The First Civil RIght

July 12, 2016 3:11 PM

"We as a polity seem to think policing is the solution to every social problem." Political scientist Naomi Murakawa's book The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America tackles assumptions about how we got to today and what needs to change. In an interview at the Marshall Project, Murakawa argues "those being sentenced under punitive sentencing guidelines it doesn’t make a difference to them that Sen. Ted Kennedy was liberal and overall had a good voting record."

"We need to ask ourselves basic questions about who is being policed and what they’re being policed for. For example, in 2011, there were about 75,000 arrests of black children on charges of disorderly conduct, vandalism, loitering, and violating curfew. These were children under age 18. And these were their most serious charges. We have to ask ourselves, if every one of these arrests was made by a perfectly courteous police officer following the most pristine protocol and adherence to due process rights, and if we had recordings of these arrests, would it be okay? And I think the answer has to be no. Once we say out loud, 'No it’s not okay,' this is about the core of police power."

Murakawa talks with fellow Princeton professor Eddie Glaude on camera about the origins of mass incarceration.

posted by spamandkimchi (46 comments total)

Seems like a tendentious framing. Were "conservatives" opposing these policies?
posted by thelonius at 3:17 PM on July 12, 2016 [16 favorites]

Color me unimpressed by the argument that she makes, because she seems to be doing her level best to avoid discussing how the principles that liberals pushed for wound up getting twisted by conservatives. People love to complain about the Sentencing Guidelines, but we've just seen a demonstration of why they came about in the atrocious track record of Aaron Persky.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:24 PM on July 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

The Near Certainty of Anti-Police Violence by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I do hope people in Washington and in think tanks are reading him.
posted by suelac at 3:53 PM on July 12, 2016 [12 favorites]

A very good response from Margo Schlanger, writing for the New Rambler: No Reason To Blame Liberals (Or, The Unbearable Lightness of Perversity Arguments) – a review of Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right. It includes some positive highlights of the book, too, but I believe it's correct in asserting that Murakawa fails to successfully lay the blame for the carceral state squarely and chiefly on liberals and liberalism.

This is not to say that I don't agree that liberalism in the abstract is certainly what allows White America to happily share Facebook posts about Black Lives Mattering all day long whilst blithely propping up the carceral state. But I'm not sure she's really correctly traced the roots of this state, and racial conservatism (as she calls it) cannot but be called to account when we do.
posted by koeselitz at 4:00 PM on July 12, 2016 [12 favorites]

Looks like interesting although not really novel research presented in an inexcusably, gratuitously, and counter-productively tendentious way. It would be no less accurate to state that A) the War on Drugs helped to co-opt a Democratic drive to professionalize and subject to federal scrutiny the work of police across the US, and that B) some policies promulgated by Democrats may have had unintended consequences. But talking openly about "blaming" one of our higher-order political orientations seems moronic and unhelpful, to be perfectly honest. Blaming adds nothing to understanding, and this is purportedly scholarly work.
posted by clockzero at 4:12 PM on July 12, 2016 [5 favorites]

RTFI people. please.
posted by lalochezia at 4:33 PM on July 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's fairly well-established that law-and-order has been a bipartisan project, no? This seems a little incomplete without referencing Michael Fortner's argument that such policies were also once quite popular among black leaders (though many also hoped for positive investment in their communities which never panned out.)
posted by atoxyl at 4:36 PM on July 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is a great interview, and I'm so happy she said:

While I was writing the book, I kept thinking about how deep our tendency is to say that racism is somewhere else. For example, that it resides in the south. The popularity of books like THE NEW JIM CROW2 helps us to say racism resides predominantly among conservatives and the Republican party. The debates we’re having about police now are part of this trend of displacing blame.

