Bachelor thesis
Regulating poor urban “others” in post-industrial America
About the interplay of media, racism, and policies
12,086 words
University of Amsterdam
Supervision: Karen Witsenburg
Secondary judge: Flip Lindo
20/05/2013
Nina Haerter
nina.haerter@gmail.com
Student number: 10073213
Introduction
An important development has been taking place in the United States since the 1970s: the number of Americans that are disciplined by the criminal justice system has exploded. The USA now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. More than two million people are in prison or jail, and five million more on parole or probation. The United States holds 25 percent of the world prison population, in contrast to five percent of all people.1 Many scholars have commented that, interestingly, this is not proportional or even due to changes in crime rates, even though this is what most of the public believes. There are many other relevant factors that help explaining this development. One is the “War on Drugs” that the US have been waging. Most of all convicts are drug offenders. Of these, four in five have been arrested only for possession of drugs, not sale. Police forces raid poor urban areas and mostly ethno/racial others; therefore, blacks and other minorities are incarcerated in disproportionate numbers.
Another development has been taking place at the same time. It is the shift from welfare to workfare: welfare refers to the social net that the American state has been building up since the New Deal. For Americans to qualify for welfare, they only needed to be a citizen and in need. Workfare, on the contrary, means to provide help only for a short period of time and only when many obligations are met. That is, services are no longer simply given to all needy by the state; rather, they are only provided to keep the pressure of finding a job high at all times. When obligations are not met by the claimant, s/he can lose all rights to social services.
In this thesis, I want to illuminate the interrelationship of these two processes. The reduction of the welfare state correlates with the increase of the prison industrial complex. It seems that one is being superseded by the other. The American state has reformulated two of its major arenas of involvement into the lives of its population. These changes have been gradual and in accordance with new experiences of the population with late modernity. One factor that contributed to this was certainly the media that to a great extent influences public opinion. Many scholars have shown how the media provides only a biased picture of both welfare recipients and criminals. I am interested in the interplay between the state, the media, and the population. How are the two developments in penal and welfare policies influenced by different actors? How do they make sense of this shift? In short, what is happening, and why?
1
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289 (04/05/2013).
In fact, much has been written and said about these topics. However, there is a difference between much scholarly work, especially from the social sciences, and the more general representations (TV, radio, newspapers, and politicians). There are two entirely different sets of assumptions, one that focuses on structural barriers and another that emphasizes personal responsibility. I will illuminate both perspectives and try to assess their raisons d’être and validity.
In specific, I am addressing the following questions: What has the state changed in its approach toward the poor and why? What is the role of the media in this process? What functions does the new situation fulfil? What implications do these trends have for democracy? I will first describe facts about this new phenomenon of mass imprisonment itself, and then describe changes in crime rates and the perception thereof. Next, I will discuss the impact of the “War on Drugs” and other changes in penal policies, and compare them to changes in welfare policies. I will go on to analyze the roles of capitalism, the labor market, and the state. At last, I will analyze functions, describe implications for democracy, and discuss options for change.
Mass imprisonment as indicator for the existence of a problem
“Crime normalizes what remained problematic when framed in explicitly racial terms” (Simon 2000:1125).
Since the 1970s, the prison population in the USA has multiplied on an unprecedented scale. No country in the world has a higher incarceration rate today. The total correctional population (people imprisoned, on probation, or parole) rose steadily from under two million in 1980 to over seven million in 2007, ever since declining slightly to just under seven million at the end of 2011.2 One in 34 people, i.e. 2.9 percent of the population are under some form of correctional supervision. 2.24 million people are imprisoned (end of 2011), almost 4 million on probation, and about 850.000 on parole.2 Most of the (quite modest) decline since 2007 has been due to a decrease in the probation population.2 Graph 1 shows the number of state and federal prisoners (people imprisoned in jails are not included3) over time. One of the things this graph shows marvellously is the increase since the 1970s. Between 1925 and 1970,
2
http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus11.pdf (13/04/2013).
the number of inmates remained relatively stable, but then it increased significantly every year until 2007.4
Graph 1. State and Federal Prisoners 1925-2010. (excluding people in jails)
Source: http://sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=107 (05/04/2013).
As poor urban neighborhoods are exposed to harsher and more punitive police enforcement and parole surveillance, most convicted people are from those areas (Roberts 2004:1276). Up to 1 in 8 of the adult male residents of poor urban areas are imprisoned each year and 1 in 4 is in prison on any given day (Clear in Roberts 2004: 1276). That means prison becomes a normal part of life of these urban residents. As mass incarceration mainly hits these areas, the effects are concentrated there as well. Due to the significant shortage of men that these neighborhoods experience, social networks are harmed (ibid.:1281-1284). Especially women and children, those who remain in the ghettos when the men are imprisoned, are hit by financial strain, stress, and resignation. Furthermore, social norms in the communities suffer: “Distrust of the criminal justice system is tied to ‘a kind of civic isolation, in which the
4 US population count at specific times: 1925: 114 million; 1970: 203 million (78% growth); 2013: 216 million (89% growth since 1925 or 6% growth since 1970). Growth rates are thus not at all proportional to incarceration rates as seen in the graph.
workings of the state are seen as alien forces to be avoided rather than services to be employed’” (Clear and Rose in Roberts 2004:1287).
One of the most troubling characteristics of this new mass imprisonment is its racial component. “The ethnoracial makeup of convicts has completely flip-flopped in four decades, turning over from 70 percent white and 30 percent ‘others’ at the close of World War II to 70 percent African American and Latino versus 30 percent white by century’s end” (Wacquant 2010:79, emphasis in original). At the moment, almost 1 in 3 African Americans will be imprisoned some time of their lives (in contrast to 1 in 25 whites); when wealthier blacks are taken out of the equation, even more will find themselves behind bars (Bonszar and Beck in Simon 2000:1122).
One of the leading sociologists on this topic, Loïc Wacquant, is in fact urging to replace the term mass incarceration with hyper incarceration (Wacquant 2010:78). He therewith wants to stress what I have just described: detention is not evenly distributed in the American society as the term mass incarceration would imply; rather, it is filtered by three categorizations. The first is class – inmates are “first and foremost poor people” (ibid.:78-79, emphasis in original). Two-thirds of US prison inmates lived under half the national poverty line before getting locked up.5 Employment rates before an arrest, education levels, and other class indicators of inmates are equally bad. The second filter is race: blacks and other minorities are imprisoned in grossly disproportionate numbers, for once because they are generally poorer and therefore live in those urban neighborhoods more often, and secondly because the police often uses “color as a proxy for dangerousness” and thus suspects and searches blacks much more often than others (Kennedy in Wacquant 2005:128). The last filter is place. Intertwined with the first two filters, place refers to “remnants of the dark ghetto,” and points to the spatial, economic, and cultural exclusion of certain inner-city areas (Wacquant 2010:80).
