Bill Clinton recently admitted, “We basically took a shotgun to a problem that needed a .22.”
That’s easy for an ex-president to say. Politicians still hoping to be elected have a somewhat harder time proposing solutions. Voters love a tough-on-crime candidate, and they are quick to punish any step toward loosening sentencing requirements or reducing the prison population. Indeed, they want our penal system to keep ratcheting up the incarceration rate. Rather than prefer rational punishment for all, voters aware of unjust incarceration seem to prefer harsher, more callous treatment for all—a “leveling down,” in Gottschalk’s phrase, whereby even whites caught up in the justice system are subject to treatment once reserved for despised outcasts.
Even without leveling down, the practice of mass incarceration looks dispiritingly robust. For it to persist, it need only keep afflicting the weak and poor and feeding the greedy maws of corporations that run private prisons (and those of other amoral bureaucracies). For it to die would take a society-wide shift in values and empathy. Gottschalk doubts that concern over the ballooning costs of mass incarceration will ever be enough to motivate real, lasting change. Since such a movement would come from budgetary concerns and not moral ones, it would reduce prison rates only if it could generate savings. Unprincipled motivations are dangerous: If costs could somehow be driven down by increasing brutality and dehumanization, we might see these rise as our budgets fall. At a minimum, real change would involve making people understand the needless suffering wrought by mass incarceration; moving away from joyfully punitive sentencing in favor of punishments that reflect, to use an old- fashioned expression, the common good; and restoring the civil rights of convicts who have done their time.
In other words, we’d need a reversal of the trends of the past 30-odd years of American life. We like prison experience to be harsh. Anyone who doubts this is welcome to Google don’t drop the soap to see the levity with which prison rape is treated. Indeed, we’ve countenanced, even cheered, surveillance and cross-examination of poor Americans outside prison, in the form of extraordinary barriers to obtaining social assistance, mandatory drug testing, and employers’ “behavioral standards” on and off the job, the violation of which gives cause for termination and disqualifies laid-off workers from unemployment benefits. Gottschalk would like to see change that would return dignity and decency to criminal offenders, but further “leveling down” appears to be the popular preference.
Americans tend to consider themselves a virtuous and generous people, and not a nation of grinning sadists. So why the urge to brutalize criminals? Critics on the left (Gottschalk among them) like to point to America’s embrace of unforgiving capitalism, but neoliberalism dominates the entire West, and no other country has mass incarceration like ours. The example of other developed countries, where economic failure and even prosecution are seen as misfortunes that can befall otherwise decent people, is instructive. There, neither social-welfare beneficiaries nor inmates are seen as parasitic failures, but as folks like us.