Liberals are great at identifying other people who are more racist than they are, but for white liberals especially we're not going to make a whole lot of progress as long as every conversation about our own relationship with race has to pause so we can say "well yeah, but we're not as bad as THEY are."
posted by teponaztli at 4:45 PM on July 12, 2016 [13 favorites]

Does the Marshall Project always use BLOCKCAPS SIDEBAR NOTES, or is that peculiar to this article?
posted by zamboni at 5:05 PM on July 12, 2016

One of many attempts we'll see this year to drive wedges between Democrats and their natural constituencies, most, including this one, probably made futile by the enormities of Trump.
posted by jamjam at 6:25 PM on July 12, 2016 [5 favorites]

The criticisms in the interview seem fair to me. I will probably check out the book.

Most of the bullshit that led to the police and prison system as we know them was ushered in with bipartisan approval. It's one of the main reasons I just can't can't identify as a Democrat.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:41 PM on July 12, 2016 [7 favorites]

RTFI, and Margo Schlanger's response, and I agree with the latter. In particular, Schlanger's remarks about perversity arguments, and their rhetorical appeal:

perversity arguments are appealing not only to reactionaries and the left-of-liberal left but to academics, irregardless of ideology. As Hirschman says, a perversity argument “is, at first blush, a daring intellectual maneuver. The structure of the argument is admirably simple, whereas the claim being made is rather extreme.” Perversity arguments are counter-intuitive, attention-grabbing. These are attractive characteristics for someone trying to stand out in a crowd of monographs.

There's also a certain amount of commercial appeal, since the sales tactic of blaming liberals for something in the subtitle of a book is something of a cliche among right-wing writers.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:06 PM on July 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

The popularity of books like THE NEW JIM CROW2 helps us to say racism resides predominantly among conservatives and the Republican party.

Not at all in the slightest bit what The New Jim Crow says. Anyone who actually read it and came away with that impression went into it positively knowing they would come out of it with that impression.
posted by Etrigan at 7:21 PM on July 12, 2016 [9 favorites]

irregardless

You expect me to pay attention to Schlanger after this?
posted by fatbird at 7:24 PM on July 12, 2016 [8 favorites]

Does the Marshall Project always use BLOCKCAPS SIDEBAR NOTES, or is that peculiar to this article?

Not directly an answer, but I just remembered that their site designers were interviewed on the popular web design/dev podcast, Shop Talk (episode link) a few months back. From memory- they run a customized CMS with some styles sitewide and others customized for individual articles. Not sure where the sidebar notes fit into that though. My .02- they look nice on the side, but not so much in the paragraph.
posted by p3t3 at 7:28 PM on July 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's one of the main reasons I just can't can't identify as a Democrat.

Never forget that modern political movements must always be held accountable not just for their current positions but also for the platforms they held in the past.

The Democrats lost *me* because of the way they sabotaged Reconstruction.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 7:52 PM on July 12, 2016 [11 favorites]

Most of the bullshit that led to the police and prison system as we know them was ushered in with bipartisan approval.

More than that, going to where the votes are.

And union money to a significant extent too of course.

There are simply too many stupid people here in the US for my preferred system -- the Scandinavian Model -- to work here. Too many poor people too, and this gets to be an ugly cyclical dynamic.

(I don't know how the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes do it . . . I guess being just 10M, 5M, and 5M people respectively helps a lot)
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 7:54 PM on July 12, 2016

rhetorical appeal:
perversity arguments are appealing not only to reactionaries and the left-of-liberal left but to academics, irregardless of ideology. As Hirschman says, a perversity argument “is, at first blush, a daring intellectual maneuver. The structure of the argument is admirably simple, whereas the claim being made is rather extreme.” Perversity arguments are counter-intuitive, attention-grabbing. These are attractive characteristics for someone trying to stand out in a crowd of monographs.

No offense to anyone here, but this is a really bullshit and self-serving argument. And it is simply incorrect: it assumes a stable, objective "claim" that is essential to the text, when just as much of what's going on is the reader's and audience's contextual interpretation of the claim.

When the title of a polisci book is: "The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America", no rigorously trained academic scientist would take it as a literal reading. It's saying something of interest with a different point of view, take strong claims a grain of salt, learn to work with the ideas not against them, etc—these are the standard tactics of an academic when given a text of this sort. Do the Hegelian thing, right?

