Crime, Punishment and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment

By Prema Polit, AlterNet. Posted April 14, 2007.

The prison system in the U.S. stands alone in the modern Western world as a model of mass incarceration. The "tough on crime" stance taken by elected officials from across the political spectrum has not halted the resurgence of crime in the last few years, nor has it helped prevent ex-inmates from once again ending up behind bars.

How did the U.S. devolve into a nation that incarcerates over 2.13 million people, when just a quarter century ago the number was 475,000? What happens when the criminal justice system deals out vengeance instead of justice?

Sasha Abramsky delves into these questions in his new book, American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, a title that alludes to the ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance. It follows in the tracks of his first two books, Hard Time Blues and Conned, and tries to synthesize what he has learned about criminal justice in the U.S. since an article assignment first piqued his interest around eleven years ago. American Furies traces criminal justice through American history, including the psychological and religious issues, and the power dynamics involved in the development and implementation of recent policy.

Abramsky's quiet Sacramento home is a far cry from some of the dark scenes he has witnessed in his research. AlterNet interviewed Abramsky there about his book and his ideas on how to extricate this country from an age of mass imprisonment.

Prema Polit: Why has the U.S. become incarceration central when other countries have taken a different route?

Sasha Abramsky: I think one of the reasons is that America took a distinctly conservative turn in the 1970s. Other countries went through their conservative moments, England being a case in point with Margaret Thatcher, but they didn't quite have the sort of populist conservatism that we have here. One of the effects is that there has been a pandering to really very ill thought out prejudice on an array of issues. Then a result of that in the criminal justice debates are very simplistic laws like "three strikes and you're out." They sound good in 15-second sound-bytes, and they're lousy public policy.

I think that the other reason, paradoxically, is that we're extremely wealthy, and extremely powerful. Most states, when they're at the zenith of their power, in addition to projecting themselves out onto the world also seem to impose order on their own populaces. America is the big cheese at the moment, so we're seeing those social policies playing out in America in a way that they're not playing out anywhere else right now.

An example is England in the late 19th century. Brimming with self-confidence, it believes that its political, social and economic systems are the best in the world. Its empire is at its maximum expansion. You see very similar policies in late 19th century England that you see here.

I think what's distinct about the American system is that America has reached the zenith of its power at a moment when technology provides so many opportunities for the state to insert itself in ways that it couldn't previously. One of the most fascinating things that comes to mind is that in addition to being liberal with its use of incarceration, we have technology that allows the state to eavesdrop, to control, to regiment the lives of its prisoners in a way that no other prison mechanism in history has been able to do. So we're not just creating more prisons, we're creating more secure prisons and more regimented prisons. We're not just creating more jobs for prison guards, but we're creating an entire subset of the economy based on the technology of incarceration.

PP: You wrote about the "Nothing Works" movement, which dismissed rehabilitative efforts for prisoners as ineffective. So what does work?

SA: I guess I should backtrack and explain what the "Nothing works" philosophy is. It's an idea which both the left and the right came to believe in in the 1970s. The idea was that a ton of money and a ton of resources had been invested in trying to create rehabilitation structures inside prisons for criminals. They were tailored to meet individual needs, and they were designed to recalibrate the way people behaved and also their belief structures. The left came to hate it because they concluded that these rehabilitation efforts were very totalitarian, that they were an attempt to sort of remodel people to meet social norms. And the right hated it because they thought it was wishy-washy. The consensus is that it should just be about punishment, that we should just get back to the basics. That's been fairly prevalent for about 25 or 30 years at this point.

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Prema Polit is an editorial intern at AlterNet.

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