“Penal Crisis” and Its Social Roots Essay

Introduction

Nowadays, more and more people in the West come to realize that the currently enacted correctional paradigm does not fit for the task of combating crime. The reason for this is thoroughly objective: the dramatic rise of the incarceration rate that has taken place through the last few decades in most Western countries did not result in improving the overall criminological situation, in the factual sense of this word.

Quite the contrary, there appears to have always been a positive correlation between the adoption of the “tough on crime” policies (behind the rate’s growth), on the one hand, and the process of many large cities in North America and Western Europe becoming increasingly crime-ridden, on the other. The US and the UK stand out particularly illustrative in this regard. For example, according to Pfaff (2016), “From the mid-1970s to 2010, the U.S. prison population steadily and relentlessly rose from around 250,000 to 1.6 million; the incarceration rate from around 120 per 100,000 to 510 per 100,000” (p. 951).

As of today, the prison population in this country has grown to be over 2 million. The issue in question concerns the UK as well, “The prison population in England and Wales… has increased by over 30 percent compared to 10 years ago, and is nearly double that of 20 years ago (the highest in Europe)” (Ryan & Ward 2015, p. 107). There are two discursive implications to the above-stated. First, it will be appropriate to refer to the described situation in terms of a “penal crisis”, just as it is being done by several contemporary criminologists and social scientists.

Second, there is good logic in assuming that this crisis has been induced by the adoption of Neoliberalism as a quasi-official ideology in the US and the UK during the early 1990s. This paper will explore the soundness of both hypothetical suggestions at length while outlining the issue’s most problematic aspects and arguing that there is a well-defined economic rationale to it. It will also be argued that the dramatic growth of the incarceration rate in the US and the UK is best assessed from the Marxist sociological perspective (Bichler & Nitzan 2014).

The rise in the number of prisoners in Western countries

As one can infer from what has been said earlier, there is a certain paradoxical quality to the fact that the prison population in the US and the UK continues to expand rather exponentially. The reason for this is that such an observable trend is inconsistent with the Neoliberal assumption that the proper functioning of the “free market” economy and the continuation of social progress are two closely interrelated categories (Ward & Green 2016).

After all, the very notion of “social progress” presupposes that as time goes on, more and more people grow intrinsically motivated to act in a socially appropriate manner, which in turn is supposed to result in reducing the number of inmates in jails. Also, under the condition of social progress, the practice of sentencing convicts to do time in jail is supposed to serve the purpose of making them immune to the temptation to commit new crimes.

For as long as the penal situation of the US and the UK is concerned, however, this is far from being the case. The rate of criminal recidivism in the US has been estimated to be the world’s highest. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, close to 70% of those who have served their initial sentences end up being charged with committing another criminal offense within 3 years after having been released from prison (Seigafo 2017).

There are also other visible inconsistencies to the trend. One of them has to do with the fact is that the rapid expansion of the prison population in the US and the UK comes hand in hand with the ongoing commercialization of the correctional domain in both countries. To illustrate the validity of this statement, it will suffice to say that since the early 1990s, it has become a widespread practice to employ private contractors for dealing with the population of convicts, “The skyrocketing costs of the prison system have worked as a magnet for private actors involved in the business of private deten­tion and related “prison services” such as prisoner health care, phone services, transportation, food catering, and so on” (De Giorgi 2016, p. 13).

The US-based Correc­tions Corporations of America (CCA), GEO Group, and the UK-based G4S are the most well-known of them. While sticking to their contractual obligations with the government, such contractors are primarily driven by the prospect of being able to generate a substantial monetary profit. It is needless to mention, however, that the activity of serving justice is hardly compatible with the activity of making money.

The fact that the described “penal crisis” is gaining momentum as we speak can also be shown about the ongoing stigmatization of convicted criminals, the problem of overcrowding, and the rapidly increasing overrepresentation of ethnically visible convicts in jails. For example, while reflecting on the correctional situation in the UK, Hart and Schlembach (2015) noted, “Prisons in the UK have been dangerous and overcrowded institutions for decades.

They house increasingly disproportionate numbers of vulnerable and marginalized groups” (p. 290). The same applies to the US, “The US prison population is disproportionately selected among the unemployed/underemployed, modestly educated, and largely disenfranchised poor populations of color” (De Giorgi 2016, p. 10). This raises a certain concern about whether the legacy of institutionalized racism continues to affect the functioning of the penitentiary system in the Anglo-Saxon West.

What is especially odd about the outlined trend is that it is utterly inconsistent with the implementation of the policy of multiculturalism that has been taking place in the US and the UK since the late 1980s onwards. After all, within the policy’s conceptual framework the extent of one’s criminal-mindedness is assumed to be irrespective of the particulars of his or her ethnocultural affiliation (Urbina & Álvarez 2016).

As of today, there are two conceptual approaches to interpreting the significance of the current penal dynamics in the UK and the US. They, in turn, can be loosely termed as Neoliberal and Marxist. According to the proponents of the former, there is a “technical” quality to the rise of the incarceration rate in both countries. As De Giorgi (2016) noted, “Mass incarceration tends to be portrayed (by liberals) as a technical problem, a temporary aberration in an otherwise rational criminal justice system… an accidental stumbling block in a long history of penal progress” (p. 7).