To sum up, there has been an enormous increase of the American population in prison and on probation or parole since the 1970s. Inmates are primarily poor, non-white, and from ghettos. Both the sheer number of the total correctional population as well as the proportion of residents from poor urban areas are troubling for a democracy and raise questions about the causes behind these facts. Therefore, I will continue with a discussion of the changes in crime and the perception thereof in the USA during the last decades.
5
Wacquant “Urban Marginality and the State – Loic Wacquant” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JPAguOSA2E (18/04/2013).
Crime and criminals
“Outrage and anger are the culture’s antidotes to fear and anxiety, and the open expression of these emotions is part of the consolation and therapy it offers” (Garland 2000:352).
Many Americans assume that rising incarceration rates and/or changes in penal policy result from rising crime rates. That is rarely the case. Research has shown that most of the rising imprisonment rates of the last forty years in the USA happened due to changes in penal policy, the approach taken to combat crime, and the philosophy behind efforts to combat street-level misdemeanors (Mauer 2006 [1999]). Between 1980 and 1996, for instance, 88 percent of the tripling of the prison population was due to higher likelihood of confinement upon conviction (51 percent) and longer prison terms (31 percent) - while only 12 percent of the rise was explicable by rising crime rates, as studies showed (Mauer in Roberts 2004:1272).
Defenders of hyper incarceration would argue that that the relationship between crime and imprisonment rates is inversely proportional: when criminals get locked up, they cannot commit crimes anymore. Therefore, they perceive rising captivity rates in accordance with falling crime rates as logical development and as supportive of their punitive approach. However, how crime is defined, categorized, and measured is always to a certain extent arbitrary: violent (thus arguably the worst) crimes such as murder and rape actually declined most of the time since the 1970s, whereas property crimes increased until 1993, after which all crime declined steadily (Wacquant 2010:76). The inconsistency of these trends shows that putting more people behind bars will not necessarily lead to a decline in crime: even though detention rates rose steadily since the 1970s, it took twenty more years until property crime declined.
The very degree of police patrolling and the like naturally also have a high influence: crime rates only measure reported crimes, not all committed ones. Changing priorities of police forces on certain kinds of crimes will therefore by definition result in higher “crime” rates. Certainly, simply measuring crime on one scale does not reflect reality. Whatever the crime rate can tell us, in the USA it rose (not continuously) until the early 1990s and then declined. Since this trend by itself does not reveal much, I will illuminate how the perception of crime changed due to the media and other societal characteristics of late modernity.
Garland (2000) analyzes what he calls “the culture of high crime societies.” He discusses various aspects that have changed with the shift from “penal-welfarism” to “tough
on crime” policies. Incorporating some of Giddens’ ideas about late modernity6, Garland comes to the conclusion that several characteristics explain “the apparent absence of a relationship between crime trends and fear of crime sentiments” (ibid.:368). Late modernity is particularly characterized by a rising sense of “ontological insecurity” (Giddens in Garland 2000:361). This sense of insecurity stems from changing gender, work, and family relations over the last decades and increases the urge to control and manage risks, uncertainties, and fears (ibid.:359-362). Risk is inversely proportional to class patterns, i.e. it accumulates at the bottom (Beck in Ritzer 2011 [2008]:558). Garland stresses that between the 1950s and 1970s, television viewing became a mass phenomenon in the USA, politicians became more populist, TV coverage was selective, and thus higher crime rates became a “normal social fact” for many (Garland 2000:362). “Television coverage of crime more than doubled from 1992 to 1993, while murder coverage tripled during the period, despite the fact that crime rates were essentially unchanged” (Mauer 2006 [1999]:73).
The crime discourse was shifted away from expertise and research areas toward the public arena, and the perspective changed from focusing on criminals to instead looking at suffering victims and public safety (Simon 2000). Everyone thus became a possible victim and felt a need for increased security. Crime became an important tool in electoral strategies that both parties could and did put to use effectively (Garland 2000:63; Simon 2000:1124). The criminal justice state is now viewed as inadequate by many Americans whose fear of crime continuously rises, which is one reason for the boom of the private security market. As final characteristic of high crime societies, a “crime consciousness” is institutionalized, especially by the media tapping into and reinforcing the new experience of crime (Garland 2000:363,367-368). There are countless examples of these new habitual crime control experiences; for illustrative reasons I will name a few: gated communities, the growing ubiquity of camera surveillance, the purchase of insurance and security devices for one’s own home, minimizing the risk of victimization of self and family by avoiding public transport and certain places – especially at night, constraining one’s behaviour in the public, avoiding on-street parking, etc. All these small changes attest to the normalization of a heightened consciousness and fear of crime. They also attest to the booming private security sector that benefits from this new social anxiety.
Crime rates have steadily decreased since the 1990s (Mauer 2006 [1999]:84). Since these crime rates are quite arbitrary, some researchers have also started to collect, analyze, and compare “victimization” data with crime rates. The former have the advantage of greater
coverage, as households are sampled randomly and asked whether they have been victim of a crime during the last year (ibid.). Less than half of all crimes are reported to the police, so the “crime rates” of these victimization studies are much higher than official numbers (ibid.). The results of both crime and victimization studies have fluctuated – sometimes rising, sometimes decreasing – between 1970 and 1990 (ibid.:95). After 1990, crime rates have been falling. Imprisonment rates, however, have increased throughout this entire period (ibid.). There is thus no clear relationship between captivity and crime, as some proponents of hyper incarceration claim. Many factors other than imprisonment mediate this relationship and thus are responsible for changes in crime rates. Some of these mediators have already been mentioned, such as a changing approach by the police and the legal definitions of crimes. Others include the availability of firearms, unemployment numbers, changes in the drug market and the like (ibid:97).
