Why Prisons?
In the United States, prisons have become the default method of punishment for those charged with every variety of crime, from not being able to pay fines to murder, and increasingly for juveniles, not just adults. In fact, over-incarceration is one of the problems for adults and youth that my students will study for solutions. In our first seminar we looked at four possible reasons we might use prisons: (1) as a deterrent—to send a message to other would-be criminals; (2) to punish—to make criminals pay with and unpleasant and extended experience; (3) to incapacitate—to keep criminals away from and to protect society; and (4) to reform—to change criminals so they not want to commit crimes again. Science and statistics show us that our prison system does not reduce recidivism.1 We’ve created a system, though, where extricating ourselves from our commercial prison contracts seems nearly impossible, and politicians at all levels of government are afraid that innovation will look like weakness in addressing crime, a mindset we adopted in the seventies that intensified in the 80s and 90s. Now we are dependent on prisons for only two of the four of the reasons listed above: punishment and incapacitation. Policies like mandatory minimums and Three Strikes laws ensure that prisons remain full and that prisoners have no chance at assimilating productively back into society. Prison populations have grown consistently, but crime rates rose and fell depending on variables like the economy and drug trends.2 Problematically, as prison use and sentences have increased for adults, the incarceration culture has also influenced how we treat juveniles. Despite the cost and ineffectiveness of prisons and juvenile detention centers, we use them because they are what we know. Understanding how locking up became the norm involves knowing the history of incarceration and of the war on drugs in our country.
Penitence, not punishment, was the philosophy of the first penitentiary, built in Philadelphia in the 1820s. Before that, up to 1790, jails were for holding defendants until trial, not for the sake of punishment, which would take the form of fines, physical labor, and public humiliation. Banishment was an option in the colonies. The death penalty was reserved for murder and theft.3 But after the American Revolution, a war fought for ideals, corporal and capital punishment came to be seen as barbaric, and imprisonment was seen as a more humane punishment and deterrent. At Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, the “Pennsylvania Model” kept prisoners solitary with access only to work and a Bible. Other models also centered on work and isolation.4 We now know the negative effects of solitary isolation and in many cases have eliminated or reduced it to very specific cases, for both adults and youth; still, isolating prisoners in individual cells is the basic model of modern prisons. Even recently in Oklahoma’s secured juvenile secured facilities, pepper spray and solitary confinement were in regular use.
Comments: