From Gulag to Guantanamo

Political, Social and Economic Evolutions of Mass Incarceration

Wesley Kendall

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783484690
• eBook ISBN: 9781783484713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Ordnung

This book offers the reader an incisive view into the political, social and economic evolutions of mass incarceration across the globe. It examines the different political and social contexts that combine with free market mechanisms of mass incarceration to ascertain how economic incentives shape penal policy.

Using qualitative analysis of a wide variety of incarceration forms, each chapter compares a US example with a non-US case study, showing how first world countries that occupy the economic forefront of prison privatization are exporting new models of penal institutionalization to developing countries. The chapters examine issues such as the privatization of asylum detention centres, the economic impacts of maintaining vast forced labour camps, the social consequences of imprisoning journalists, and the use of state sanctioned torture.

Capturing a nascent international trend through an interdisciplinary lens, this book questions why so many languish in prison, whether the incarceration of thousands benefits society as a whole, and how these penal policies might be roundly reconsidered.

ONE

A Primer on the Evolution of the Penitentiary

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.¹

—Eugene V. Debs

The quote above by Eugene Debs, a five-time socialist party candidate for president of the United States, invokes the ancient biblical question from Genesis: am I my brother’s keeper? Do we all share a compassionate commitment to the security and betterment of our fellow man, and have we bound ourselves by social contract to lend a hand to those in need, defend those unable to mount a defence under their own power, and an obligation to aid in the reform of those who have erred in society? Aside from numerous biblical passages that seemingly respond in the affirmative, Debs himself was adamant, in an eloquent speech delivered in Kansas in 1908: ‘Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe to myself. What would you think of me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death?’² Debs’s evocative metaphor of denying sustenance to the starving would leave many unshaken in agreement with his sentiment that we do in fact owe a debt to others through the compact created by our shared humanity, and that we would be morally derelict to shirk this duty. However, in an era of increasingly personal isolation coupled with political polarization, the duties we may have once palpably felt to those around us have been deadened. A secluded life spent ensconced in technological isolation has created a reclusive and inward intellectual recess in which denying the humanity of others has become de rigueur. The social tethers that formed the fabric of society which once bound villages together in solidarity has gradually become unbound, and the threads of decency and humility that before connected communities and societies and compelled them to collective accountability and purpose has begun to fray at its seams. Society has become morally compartmentalized, and the collective obligations that once shored up communal duty have disintegrated into callous and ignorant insensitivity to those that occupy the periphery of our consciousness. This disregard for our fellow man has accelerated and enabled the era of mass incarceration and prison privatization and shied from the positivism of redemption and reward for charitable action. Indeed, as Debs ultimately concludes, ‘Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery’.³ Although America is indeed an enlightened society brightly lit by the dazzling electronic bonfire of the Internet vanities, the darkness into which many have been cast who reside outside our sphere of understanding has hidden from view their desperate plight and made the social safety net rife with gaping holes. The historical holes that have led to the prison industrial complex are well documented, and are recounted in this chapter. From the moral bedrock of the puritan conception of the penitentiary to the current state of profit-driven mass incarceration, the story of America’s obsession with inflicting punishment, first for its own sake and then for the gain of profit, is fully explored below.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGINS OF INCARCERATION

One of the central philosophical themes in the history of penal incarceration is the notion that a transgressor must repeatedly confront the wrongness of his actions and, through experiencing guilt and remorse, ultimately repent and conform his behaviour to societal norms. The forced imposition of a state of solitude was seen as conducive to bringing about this moral clarity, and by incarceration forcing one to obsessively ruminate over his mistakes continuously would ultimately lead to moral correction. These correctional themes form the foundation of several distinct historical rationales for incarceration that also comported to religious traditions. The rationales would gradually evolve into contemporary penal policy.

The philosophical origins of incarceration are derived from the need to impose punishment upon those who commit violations of the law, by those who possess the lawful authority to exercise judgment to correct the wrong.⁴ The concept of punishment itself can be divisive, with some believing that the infliction of pain as a punishment is only justified if the person punished deserves the pain (as opposed to pain inflicted on an innocent person), while others believe that the pain of punishment can be justified if it serves a particular purpose.⁵ These two divergent philosophical perspectives on punishment are referred to as either retributive or utilitarian approaches. Retributive punishment, which is a retrospective approach, advocates a rationale that seeks to balance the wrong already committed by inflicting a pain that allows the transgressor to atone for their offence, but that must be proportionate to the violation. In contrast, the utilitarian perspective is prospective, and seeks to impose punishment in order to deter future violations.⁶ However, both of these philosophies are based upon the social contract, the notion that members of a civilized society voluntarily surrender some of their individual freedoms in exchange for the security the state offers to provide.⁷ The societal power to inflict punishment upon its members is derived from an ancient right first articulated in Greek law, but rising to prominence in the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and advanced by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who stated in his Metaphysics of Morals that

Judicial punishment can never be used merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society, but instead it must in all cases be imposed on him only on the ground that he has committed a crime.⁸

Kant believed that punishment was inextricably tied to justice and that punishment should be imposed to preserve the sanctity of the law, not for the benefit of the offender or of the victim, and absent a system of just punishments any society which is founded upon laws would be ultimately undermined. These reciprocal rights, society’s right to punish and an offender’s right to punishment, form the natural order of justice that, if not wondrous in its execution, should be effective in its result. As Graeme Newman so succinctly states, ‘There is little grace in punishment. Only justice.’⁹