The American population thus accepted changes in penal policies due to this new experience of crime, not due to actual crime rates (ibid.). Many scholars have stressed that punitive responses to crime find more resonance in Western countries when the picture of criminals is that of an “other.” In the US, a picture of street criminals came to dominate in journalistic, scholarly and policy debates which can be boiled down to that of the black dangerous underclass (Wacquant 2010:74). After the urban riots of the 1960s, conservatives were quick to coin the dominant image of the lower classes as people with character flaws (Wilson 1989:183). Media images of violent drug-offenders and the more generally self-destructive underclass “were especially potent in deepening the alarm felt by the middle-class public and linking crime to questions of class and race” (Garland 2000:360). As Garland furthermore points out, the middle-class had an especially big influence on whether and how penal policies would change (ibid.:356). He gives three reasons: firstly, they were very much linked to the state institutions (working in the relevant positions); secondly, through their “civilized” attitude they could differentiate themselves further from the lower classes; and thirdly, the distance between their lives and crime actually became smaller (ibid.:356).
We have seen thus far that the explosion of the total correctional population of the last forty years in the USA have not resulted from an actual rise in crime, but rather from a new experience of crime that is characterized by a heightened consciousness and fear, and from a new perception of the underclass as dangerous aliens to society who are believed to be responsible for all misery. Next, I will describe the actual changes in penal policies that have taken place with emphasis on the “War on Drugs,” and assess how they have boosted the prison population.
The War on Drugs and other changes in penal policy
“Correctional philosophies have changed radically over time, evolving to reflect changing political, religious, and legal sensibilities. Whether through ‘rehabilitation’, ‘incapacitation’, ‘deterrence’, or ‘retribution,’ prison administrators have implemented varying regimes of penalty according to changes in prevailing thinking about social control” (Hallett 2006:80).
“The War on Drugs became its own prisoner-generating machine, producing incarceration rates that ‘defy gravity and continue to grow even as crime rates are dropping’” (Zimring in Roberts 2004:1275).
With the new experience of crime and a stereotypical picture of and opinion about criminals, the stage was set for serious changes in penal policy. As crime had become a “hot topic”, politicians wanted to be seen as “tough on crime” and tried to outplay one another in designing harsher penalties for petty crime. In New York City, for example, then mayor Giuliani announced his “zero tolerance” policies in 1994 to fight “urban decay.” This meant upscaling police forces and an aggressive approach directed at the homeless, beggars, prostitutes, graffiti-sprayers, and so on (Wacquant 2010:64).
White consumers of urban space7 were annoyed by and scared of the street-level crime they encountered when they left their suburbs. Many cities established municipal codes similar to the zero tolerance policies in order to criminalize behaviour which supposedly lessoned the quality of life in specific areas and kept tourists and retail customers from frequenting these places (Lynch 2011:196). “Nuisance” behaviour was thus banished from parks, business districts, and the like (ibid.). Multiple shopping centers strove to keep undesired populations away by removing public transit stops from their locale; research showed that income and racial discrimination were the biggest forces behind this process of bus stop removal (Center for Urban Transportation Research 2009). In general, crime started to become a very politicized topic; politicians and the media disseminated much more “information” about crime rates and the like, and in the public, more and more people started
7 The term “consumers of urban space” is adopted from Wacquant’s book Prisons of Poverty. On page 16, he writes “In short, the enemy is the subproletariat that mars the scenery and menaces or annoys the consumers of urban space.” In the context of Giuliani’s zero tolerance policies, the term “consumers of urban space” points to the fact that the inner-cities were “cleaned” of beggars, prostitutes, and other poor people to make it a nicer area only for those that are spending money, thus mostly affluent white consumers. They are the ones for whom zero tolerance policies are made. They are the preferred population. Consumption is what the state (or city) wants. See Smith 2013.
to appreciate the “tough on crime” movement as necessary reaction to the crime-crisis they encountered in the mass media (Garland 2000).
The United States announced their “War on Drugs” during the Reagan presidency (Marion 2009:232). Reagan wanted to enforce stricter punishment and other changes in law for drug-related crimes which became fact with the Comprehensive Crime and Control Act in 1984 (ibid.). Mandatory sentencing had already spread to many states, but now, next to other things, it was federally institutionalized for drug-related crimes, eliminating mitigating circumstances from the decision-making process (ibid.; Mauer 2006 [1999]:56). By the end of the decade, the prison population had increased by 115 percent (Marion 2009:232). Compared to 41,000 drug offense prisoners in 1980, the 507,000 drug offense inmates of 2010 represent an increase of incredible 1,100 percent (see Graph 2). In 2010, out of 13 million total arrests, the highest number was for drug abuse violations, amounting to approximately 1.6 million arrests.8 82 percent of all drug-related arrests were for mere possession of drugs; out of these more than half were for possession of marijuana.8 Between 1996 und 2010 alone, almost 11 million people were arrested only for marijuana possession; more than 26 million in total for drug-related offenses.9 This increase of convictions is mainly due to changing penal policies: between 1980 and 1992, the risk of receiving a prison sentence for a drug offense after having been arrested rose by 447 percent (Mauer 2006 [1999]:30). Also the time served when in prison increased (ibid.:33).
Graph 2. Number of People in prisons and jails for drug offenses, 1980 and 2010.
Source: http://sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=128 (05/04/2013).
8 http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/persons-arrested (15/04/2013).
The “War on Drugs” is thus one of the biggest factors explaining the hyper incarceration of poor urban citizens. There is little evidence for positive effects of the War on Drugs that was supposed to create a “Drug-Free America by 1995”: while casual use of drugs has slightly decreased since 1979 along with alcohol and tobacco consumption (as general trend towards a healthier lifestyle), hard-core users – disproportionately low-income – registered no decline in use (ibid.:62,102). The “War on Drugs” is not really a war on drugs, or against the powerful producers and mighty drug lords; rather, it is a war against drug consumers and lowest-level dealers. The drug economy in many respects works the same way that the legal economy does: when there is a demand, there are job opportunities. Incarcerating low-level dealers typically results in nothing but their replacement with other unemployed youth (ibid.:128): “declining job opportunities for young urban males, along with changes in wages for legitimate work and measures of inequality, increased the propensity to commit crime among those in the free world” (ibid.:128).
The “end of welfare as we know it”
Hyper imprisonment in the USA developed, as we have seen, from a new experience of crime coupled with new penal policies and crime combat approaches by the police. So far, this is but one side of the explanation. At the same time in which the American state scaled up its punitive forces, it scaled down its social/welfare policies and other regulations. Between 1980 and 1993, federal spending on employment and training programs had lowered by almost 50 percent while corrections spending had increased by 521 percent (Mauer 2006 [1999]:68). A prisoner in America costs approximately $22,000 a year, a big sum that could potentially be used otherwise and/or be decreased (ibid.:92). To understand why welfare was established in the first place and how it changed in the context of hyper incarceration, I will outline some historical developments.