Someone in Margo Schlanger's position is predictably angry because this kind of social science research threatens her basis. There's a dynamic there, and part of being rigorous is being attuned to these things. Lawyers can get away with saying things like "Perversity arguments are appealing to left-of-liberal left"/"academics". That's fucking perverse. Compare the structure of the logos in the OP's quotation:

"We need to ask ourselves basic questions about who is being policed and what they’re being policed for. For example, in 2011 … These were children under age 18. … We have to ask ourselves, if every one of these arrests was made … following the most pristine protocol and adherence to due process rights … would it be okay? And I think the answer has to be no. Once we say out loud, 'No it’s not okay,' this is about the core of police power."

Is this criticism naive liberal-blaming? Leftist shock tactic? Liberal self-flagellation? Only if you want it to be.
posted by polymodus at 7:59 PM on July 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

Even if the book overstates its case and uses a provocative title to attract attention, deflecting all criticism of liberals and Democrats for mass incarceration to conservatives and Republicans is self-serving and crass.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:23 PM on July 12, 2016 [7 favorites]

Does the Marshall Project always use BLOCKCAPS SIDEBAR NOTES, or is that peculiar to this article?

Looks like it's common (but not universal) for narratives and interviews.
posted by gingerest at 8:27 PM on July 12, 2016

When the title of a polisci book is: "The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America", no rigorously trained academic scientist would take it as a literal reading. It's saying something of interest with a different point of view, take strong claims a grain of salt, learn to work with the ideas not against them, etc—these are the standard tactics of an academic when given a text of this sort. Do the Hegelian thing, right?

I have no patience for people who are deliberately provocative and then complain about being misread. It's childish "I'm not touching you" bullshit that has no place in serious discourse. If you want to be read with nuance, it's entirely counterproductive and seems to only exist as a strategy to enable this kind of condescending rebuttal of critics who have the temerity to take you at your word.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 8:41 PM on July 12, 2016 [27 favorites]

You might want to examine your apparent assumption that what generally ends up in titles and on covers has, in general, anything to do with the author. Hence the cliche.
posted by flabdablet at 9:01 PM on July 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

Dukakis tried running as being softer on crime (not really) and got made into Grade-A hamburger by the GOP.

"Liberals" don't have control of the national discourse. Even the recent advances in the same-sex partnership thing were won thanks to the independent judiciary, not election-day politics.

We "Liberals" got our heads handed to us there, too, actually.

With the Overton Window being pulled so far to the right in so many areas, principles aren't going to be worth much come Election Day when you represent a population of man-children. Just look at Feingold for how that works.

The last 2 (D) Presidents did the Triangulation thing to seize the "Center", which is the safe ground in our discourse.

And so we slide down the chute, with 30%-70% of the population actively cheering as we go.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 9:20 PM on July 12, 2016 [7 favorites]

You might want to examine your apparent assumption that what generally ends up in titles and on covers has, in general, anything to do with the author.

RTFI. That title is not one iota out of step with the author.
posted by Etrigan at 9:27 PM on July 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

Never forget that modern political movements must always be held accountable not just for their current positions but also for the platforms they held in the past.

Hillary Clinton is currently, today, not willing to say I should not be arrested because I possess marijuana. There is no pretending this idiotic tough on "crime" policy, be it born from political necessity or true belief, is something of the past until she can.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:45 PM on July 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

(and that's not close to all that needs to change, don't get me wrong)
posted by Drinky Die at 9:47 PM on July 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

The "Perversity" article is pretty good, and led me to Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (1991), which I hadn't seen before. Its blurb is pretty striking in its prescience:

With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years.

Hirschman draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to democratization and the drive toward universal suffrage in the nineteenth century, and to the welfare state in our own century. In each case he identifies three principal arguments invariably used: (1) the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what was intended; (2) the futility thesis, which predicts that attempts at social transformation will produce no effects whatever--will simply be incapable of making a dent in the status quo; (3) the jeopardy thesis, holding that the cost of the proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous hard-won accomplishments.

