Not one but several ‘peculiar institutions’ have successively
operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of
the United States. The first is chattel slavery as the pivot of the
plantation economy and inceptive matrix of racial division from the colonial
era to the Civil War. The second is the Jim Crow system of legally
enforced discrimination and segregation from cradle to grave that anchored the
predominantly agrarian society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to
the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition.
America’s third special device for containing the descendants of slaves in the
Northern industrial metropolis is the ghetto, corresponding to the
conjoint urbanization and proletarianization of African-Americans from the
Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partially
obsolete by the concurrent transformation of economy and state and by the
mounting protest of blacks against continued caste exclusion, climaxing with
the explosive urban riots chronicled in the Kerner Commission Report. [1]
The fourth, I contend here, is the novel institutional complex
formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus
with which it has become joined by a linked relationship of structural
symbiosis and functional surrogacy. This suggests that slavery and mass
imprisonment are genealogically linked and that one cannot understand the
latter—its timing, composition, and smooth onset as well as the quiet ignorance
or acceptance of its deleterious effects on those it affects—without returning
to the former as historic starting point and functional analogue.
Viewed against the backdrop of the full historical trajectory of
racial domination in the United States (summed up in Table 1), the glaring and
growing ‘disproportionality’ in incarceration that has afflicted
African-Americans over the past three decades can be understood as the result
of the ‘extra-penological’ functions that the prison system has come to
shoulder in the wake of the crisis of the ghetto and of the continuing stigma
that afflicts the descendants of slaves by virtue of their membership in a
group constitutively deprived of ethnic honour (Max Weber’s Massehre).
Not crime, but the need to shore up an eroding caste cleavage,
along with buttressing the emergent regime of desocialized wage labour to which
most blacks are fated by virtue of their lack of marketable cultural capital,
and which the most deprived among them resist by escaping into the illegal
street economy, is the main impetus behind the stupendous expansion of
America’s penal state in the post-Keynesian age and its de facto policy of
‘carceral affirmative action’ towards African-Americans. [2]
Labour extraction and caste division
America’s first three ‘peculiar institutions’, slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto, have this in common: they were all instruments for the conjoint extraction of labour and social ostracization of an outcast group deemed unassimilable by virtue of the indelible threefold stigma it carries. African-Americans arrived under bondage in the land of freedom. They were accordingly deprived of the right to vote in the self-appointed cradle of democracy (until 1965 for residents of the Southern states). And, for lack of a recognizable national affiliation, they were shorn of ethnic honour, which implies that, rather than simply standing at the bottom of the rank ordering of group prestige in American society, they were barred from it ab initio. [3]
1. Slavery (1619–1865). Slavery is a highly malleable and versatile institution that can be harnessed to a variety of purposes, but in the Americas property-in-person was geared primarily to the provision and control of labour. [4] Its introduction in the Chesapeake, Middle Atlantic and Low Country regions of the United States in the 17th century served to recruit and regulate the unfree workforce forcibly imported from Africa and the West Indies to cater to their tobacco, rice and mixed-farming economy. (Indentured labourers from Europe and native Indians were not enslaved because of their greater capacity to resist and because their servitude would have impeded future immigration as well as rapidly exhausted a limited supply of labour.) By the close of the 18th century, slavery had become self-reproducing and expanded to the fertile crescent of the Southern interior, running from South Carolina to Louisiana, where it supplied a highly profitable organization of labour for cotton production and the basis for a plantation society distinctive for its feudal-like culture, politics, and psychology. [5]
An unforeseen by-product of the systematic enslavement
and dehumanization of Africans and their descendants on North American soil was
the creation of a racial caste line separating what would later become labelled
‘blacks’ and ‘whites.’ As Barbara Fields has shown, the American ideology of
‘race’, as putative biological division anchored by the inflexible application
of the ‘one-drop rule’ together with the principle of hypodescent, crystallized
to resolve the blatant contradiction between human bondage and democracy. [6] The religious and pseudo-scientific
belief in racial difference reconciled the brute fact of unfree labor with the
doctrine of liberty premised on natural rights by reducing the slave to live
property—three-fifths of a man according the sacred scriptures of the
Constitution.
