Locked In

April 8, 2017 4:51 PM

How We Misunderstand Mass Incarceration: Adam Gopnik revises his "Caging of America" with a review of John Pfaff's Locked In.
posted by anotherpanacea (12 comments total)

very interesting, adding Locked In to the reading list.
posted by crush at 5:34 PM on April 8, 2017

i'm a prosecutor (albeit appellate, not trial). to think about these issues well, we have to remember that for many people, incarceration is as much about punishment and retribution as it is about utilitarian concerns of simply keeping dangerous people at bay. criminal justice reformers, to whom i'm very sympathetic, must learn how to speak to the average joe, who believes in an eye-for-an-eye.
for example: california, the bluest of blue states, just voted not just to keep capital punishment, but to *expedite* it. In 2016!
posted by wibari at 10:14 PM on April 8, 2017 [8 favorites]

What's a "line" prosecutor? Gopnik uses that phrase in his piece (complete with the quote marks) but never defines it.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:20 AM on April 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

As I was reading the first link I grudgingly accepted the idea that many of the factors driving mass incarceration are over-emphasized, but when they got to the main point I wanted to yell "hell yes!" The politicization of the justice system has long bothered me. We elect the DA here, and the campaigns always emphasize being tough on crime and having high conviction rates, at least for successful candidates. No mention of cases overturned on appeal, wrongful conviction, or the concept of justice in general. This gets compounded by two things the article didn't touch on much but that presumably come up in the book. First, many judges are elected, and around here at least almost all of them are former prosecutors who campaigned with the same tough on crime rhetoric and bring the same mindset to the bench that they had as prosecutors. Second, it seems that most of the convictions of innocent people that I read about involve some sort of prosecutorial misconduct. This ranges from ignoring police misbehavior to influencing witnesses to hiding exculpatory evidence. This seems to be rarely punished (unless the unjustly prosecuted are white, as in the Duke lacrosse case or cops, as in the Freddy Gray case), and in fact these prosecutors seem unable to realize that they did anything wrong or admit that they sent an innocent person to prison. I, too plan on reading the book, but am pessimistic thing will change anytime soon.
posted by TedW at 5:40 AM on April 9, 2017 [13 favorites]

Given that the prosecutorial behavior driving much of the incarceration in this country is closely tied to the idea of "law and order", this article makes a nice companion read to the links in the FPP.
posted by TedW at 7:02 AM on April 9, 2017 [2 favorites]

Refreshing to see someone thinking outside the current stalled narratives on this subject. I especially like this idea: "A program of 'graduated release,' in which a small number of inmates would be released at the age of forty, and then tracked, in order to demonstrate to the public how small the actual risk of re-offending is. "
posted by Modest House at 7:20 AM on April 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

"A program of 'graduated release,' in which a small number of inmates would be released at the age of forty"

Better than nothing, perhaps, but a woefully inadequate measure that would still waste years, and decades, of people's lives.

"Getting a bit grey, are you? Well, you sure do seem more harmless now. How about we let you try to start over after spending more than half of your life in and out of the system? Sure, you've probably experienced a lot of trauma and we're leaving you with none of the tools or networks you need to succeed, but let bygones be bygones, right?"
posted by evidenceofabsence at 7:39 AM on April 9, 2017 [5 favorites]

Given the conventional wisdom about what the lack of rehabilitation services during prison sentences, lack of re-entry support following a prison sentence and the devastation the prison-industrial complex does to the relationships and support structures of people in prison, I don't know that graduated release of men who've been in prison their entire adult lives will demonstrate that these men are not lost causes. But maybe there's some alternative theories.

Either way, I think decarceration is very good goal but it's an expensive one that requires treating prisoners like something that is the polar opposite of "criminals" and I don't see Americans doing that in any real sense right now.
posted by crush at 8:13 AM on April 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

Getting a bit grey, are you? Well, you sure do seem more harmless now. How about we let you try to start over after spending more than half of your life in and out of the system?

Not to mention the fact that letting older prisoners out absolves the state of responsibility for their health care, which is becoming a real issue as the prison population ages. Then releases them into a society that will provide neither health care nor employment. Of course to many people those are features, not bugs.
posted by TedW at 9:34 AM on April 9, 2017 [10 favorites]

Given the facts of the cases I am most familiar with, the problem is that prosecutorial decisions are often made based on the prosecutor's ambitions. Justice never enters into it.
posted by ob1quixote at 10:51 AM on April 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

While it's all well and good to call out the "standard story" if that's his contrarian selling point, I really don't get the sense that Pfaff has read all of The New Jim Crow, which talks at exhaustive and eye-opening length about how detention, incarceration, and prosecution are targeted, discretionary practices driven by a political narrative.
posted by lumensimus at 11:46 PM on April 9, 2017

I can't believe I didn't notice this thread when it was posted. I love this article.

This part is especially true, in my experience as a state trial public defender:

“There is basically no limit to how prosecutors can use the charges available to them to threaten defendants,” Pfaff observes. That’s why mandatory-sentencing rules can affect the justice system even if the mandatory minimums are relatively rarely enforced. A defendant, forced to choose between a thirty-year sentence if convicted of using a gun in a crime and pleading to a lesser drug offense, is bound to cop to the latter. Some ninety-five per cent of criminal cases in the U.S. are decided by plea bargains—the risk of being convicted of a more serious offense and getting a much longer sentence is a formidable incentive—and so prosecutors can determine another man’s crime and punishment while scarcely setting foot in a courtroom.

Prosecutors are enabled by crazy high legislative authority (persistent felony offender laws, extremely large prison ranges, etc.) which are enacted by tough-on-crime politicians to target the worst of the worst crimes. For example, most alleged burglaries are not the terrifying night burglary by a stranger of a family at gun point, but all accused burglars face the crazy high range if they try to exert their constitutional rights to trial by jurors who are not informed of the penalties until after they convict of the charged offenses. So even relatively decent prosecutors - or at least ones who would self-identify as such - get to coerce people into taking guilty pleas regardless of actual guilt or provability of the offense to secure something in a more realistic range of punishment for the facts alleged. But there is always an assumption of factual guilt, because even innocent or less culpable defendants know to be scared of the possibility of hard time they are exposed to if they don't accept a plea to a lesser offense (and many of them will wait in jail until they do). It's a daily and pernicious reality of the criminal justice system.
posted by likeatoaster at 3:59 PM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]