The blurb goes on to mention that these three moves aren't exclusive to the critiques from the right, and Schlanger's article elucidates what she says is the most common left form:

A classic radical argument, founded in Marxist dialectical thought, is to promote drastic but salutary change (that is, revolution) by making the current state of affairs more intolerable. The idea, often tagged with the imperative “heighten the contradictions,” is that if things get worse for the proletariat, that will spur much-needed radical solutions. The converse claim is that moderate reform, by dulling “contradictions,” perversely makes things worse for its purported beneficiaries.

So as an issue entirely separate from the book at hand or even criminal justice, these two classes of perversity -- the three from the right and the one from the left -- are really pretty striking in capturing the arguments within the left we've been seeing over the last 6-12 months. That debate within the left may be over as of today, but I bet we'll see plenty of instances from both sides as the general gears up over the next few months, and presumably for many years to come.
posted by chortly at 10:55 PM on July 12, 2016 [8 favorites]

It's unfortunate that any critique of the left is automatically constructed as a partisan attack.
posted by mecran01 at 6:43 AM on July 13, 2016 [4 favorites]

It's unfortunate that any critique of the left is automatically constructed as a partisan attack.

"It's all the liberals' fault!" is not critique. It's cherry-picking.
posted by Etrigan at 6:49 AM on July 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's really weird that this is being perceived as some kind of counterpoint to The New Jim Crow, which was very explicit in its claims that the current system of minority imprisonment and oppression was the result of actions undertaken by both political parties. For example:

In the early 1990s, resistance to the emergence of a new system of racialized social control collapsed across the political spectrum. A century earlier, a similar political dynamic had resulted in the birth of Jim Crow. In the 1890s, Populists buckled under the political pressure created by the Redeemers, who had successfully appealed to poor and working-class whites by proposing overtly racist and increasingly absurd Jim Crow laws. Now, a new racial caste system— mass incarceration— was taking hold, as politicians of every stripe competed with each other to win the votes of poor and working-class whites, whose economic status was precarious, at best, and who felt threatened by racial reforms. As had happened before, former allies of African Americans— as much as conservatives— adopted a political strategy that required them to prove how “tough” they could be on “them,” the dark-skinned pariahs. The results were immediate. As law enforcement budgets exploded, so did prison and jail populations. In 1991, the Sentencing Project reported that the number of people behind bars in the United States was unprecedented in world history, and that one fourth of young African American men were now under the control of the criminal justice system. Despite the jaw-dropping impact of the “get tough” movement on the African American community, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans revealed any inclination to slow the pace of incarceration.

To the contrary, in 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton vowed that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he. True to his word, just weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, Clinton chose to fly home to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired black man who had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him until the morning. After the execution, Clinton remarked, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”

Once elected, Clinton endorsed the idea of a federal “three strikes and you’re out” law, which he advocated in his 1994 State of the Union address to enthusiastic applause on both sides of the aisle. The $30 billion crime bill sent to President Clinton in August 1994 was hailed as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.” The bill created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and expansion of state and local police forces. Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.”

Clinton eventually moved beyond crime and capitulated to the conservative racial agenda on welfare. This move, like his “get tough” rhetoric and policies, was part of a grand strategy articulated by the “new Democrats” to appeal to the elusive white swing voters. In so doing, Clinton— more than any other president— created the current racial undercaste. He signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which “ended welfare as we know it,” replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a block grant to states called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). TANF imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance, as well as a permanent, lifetime ban on eligibility for welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense— including simple possession of marijuana.