2. Jim Crow (South, 1865–1965). Racial division was a
consequence, not a precondition, of US slavery, but once it was instituted it
became detached from its initial function and acquired a social potency of its
own. Emancipation thus created a double dilemma for Southern white society: how
to secure anew the labour of former slaves, without whom the region’s economy
would collapse, and how to sustain the cardinal status distinction between
whites and ‘persons of colour,’ i.e, the social and symbolic distance needed to
prevent the odium of ‘amalgamation’ with a group considered inferior, rootless
and vile. After a protracted interregnum lasting into the 1890s, during which
early white hysteria gave way to partial if inconsistent relaxation of
ethnoracial strictures, when blacks were allowed to vote, to hold public
office, and even to mix with whites to a degree in keeping with the intergroup
intimacy fostered by slavery, the solution came in the form of the ‘Jim Crow’
regime. [7] It consisted of an
ensemble of social and legal codes that prescribed the complete separation of
the ‘races’ and sharply circumscribed the life chances of African-Americans
while binding them to whites in a relation of suffusive submission backed by
legal coercion and terroristic violence.
Imported from the North where it had been experimented within
cities, this regime stipulated that blacks travel in separate trains,
streetcars and waiting rooms; that they reside in the ‘darktown’ slums and be
educated in separate schools (if at all); that they patronize separate service
establishments and use their own bathrooms and water fountains; that they pray
in separate churches, entertain themselves in separate clubs and sit in
separate ‘nigger galleries’ in theatres; that they receive medical care in
separate hospitals and exclusively from ‘coloured’ staff; and that they be
incarcerated in separate cells and buried in separate cemeteries. Most crucial
of all, laws joined mores in condemning the ‘unspeakable crime’ of interracial
marriage, cohabitation or mere sexual congress so as to uphold the ‘supreme law
of self-preservation’ of the races and the myth of innate white superiority.
Through continued white ownership of the land and the generalization of
sharecropping and debt peonage, the plantation system remained virtually
untouched as former slaves became a ‘dependent, propertyless peasantry,
nominally free, but ensnared by poverty, ignorance, and the new servitude of
tenantry’. [8] While
sharecropping tied African-American labour to the farm, a rigid etiquette
ensured that whites and blacks never interacted on a plane of equality, not
even on the running track or in a boxing ring—a Birmingham ordinance of 1930
made it unlawful for them to play at checkers and dominoes with one
another. [9] Whenever the
‘colour line’ was breached or even brushed, a torrent of violence was unleashed
in the form of periodic pogroms, Ku Klux Klan and vigilante raids, public
floggings, mob killings and lynchings, this ritual caste murder designed to
keep ‘uppity niggers’ in their appointed place. All this was made possible by
the swift and near-complete disenfranchisement of blacks as well as by the
enforcement of ‘Negro law’ by courts which granted the latter fewer effective
legal safeguards than slaves had enjoyed earlier by dint of being both property
and persons.
3. Ghetto (North, 1915–68). The sheer brutality of
caste oppression in the South, the decline of cotton agriculture due to floods
and the boll weevil, and the pressing shortage of labour in Northern factories
caused by the outbreak of World War 1 created the impetus for African-Americans
to emigrate en masse to the booming industrial centers of the Midwest and
Northeast (over 1.5 million left in 1910–30, followed by another 3 million in
1940–60). But as migrants from Mississippi to the Carolinas flocked to the
Northern metropolis, what they discovered there was not the ‘promised land’ of
equality and full citizenship but another system of racial enclosure, the
ghetto, which, though it was less rigid and fearsome than the one they had
fled, was no less encompassing and constricting. To be sure, greater freedom to
come and go in public places and to consume in regular commercial
establishments, the disappearance of the humiliating signs pointing to
‘Coloured’ here and ‘White’ there, renewed access to the ballot box and
protection from the courts, the possibility of limited economic advancement,
release from personal subservience and from the dread of omnipresent white
violence, all made life in the urban North incomparably preferable to continued
peonage in the rural South: it was ‘better to be a lamppost in Chicago than
President of Dixie,’ as migrants famously put it to Richard Wright. But
restrictive covenants forced African-Americans to congregate in a ‘Black Belt’
which quickly became overcrowded, underserved and blighted by crime, disease,
and dilapidation, while the ‘job ceiling’ restricted them to the most
hazardous, menial, and underpaid occupations in both industry and personal
services. As for ‘social equality’, understood as the possibility of ‘becoming
members of white cliques, churches and voluntary associations, or marrying into
their families’, it was firmly and definitively denied. [10]
Blacks had entered the Fordist industrial economy, to which they
contributed a vital source of abundant and cheap labour willing to ride along
its cycles of boom and bust. Yet they remained locked in a precarious position
of structural economic marginality and consigned to a secluded and dependent
microcosm, complete with its own internal division of labour, social
stratification, and agencies of collective voice and symbolic representation: a
‘city within the city’ moored in a complexus of black churches and press,
businesses and professional practices, fraternal lodges and communal
associations that provided both a ‘milieu for Negro Americans in which they
[could] imbue their lives with meaning’ and a bulwark ‘to “protect” white
America from “social contact” with Negroes’. [11] Continued caste hostility
from without and renewed ethnic affinity from within converged to create the
ghetto as the third vehicle to extract black labour while keeping black bodies
at a safe distance, to the material and symbolic benefit of white society.