These individuals prefer to rationalize “mass incarceration” and “penal commercialization” as having been brought about by an objective need to increase the cost-efficiency of operating jails, which in turn was predetermined to emerge by the economic downturn of the late 2000s. It is also often suggested that the concerned phenomenon is reflective of the fact that the very realities of a post-industrial living call for the revision of many classical assumptions about the nature of a crime and what account for the best strategies for countering it.

In particular, the advocates of Neoliberal penology claim that the primary focus of law enforcement should be shifted from preventing crime to “managing crime”. As McLaughlin and Muncie (2014) suggested, “The new penology is neither about punishing nor about rehabilitating individuals. It is about identifying and managing unruly groups… Its goal is not to eliminate crime, but to make it tolerable through systemic coordination” (p. 512).

In plain words, the emphasis must be put on ensuring the criminological safety of specifically the well-off residents of the “white suburbia” at the expense of legitimizing (even if informally) the practice of racial profiling and keeping the representatives of “unruly groups” behind bars for as long as possible. This is exactly what has been happening as of late in both the UK and the US (Lynch 2015).

There is, however, a much more logically sound explanation as to why the incarceration rate in both countries has been steadily rising, as well as to the rest of the mentioned paradoxical aspects of the phenomenon in question. It has to do with the fact that since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the world’s rich and powerful are no longer pressed to share some of their riches with the rest, as a way of reducing the severity of class-tensions within the society that commonly lead towards the outbreak of the Socialist revolution (Jacobs 2017). Hence, the rapidly widening gap between the rich and poor in the West and the suddenly emerged “necessity” in clamping down on people’s civil rights (to increase “safety”) and reducing the amount of social welfare spending by the government (to increase “cost-effectiveness”).

In this regard, the mentioned upsurge of the incarceration rate in the US and the UK appears to be merely symptomatic. In this regard, De Giorgi (2017) came up with yet another enlightening observation, “The US carceral state… keeps fulfilling the role penal institutions have historically played in capitalist societies: transforming the poor into criminals, criminals into prisoners, and prisoners into a disposable labor force” (p. 113).

Therefore, the rapid growth of the number of “private jails” across the UK and the US should be perceived for what it is: yet another indication that the workings of the “free market” economy are quintessentially immoral and inconsistent with the notion of social progress by definition. After all, slave labor has been considered the most “cost-effective” since the time of antiquity and this continues to be the case today. The realities of the ongoing commercialization of the penitentiary domain in both countries substantiate the validity of this suggestion. For example, as of 2014, the share of convict-labor in all the electronic products manufactured in America accounted for 36% and it continues to grow.

Among the most well-known American companies that have signed convict-lease contracts with the privately owned prisons are Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Starbucks, IBM, Boeing, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, etc. The CCA pays convicts about 50 cents per hour on average while requiring them to work for no less than 6 hours a day. However, it is not uncommon for prisoners in certain privatized facilities to be paid as little as 17 cents per hour (Burkhardt 2014).

Such a situation is explainable. By the early nineties, the cost of labor in the US and the UK has grown much too high for most of the locally-based manufacturing companies, hence the phenomenon of outsourcing. However, there is also another way to address the challenge: using increasing the population of convicts in the privately owned jails and legitimizing “slave labor” in those facilities.

The most logical way to go about achieving this objective is by providing ever-harsher sentences for even the comparatively minor criminal offenses. For example, in the US the federal law provides a five-year sentence without the right to parole for storing 1 ounce of crack cocaine, 4 ounces of marijuana, or 3.5 ounces of heroin (Eaglin 2017). Thus, there is indeed a good reason to think of the current “penal crisis” in the US and the UK as having been deliberately triggered by the very nature of how the “free market” economy addresses the challenge of remaining sustainable. Consequently, this implies that the rate of incarceration in the Anglo-Saxon West will continue to increase while effectively turning both the US and the UK into nothing short of “carceral states”.

Conclusion

Just as it was implied initially, the currently deployed correctional paradigm in The UK and the US exhibits ever more signs of becoming indifferent to the cause of rehabilitation. Instead, the societal practice of sentencing criminals to spend time in jail now serves only two utilitarian purposes: to keep “criminally-minded” (read ethnically visible) citizens off the street, on the one hand, and supply large manufacturing companies with “slave labor”, on the other (Rucman 2019).

Once assessed from a broader perspective, such a situation will appear to be predetermined by the fact that the form of political governing in the US and the UK is not de facto democratic. After all, neither the British nor American ordinary citizens are allowed to elect their Prime Minister/President by mean of a direct vote. The governments of both countries prefer to defend democracy abroad, as opposed to developing it at home.

Therefore, for as long as there remains the status quo in this respect, there can be no effective solution to the earlier described “penal crisis”. This conclusion correlates well with the paper’s overall argumentative logic.

References

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