punishment (was: Student Loans & Bankruptcies (was Re: creative financing)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Apr 24 15:33:28 PDT 2001



>At 07:29 PM 4/22/01 -0500, Carrol wrote:
>>Actully I've never given a thought to this question. And I presume any
>>social order takes whatever steps are necessary, under given conditions,
>>to protect itself. It is punishment, which is just a polite name for
>>revenge, that I object to. I agree with Orwell that under some
>>circumstances you can achieve good results by killing people, but if one
> >must kill, it ought not to be for such an obscene reason as punishment.
>
>Carroll, you seem to forget the deterrent effect of punishment. In fact,
>we use negative sanctions (i.e. punishments by another name), such as
>frowning, avoidance, withdrawal of affection, spanking, slapping, etc. in
>every day interaction to deter certain forms of behavior. Th eonly
>difference between this and the criminal justice system is that the latter
>uses a much more formalized froms of sanctions than those used in everyday
>life.
>
>We may debate whether a particular sanction deters a particuluar form of
>behaviour (an issue most frequently raised in connection with capital
>punishment or formal vs informal sanctions) - but it would be utterly naive
>to deny the pivotal role punishment plays in maintaining social norms and
>rules.
>
>wojtek

Since Carrol's post made its initial appearance in a thread on debts, I take the liberty of introducing Nietzsche here. According to Nietzsche, at the origin of morality, there stood the debtor-creditor relation: "Have these genealogist of morals had even the remotest suspicion that, for example, the major moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its origin in the very material concept Schulden [debts]" (_The Genealogy of Morals_)? The creditor is given the right to inflict suffering upon the debtor in the event of non-payment. In other words, guilt = unpaid debts, and punishment = the creditor's right to inflict pain.

In a class society, generally speaking, the ruling class punish, the working class get punished (or become instruments of punishment -- e.g., cops, prison guards, etc.), & intellectuals employed by the ruling class write moral theories that justify punishment. As Jeffrey Reiman documents, the rich get richer & the poor get prison.

Now, speaking of prison, here's a new book:

***** New York Times 22 April 2001

Everybody Wants One

All over America, the author finds, new prisons are the answer to local economic revival.

Related Link First Chapter: 'Going Up the River' <http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hallinan-river.html>

By MICHAEL MASSING

Just before the start of the year 2000, the number of people in American jails and prisons surpassed two million for the first time. This was up from 1.5 million in 1995 and 500,000 in 1980. Every week, the nation's prison population swells by about 1,000 -- enough to fill two new prisons. This growth has occurred even as the crime rate has fallen, by about 16 percent since 1995.

Criminologists have advanced a number of reasons to explain this seeming contradiction. The tougher sentences passed over the last 15 years have meant longer terms of confinement. The cutback or outright elimination of parole in many states has sharply reduced the number of early releases. The war on drugs has served up a steady stream of bodies to the criminal justice system. Some experts maintain that there is no discrepancy between rising prison populations and falling crime rates -- that the former has helped bring about the latter.

In ''Going Up the River,'' Joseph T. Hallinan offers a novel, and disturbing, explanation for the relentless rise in the prison population. A reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Hallinan spent four years visiting prisons -- traveling from one to another, he writes, ''the way some might travel Civil War battlefields, ticking off the famous sites.'' He visited the Limestone Correctional Center in Capshaw, Ala., where inmates wearing iron shackles around their ankles spend their days smashing boulders with sledgehammers. He visited the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, where 10,000 spectators at a prison rodeo roared as bronco-riding inmates were thrown to the ground, knocked unconscious and trampled. He spent much of his time in Texas, which, since 1991, has undertaken the most extensive prison-building program in United States history. At its peak, in 1995 (when George W. Bush was governor), the state was opening one new prison nearly every week.

Hallinan also traveled back in time, in a sense, to some early landmark prisons, like the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Opened in 1829, Eastern State was created by Quakers. Abhorring corporal punishment, they believed in not merely confining inmates but in reforming them. To that end, they stressed work and solitude. Inmates were made to serve their entire sentence inside their cells, working alone, eating alone, praying alone. This, the Quakers believed, would lead to penitence -- hence the name, ''penitentiary.'' Penologists of the day proclaimed the prison an extraordinarily humane institution, but Charles Dickens, visiting while on a tour of the United States, found it barbaric. ''Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house,'' he wrote, ''a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired.''

Such cruelties seem to belong to some bygone era, but, as Hallinan discovered, the conditions in today's prisons are no less severe. In language that is simple and unadorned, he describes scenes that are graphic and unsettling. At the Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, Calif., for instance -- one of a new generation of ultramodern, ultraexpensive ''supermaxes'' -- the conditions ''press the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate,'' as one judge put it. About 1,500 of the 3,800 inmates live in a special Security Housing Unit, or SHU. (Among them is Charles Manson.) Inmates are kept inside their tiny cells 22 1/2 hours a day. Most have cellmates, but one-third are kept alone. And their stays can last for years.