The era of the ghetto as paramount mechanism of ethnoracial
domination had opened with the urban riots of 1917–19 (in East St. Louis,
Chicago, Longview, Houston, etc.). It closed with a wave of clashes, looting
and burning that rocked hundreds of American cities from coast to coast, from
the Watts uprising of 1965 to the riots of rage and grief triggered by the
assassination of Martin Luther King in the summer of 1968. Indeed, by the end
of the sixties, the ghetto was well on its way to becoming functionally
obsolete or, to be more precise, increasingly unsuited to
accomplishing the twofold task historically entrusted to America’s ‘peculiar
institutions.’ On the side of labour extraction, the shift from an
urban industrial economy to a suburban service economy and the accompanying
dualization of the occupational structure, along with the upsurge of
working-class immigration from Mexico, the Caribbean and Asia, meant that large
segments of the workforce contained in the ‘Black Belts’ of the Northern
metropolis were simply no longer needed. On the side of ethnoracial
closure, the decades-long mobilization of African-Americans against caste
rule finally succeeded, in the propitious political conjuncture of crisis
stemming from the Vietnam war and assorted social unrest, in forcing the
federal state to dismantle the legal machinery of caste exclusion. Having
secured voting and civil rights, blacks were at long last full citizens who
would no longer brook being shunted off into the separate and inferior world of
the ghetto. [12]
But while whites begrudgingly accepted ‘integration’ in
principle, in practice they strove to maintain an unbridgeable social and
symbolic gulf with their compatriots of African descent. They abandoned public
schools, shunned public space, and fled to the suburbs in their millions to
avoid mixing and ward off the spectre of ‘social equality’ in the city. They
then turned against the welfare state and those social programmes upon which
the collective advancement of blacks was most dependent. A contrario,
they extended enthusiastic support for the ‘law-and-order’ policies that vowed
to firmly repress urban disorders connately perceived as racial threats. [13] Such
policies pointed to yet another special institution capable of confining and
controlling if not the entire African-American community, at least its most
disruptive, disreputable and dangerous members: the prison.
The ghetto as prison, the prison as ghetto
To grasp the deep kinship between ghetto and prison, which helps
explain how the structural decline and functional redundancy of the one led to
the unexpected ascent and astonishing growth of the other during the last
quarter-century, it is necessary first to characterize accurately the
ghetto. [14] But
here we come upon the troublesome fact that the social sciences have failed to
develop a robust analytic concept of the ghetto; instead they have
been content to borrow the folk concept current in political and
popular discourse at each epoch. This has caused a good deal of confusion, as
the ghetto has been successively conflated with—and mistaken for—a segregated
district, an ethnic neighbourhood, a territory of intense poverty or housing
blight and even, with the rise of the policy myth of the ‘underclass’ in the
more recent period, a mere accumulation of urban pathologies and antisocial
behaviours. [15]
A comparative and historical sociology of the reserved Jewish
quarters in the cities of Renaissance Europe and of America’s ‘Bronzeville’ in
the Fordist metropolis of the twentieth century reveals that a ghetto is
essentially a sociospatial device that enables a dominant status group in an
urban setting simultaneously to ostracize and exploit a subordinate group
endowed with negative symbolic capital, that is, an incarnate property
perceived to make its contact degrading by virtue of what Max Weber calls
‘negative social estimation of honour.’ Put differently, it is a relation of
ethnoracial control and closure built out of four elements: (i) stigma; (ii)
constraint; (iii) territorial confinement; and (iv) institutional encasement.
The resulting formation is a distinct space, containing an ethnically
homogeneous population, which finds itself forced to develop within it
a set of interlinked institutions that duplicates the organizational
framework of the broader society from which that group is banished and supplies
the scaffoldings for the construction of its specific ‘style of life’ and
social strategies. This parallel institutional nexus affords the subordinate
group a measure of protection, autonomy and dignity, but at the cost of locking
it in a relationship of structural subordination and dependency.