Despite claims that these radical policy changes were driven by fiscal conservatism— i.e., the desire to end big government and slash budget deficits— the reality is that government was not reducing the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor. It was radically altering what the funds would be used for. The dramatic shift toward punitiveness resulted in a massive reallocation of public resources. By 1996, the penal budget doubled the amount that had been allocated to AFDC or food stamps. Similarly, funding that had once been used for public housing was being redirected to prison construction. During Clinton’s tenure, Washington slashed funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent) and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), “effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”

Clinton did not stop there. Determined to prove how “tough” he could be on “them,” Clinton also made it easier for federally assisted public housing projects to exclude anyone with a criminal history— an extraordinarily harsh step in the midst of a drug war aimed at racial and ethnic minorities. In his announcement of the “One Strike and You’re Out” Initiative, Clinton explained: “From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime and peddle drugs should be one strike and you’re out.” The new rule promised to be “the toughest admission and eviction policy that HUD has implemented.” Thus, for countless poor people, particularly racial minorities targeted by the drug war, public housing was no longer available, leaving many of them homeless— locked out not only of mainstream society, but their own homes.

The law and order perspective, first introduced during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement by rabid segregationists, had become nearly hegemonic two decades later. By the mid-1990s, no serious alternatives to the War on Drugs and “get tough” movement were being entertained in mainstream political discourse.

Alexander, Michelle (2012-01-16). The New Jim Crow (pp. 55-58). The New Press. Kindle Edition.

Alexander was adamantly opposed to Hillary Clinton during the primaries, largely because of her support for these policies.

From what I can tell, Murakawa and Alexander are in large agreement on how this played out, with Murakawa being, at most, very slightly more explicit in saying that liberals also share the blame.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:56 AM on July 13, 2016 [21 favorites]

"It's all the liberals' fault!" is not critique. It's cherry-picking.

That's not the argument she makes. FTFA:

"She argues that conservatives, playing the politics of racial animus, helped quadruple the incarceration rate, but they were not alone. Rather, she points to “liberal law and order” ideas first expressed by Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, and even the NAACP. These liberals believed that federalizing crime policy would “professionalize” the justice system and prevent racial bias. But in fact, federal funding and federal oversight of courts, sentencing, and policing helped build what Murakawa calls a “carceral state” that disproportionately punishes people of color."

She's basically arguing that federalizing crime policy was a huge mistake that helped imprison a huge number of people, many of them poor and black. Federalizing crime policy was a thing that liberals, like Ted Kennedy, did. Does anyone have any evidence that suggests she is wrong?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:12 AM on July 13, 2016 [7 favorites]

She's basically arguing that federalizing crime policy was a huge mistake that helped imprison a huge number of people, many of them poor and black. Federalizing crime policy was a thing that liberals, like Ted Kennedy, did. Does anyone have any evidence that suggests she is wrong?

As I said before, Aaron Persky is a good example of why the Sentencing Guidelines wound up happening at the federal level. And as several of the critiques have pointed out, the reality is that the abuses that we see with law enforcement and sentencing are mainly at local and state levels. And it's very doubtful from my perspective that things would be better at those levels without influence from the federal level.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:19 AM on July 13, 2016

I still think the term "liberal" as used today is pretty much useless for anything but confusing the discussion. The clearest and most useful way to understand the terms has gotten lost due to semantic drift. Liberalism isn't aligned to either Left or Right. Left/Right is about who has power. Liberal/Conservative is about different styles of wielding power once you've got it. Yes, the terms in the American context have shifted meanings, but from everything I can tell, they've shifted around in meaning so much, we no longer have any useful way to make the distinctions the older ways of using the terms gave us. That muddles our ability to discuss the political realities.

What's wrong with the older formulations of Left/Right meaning "those who don't have great political/economic power"/"those who do" and Liberal/Conservative meaning "has a style of favoring big reform and disruptions to the status quo in favor of individual freedom"/"wants the system to stay as is and doesn't favor reform in deference to state authority."

What do the terms give us now other than a bunch of tribal identity markers and noise? How is it even possible to clearly and intelligently discuss where a politician falls according to the older measures now?
posted by saulgoodman at 8:23 AM on July 13, 2016 [3 favorites]

And yes, as the term is used today, "liberals" have been complicit in setting up and defending these oppressive institutions all along.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:25 AM on July 13, 2016

1) Schlanger definitely has a lot at stake in this argument:

As an academic, Schlanger is noted as one of the nation's leading experts on prison litigation and reform.[8] She was a Commissioner of the blue-ribbon Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, co-chaired by former United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and former United States Circuit Judge John Gibbons.