''The SHU is designed to deaden the senses,'' Hallinan writes. ''The cells are windowless; the walls are white. From inside the cell, all one can see through the perforated metal door is another white wall.'' A Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who interviewed 55 inmates over a two-week period found the SHU to be a breeding ground of psychosis. Nonetheless, Hallinan reports, many inmates sought to be assigned to it, so pervasive was the violence in the rest of the facility. ''Pelican Bay inmates,'' he notes, ''have had their arms broken, their eyes gouged out, their brains splattered.''

Visiting Pelican Bay, Hallinan was struck by its similarities to Eastern State: ''It has the same fortresslike construction, the same use of isolation and sensory deprivation, the same resulting mental illness.'' The primary difference, he observes, is that while Eastern State genuinely sought to reform its inmates, Pelican Bay ''makes no such pretense. . . . It is Eastern State minus the hope.'' What's more, he notes, such supermaxes are proliferating. The same is true of solitary confinement. On any given day, thousands of inmates nationwide are kept in ''administrative segregation,'' as it's now called. The experience, Hallinan says, drives many to the brink of madness.

Each prison Hallinan visits seems to feature its own form of depravity. At the state prison in Corcoran, Calif., rival gang members were pitted against each other in ''human cockfights'' while guards placed bets. In Alabama, a state on the cutting edge of penal punishment, inmates caught masturbating are required to wear special flamingo-pink uniforms. At the Ad Seg section of the McConnell Unit in Beeville, Tex., up to a dozen assaults occur every day, and guards wear safety glasses to protect them from the feces, urine and food that are regularly hurled at them.

Despite such conditions, Hallinan found, people were eager to work in these institutions. For the jobs are considered very desirable. At the McConnell Unit, for instance, a corrections officer after 18 months earns $24,324 a year -- nearly three times the county's per capita income of $8,600. The prison was also valued for the boost it gave the local economy. Since the opening of McConnell and a second unit, Beeville had gotten ''a new Taco Bell, a new movie theater and three State Farm agents where before there had been only one.'' Interestingly, back in the 1960's, most communities in Texas had opposed all efforts to build prisons in their backyards. But in the mid-1980's the state's oil industry collapsed, and by 1990 prisons had come to be seen as ''engines of economic salvation.''

As in Texas, so in the rest of the country. In Tamms, Ill., Hallinan reports, local residents love their new prison so much that the local sandwich shop renamed its specialty after it: the ''Supermax burger.'' Fremont County, Colo. -- home to 13 prisons -- proudly bills itself as the Corrections Capital of the World. And the residents of Wallens Ridge, Va. -- devastated by the closing of a local coal mining company -- rejoiced when the state decided to build two new prisons in the area. At the opening ceremony for one of them, Gov. James S. Gilmore III told 200 attending dignitaries that the prison ''shows we can make a difference. We can create jobs and prosperity and protect people while we're doing it.''

It was good for everybody in Wallens Ridge, Hallinan notes, except the inmates. Because of the prison's remote location -- the nearest bus stop was 50 miles away -- it was hard for friends and family members to visit. In addition, the local county was one of the whitest in the state, guaranteeing that most of the guards would be white; most of the state's inmates, meanwhile, are black. Such disparities are considered a recipe for racial tension. All of this was secondary, however, to job considerations. Across the United States, Hallinan writes, prisons have become public works projects, requiring a steady flow of inmates to sustain them.

Hallinan dismisses the notion that America may have built so many prisons out of a genuine fear of crime. Just as the threat of Communism was used to justify the creation of a vast military-industrial complex in the 1950's, he writes, so the threat of crime is being used today to justify the creation of a prison-industrial complex. This, I think, goes too far. ''Going Up the River'' makes no mention of the wave of violence that swept the United States in the late 1970's and again in the late 1980's, when the crack epidemic made drive-by shootings and street-corner executions a fixture in the nation's cities. As a result, Hallinan seems blind to the very real concerns of Americans about the safety of their streets. And he never even joins the debate over how much of a deterrent effect all those new prisons have had.

Nonetheless, Hallinan's larger point -- that the building of prisons in the United States has taken on a life of its own -- seems unassailable. By documenting the vested interest many Americans now have in building more prisons, he has made a valuable contribution to the debates over crime and punishment in America.

Michael Massing is the author of ''The Fix,'' a study of United States drug policy since the 1960's.

<http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/22/reviews/010422.22massint.html> *****

However, the following NYT article in contrast reports that in a booming economy there has been less willingness to become prison guards, since their jobs are unpleasant & come with low wages:

***** New York Times 21 April 2001

Desperate for Prison Guards, Some States Rob Cradles

By PAM BELLUCK

LANSING, Kan. - Donald Culbertson's face betrays the untamed skin of a teenager, and his uniform practically swims on his gangly frame. His buzz haircut does nothing to disguise the fact that he is not long out of high school, and his way of blowing off steam after work is to play video games.

There can be lot of steam to blow off because Mr. Culbertson is a corrections officer at the state prison here in Lansing, hired three months ago at the age of 19 to oversee murderers, rapists and other medium- and maximum-security prisoners.

