[lbo-talk] Prisons and The Left

[Mike Beggs]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 3:00 PM, andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I am a retributivist and if provoked will give an elaborate explaantion of why retribution is justice. It's not blood lust. It's also not going away.
>
> I agree, and I guess as a sometime criminal defense lawyer that I am person who has a fair amount of contact with the criminal injustice system. I agree that it is seriously broke. It does not often, and then generally accidentally, provide real retribution. It does seem to provide real deterrence. Index crime rates have been falling like a stone since the start of the Reagan era.
>
> Oddly enough for all the humane opponents of irrational retribution, a pretty good case can be made that the savagely disproportionate (thus nonretributive) penalties we inflict are pretty effective at deterrence, and it's a concern that proportionate retribution, an eye for an eye, would not be nearly as effect as a deterrent because the penalties would be much lighter on average.
>
> But pay no mind to me, I'm irrational, right?

Look, I shouldn't have been patronising about the desire for
retribution, I agree that it's not going away and I feel it myself
sometimes, like for those judges that were taking bribes to give kids
tougher sentences. Any penal system that doesn't indulge the public's
sense of retributive justice is not likely to last.

But like you say, sentencing goes way beyond 'an eye for an eye' in
most cases. Maybe, like you suggest, it takes savagely
disproportionate sentences to work as a deterrent. In any case, I
agree that prisons are functional to society as it is, and not going
anywhere fast, but as shag keeps pointing out, Davis's point is to
make a society which is less criminogenic. Anyone can get behind that
- even the Blairite slogan is "tough on crime, tough on the causes of
crime". But in the meantime, our societies - especially the US - are
way tougher on crime than they need to be, and tough on a lot of
things that don't need to be crimes. Prisons are hellish and the fact
that they are bursting at the seams is for me one of the clearest
signals that something is rotten in society as a whole.

As for the relationship between Reagan and crime rates: it fails to
explain why Canadian rates fell the same magnitude. Between 1991 and
2001 the ratio of cops to population in Canada fell 9 per cent and the
incarceration rate fell 7 per cent, while the American figures moved
10 per cent and _47 per cent_ respectively. Yet most of Canada saw
about the same fall in homicides, armed robberies and burglaries as
the US. These stats are from Loic Wacquant in Socialist Register 2006,
and he gets them from Canadian criminologist Marc Ouimet, whose
original article I can't read as it is in French. But according to
Wacquant, Oimet argues that the parallel crime rate falls need some
explanation that apply evenly to both countries, and "he points
towards two exogenous forces... the one-fifth drop in the number of
people in the 20- to 34-year age bracket on both sides of their common
border, and the marked decrease in unemployment in both countries,
which allowed unskilled lower-class youths to find work and thus
encouraged them to withdraw from the criminal economy." ["The
'scholarly myths' of the new law and order doxa", pp. 100-01]

Mike Beggs
scandalum.wordpress.com