Using the literary license that is her trade, LeGuin subtly asks her
readers to consider whether they, too, are willing to accept such
conditions, or, after becoming fully conscious members of such a utopia,
they will choose to join those brave (and rare) few who walk away from
Omelas. While LeGuin's masterful story is usually interpreted as a
commentary on the scapegoat phenomenon, it does not require much of an
imaginative leap to relate her tale to the social role of prisons.
In fact, as elaborated below, her insights resonate in the words and works of
many social theorists and activists working in the realm of prison reform.
The use of prisons as the primary vehicle to punish those who disobey the
law is a given in most modern nations. But as the populations and budgets
of prison systems continue to increase without an apparent corresponding
decrease in crime, and as accounts of abhorrent prison conditions and
imbalances in criminal justice systems keep cropping up, it behooves us to
reflect upon both the concept and the practice of imprisonment as the
principal mode of punishment in most societies.
2
Fundamental Functions of Prisons: Safety, Crime Prevention, and Rehabilitation
Unlike many other social problems which are more pronounced in the
developing world, the United States has one of the most vexing prison
problems on the planet. In the so-called "land of the free," over 1.8
million people are behind bars.
"The United States now imprisons more
people than any other country in the world," states journalist Eric
Schlosser in a recent Atlantic Monthly
article
on the Prison Industrial
Complex. 3 The California prison system alone has more inmates
than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands
combined. The last twenty years has seen a dramatic increase in the number
of prisons across the U.S.; California has built twenty-one new prisons and
increased its inmate population eightfold during this period. The majority
of these prisons suffer from extreme overcrowding, typically operating at
double their intended capacity. How are these astronomical figures
justified? And how is such a scenario perpetuated?
The presence of prisons in most societies rests on three fundamental
assumptions about the functions that prisons serve. First, by locking up
law-breakers, prisons keep the rest of society safe. Another "standard
justification for today's prisons is that they prevent crime." 4
In addition to preventing crime and keeping law-abiding citizens safe,
prison advocates rely on the trope of rehabilitation. Schlosser indicates
that this is a relatively modern phenomenon, evidenced by the historical
fact that the United States, in the 1830s "was renowned in Europe for
having created a whole new social institution: the penitentiary. In New
York and Pennsylvania prisons were being designed not to punish inmates but
to reform them. Solitary confinement, silence, and hard work were imposed
in order to encourage spiritual and moral change." 5
De-myth-ification
Dispelling these three central "prison myths" appears as a leitmotif in
much of the literature on prison reform. Many U.S. advocates for prison
reform have challenged assumptions about crime prevention by arguing that
larger cultural and demographic trends are primarily responsible for recent
decreases in crime, and pointing to other countries, such as Canada, in
which the rate of incarceration and crime do not seem to correspond. And
as for safeguarding law-abiding citizens from violent sociopaths, according
to Schlosser, even with the dramatic increases in prison populations, "the
proportion of offenders being sent to prison each year for violent crimes
has actually fallen during the prison boom." 6
Some prison reform advocates also insist that the rhetoric of crime
prevention and safety mask larger and deeper social ills like racism. They
point out that the prison population in the U.S. by no means reflects the
demographic make-up of the society. Approximately 50 percent of U.S.
prisoners are African-American, which means one of every fourteen
African-American men is currently incarcerated. Seventy percent of U.S.
prison inmates are illiterate.
Moreover, it has become axiomatic among prison reformers that, rather than
reforming wayward citizens and helping them adjust to a harmonious social
existence, prisons have become "factories of crime." The education most
prisoners receive, whether in the U.S or Brazil or Paraguay or Thailand,
helps reform them not into law-abiding citizens but better criminals.
Camilo Soares' work in Paraguay (profiled in this issue) exposes this
insidious downward spiral of increasing criminality, especially among youth
at so-called "reformatories."
