Why We Lock 'Em Up

In his Road to Wigan Pier, a book-length analysis of the mining industry in England, the public intellectual George Orwell explained that it was the writer's job to give the reader his analysis of the world.  The writer had the task of explaining how things worked, so that the reader understood.

It seems to me that we have lost that.  Long discussions of present-day problems proceed, with contributions by several Serious People, without a breath of cause and effect entering into the discourse -- which usually consists of a string of rhetorical questions.

The Economist magazine, one of the most close-read journals in the world, published in London, England, asked recently, "Why America locks up too many people."  Note the level of explanation.

Most Americans think that dangerous criminals, which statistically usually means young men, should go to prison for long periods of time, especially for violent offences.  Even by that standard, the extreme toughness of American laws, especially the ever broader classes of "criminals" affected by them, seems increasingly counterproductive.

. . . .

Muddle plays a large role.  America imprisons people for technical violations of immigration laws, environmental standards and arcane business rules.  So many federal rules carry criminal penalties that experts struggle to count them.  Many are incomprehensible.  Few are ever repealed . . .

Today's Sunday Oregonian carries a column which piggybacks on that Economist cover story, written by the Washington Post's  Neal Peirce.  This begins

The rest of the world is starting to notice the United States' incarceration follies.

Case in point: "Why America locks up so many people," the recent cover story of the British-based Economist magazine.

but stops way short of suggesting any cause.  The argument incorporates the usual rhetorical questions, though.

When imprisonment costs from Mississippi's $18,000 a year to roughly $50,000 a year in California, when schools and crucial social services are being cut to the bone, do long sentences into middle and late age serve the public interest?

Well, the rational reader may reply, Perhaps they do.  Perhaps they don't.  What do you think, and why?  Neither The Economist nor the columnist from the Washington Post  feel any need to explain, to show why the situation has developed in this way.

It is not thus everywhere.  In academic discussion, in specialist discussion, the existence of a mechanism is basic.  For one example from my own recent reading, Richard L. Bushman described the transition From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765  quite effectively, using the change from land tenure as a community in the early townships, established by emigrants from Massachusetts Bay colony, to the private ownership of land by individuals, in towns established after the turn of the eighteenth century.  

Seventeenth-century land grants had bound the inhabitants to the town, and the vote of admission carried with it solid benefits; farmers depended on the town to enlarge their marketable surpluses and hence identified themselves with the village which provided them with the surest avenue to prosperity.  This tie was broken when the distribution of land became solely the function of private proprietors.  

Some new settlers purchased the right to participate in the quasi-public body controlling the undivided land, while others bought land from older residents without obtaining dividend rights.  In each transaction money was at the nexus.  The inhabitant owned land not by virtue of the town's benevolence, but because he had paid for his acres.

His involvement in the community was less an engagement to a social and religious commonweal than participation in a company of landowners. (pp. 76-77)

This trend toward self-interest was only exacerbated by the Great Awakening of the 18th century, with its emphasis on personal conviction of sin.

The revivalists undermined the social order. . .  not by repudiating law and authority, but by denying them sanctifying power.  Estrangement from rulers and the traditional patterns of life was demoralizing as long as the social order was considered divine, but Awakening preachers repeatedly denied that salvation came by following the law.

No amount of covenant owning, Sabbath observance, moral rectitude, or obedience to rulers redeemed the soul. . . .  Obedience brought no assurance of grace, and disobedience did not entail damnation.  Though still driven to resist rulers or to depart from the approved pattern of community life, believers in the revival message felt little guilt.  (pp. 193-194)

As a reader, you come away with a circumstantial, specific explanation of the transition in less than a century from a Puritan world view to that of the early American Republic, an explanation which won the author the Bancroft Prize in American History.

Not only historians, but political activists concerned about oppressive social injustice in our country, also begin with a framework in which the reader is presented with an explanation on the basis of cause and effect.  In the July 2010 issue of the Portland Alliance, the premier progressive newspaper in the state, Kristian Williams discussed with democratic socialist KBOO host Bill Resnick the reason for the growth of police forces in this country (there is no link to a webpage, so I quote from the hard copy). Notice how Kristian, the author of the book Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America , speaks within a framework of a cause and effect relationship.

If the job of the police is to protect the public and solve crimes and that sort of thing, then a lot of what they do really doesn't make sense.

Given the fact, detailed in his book, that the new urban police forces of the mid-nineteenth century did not face a large increase in crime but instead generated -- with new laws, with many more arrests, with new prison facilities -- more crime, author Williams provides the reader with an explanation that does make sense.

If you operate from the assumption that the police are there to enforce inequalities, especially those based on race and class, then a lot of the things that make no sense at all from a crowd control perspective, start to gain a kind of strategic coherence.

We are no longer in the world where tens of thousands of laws, and millions of prisoners, are put in place due to "muddle."  We inhabit a mental universe where an effect -- the largest prison population in the world, and by far the largest per capita, rising to five percent of all African American males -- has a cause commensurate to the phenomenon we observe.

The United States for the last 30 years has declared class war against the poor and black and brown.  That's why we've been locking up so many millions of people.  The Economist and the Washington Post  are willing to say that we've gone overboard in oppressing our poor and black and brown citizens, but they carefully refrain from inquiring why.