired by prison-reform efforts.
The revival was long due. To hear specialists tell it, during the 1980s
and 1990s, most criminologists ignored prisons to study the causes and
prevention of crime. Meanwhile, when political liberals demanded im-
proved prison safety and conservatives called for greater security, prison
officials created locked-down lockups where academics were unwelcome.
In the past few decades, Michel Foucault figured large in studies of imprisonment, but recently his influence has begun to wane. Many scholars were enamored of the French theorist’s argument that the disciplinary mechanisms of prisons were analogous to, and even would be superceded by, everyday practices of surveillance and correction designed to create “docile bodies” fitted to service in modern economies.
The chief failing of Foucault’s argument, says Stephen D. Cox, a professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego, was its assumption that it was possible to construct institutions that conquered inmates’ resistance. For Cox, author of a new study of imprisonment, The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison, Foucault’s thesis “ therefore has no leverage on the facts of prison life. … Gresham M. Sykes, the great sociologist of prisons, knew this in the 1950s, and it’s obvious to anyone who works in a prison.”
Several scholars have proposed explanations for American incarceration that are clearly indebted to Foucault but seek to take account of prison conditions.
David Garland, a professor of sociology and law at New York University, suggests that a “ penal-wel-fare” system that sought to rehabilitate prisoners held sway for a century until the 1970s, when militant prison reform provoked conservatives like Ronald Reagan to impose radical law-and-order regimes. Even as crime rates eased, fearful voters came to view criminals, particularly African-American ones, as undeserving of the rights of citizenship.
Jonathan Simon, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Criminal Justice, sees the roots of the phenomenon in the collapse of the New Deal in the 1960s and the rise of a new kind of social control: Fear-monger-ing by governments and other powerful agents led to a societal embrace of the lockdown in various forms—incarceration, the detention of immigrants,
zero-tolerance policies in schools, and gated communities. The Berkeley social theorist Loïc Wacquant, too, contends that neoliber-alism has eroded democratic citizenship by
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imposing harsh penal policies as a means of containing social unrest.
Sixty percent of African-American men who do not graduate from high school spend time in prison, and almost 30 percent of all black men do. But scholarly attention to the severe racial imbalance in American imprisonment has been surprisingly slow in coming given how stark the statistics are, says Robert R. Perkinson, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
While Wacquant, like another senior prison researcher at Berkeley, Franklin E. Zimring, concludes that class is a greater factor than race, Perkinson sees mass incarceration as a backlash against the civil-rights era, an echo of chattel slavery, and a triumph of the old South’s punitive, plantation-style approach to imprisonment over a Northern, Quaker-inspired emphasis on rehabilitation.
Colin Dayan, of Vanderbilt University, sounds a similar note. She argues that colonial penitentiary and plantation practices begot a continuous network of oppressive modern institutions that includes the mammoth prison system, immigrant detention centers, and war prisons such as Guantánamo Bay’s. Throughout those institutions, she suggests, more and more detainees have been categorized as dangerous so that due process may be suspended; forms of “disciplinary detention” such as solitary confinement have been renamed “administrative confinement” and made indefinite; and the result has been a redefinition of legal personhood.
“Dayan’s studies may be the most innovative and the most elegantly written work on the deep history of incarcerations since Foucault’s,” says Caleb Smith, an assistant professor of English at Yale University.
Prison researchers know that “get tough on crime” policies lead to more incarcerations, and longer sentences. But how, they ask, did American imprisonment become so exceptional?
Smith, one of an increasing number of scholars looking at the question from outside the social sciences, essays an answer in his new book, The Prison and the American Imagination. He argues that accidents of American history, including its Puritan roots, struggles for independence, and efforts to differentiate its justice from the Old World’s, gave rise to a peculiarly American prison narrative. In legal, political, and literary texts from colonial times to the present, he detects opposing conceptions of prisons—as manufacturers of ideal citizens and as zones of abjection and mortification—reconciled in the notion that inmates undergo a ceremonial death and are resurrected to civil rebirth.
That “re-entry” is getting particular attention from corrections scholars. Almost all people thrown into prison re-emerge—these days, some 700,000 annually. Most have become more serious criminals while housed in jam-packed prisons that use harsh control measures such as solitary confinement and “supermax” special-management units that impose sensory deprivation and enforced idleness.
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