The ghetto, in short, operates as an ethnoracial
prison: it encages a dishonoured category and severely curtails the life
chances of its members in support of the ‘monopolization of ideal and material
goods or opportunities’ by the dominant status group dwelling on its
outskirts. [16] Recall that the ghettos of early modern Europe
were typically delimited by high walls with one or more gates which were locked
at night and within which Jews had to return before sunset on pain of severe
punishment, and that their perimeter was subjected to continuous monitoring by
external authorities. [17] Note next the structural and functional
homologies with the prison conceptualized as a judicial ghetto: a jail
or penitentiary is in effect a reserved space which serves to forcibly
confine a legally denigrated population and wherein this latter
evolves its distinctive institutions, culture and sullied identity. It
is thus formed of the same four fundamental constituents—stigma, coercion,
physical enclosure and organizational parallelism and insulation—that make up a
ghetto, and for similar purposes.
Much as the ghetto protects the city’s residents from the
pollution of intercourse with the tainted but necessary bodies of an outcast
group in the manner of an ‘urban condom,’ as Richard Sennett vividly put it in
his depiction of the ‘fear of touching’ in sixteenth-century Venice, [18] the prison cleanses the social body
from the temporary blemish of those of its members who have committed crimes,
that is, following Durkheim, individuals who have violated the sociomoral
integrity of the collectivity by infringing on ‘definite and strong states of
the collective conscience.’ Students of the ‘inmate society’ from Donald
Clemmer and Gresham Sykes to James Jacobs and John Irwin have noted time and
again how the incarcerated develop their own argot roles, exchange systems and
normative standards, whether as an adaptive response to the ‘pains of
imprisonment’ or through selective importation of criminal and lower-class
values from the outside, much like residents of the ghetto have elaborated or
intensified a ‘separate sub-culture’ to counter their sociosymbolic
immurement. [19] As for the secondary aim of the ghetto, to facilitate
exploitation of the interned category, it was central to the ‘house of
correction’ which is the direct historical predecessor of the modern prison and
it has periodically played a major role in the evolution and operation of the
latter. [20]
Finally, both prison and ghetto are authority structures saddled with
inherently dubious or problematic legitimacy whose maintenance is ensured by
intermittent recourse to external force.
By the end of the seventies, then, as the racial and class
backlash against the democratic advances won by the social movements of the
preceding decade got into full swing, the prison abruptly returned to the
forefront of American society and offered itself as the universal and simplex
solution to all manners of social problems. Chief among these problems was the
‘breakdown’ of social order in the ‘inner city,’ which is scholarly and policy
euphemism for the patent incapacity of the dark ghetto to contain a dishonoured
and supernumerary population henceforth viewed not only as deviant and devious
but as downright dangerous in light of the violent urban upheavals of
mid-sixties. As the walls of the ghetto shook and threatened to crumble, the
walls of the prison were correspondingly extended, enlarged and fortified, and
‘confinement of differentiation’, aimed at keeping a group apart (the
etymological meaning of segregare), gained primacy over ‘confinement
of safety’ and ‘confinement of authority’—to use the distinction proposed by
French sociologist Claude Faugeron. [21] Soon the black ghetto,
converted into an instrument of naked exclusion by the concurrent retrenchment
of wage labour and social protection, and further destabilized by the
increasing penetration of the penal arm of the state, became bound to the jail
and prison system by a triple relationship of functional equivalency,
structural homology and cultural syncretism, such that they now constitute a
single carceral continuum which entraps a redundant population of
younger black men (and increasingly women) who circulate in closed circuit
between its two poles in a self-perpetuating cycle of social and legal
marginality with devastating personal and social consequences. [22]
Now, the carceral system had already functioned as an
ancillary institution for caste preservation and labour control in
America during one previous transition between regimes of racial domination,
that between slavery and Jim Crow in the South. On the morrow of Emancipation,
Southern prisons turned black overnight as ‘thousands of ex-slaves were being
arrested, tried, and convicted for acts that in the past had been dealt with by
the master alone’ and for refusing to behave as menials and follow the
demeaning rules of racial etiquette. Soon thereafter, the former confederate
states introduced ‘convict leasing’ as a response to the moral panic of ‘Negro
crime’ that presented the double advantage of generating prodigious funds for
the state coffers and furnishing abundant bound labour to till the fields,
build the levees, lay down the railroads, clean the swamps, and dig the mines
of the region under murderous conditions. [23] Indeed, penal labour, in the
form of the convict-lease and its heir, the chain gang, played a major role in
the economic advancement of the New South during the Progressive era, as it
‘reconciled modernization with the continuation of racial domination’. [24]
What makes the racial intercession of the carceral system
different today is that, unlike slavery, Jim Crow and the ghetto of
mid-century, it does not carry out a positive economic mission of recruitment
and disciplining of the workforce: it serves only to warehouse the precarious
and deproletarianized fractions of the black working class, be it that they
cannot find employment owing to a combination of skills deficit, employer
discrimination and competition from immigrants, or that they refuse to submit
to the indignity of substandard work in the peripheral sectors of the service
economy—what ghetto residents commonly label ‘slave jobs.’ But there is
presently mounting financial and ideological pressure, as well as renewed
political interest, to relax restrictions on penal labour so as to
(re)introduce mass unskilled work in private enterprises inside American
prisons: putting most inmates to work would help lower the country’s ‘carceral
bill’ as well as effectively extend to the inmate poor the workfare
requirements now imposed upon the free poor as a requirement of
citizenship. [25] The next decade will tell whether the
prison remains an appendage to the dark ghetto or supersedes it to go it alone
and become America’s fourth ‘peculiar institution.’