As I briefly mentioned above, the 1930s ushered in a new era of Keynesian regulation of the national market economy. The New Deal was the first big-scale organized effort of the administrative state to intervene into the economy. Main objectives were recovery and stabilization since the Great Depression had left millions of people hungry and without jobs (Kantor, Lowe 1995:5). Minimum wages, maximum hours, codes of fair competition, and labor’s rights to form unions were established or improved (Skocpol, Feingold 1982:265).
The economy recovered and between 1950 and 1970, there was much work available in the industrial manufacturing sector for unskilled laborers; afterwards however, it
plummeted (Kasarda in Wilson 1989:184). The American labor market experienced a rapid restructuring toward an economy with emphasis on the tertiary sector; most industry has been shifted to cheaper countries such as Mexico (Bourgois 2003:114-115). Inequality levels had declined between 1947 and 1968, but with the changing economy, inequality rose again (Ross in Singh 2010 [2003]:323). Ross points out that inequality correlates highly with other indicators of social disintegration; so that a poor child for instance will more likely drop out of school early, engage in criminal behaviour, develop psychological pathologies, and receive low earnings in adulthood, which, in turn, will lead to repetition of this system – “the poverty syndrome” - across generations (ibid.: 322,324).
Whereas the value of skilled work increased in post-industrial America, that of unskilled work decreased; the Census Bureau explained this shift in distribution in terms of globalization, immigration, and trade union membership (ibid.:323). Research has also shown that in general, the wealthier an American is, the more will his/her income derive from capital earnings, i.e. dividend and interest income, rather than wage earnings - since latter are taxed more (OECD 2012:32). Whenever capital earning taxes are less than wage earning taxes, inequality rises: the more capital a person has, the more money s/he will get. The money that someone owns produces more profit than the work s/he does.
Thus, there were fewer jobs for unskilled workers and poor urban residents became more and more unfit to do them. At the same time, wages for unskilled labor decreased and social services were reduced. Unemployed workers, especially minorities and other residents of ghettos, now had a hard time finding jobs due to lacking social, cultural, and economic capital (Bourgois 2003:28). Social capital refers to the networks that individuals can put to use for their aims, and cultural capital consists of all those forms of knowledge, manner, custom, posture and the like that individuals learn and internalize through socialization in the their respective environments, and that reveals their social position (Bourdieu 1986:243-246). Due to all the above mentioned disadvantages that ghetto residents have, “greater significance is attached to the availability of welfare in the ghetto that in low-poverty areas” (Wilson 1989:188).
Besides the restructuring of the American labor market, also the emergence of dominant ideas connecting the underclass to “social disorder, sexual dissolution, school deterioration, welfare profiteering, neighborhood decline, economic regression, and most significantly violent crime” influenced the withdrawal of the welfare state (Wacquant 2005:128). Opinion polls have revealed that many Americans believe poverty to be caused by structural barriers only to a small extent and instead blame character and bad choices of
individuals (Ross in Singh 2010 [2003]:334). Therefore, a sharp distinction is drawn between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor (ibid.). As I have pointed out before, since the 1950s, the mass media disseminated biased pictures of the underclass, so that “Americans want to help the deserving poor, but they suffer from pervasive misinformation regarding welfare and this misinformation is racially distorted” (ibid., emphasis in original; Garland 2000:363).
The shifting national economy and the emergence of the dominant vision of the “undeserving” poor led to the turn away from regulation and welfare, initiated by Ronald Reagan (Simon 2000:1113). Tapping into the new experience of crime, he argued that social policies undermined the most important function of the government – physical security of the population – which implied the need to upscale punitive forces (ibid.:1121). Since the mid-1970s, unions, regulatory agencies, and other social welfare systems have started to decrease (ibid.:1124-1125). As welfare decreased, ghetto residents were hit hardest, and could neither survive on what they had nor find legal employment – forcing them into the informal sector (Bourgois 2003:143). Since the new penal policies had established zero tolerance for low-level street crimes, the very people that had been pushed into illegality by the downsizing of the welfare state were now punished for it by the growing penal state.
Usually, as the classic Regulating the Poor (Piven 1971) suggests, when the economy goes through a phase of recession, the state protects and supports people, and when the economy is booming again, the welfare state retracts and helps people to find the right job. This is not what has been happening recently (Wacquant 2010:83-84). In 1996 Clinton announced the “end of welfare as we know it,” meaning the shift from the right on welfare to the obligation of “workfare,” a new ideology with according practices that emphasizes work requirements and other obligations for applicants and recipients, while delegating power to the states (Handler 2009:72). Clinton established the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act10 (ibid.:76). “The primary concern of welfare policy is not primarily to relieve hardship but to make sure that benefits do not result in disincentives to work” (ibid.:73, emphasis added). The underlying assumption here is that welfare works as disincentive to get a job, implying also that the poor do not want to work. Therefore, benefits are only provided for certain periods of time (e.g. TANF only up to two years in one piece and only up to five
10
It is fruitful to pay attention to the names of certain policies. Recent laws reflect ideological changes toward more self-responsibility and the rhetoric of “incentives” to go out and get a job, rather than support to find one. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act is but one example. There is also e.g. “WIN” – the Work Incentive Program. Also, “AFDC” – Aid to Families with Dependent Children - was changed to “TANF” – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Rather than “support,” it is now about “opportunities” and “incentives.”
years during a lifetime - in stark contrast to AFDC in the past). Furthermore, recipients and applicants are required to fulfil many obligations: they continuously have to prove they are searching and applying for jobs, they need to take the first available job no matter their qualifications and experience (“work first” strategy), they must always keep the agencies updated with all kinds of documents (income, spending, gifts, school expenses, etc.) and re-apply every six months (ibid.:76-77). There are even “family values requirements – marriage promotion classes, abstinence-only programs, limits on supporting new children when on welfare, etc” (ibid.:77). All in all, the needy are disciplined and forced to work if they want to receive state aid. At the same time, those that do not comply with the traditional family model of the nuclear family are disadvantaged.
Next to the public welfare system that I have just described, there is also a private welfare system that is heavily subsidized by the government in which the employers provide insurance, health care, child care, sick care, and other services (ibid.:79). The better-off workers have therefore not been directly affected by the change from welfare to workfare. They enjoy many privileges and are not subjected to as many obligations as the poor. Mainly the people at the very bottom of both class and symbolic hierarchy11 suffer from the changes in policy.