She's exhibit A for liberal technocratic responses to the US prison system. In particular, she seems to put a lot of faith in prisoners suing the system as a vehicle for change.

perversity arguments are appealing not only to reactionaries and the left-of-liberal left but to academics, irregardless of ideology. As Hirschman says, a perversity argument “is, at first blush, a daring intellectual maneuver. The structure of the argument is admirably simple, whereas the claim being made is rather extreme.” Perversity arguments are counter-intuitive, attention-grabbing. These are attractive characteristics for someone trying to stand out in a crowd of monographs.

Also, her whole derail into "perversity" arguments is a nice lawyerly misdirection and quite purposefully misses the philosophy behind Murakawa's critique. It's not that "the better is the enemy of the good" but the basic question of how *politics* itself works in a capitalist society. Liberals, and in particular lawyers, like to imagine politics is defined by elections turning enlightened policy into laws. It's a point of ideology, to the liberal, that the way you resolve a problem is by improving policy and the institutions of the state that implement policy. The leftist view is that politics in a capitalist society is driven by the need to respond to the basic contradictions built into the basic structure of that society.

The fact is that since 1970, the US has been liquidating industrial capital and industrial employment. Where would all those men be if they weren't in prison? What industry would employ them? Where are the stable communities they would be integral members of? An efficient professional police force is just a buzz-saw that a steady stream of people run into. Except that even that ignores the basic emotional fact of policing: most cops aren't all that different from the people they arrest. Now, how do you work a job which involves daily ruining the lives of people who are just like you? The answer is that you can justify hurting people just like you, by destroying the people who aren't. And there are always ways to make people 'other'.

But the bottom-line is that people like Schlanger think that somehow the disaster which is represented by the US incarceration rate can be solved by some enlightened policy decisions... but to believe that is to deny the massive contradictions within our society and thereby reinforce them.
posted by ennui.bz at 8:25 AM on July 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

It is important to acknowledged the origins and construction of the carceral state as bipartisan, because the project of dismantling the carceral state is a huge and formidable task, one that will need sustained bipartisan political will and focus. I highly recommend Marie Gottschalk's work on this (1, 2, 3).

She argues that mainstream, popular solutions (ie, decriminalizing non-violent, victimless drug crimes) would not nearly do enough to lower mass incarceration. If you freed every person in prison or jail for non-violent offenses, the US would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world by a mile. Even if you took out all the drug cases, the US imprisonment rate would have still quadrupled over the past 35 years.

A major part of the problem is not what we criminalize, but how harshly we punish people for committing crimes, even violent ones. Gottschalk estimates that rolling back punishments (sentence lengths) of violent crimes to 1984 levels (or levels closer to those in other industrialized nations) would cut state imprisonment rates by 30%, a larger affect than what would be achieved by ending the Drug War (though I am not sure that she is taking into account violence that is directly tied to doing business in illegal drugs).
posted by AceRock at 8:26 AM on July 13, 2016 [4 favorites]

More from Gottschalk in a wide-ranging interview in Jacobin:

What about the role of private-sector interests in the construction of the carceral state?

We need to get away from a simple-minded, left-leaning approach to understanding mass incarceration that blames it all on economic interests and the prison-industrial complex. That said, what built the carceral state is not the same thing that sustains it today. The prison-industrial complex and economic interests were not the primary driving forces behind the construction of the carceral state, but they do much to sustain it today.

The biggest private-sector prison companies, notably The GEO Group and CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), have become very nimble political actors. They have been repositioning themselves to adapt to a new political climate in which calls for criminal justice reform are escalating.

They view the criminalization of immigration enforcement as a new frontier to make money and repurpose excess jail and prison beds. They increasingly talk about the need to invest more in the “corrections lifecycle,” that is, to privatize not just jails and prisons, but also to expand and privatize probation, parole, electronic monitoring, drug testing, etc. They are aggressively pushing to expand the “prison beyond the prison,” that gray area where people are not in prison but are tightly surveilled and not full citizens.