Race making and social death
Slavery, the Jim Crow system and the ghetto are ‘race making’
institutions, which is to say that they do not simply process an ethnoracial
division that would somehow exist outside of and independently from them.
Rather, each produces (or co-produces) this division (anew) out of
inherited demarcations and disparities of group power and inscribes it at every
epoch in a distinctive constellation of material and symbolic forms. And all
have consistently racialized the arbitrary boundary setting African-Americans
apart from all others in the United States by actively denying its cultural
origin in history, ascribing it instead to the fictitious necessity of biology.
The highly particular conception of ‘race’ that America has
invented, virtually unique in the world for its rigidity and consequentiality,
is a direct outcome of the momentous collision between slavery and democracy as
modes of organization of social life after bondage had been
established as the major form of labour conscription and control in a
underpopulated colony home to a precapitalist system of production. The Jim
Crow regime reworked the racialized boundary between slave and free into a
rigid caste separation between ‘whites’ and ‘Negros’—comprising all persons of
known African ancestry, no matter how minimal—that infected every crevice of
the postbellum social system in the South. The ghetto, in turn, imprinted this
dichotomy onto the spatial makeup and institutional schemas of the industrial
metropolis. So much so that, in the wake of the ‘urban riots’ of the sixties,
which in truth were uprisings against intersecting caste and class
subordination, ‘urban’ and black became near-synonymous in policy making as
well as everyday parlance. And the ‘crisis’ of the city came to stand for the
enduring contradiction between the individualistic and competitive tenor of
American life, on the one hand, and the continued seclusion of
African-Americans from it, on the other. [26]
As a new century dawns, it is up to the fourth ‘peculiar
institution’ born of the adjoining of the hyperghetto with the carceral system
to remould the social meaning and significance of ‘race’ in accordance with the
dictates of the deregulated economy and the post-Keynesian state. Now, the
penal apparatus has long served as accessory to ethnoracial domination by
helping to stabilize a regime under attack or bridge the hiatus between
successive regimes: thus the ‘Black Codes’ of Reconstruction served to keep
African-American labour in place following the demise of slavery while the
criminalization of civil rights protests in the South in the 1950s aimed to
retard the agony of Jim Crow. But the role of the carceral institution today is
different in that, for the first time in US history, it has been elevated to
the rank of main machine for ‘race making.’
Among the manifold effects of the wedding of ghetto and prison
into an extended carceral mesh, perhaps the most consequential is the practical
revivification and official solidification of the centuries-old association
of blackness within criminality and devious violence. Along with the
return of Lombroso-style mythologies about criminal atavism and the wide
diffusion of bestial metaphors in the journalistic and political field (where
mentions of ‘superpredators’, ‘wolf-packs’, ‘animals’ and the like are
commonplace), the massive over-incarceration of blacks has supplied a powerful
common-sense warrant for ‘using colour as a proxy for dangerousness’. [27] In recent years, the courts have consistently
authorized the police to employ race as ‘a negative signal of increased risk of
criminality’ and legal scholars have rushed to endorse it as ‘a rational
adaptation to the demographics of crime’, made salient and verified, as it
were, by the blackening of the prison population, even though such practice
entails major inconsistencies from the standpoint of constitutional law.