The concomitant downsizing of the welfare wing and upsizing of the criminal justice wing of the American state have not been driven by raw trends in poverty and crime, but [were] fuelled by a politics of resentment toward categories deemed undeserving and unruly. Chief among those stigmatized populations are the public-aid recipients and the street criminals framed as the two demonic figureheads of the “black underclass” (Wacquant 2010:74).
The penal system and racial oppression in historical perspective
“Race, racism, and the law have been fundamentally interconnected throughout the history of the United States” (Moore 2013:3).
11 “Class and symbolic hierarchy” is adopted from Wacquant who, in turn, adopted it from Bourdieu in bridging neo-Marxist (materialist) approaches with Weberian (idealist) approaches. At the bottom of the class structure are the poor, and at the bottom of the symbolic structure are minorities and others (in the US). Poor blacks are thus at the bottom of both.
“Privilege, in the abstract, does not exist; there is no such thing. Rights recognized, privilege is destroyed” (de Cleyre 1890).
The new phenomenon of hyper incarceration in the USA is, next to other things, characterized by its racial component. Blacks and other minorities are locked up in very disproportionate numbers. Some scholars have referred to other periods of institutionalized racism to underline why the current situation is problematic.12 Therefore, I want to briefly discuss the history of prisons and of racial oppression in the United States.
Prisons were invented in the 16th century, when the slow shift from feudalism to capitalism brought forth the first people that were able-bodied but did not have work and were no longer integrated into traditional social networks in the family or village, thus begging in cities.13 During the early colonial period of the United States, jails were not intended as a form of punishment in itself, but rather as place where such socially marginalized people had to wait for their trial or actual punishment (Marion 2009:215). The British Empire already sent prisoners to plantations in the new colonies to work off their debts (ibid.:216). In the late 17th century, voices became louder asking for “houses of correction,” prisons in which the supposedly morally corrupted criminals would have to work to be transformed into proper law-abiding citizens (ibid.:217). The penitentiary was adopted in almost every state in the 1820 prison reform; profits made by prison-work had to be redistributed between the state and the prisoners (ibid.:218-219). At about the same time, slavery was getting abolished in most states and the 13th Amendment was put into place to ensure that no racially ordered system of oppression would ever be institutionalized again (ibid.:222). However, soon after freeing the slaves, it became clear that the Southern states and their economies would be destroyed if no new pool of cheap labor would be available soon again, and “convict leasing” was established. Vagrancy laws were passed specifically designed to imprison the newly freed slaves by criminalizing behaviour that was typical for them, such as “loitering,” which applied to the homeless (ibid.:224-225). Since prisons were short (destroyed or damaged during the war), businessmen and farmers would provide food and housing for inmates in exchange for the use of their labor (Mauer 2006 [1999]:132-133). To be sure, conditions had not improved for most; many workers died during this time due to maltreatment and neglect.
12 See for example Michelle Alexander’s lecture “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness: The New Jim Crow” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Fah_W10do.
13
“Loic Wacquant – Advanced Marginality, ethnoracial divisions and the strategies of the state” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaIz32fUJkg (18/04/2013).
Profits were made with prisoners until the Great Depression of 1929 changed the U.S. economy again. Now, there was a shortage of available jobs and poor white laborers felt disadvantaged because of the cheap labor provided by black inmates. The New Deal Congress passed the Ashurst-Sumners Act in 1935 which forbid trade with convict-made goods etc., therewith eliminating “convict leasing”. The New Deal ushered in a new era of state regulation of the economy and social benefits for workers etc (Skocpol, Finegold 1982:265). Between 1940 and the early 1980s, there was virtually no private sector involvement into the correctional services of the state (Marion 2009:229). At the same time, there was a massive movement of blacks from the rural South to the growing industrial cities in the North (Mauer 2006 [1999]:51).
In the southern states, Jim Crow laws that served to separate blacks from whites were kept in place until the Civil Rights Movement. In the northern states, the ghetto emerged. It had to be close to the city, so that labor could be extracted easily; at the same time it needed to be a distinct place, a segregated homogenous neighborhood with rather insuperable boundaries so that whites would not have to “mix” with racially others.5 With the 1960s emerged the Civil Rights Movement, destroying all such forms of legal apartheid (separated schooling, organizations, bathrooms, marriage etc). The ghetto stayed, but changed in characteristics. It grew more heterogeneous as capitalism drew more and more workers from all over the world (Wolf 1997 [1982]). The newcomers would always have to enter the ghetto at the lowest rank in the symbolic hierarchy and there would be internal competition (Bourgois 2003). Support for the “rehabilitative model” of prisons was decreasing, as people from the left criticized it for its coercive nature, and people from the right started advertising for “law and order” in response to the supposed rise in black criminal behaviour (Mauer 2006 [1999]:42-46). The Safe Streets Act was passed in 1967, creating the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration that provided massive increases in funding to local police forces, therewith itself resulting in higher crime reporting numbers (ibid.:49). Starting in the 1970s, when the criminal justice system started to grow, the internal cohesion and social organization of the ghetto was further weakened as men were taken out and into prisons in disproportionate numbers, leaving children especially vulnerable and limiting their chances even more to enter into the legal labor market. “They [the children] are chewed up and spit out by the American Dream, only to find themselves recycled a dozen or so years later at extraordinary financial and human cost into the prison industrial complex” (ibid.:xxiii).
Wacquant has framed racial oppression in the US in terms of what he names “peculiar institutions.” Chattel slavery and Jim Crow were such peculiar institutions designed to
segregate blacks while at the same time using them for cheap labor. The “wedding of workfare and prisonfare”14 that the USA has been experiencing is a modern peculiar institution, according to Wacquant. Together workfare and the prison discipline blacks and other minorities disproportionately and push them into the lowest ranks of the labor market, into precarious labor relationships, and destroy their networks and possibilities of organized protest. To fully understand the changes of the relations of production and labor in post-industrial America, I will now turn to a discussion of modern trends of capitalism and their implications.