For the punishment to be just, however, it must be proportionate. The concept of proportionality, captured by the ancient Latin aphorism ‘lex talionis’ or ‘measure for measure’, appears in many historic texts. Although Cicero was the first man to be assigned credit for uttering the immortal exhortation ‘let the punishment fit the crime’, the idea of proportionality finds itself rooted in biblical passages in Deuteronomy and Exodus, which espouse the taking of ‘life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot’, as well as the older Codes of Hammurabi.¹⁰ Proportionality in contemporary contexts requires that punishments should be comparable to the offence. Meting out punishments that are proportional to the crimes committed establishes a framework of fundamental fairness and impartiality, ensuring confidence in the objectivity of the justice system and discouraging notions of revenge by the state. Revenge, which evokes connotations of personal grievance and emotional intention, is an act of wanton disregard of natural law that unbalances the dispassionate nature of justice which is integral to its effective use. Without fairness and impartiality, the integrity of a justice system will begin to erode. As John Rawls eloquently posits, ‘Justice is the virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought’.¹¹

The philosophical approach of utilitarianism in punishment is more forward looking, eschewing the reconciliation of past violations and focusing more intently on deterring offences from occurring in the future. Utilitarian theory is a normative ethical construct, founded on anthropocentric economic principles, which posits that if a punishment maximizes social benefits (lowering crime),¹² the benefit to society outweighs the harm of the punishment to the individual. Utilitarianism considers punishment and the infliction of pain to be inherently immoral, but justifiable if it creates some social benefit that counters the malevolence of the punishment. Utilitarianism constructs a moral calculus which weighs the putative benefits of a punishment against individual and societal costs. If a majority benefit from the costs borne out by the few, then the punishment is acceptable as having served a utilitarian function. If an individual’s pain can be transmitted as a societal benefit, that person’s pain is justifiable. The utilitarian perspective is also founded upon the theory of the social contract, holding that society has an obligation to deter future offences, and therefore the ability to impose punishment to dissuade potential offenders.¹³ One of the foremost proponents of the utilitarian approach was Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth-century English philosopher who designed a ‘hedonistic calculus’ to evaluate the effectiveness of punishment policies. Bentham’s calculus balanced two ostensibly competing interests to arrive at the precise policy formulation to deter crime: an individual’s incentive to rationally seek pleasure and avoid pain, and the state’s interest in crafting policies that discourage the seeking of pleasures or profits that constitute crimes.¹⁴ Bentham argued that if the costs associated with crime exceed the benefits of the pleasures and profits, rational people will be naturally deterred from committing crimes and will voluntarily obey the law.

The cost-benefit approach of utilitarianism views punishment as a means to an end, and the ends envisioned by utilitarians such as Bentham (who designed the architectural plans for his own perfect prison, which he called the ‘Panopticon’) include deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation.¹⁵ As a punishment, incapacitation doesn’t inflict pain upon the perpetrator, but imposes some restriction on their behaviour or their ability to commit future crimes, and thus protects society from further violation. Incarceration would be an obvious example of a painless punishment that constrains behaviour and deprives the offender of the opportunity to commit crimes. Other examples would be methods that involve the restriction or monitoring of an offender’s movements, such as a restraining order, house arrest or electronic monitoring devices (such as bracelets or a BAC breathalyser installed in a driver’s car). The methods of incapacitation may also cover chemical treatments designed to inhibit criminal behaviour, such as chemical castration or court-order medication regimes (to prevent rape or future drug-related offence). The concept of selective incapacitation refers to the policy of adjusting the term of incapacitation to reduce the potential for recidivism, based on predictive modelling techniques that purport to identify certain offenders as higher risks for likelihood of reoffending.¹⁶ However, Kathleen Auerhahn’s research has demonstrated the weakness of this approach, finding error rates in predictability ranging from 49 to 55 percent, making them as effective as randomized selection. Rehabilitation, or the effort to modify and reform behaviour through psychological conditioning (either forced or willing), seeks to deter future crime by reshaping the thought processes of an offender to, as Bentham may have put it, recalibrate their hedonistic calculus.¹⁷ Considered the most invasive of utilitarian punishments, as its stated end is to alter certain personality traits that give rise to criminal offences and its potential for abuse and damage to the psyche is greater than other punishments, rehabilitation possesses the greatest potential for reaping future societal benefits in that reintroducing a reformed and productive member of society far outweighs the costs of rehabilitation, making its utility justifiable.

The increasingly intrusive nature of each of these forms of utilitarian punishment suggests the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault, when discussing his concept of biopolitics and the relation of the citizen to the powers of the state. Biopolitics, defined as the exercise of state power over the physical and political bodies of a civilized society, posited that the state was burgeoning into a power with ever-greater degrees of control. Foucault identified ‘a new technology of power . . . that exists at a different level, on a different scale . . . and makes use of different instruments’, to form an apparatus of control that permeates the lives of all citizens.¹⁸ Although Foucault spoke specifically about technological advances that lend more state control over ‘ratios of birth, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of the population, and so on’, later in this chapter we explore how state technology has forged new instruments that enable the state to exert ever greater degrees of control upon the bodies and minds of those incarcerated.¹⁹

In sum, the philosophical approaches to punishment are grounded in two separate theories, both based upon the social contract. The retrospective retributive approach and the prospective utilitarian view both seek to punish offenders, the former focusing on righti...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Primer on the Evolution of the Penitentiary
• 2 The Institution of American Slavery and the Evolution of Modern Mass Incarceration: A Critical Assessment of Forced Labour in America and China
• 3 Reaping Refugees: Privatized Immigration Detention Centres
• 4 Condemned Kids: The Incarceration of Children for Profit
• 5 From Gulag to Guantanamo: State-Sanctioned Torture and the Global Convergence of Corporate States
• Selected Bibliography