Prison activists such as Bettina Aptheker and Joel Olsen echo some of
LeGuin's questions in their analyses of the "social functions" of prisons,
particularly in the United States. Olsen insists that prisons are, in
fact, not about either decreasing crime nor about rehabilitation. Like
LeGuin (though far less subtle or poetic), Olsen asserts that "the criminal
class is the scapegoat for . . . social ills." 7
Aptheker's and Olsen's views represent those who seek to abolish the prison
system altogether, which they see as a reflection of a "morally bankrupt,
racist, defective and generally deteriorating social order." 8
Prisons, according to Olsen, are "first and foremost about social control,
about suppressing dissent, about creating a more politically obedient and
economically useful population." 9
While these views might seem extreme, they emerge from a long-standing
philosophical tradition which sees the prison as an inherently repressive
arm of the modern capitalist state. More than a hundred years ago, a
disgruntled Nietzsche decried the hypocrisy the prison systems'
rehabilitation myth: "A Strange thing this, our punishment! It does not
cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes
worse than the crime does." 10 His intellectual successor,
Michel Foucault, provided some of this century's most provocative
scholarship on the history of punishment and the social meanings of prisons.
In an interview with J. J. Brochier in 1977, Foucault succinctly
explained his views on the prison as a reflection of a repressive society:
My hypothesis is that the prison was linked from its beginning to a project
for the transformation of individuals. People tend to suppose that the
prison was a kind of refuse-dump for criminals, a dump whose disadvantages
became apparent during use, giving rise to the conviction that the prisons
must be reformed and made into means of transforming individuals. But this
is not true. . . . The prison was meant to be an instrument, comparable with –
and no less perfect than – the school, the barracks, or the hospital,
acting with precision upon its individual subjects. The failure of this
project was immediate . . . In 1820 it was already understood that the prisons,
far from transforming criminals into honest citizens, serve only to
manufacture new criminals and to drive existing criminals even deeper into
criminality. It was then that there took place, as always in the mechanics
of power, a strategic utilisation of what had been experienced as a
drawback. Prisons manufactured delinquents, but delinquents turned out to
be useful, in the economic domain as much as the political. Criminals come
in handy. 11
Beyond the Words
These compelling critiques provide a framework in which to consider the
challenges facing prison reform efforts today. But while they might strike
a chord somewhere in the heart of the committed social reformer, they do
little in the way of furthering practical analyses of penal systems, let
alone offering viable solutions for maintaining non-repressive social
order. We are left with wide open questions about what to do. Are there,
in fact, practical alternatives to prisons? How do we construct a society
in which we can effectively and responsibly address inevitable
transgressions of the law without creating large, expensive, and
often-repressive penal systems?
This issue of Changemakers Journal profiles a selection of innovative
initiatives dedicated to addressing some of these questions. It is by no
means an exhaustive survey of the range of efforts in the field of prison
reform. Rather, the articles included represent a sampling of current
prison-related projects in diverse contexts around the globe.
Given the complexity of the problem, approaches to prison reform come from
many angles. For some, the improvement of prison conditions is the primary
objective. Prisoners are the target population, and solutions take the
form of demanding basic rights, services, and conditions for inmates, but
not necessarily challenging the penal system as a whole. Basic human
needs, such as decent sanitation, health care, food and water, as well as
appropriate psychological care and programs like job training, literacy,
and other educational efforts, are advocated for and (ideally) instituted.
Elvira Alvarez of Bolivia, whose project is profiled below, exemplifies
such an effort.
Other prison reformers tackle the issue of who actually gets incarcerated
and why. They take on particular political prisoners' cases or look to
larger social patterns, like the disproportionate numbers of specific
racial, ethnic or economic groups in jails evidenced above. Efforts might
concentrate on reforming legal representation, the judicial system, and/or
parole boards so that they account for this imbalance reflective of larger
social ills.