Capitalism and the labor market
Karl Marx was the first person to thoroughly analyze capitalism as he was living in a time in which the Industrial Revolution was just changing the nature and distribution of labor. New technologies such as the steam engine and thus the building of railway networks, as well as factories became possible (Marx 2009[1867]). At the time, capitalism was characterized by two opposing classes: the factory owners, bourgeoisie, or capitalists, on the one hand, and the laborers, or the proletariat, on the other. The bourgeoisie owned the capital and thus the means of production. The laborers, on the other hand, had no means of production and therefore had to start selling their labor for wages. Since the proletariat not only depended on the capitalists to earn their living but also had to compete amongst one another for jobs, they had little power to negotiate their labor conditions. Capitalism thrives on a constant “reserve army” of unemployed workers because they embody the immediate replacement when workers demand more than the bourgeoisie wants to give. Capitalists accumulate more and more capital by paying the workers less than the worth of their product and extracting the surplus. Since the capitalists are paying less than the actual worth of the proletariat’s work, Marx defined this relationship as exploitative. The extracted surplus can be used to reinvest into the factory, e.g. to buy new machines or to enlarge the company, be distributed amongst workers, or simply kept. To escape from the inherent contradictions in capitalism, the workers would have to become a “Klasse für sich,” i.e. develop “class consciousness,” and overthrow the relations of production, according to Marx. As long as they did not try to revolutionize the system, they suffered from “false consciousness,” an ideology fed from above that legitimates the exploitation of the lower class.
14 A term adopted from Wacquant. One of his articles is titled: “The Wedding of Workfare and Prisonfare in the 21st century” (2012 in The Journal of Urban Poverty). It points to the combination of workfare and prisonfare to target the same population.
Capitalism has changed in the meantime. Companies, especially multinational ones, often do not belong to one person anymore, but rather to many shareholders. Wage labor and the division of labor have spread throughout the globe. The global financial and trade market is now supervised and managed by supranational organizations. Workers have gained rights and started organizing in unions. And yet, Marx’ analysis is still useful in many respects and it has been reformulated many times to fit different circumstances. Eric Wolf, for instance, has shown how capital movement to other countries or regions affects local labor markets and often poses a problem for the local working class (1997[1982]:358). This has also happened in the United States where enormous sectors of the labor market, especially factory work, has been shifted to Mexico or other cheap countries. Especially immigrants, minorities, and ghetto residents suffered from this shift, as they did not possess the necessary cultural capital to work in offices or other newly emerging job opportunities in Anglo-Saxon cultured jobs (Bourgois 2003). Wolf furthermore shows how capitalism increased urban concentrations and then the fracturing of cities (1997[1982]:360-361). As many immigrants came to the New World as indentured laborers or even, as in the case of most African Americans, as slaves, the opposing interests that divide the classes are still reinforced through ethno-racial distinctions (ibid.:380).
Such appeals serve to allocate different categories of workers to rungs on the scale of labor markets, relegating the stigmatized populations to the lower levels and insulating the higher echelons from competition from below. Capitalism did not create all the distinctions of ethnicity and race that function to set off
categories of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the process of labor
mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their effective value (ibid.:380, emphasis added).
Another author that uses Marxist theories to explain today’s phenomena is Thomas Frank. He wondered why many small workers and farmers in mid-America – traditional Democrats – have started to vote for the Republicans against their class interests in recent elections. He reminds us that Republican economic policies include tax cuts for the upper class and corporations, free trade, privatized Social Security and Health Care, and de-unionization - basically reducing all aspects of the market and of people’s securities to efficiency, profitability, and self-responsibility. The Democrats, on the other hand, have traditionally been the party of the opposite policy aims: strengthening worker’s rights, providing universal free health care and education, regulating the market, and so on. Frank analyzes how
Republicans have been deploying culture wars to fracture the underclass and gain the votes from white workers. Culture war issues include abortion, media violence, homosexual marriage, religion in public life, women’s role, government aid to blacks, gun control, school vouchers, immigration, death penalty, and so on. By focusing on these moral issues, economic policies have been wiped off the campaign table and legitimized and authorized Republicans to take care of this “moral decline”, an example par excellence of false consciousness. White workers were thus convinced to vote against their class interests. If someone is to blame for the supposed decline of moral values (e.g. more sex on TV), according to Frank, it is free-market capitalism. The deployment of culture wars is but a strategy for neo-liberalism (to which I shall return later), he urges. Only when some parts of the working class combine their votes with the upper and middle class, Republicans can achieve majority in some (swing) states.
How are these theories of capitalism by Marx, Wolf, and Frank connected to the topic of hyper incarceration? I have shown that inmates are generally poor, black, and from the ghetto – the proletariat in Marxist terms. Many of them are unemployed or in precarious labor relationships, so they form todays’ reserve army. African Americans have come to the US in bondage, and this history stigmatizes them as descendents of former slaves until today (Wolf 1997[1982]:379-381). Nowadays, racial categories derive their discriminatory strength from labor mobilization under capitalism. Political strategists use culture wars as false consciousness to further the fracturing of the underclass to prevent them from forming class consciousness and organizing their class interests. Rather than solidarizing with fellow workers, different ethnic groups thus compete amongst each other in the ghettos.
One of the main things that have emerged with spreading capitalism is the modern state with its bureaucracy that can manage and intervene into the relations of production. Therefore, we will now turn the question of how and why the state reacted to changes of late modernity.
State power
“Deviance does not exist in some natural or arbitrary state: it exists by virtue of law” (Foucault in Stearns 1978:513).
Pierre Bourdieu developed several analytical tools to better understand the state and its workings (2012). One of those tools is the differentiation between the left and the right hand
of the state. The left hand is the supportive, protective side; it typically includes the ministry of labor, of education, and of social services (care for children, the elderly, and so on). The right hand of the state is the disciplinary side; it includes the treasury and/or ministry of economy, and – what Wacquant adds – the ministry of interior, i.e. the criminal justice system, the police, etc.13 There is a gender dimension to this differentiation, too: the left hand is feminine, motherly. Not only do many women work in left hand institutions, women are also the main beneficiaries of many of these programs. The right hand is the male, patriarchal side. More men work in the institutions and men are the ones that are more in contact with them. The left hand typically concerns the mothers of poor families whereas their husbands, sons, and brothers have to deal with the right hand of the state (Wacquant 2010:83-84). The same population – one class - is thus targeted by both the social and the penal institutions, namely the poor and unskilled, those that suffer most from social insecurity. Since these institutions interlock and deal with the same “problem,” they have to be understood and analyzed as one unit.