...

Let’s talk about solutions: what policies could an effective political movement implement that could roll this back substantially?

Let’s aim at minimum to reduce the incarceration rate to about 150 to 175 per 100,000, which is where it was on the eve of the prison boom and is somewhat comparable to other developed countries. That would mean cutting the rate by about 75 to 80 percent. Some people have begun to talk about cutting it in half over the next 10 years — and this has been dismissed as a radical idea.

We need comprehensive sentencing reform, and not just for drug crimes. We have to look at the hard cases like child pornography. We also need to roll back these very punitive sentences for people who’ve committed some pretty serious crimes — like homicide.

We should abolish life in prison without the possibility of parole. This is a nearly unheard-of sentence in Europe. Everyone serving time should be entitled to a meaningful parole review. We’ve lost the distinction between somebody who’s done something horrible and somebody who is a horrible person.

Public opinion surveys show that Americans in many ways are not more punitive than people in other countries. Public officials and politicians in the United States misread public sentiment on this issue. They’re excessively fearful of public opinion, and they’ve been unwilling to lead public opinion to dismantle the carceral state, not just trim it around the edges.

The mainstream narrative on criminal justice reform today is that since everything is so polarized in Washington and state capitols, the best we can hope for is small-bore legislative fixes aimed at the non, non, nons. Comprehensive sentencing reform is considered a nonstarter.

But it is important to remember that the carceral state was not built by legislation alone. In its formative years, a growing number of prosecutors, police, judges, and corrections officials made a major shift and decided to exert their enormous discretion in a more punitive direction. Now they can choose to do the opposite.

And if you look around today, you will find a handful of maverick prosecutors, judges, police chiefs, and corrections officials who have become disenchanted with the carceral state. They are displaying some rare examples of political courage as they wield their enormous discretion to pursue less punitive policies and practices.

posted by AceRock at 8:34 AM on July 13, 2016 [7 favorites]

Color me unimpressed by the argument that she makes, because she seems to be doing her level best to avoid discussing how the principles that liberals pushed for wound up getting twisted by conservatives.

It's interesting that you see her avoiding the discussion of liberal principles being warped by conservatives, because I see her explicitly addressing that point.

Kennedy promulgated this idea of sentencing guidelines. It was his baby. He ushered it through the Senate at first as guidelines that were rigid but would have been somewhat anti-carceral. They became guidelines that were rigid and more carceral. And Reagan signed THIS LEGISLATION3, in 1984. Kennedy had the rest of his life to say, “The sentencing guidelines have had a terrible impact. This is not what I meant.” Not once did he introduce legislation to reform the guidelines. Not once did he apologize or try to change it. When I look at that kind of history, that’s where I feel like it’s fair to hold liberals responsible.

I haven't read the book, but despite the provocative title, in the Marshall Project interview, Dana Goldstein says the theme of Murakawa's book is that liberals are as responsible as conservatives for the carceral state. In her discussion of that, she includes examples of liberal initiatives that had unintended consequences. She also details as episodes like Biden's horrible work on Clinton's 1994 Omnibus Crime Act, where liberals took the leadership in creating policies that contribute to mass incarceration.

I'm definitely interested in reading the book.
posted by layceepee at 9:21 AM on July 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

If you hadn't noticed, I don't agree with her argument about the Sentencing Guidelines, because she's ignoring the actual issue that they were created to solve - inequity of judgement. And I think that is a much bigger issue, because it fundamentally undermines the idea of equality before the law.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:30 AM on July 13, 2016

huh? its either the case that the sentencing guidelines increased the prison population, lower the prison population, or had no effect. She's saying it increased the prison population.

So did the sentencing guidelines not make more people be in prison? Where's the evidence for that?
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:35 AM on July 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

My point is that she's missing the forest for the trees, and that there's more going on than just more people are going into prison. I really recommend you read melissa may's excellent posts with regards to the anti-carceral movement in the Brock Turner thread.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:52 AM on July 13, 2016

layceepee: “I haven't read the book, but despite the provocative title, in the Marshall Project interview, Dana Goldstein says the theme of Murakawa's book is that liberals are as responsible as conservatives for the carceral state.”