Throughout the urban criminal justice system, the formula ‘Young + Black +
Male’ is now openly equated with ‘probable cause’ justifying the arrest,
questioning, bodily search and detention of millions of African-American males
every year.
In the era of racially targeted ‘law-and-order’ policies and
their sociological pendant, racially skewed mass imprisonment, the reigning
public image of the criminal is not just that of ‘a monstruum—a being
whose features are inherently different from ours’, but that of a
black monster, as young African-American men from the ‘inner city’
have come to personify the explosive mix of moral degeneracy and mayhem. The
conflation of blackness and crime in collective representation and government
policy (the other side of this equation being the conflation of blackness and
welfare) thus re-activates ‘race’ by giving a legitimate outlet to the
expression of anti-black animus in the form of the public vituperation of
criminals and prisoners. As writer John Edgar Wideman points out:
It’s respectable to tar and feather criminals, to advocate locking them up and throwing away the key. It’s not racist to be against crime, even though the archetypal criminal in the media and the public imagination almost always wears ‘Willie’ Horton’s face. Gradually, ‘urban’ and ‘ghetto’ have become codewords for terrible places where only blacks reside. Prison is rapidly being re-lexified in the same segregated fashion. [28]
Indeed, when ‘to be a man of colour of a certain economic class
and milieu is equivalent in the public eye to being a criminal’, being
processed by the penal system is tantamount to being made black, and ‘doing
time’ behind bars is at the same time ‘marking race’. [29]
By assuming a central role in the post-Keynesian government of
race and poverty, at the crossroads of the deregulated low-wage labour market,
a revamped ‘welfare-workfare’ apparatus designed to support casual employment,
and the vestiges of the ghetto, the overgrown carceral system of the United
States has become a major engine of symbolic production in its own right. It is
not only the pre-eminent institution for signifying and enforcing blackness,
much as slavery was during the first three centuries of US history. Just as
bondage effected the ‘social death’ of imported African captives and their
descendants on American soil, mass incarceration also induces the civic death
of those it ensnares by extruding them from the social compact. [30] Today’s inmates are thus the target of a threefold
movement of exclusionary closure:
- Prisoners are denied access to valued cultural capital: just as university credentials are becoming a prerequisite for employment in the (semi)protected sector of the labour market, inmates have been expelled from higher education by being made ineligible for Pell Grants, starting with drug offenders in 1988, continuing with convicts sentenced to death or lifelong imprisonment without the possibility of parole in 1992, and ending with all remaining state and federal prisoners in 1994. This expulsion was voted by Congress for the sole purpose of accentuating the symbolic divide between criminals and ‘law-abiding citizens’ in spite of overwhelming evidence that prison educational programmes drastically cut recividism as well as help to maintain carceral order. [31]
- Prisoners are systematically excluded from social redistribution and public aid in an age when work insecurity makes access to such programmes more vital than ever for those dwelling in the lower regions of social space. Laws deny welfare payments, veterans’ benefits and food stamps to anyone in detention for more than 60 days. The Work Opportunity and Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 further banishes most ex-convicts from Medicaid, public housing, Section 8 vouchers and related forms of assistance. In the spring of 1998, President Clinton denounced as intolerable ‘fraud and abuse’ perpetrated against ‘working families’ who ‘play by the rules’ the fact that some prisoners (or their households) continued to get public payments due to lax bureaucratic enforcement of these prohibitions. And he proudly launched ‘unprecedented federal, state, and local cooperation as well as new, innovative incentive programs’ using the latest ‘high-tech tools to weed out any inmate’ who still received benefits (see opposite), including the disbursement of bounties to counties who promptly turn in identifying information on their jail detainees to the Social Security administration.
- Convicts are banned from political participation via ‘criminal disenfranchisement’ practised on a scale and with a vigour unimagined in any other country. All but four members of the Union deny the vote to mentally competent adults held in detention facilities; 39 states forbid convicts placed on probation from exercising their political rights and 32 states also interdict parolees. In 14 states, ex-felons are barred from voting even when they are no longer under criminal justice supervision—for life in ten of these states. The result is that nearly 4 million Americans have temporarily or permanently lost the ability to cast a ballot, including 1.47 million who are not behind bars and another 1.39 million who served their sentence in full. [32] A mere quarter of a century after acceding to full voting rights, one black man in seven nationwide is banned from the electoral booth through penal disenfranchisement and seven states permanently deny the vote to more than one fourth of their black male residents.