Finally, others take an even further step back to question the role of
prisons in society overall, and posit that, perhaps, there might be
alternatives to prisons. These reformers sometimes stick to an ideological
platform, illustrated in the words of Aptheker and Olsen above, by
insisting that prisons are nothing more than a vehicle for state
repression, that they serve to force both prisoners and non-prisoners into
docile obedience, and that they are a necessary tool to maintain capitalist
social order.
One recent example of a vision which has gone beyond scathing social
critiques to practically apply a radical new approach to punishment can be
found in Archbishop Desmond Tutu's brainchild – the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. Tutu eloquently describes
the process through which the TRC was born from the endemic violence that
plagued apartheid South Africa. The central challenge he and others of the
new South African faced – how to deal with the horrendous past of a
post-conflict situation – is unfortunately similar to many situations
around the globe. Tutu discusses the several options that were considered,
including Nuremberg-type trials, revenge, and collective amnesia. None of
these alternatives, he insists, was appropriate for the South African
context, so they were forced to invent their own. Tutu suggests that
"South Africa is probably producing a new paradigm of how to deal with the
past in a way that will enable former enemies to live in peace together."
12
To be sure, the TRC addresses a unique situation in terms of the particular
social and historical circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. But
rather than dismiss it as an exclusively South African phenomenon, one of
the most important lessons the TRC offers is in the potential to both
imagine and implement a highly innovative scheme to address deep social
rifts and complex modes of punishment for a crime-ridden society.
The significance of the TRC for the purposes of prison reform lies in its
intrepid invention of a new way to deal with crime. The fact that Tutu and
others were able to dream of, develop, and deploy a process which did not
have to rely on traditional trials and punishments of criminal activity
invites others to be similarly bold in their thought and action, whether
they, too, are faced with a society which has torn itself apart, or a
society in which crime continues to rise, prisons continue to get built,
and more and more citizens continue to be incarcerated with no apparent
benefits to anyone involved. Perhaps the TRC's legacy can best be found in
the example it sets in daring to think beyond conventional solutions, even
in the midst of the most wrenching, seemingly intractable, problems. Such
is the hallmark of social entrepreneurship.
Joanna Davidson is a former Associate Director of Ashoka: Innovators for
the Public. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Emory
University.
Footnotes
LeGuin, pp. 281-282.
[ back ]
The way societies develop appropriate mechanisms to maintain "social
order," broadly defined, has long been a topic for social theorists,
philosophers, revolutionaries, politicians, and social changemakers. The
wealth of literature concerned with prisons and punishment provides a
veritable schmorgasboard of information and opinions on these matters. For
a sampling of this literature and other resources on prison reform, please
go to the library section of the website.
[ back ]
Schlosser, p. 52.
[ back ]
Ibid, p. 77.
[ back ]
Ibid, p. 76.
[ back ]
Ibid.
[ back ]
Olsen, p. 2.
[ back ]
Aptheker, p. 4.
[ back ]
Olsen, p. 1.
[ back ]
Nietzsche, p. 190.
[ back ]
Foucault, pp. 39-40.
[ back ]
Speech by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; November 9, 1998, Emory
University; Atlanta, GA, USA.
[ back ]
References
Aptheker, Bettina. 1971. "The Social Functions of the Prisons in the
United States," originally in If They Come in the Morning (Angela Davis,
ed.) reprinted in
www.prisonactivist.org/crisis/aptheker-prisons.html.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books.
LeGuin, Ursula K. 1975. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," in The
Wind's Twelve Quarters (New York: Harper & Row).
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1881. "The Dawn," in On The Genealogy of Morals
(translated by Walter Kaufmann), New York: Vintage Books
Olsen, Joel. 1994. "Gardens of the Law: The role of Prisons in Capitalist
Society," in Criminal Injustice: Confronting the Prison Crisis, reprinted in
www.prisonactivist.org/crisis/gardens-of-law.html.
Schlosser, Eric. December, 1998. "The Prison-Industrial Complex," in The
Atlantic Monthly.
April 1999 Journal Home Page