Kansas hired Mr. Culbertson and others his age this year as part of a desperate effort to fill vacancies at the prison by lowering the minimum age of corrections officers to 19 from 21.

The situation in Kansas is hardly unique. Low salaries in a competitive economy, an explosion of prison building and a tougher, more violent class of inmate have all contributed to a severe shortage of guards in prisons around the country. Unable to find enough people willing to work as corrections officers and having even more trouble convincing those who do to stay, prison officials across the United States are unleashing a barrage of recruiting techniques.

"Every state is really being affected in one way or another," said George Camp, co-president of the Criminal Justice Institute, an independent group that studies prisons. "In some jurisdictions it is a matter of wages; in other jurisdictions it's simply the matter of the lack of potential workers in close proximity to the institutions."

Another deterrent is that inmates are likelier to be serving long mandatory sentences that offer no incentive for good behavior and are more likely to be mentally ill and have drug problems, corrections officials say.

"If prisons were to honestly advertise the job," Mr. Camp said, "they might say: `Come to work with us. Have feces thrown at you. Be verbally abused every day.' People don't advertise the job that way, but that often is what they have to deal with."

Staff turnover rates have risen steadily in recent years, with several states losing more people a year than they are able to hire. An average of 16 percent of officers left in 1999, up from 9.6 percent in 1991, according to the Corrections Yearbook, published by the Criminal Justice Institute. In some states the number is much higher: Arkansas lost 42 percent.

Turnover is especially high among new staff. In Oklahoma, which is considering lowering its minimum age to 18 from 21, 57 percent of last year's recruits have already quit, officials say. And in Alabama, which is short 412 corrections officers, even after lowering its minimum age to 20 from 21, John Hamm, a corrections department spokesman, estimated that last year 180 officers were hired, but 240 quit.

In some states, the problem is so serious that it has contributed to prison breaks or attacks on staff. Mr. Hamm said the escape in January of six inmates from a prison near Birmingham was the result of having 41 officers instead of 58, and leaving three of four towers unmanned.

In Arizona, corrections officials claimed that short staffing contributed to a November assault of a nurse by six inmates in a Phoenix prison.

In Texas, which is down nearly 2,600 officers from the 26,000 it needs, twice as many down as it was three years ago, Glen Castlebury, a corrections department spokesman, said a shortage of guards has meant that "shakedown searches" of cellblocks are not done as often or as thoroughly as necessary.

And it was staffing problems at Lansing that contributed to the 1998 rape by an inmate of an officer who was alone in a three-person post, said the warden, David McKune. A state audit followed the rape, underscoring staffing problems and getting officers a salary increase.

In some states, new prisons are being mothballed for lack of guards. Arizona has delayed opening 1,150 beds at its complex in Lewis, and Wyoming may not be able to open a high-security prison in Rawlins.

To attract guards, states are turning to a multitude of strategies, some never tried before. Some are trying to lower the minimum age to as low as 18. While some states already have policies permitting teenage prison guards, they say they hire few. Some corrections officers and experts question whether teenagers have the maturity to be guards.

...Some are advertising on television, taking to the Internet or using direct- mail blitzes. And many are swooping down on factory or mine closings and peppering military bases with help-wanted posters.

"My God," said Mr. Castlebury of Texas's advertising campaign. "I don't think you can move anywhere in Texas without seeing our signs."

Still others offer free room and board, or free transportation, to officers who live far away.

About two years ago, Kentucky feared it might have to call in the National Guard to fill vacancies in the Kentucky State Reformatory near Louisville. Instead, the state instituted a three-day workweek, complete with room and board, to attract people from distant rural communities. Now, said the warden, Bill Seabold, two-thirds of the employees work three 13-hour shifts, with many traveling back to faraway hometowns on their four days off.

States like Texas are cobbling together a work force of retired corrections officers, college students or police officers to work part time. The state also started paying overtime two years ago, giving officers the opportunity to augment salaries that top out at $28,380 after four years.

As they have for years, corrections departments and officers unions are pushing for pay raises for a job whose starting salary averages $23,000 a year nationally. But at a time when many state budgets are being cut, salary increases, never particularly popular for a profession that many voters rarely come in contact with, are a tougher sell.

In Oklahoma, where nearly one-fifth of the positions are empty and overtime pay is skyrocketing, the starting salary is $16,742 a year, below poverty level for a family of four and, said Jerry Massie, a corrections department spokesman, less than "you can make as a convenience store clerk in Oklahoma City."

...Aside from the cost in dollars, there is the cost to overburdened officers, exhausted from long hours and the stress of having to deal with a revolving door of inexperienced cadets. Officers say they become less attentive and more forgetful in these situations, and more afraid that inmates will take advantage of the fact that they are stretched too thin.

"Put together the shortage of officers, the size of the system, the attrition rate and new officers coming on line almost all of the time, and you have a dynamite keg," said Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "You have a real threat in terms of the security of state prisons."...

<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/21/national/21PRIS.html?pagewanted=all> *****

Yoshie



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