Through this triple exclusion, the prison and the
criminal justice system more broadly contribute to the ongoing
reconstruction of the ‘imagined community’ of Americans around the
polar opposition between praiseworthy ‘working families’—implicitly white,
suburban, and deserving—and the despicable ‘underclass’ of criminals, loafers,
and leeches, a two-headed antisocial hydra personified by the dissolute teenage
‘welfare mother’ on the female side and the dangerous street ‘gang banger’ on
the male side—by definition dark-skinned, urban and undeserving. The former are
exalted as the living incarnation of genuine American values, self-control,
deferred gratification, subservience of life to labour; the latter is
vituperated as the loathsome embodiment of their abject desecration, the ‘dark
side’ of the ‘American dream’ of affluence and opportunity for all, believed to
flow from morality anchored in conjugality and work. And the line that divides
them is increasingly being drawn, materially and symbolically, by the prison.
On the other side of that line lies an institutional setting
unlike any other. Building on his celebrated analyses of Ancient Greece,
classical historian Moses Finley has introduced a fruitful distinction between
‘societies with slaves’ and ‘genuine slave societies.’ [33] In the former, slavery is but one of several modes of
labour control and the division between slave and free is neither impermeable
nor axial to the entire social order. In the latter, enslaved labour is
epicentral to both economic production and class structure, and the
slave-master relation provides the pattern after which all other social
relations are built or distorted, such that no corner of culture, society and
self is left untouched by it. The astronomical overrepresentation of blacks in
houses of penal confinement and the increasingly tight meshing of the
hyperghetto with the carceral system suggests that, owing to America’s adoption
of mass incarceration as a queer social policy designed to discipline the poor
and contain the dishonoured, lower-class African-Americans now dwell, not in a
society with prisons as their white compatriots do, but in the first
genuine prison society in history.
[1] See, respectively: Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, New York [1956] 1989; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Cambridge, MA 1998; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Oxford [1957] 1989; Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, New York 1998; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920, Chicago 1968; Kerner Commission, 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, New York [1968] 1988.
[2] See my ‘Crime et châtiment en Amérique de Nixon à Clinton’, Archives de politique criminelle, vol. 20, pp. 123–38; and Les Prisons de la misère, Paris 1999, pp. 71–94 (English trans. Prisons of Poverty, Minneapolis 2002).
[3] ‘Among the groups commonly considered
unassimilable, the Negro people is by far the largest. The Negroes do
not, like the Japanese and the Chinese, have a politically organized
nation and an accepted culture of their own outside of America to fall
back upon. Unlike the Oriental, there attaches to the Negro an
historical memory of slavery and inferiority. It is more difficult for
them to answer prejudice with prejudice and, as the Orientals may do, to
consider themselves and their history superior to the white Americans
and their recent cultural achievements. The Negroes do not have these
fortifications of self-respect. They are more helplessly imprisoned
as a subordinate caste, a caste of people deemed to be lacking a
cultural past and assumed to be incapable of a cultural future.’ Gunnar
Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, New York [1944] 1962, p. 54; emphasis added.
[4] Seymour Drescher and Stanley Engerman, A Historical Guide to World Slavery, Oxford 1998.
[5] Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, New York 1978; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877, New York 1993.
[6] ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America’, NLR 1/181, May–June 1990.
[7] The term comes from a song-and-dance routine,
‘Jumping Jim Crow’, first performed in 1828 by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a
popular travelling actor considered the father of the ‘black-and-white’
minstrel show; see Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow.
[8] Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow, Urbana 1990.
[9] The Mississippi legislature went so far as to
outlaw the advocacy of social equality between blacks and whites. A law
of 1920 subjected to a fine of 500 dollars and 6 months’ jail anyone
‘found guilty of printing, publishing or circulating arguments in favour
of social equality or intermarriage’: McMillen, Dark Journey, pp. 8–9.
[10] St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, New York [1945] 1962, vol. 1, pp. 112–28.
[11] Black Metropolis, vol. 2, p. xiv.
[12] This was the meaning of Martin Luther King’s
Freedom Campaign in the summer of 1966 in Chicago: it sought to apply to
the ghetto the techniques of collective mobilization and civil
disobedience successfully used in the attack on Jim Crow in the South,
to reveal and protest against the life to which blacks were condemned in
the Northern metropolis. The campaign to make Chicago an open city was
swiftly crushed by formidable repression, spearheaded by 4,000 National
Guards. Stephen Oakes, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, New York 1982.