Wacquant argues that the state is the most important agent in determining the distribution of social marginality.13 As I have described above, the polarization of the class structure has for once shifted risks to the bottom and opportunities to the top, and secondly, further devalued unskilled labor in the economic as well as symbolic hierarchy. This polarization and the restructuring of the economy has led to a situation in which there are only precarious work opportunities for those without economic, social, and cultural capital. At the same time, the state rolled back its left hand institutions and services, thereby creating more social marginality in the ghettos. The state then reacted to this “advanced urban marginality” by taking a punitive, disciplinary turn: it rolled out its criminal justice system. Wacquant stresses that this new kind of regulation of poverty is thus not a response to crime, but to social insecurity, to the new insecure situation in which even the middle class fears not to be able to confer their status to their children, not to speak of the poor.
The conservatives in the USA - who mainly have been pushing into this right-hand direction - have praised their program as the turn to “small government.”Fehler! Textmarke
nicht definiert. There are several things wrong with this: firstly, a “small government” is
being sold as a good thing to the working class with the argument that the smaller the government, the smaller the tax spending. The working class is of course the main beneficiary of social policies and thus benefits from tax spending, or “big government,” if you wish. Secondly, people are led to think that contracting out parts of the work of governments to private companies will make the operations more efficient. This reflects the widespread belief
that governmental institutions and bureaucracy are inefficient, and failing. Thirdly, and most importantly for this case, what has happened is not a turn to “small government.” The rolling back of the left hand of the state has been superseded by the growth of its right hand. The punitive turn therefore does not qualify as a turn to “small government.”
In 1982, the USA spent $84 billion in total justice expenditures. On an individual basis that could be divided into $78 per capita for judicial and legal services, $191 for “police protection”, and $92 for corrections. In 2007, in contrast, the USA spent $228 billion in total (a growth of 170 percent while the population grew only by about 30 percent), $165 per capita for judicial and legal services, $344 for police protection, and an incredible $246 for corrections, the latter representing 315 percent of the amount 25 years earlier (Bureau of Justice Statistics: Justice Expenditures and Employment FY 1982-2007). These numbers reveal that the decrease in expenditures for welfare has been superseded by the enormous increase in expenses created by the growing criminal justice system.
In fact, the criminal justice system grew so big that the USA decided to establish the possibility for private prisons again, as it could no longer handle the numbers of prisoners. In 2000, there were already about 91 thousand people in privately owned prisons.15 At the end of 2011, the number had risen to 131 thousand, an increase of 44 percent. The total correctional population has started to decline since 2007; however, this is mainly due to a decrease in the parole population, not the imprisoned.15 More than half of all operating prisons have been built during the last decades. The state has allowed private companies to build and run prisons; a fixed price is paid per detainee to such companies. Corrections Corporation of America is one of them and now the third largest employer in the US, right after Manpower Inc. and Wal-Mart (Wacquant 2010:76). All data about the growth of the right hand of the state and the reduction of the left support Wacquant’s theory that the state is re-engineering itself in reaction to the new social anxiety that characterizes post-industrial America. Aim of this strategy is to impose precarious labor relations as the normal horizon of expectation for the lower class: welfare is becoming less and less an option, and illegal work in the underground economy is being punished harder. That way, precarious labor is the only option left for many poor and unskilled city dwellers.
Democracy
“Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means — what it bestows on us — the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency” (Bill Moyers in his speech “”The Power of Democracy” on February 7, 2007).
Hyper incarceration and advanced urban marginality affect mainly the lower class of society, those that are most dependent on state aid to overcome structural barriers. In a fair modern democracy, no group should be treated the way that urban poor in America are currently being treated. There are some very particular and some more universal implications for democracy that the developments of the last decades have.
The punitive turn of the state has resulted in hyper imprisonment and all kinds of changes of penal approaches and strategies. Imprisoning such a big proportion of a population is in itself questionable in a democracy. If one considers the categories of class, race, and place by which the correctional population is filtered, democracy is certainly jeopardized. Not only does the extraction of poor males from their urban neighborhoods result in damaged social networks and norms, but also in the destruction of social citizenship of residents (Roberts 2004). Entire inner-city areas are alienated from civic life and stigmatized, thereby distancing the inhabitants from relevant political institutions. People become disenchanted with the state and democracy, and resign.
Many states in fact practice felon disenfranchisement, i.e. they bar inmates and/or offenders from voting, some states even for life (ibid.:1291-1292).
Nationally, an estimated 5.85 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of laws that prohibit voting by people with felony convictions. Felony disenfranchisement is an obstacle to participation in democratic life which is exacerbated by racial disparities in the criminal justice system, resulting in 1 of every 13 African Americans unable to vote.16
16
Recently, 23 states have reformulated their laws concerning felony disenfranchisement to allow some first-time offenders to vote; it has been estimated that 800,000 people have regained their right to vote.17
Another effect of detainment on social citizenship is the labor market exclusion it results in (Roberts 2004:1293). There are three intertwined processes at work: firstly, inmates cannot work and are not included in unemployment statistics. By taking many residents out of poor areas that have been engaging in legal as well as illegal work, local economies suffer.18 Secondly, finding legal employment is difficult after having been incarcerated. Potential future employers are discouraged by the offense history and gaps in the employment history, and job skills as well as social and cultural capital are eroded during imprisonment. Thirdly, job opportunities for the poor urban youth become even rarer as their fathers cannot lead them into the working world and their neighborhoods become increasingly stigmatized. In 2012, the unemployment rate for young African Americans was at almost 40 percent, that for whites 25 percent (OECD 2012:55-56).
Another worrying aspect of the developments of the last decades is the contracting out, or privatization, of state institutions and business. During the last ten years, the number of private prisons rose from five to a hundred, now housing 62,000 prisoners.19 Prisoners are “offered” work at incredibly low hourly wages which, in turn, opens new investment opportunities in the Unites States. In 2012, Corrections Corporations offered 48 states to buy prisons under specific conditions, one of them being a guaranteed 90 percent occupancy rate during at least the next twenty years.20 Some states guaranteed that they will keep these prisons full, no matter what. I want to argue that some things - such as prisons - should not be incorporated into the private capitalist market. If they do anyway, surplus is not only generated but maximized where none should be made at all. When the state makes a “profit” with an institution, the money flows back; the taxes that paid for the institution thus remain in public hands. When a private company makes a profit, it takes tax money that paid the costs of the prison into the hands of private shareholders with economic capital. Inequality rises when public money generates profits for private investors. Also, rehabilitation is undermined
17
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-11-10/news/ct-oped-1111-chapman-20101110_1_vote-sentencing-project-policy (21/04/2013).