No. In the excerpts posted in the articles above and the reviews linked, Murakawa argues that liberals are solely responsible for the carceral state; and that while the carceral state serves the interests of racist conservatism, its implementation was historically solely down to liberalism.

I... could agree with that. I'll have to think about it. I sort of wish this were considered less in terms of liberal and conservative, which are dominant policy identifications and little more, and more in terms of white supremacy, which is the animating factor behind all of this as far as I can tell. "Liberals" and "conservatives" are symbiotic – collaborative, in fact, and it makes sense to see them as two parts of the same mechanism. I'm not sure it makes sense to blame one or valorize the other, which was my general objection to the bits of this book that I've read. But at the same time, it can't be denied that the modern carceral state, in all its racist and classist glory, was built by people who identified as liberals.

Honestly - maybe that's a point that does need to be made more. I thought it was well-known, but the pushback against this article on so many fronts seems to indicate that it's necessary to again present liberalism in a harsher light. Liberalism is indeed what allowed Nixon and Reagan to triumph; what allowed middle-class whites to remain complacent in the 1960s and 1970s; what allowed the mass of Americans to ignore every massive societal crisis of the 20th century. It is sympathy without solidarity. Recently people are finally talking about "neoliberalism" in a more critical way; I guess that is a sign of progress.
posted by koeselitz at 10:28 AM on July 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

No. In the excerpts posted in the articles above and the reviews linked, Murakawa argues that liberals are solely responsible for the carceral state

From the book:

"“the race “problem” of the civil rights movement from the 1940s onward was answered with pledges of carceral state development—from racially liberal and conservative lawmakers alike." p22

"Accounts of conservative backlash [as an explanation for the rise of the carceral state] are not wrong; rather, I believe that they are so overwhelmingly persuasive that they eclipse the specificity of racial liberalism against which they respond” p33

There's nothing in the article that says liberals are solely to blame. Her book shouldn't be read as a history of the rise of the carceral state. Its not. Its a history of how liberals helped build the carceral state. She clearly wrote this book because the history of how conservatives helped build the carceral state is so well told and has become the dominant narrative on its rise. This book is a corrective and it really stuns me how much knee-jerk reaction there is against it for daring to say that the bills the Democrats put forth made shit a lot worse.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:55 AM on July 13, 2016 [6 favorites]

Its a history of how liberals helped build the carceral state.

Funny how the word "helped" isn't in the title.
posted by Etrigan at 11:09 AM on July 13, 2016 [5 favorites]

MisantropicPainforest: “There's nothing in the article that says liberals are solely to blame.”

Well, maybe I'm taking too strongly the bit quoted by Schlanger from page 151, but she comes very close to saying exactly that – this is what I was thinking of when I wrote that:

In the end, the Big House may serve racial conservativism, but it was built on the rock of racial liberalism. Liberal law-and-order promised to deliver freedom from racial violence by way of the civil rights carceral state, with professionalized police and prison guards less likely to provoke Watts and Attica.

As I say, maybe I'm reading that too strongly – it is possible to read that as merely focusing solely on racial liberalism. Given the excerpts you give, I guess that's probably likely.

“Her book shouldn't be read as a history of the rise of the carceral state. Its not. Its a history of how liberals helped build the carceral state. She clearly wrote this book because the history of how conservatives helped build the carceral state is so well told and has become the dominant narrative on its rise. This book is a corrective and it really stuns me how much knee-jerk reaction there is against it for daring to say that the bills the Democrats put forth made shit a lot worse.”

Heh. Is that really so stunning? Seems fairly predictable at this point. No less unfortunate for being so, granted. Given the current vogue, she probably would have had more luck if she'd put "neo" in front of the word "liberals" on the cover.
posted by koeselitz at 12:28 PM on July 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:40 AM on July 30, 2016