[13] Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, New York 1991; Jill Quadagno, The Colour of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty, Oxford 1994; Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson, The Politics of Injustice, Thousand Oaks 2000, pp. 49–74.
[14] By 1975 the carceral population of the US had
been steadily declining for nearly two decades to reach a low of 380,000
inmates. The leading analysts of the penal question, from David Rothman
to Michel Foucault to Alfred Blumstein, were then unanimous in
predicting the imminent marginalization of the prison as an institution
of social control or, at worst, the stabilization of penal confinement
at a historically moderate level. No one foresaw the runaway growth that
has quadrupled that figure to over two million in 2000 even as crime
levels remained stagnant.
[15] See my ‘Gutting the Ghetto’ for a historical
recapitulation of the meanings of ‘ghetto’ in American society and
social science, leading to a diagnosis of the curious expurgation of
race from a concept expressly forged to denote a mechanism of
ethnoracial domination, which ties it to the changing concerns of state
elites over the nexus of poverty and ethnicity in the metropolis. In
Malcolm Cross and Robert Moore, eds, Globalization and the New City, Basingstoke 2000.
[16] Max Weber, Economy and Society, Berkeley 1978, p. 935.
[17] Louis Wirth, The Ghetto, Chicago 1928.
[18] Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York 1994.
[19] Black Metropolis, vol. 2, p. xiii.
[20] Describing London’s Bridewell, the Zuchthaus of Amsterdam and the Paris Hôpital général,
Georg Rusche and Otto Kirschheimer show that the main aim of the house
of correction was ‘to make the labour power of the unwilling people
socially useful’ by forcing them to work under close supervision in the
hope that, once released, ‘they would voluntarily swell the labour
market’. Punishment and Social Structure, New York 1939, p. 42; for the modern prison, see Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience, New Brunswick, NJ 1991.
[21] ‘La dérive pénale’, Esprit 215, October 1995.
[22] A fuller discussion of this ‘deadly symbiosis’
between ghetto and prison in the post-Civil Rights era is provided in
my ‘Deadly Symbiosis’, Punishment and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 95–134.
[23] This is not a figure of speech: the annual
mortality rate for convicts reached 16 per cent in Mississippi in the
1880s, where ‘not a single leased convict ever lived long enough to
serve a sentence of ten years or more’. Hundreds of black children, many
as young as six years old, were leased by the state for the benefit of
planters, businessmen and financers, to toil in conditions that even
some patrician Southerners found shameful and ‘a stain upon our
manhood’. See David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim CrowJustice, New York 1996, p. 45.
[24] Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labour: The Political Economy of Convict Labour in the NewSouth, London and New York 1999, p. 195.
[25] See my Les Prisons de la misère, Paris
1999, pp. 71–94. Expert testimony presented to the House Committees on
the Judiciary and Crime during discussion of the Prison Industries
Reform Act of 1998 explicitly linked welfare reform to the need to
expand private prison labour.
[26] Two indicators suffice to spotlight the
enduring ostracization of African-Americans in US society. They are the
only group to be ‘hypersegregated’, with spatial isolation shifting from
the macro-level of state and county to the micro-level of municipality
and neighbourhood so as to minimize contacts with whites throughout the
century. See Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid,
Cambridge 1993; Douglas Massey and Zoltan Hajnal, ‘The Changing
Geographic Structure of Black–White Segregation in the United States’, Social Science Quarterly,
vol. 76, no. 3, September 1995, pp. 527–42. They remain barred from
exogamy to a degree unknown to any other community, notwithstanding the
recent growth of so-called multiracial families, with fewer than 3 per
cent of black women marrying out compared to a majority of Hispanic and
Asian women. Kim DaCosta, ‘Remaking the Colour Line: Social Bases and
Implications of the Multiracial Movement,’ Berkeley, Ph.D Dissertation.
[27] Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law, New York 1997, pp. 136–67.
[28] John Edgar Wideman, ‘Doing Time, Marking Race’, The Nation, 30 October 1995.
[29] ‘Doing Time, Marking Race’.
[30] Orlando Patterson, Slavery as Social Death, Cambridge, MA 1982.
[31] Josh Page, ‘Eliminating the Enemy: A Cultural
Analysis of the Exclusion of Prisoners from Higher Education’, MA paper,
Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley.
[32] Jamie Fellner and Marc Mauer, Losing the Vote.
[33] ‘Slavery’, International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York 1968.