18 Data shows that many people, especially from poor urban areas, cannot live from the money they get from the state. Since they survive anyway, one can assume income from other sources: either friends and family, or illegal work. 19 http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289 (04/05/2013). 20 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-01/buying-prisons-require-high-occupancy/53402894/1; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/14/private-prisons-buying-state-prisons_n_1272143.html (15/05/2013).
by the profit-maximizing characteristic of capitalism; by keeping the costs per prisoner as low as possible, e.g. by not providing drug treatment, skill/job training, education, and the like, profits remain higher (Hallett 2006:82). At the same time, the interest of a private prison by definition is to keep the demand - incarceration rates – high. Thousands of employees (rural, white) now have jobs in the huge prison industrial complex and have created unions to support their and prisons’ interests. Corrections Corporation of America announced $1.5 billion profits on crime in 2009 and has a monthly payroll of $2.4 billion (Marion 2009:213; Wacquant 2010:76). Together with Wackenhut it controls 75 percent of the private prison market.21 The state makes contracts with such companies and pays fixed prices for each prisoner they take into their prisons. The trick to maximize profits is thus to keep the costs per prisoner as low as possible, and imprisonment rates high (or sentences long). “If the state is characterized as ‘contracting out’ inmates to these corporations who subsequently aid the prison in earning corporate revenue, the system begins to resemble a modern day form of slavery” (Marion 2009:214).
There are thus many reasons why the punitive turn of the American state has troublesome implications for democracy. One quote beautifully sums up many of them and underlines the relative powerlessness of many actors in the system:
Unbeknownst to this offender, and perhaps to any other actor in the sentencing process, as a result of his conviction he may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal education assistance. His driver’s licence may be automatically suspended, and he may no longer qualify for certain employment and professional licences. … He will not be permitted to enlist in the military, or possess a firearm, or obtain a federal security clearance. If a citizen, he may loose the right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable (Mauer and Chesney-Lind in Roberts:1291).
The “new functionalism”22
Now that I have described changes in late modern American society and the state, I will analyze the consequences of these developments. I want to stress that what follows is a purely functional analysis. It serves only to show forces that might be “interested” in reproducing the
21 http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289 (04/05/2013).
status quo or in furthering specific trends, but it does not necessarily imply causal links. The functional analysis must always be separated from the causal explanation.
Merton’s analysis of 1949 about deviancy in different social structures is still of particular value for this topic. He analyzed how social structures “produce” deviancy, i.e. under what circumstances non-conformity is a logical reaction by specific actors.23 Two elements of social structures are of particular importance for this analysis. The first consists of culturally defined goals. These are legitimate objectives for all, things worth striving for, the frame of aspirational reference. The second element defines the acceptable, allowable procedures for trying to achieve the goals. “Aberrant behaviour may be regarded sociologically as a symptom of disassociation between culturally prescribed aspirations and socially structured avenues for realizing these aspirations,” according to Merton (1949:188). America is a society in which there is an exceptionally strong emphasis on goals such as success or power without a corresponding emphasis upon legitimate procedures to get there. According to Merton, too great an emphasis on the goals invites the second type of adaptation: innovation. Innovation means that individuals ascribe to cultural goals (they want to be successful) but they see little chances of achieving those goals by only using legitimate means. Therefore, they reject them; they innovate, i.e. they use all kinds of avenues to get there, even if that includes illegal actions or the like. Ends come to justify means. In the US, the American Dream is instilled in every child: the land of opportunity, from dishwasher to millionaire. If you try hard, you can be at the top. And, almost most importantly: never give up. Little attention is paid to the sometimes dubious ways in which someone became powerful. The success weighs stronger and that can be problematic.
Goals are held to transcend class lines, not to be bounded by them, yet the actual social organization is such that there exist class differentials in accessibility of the
goals. In this setting, a cardinal American virtue, ‘ambition,’ promotes a cardinal
American vice, ‘deviant behaviour’ (ibid.:200, emphasis added).
23 Merton developed five types of adaptation of actors in different positions of a social structure. The two variables are the goals and the means. A (+) implies acceptance, a (-) rejection, and (+-) a rejection of prevailing values and substitution with new values.
Modes of Adaptation Culture Goals Institutionalized Means
1. Conformity + +
2. Innovation + -
3. Ritualism - +
4. Retreatism - -
American culture also nowadays is characterized by a strong emphasis on goals and little on means. Everyone wants to be successful but not everyone can. In recent decades, there has been a shift in rhetoric of the state. Most of the laws and acts that have been passed concerning the penal and the welfare state bear witness to an even greater emphasis on personal responsibility (rather than structural barriers), such as the welfare reform called “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.” The state has been placing more and more emphasis on the autonomy of the individual. It sends a message to millions of people who are trying hard but who are also facing many obstacles, especially to residents of the poor urban areas I have been discussing. They face many disadvantages, such as bad education, stigma, parents with financial, legal, or drug problems, the wrong social and cultural capital, and so on. But when that message is strong and loud enough, it promotes aberrant behaviour. In fact, Mauer analyzes young people’s opportunities nowadays in terms that could be Merton’s: “Essentially, those young people who are so isolated from the mainstream that they are not even looking for work have little incentive to conform to societal norms, since they do not perceive themselves as having an opportunity to share in the rewards of the working world” (Mauer 2006 [1999]:136).
In his functionalism, Merton established the differentiation of functions, dysfunctions, and non-functions. The same thing can be functional on one level of analysis and dysfunctional on another. All the functions I will turn to now have already turned out to be barriers, or dysfunctions, for ghetto residents. When something is functional to one group of actors and dysfunctional to another, it is problematic to find an acceptable solution for all people involved.
The “War on Drugs” is a huge enterprise. It is functional to all employees involved - since they work in newly created jobs. It is also functional to all kinds of companies that supply the “war.” As long as drugs are illegal and hunted, their prices will remain high and drug producers powerful due to high risks. Recent years have seen changes in some (even if few) states and their drug laws. Marijuana is currently legal in medicinal form in some states, ownership of small amounts has been decriminalized in others, and two states have implemented legal recreational use of cannabis.24 Many interest and lobby groups have tried to prevent such trends.
One other aspect of the developments of the last decades is the privatization of prisons. The state contracts-out not only prisons but also many other tasks. Even the former state agency that was solely responsible for the oversight of privatization has been privatized
