Stir . . . crazy?

Prison blues

Prisons as we know them were invented in America in the first years of the republic. Massachusetts opened a state prison in 1785. Connecticut did the same in 1790 and Pennsylvania in 1794.

The timing wasn’t accidental. There had been jails—places of detention while arrestees awaited the outcome of legal proceedings—in English history for a long time. They were called “gaols,” with an original hard g that softened into j. And there were special prisons like the Tower of London and the Bastille in Paris, where political prisoners were held. But prison as a place where convicted people were sent as punishment for their crimes was new.

The connection with republicanism was straightforward. The Declaration of Independence and most of the state constitutions asserted liberty as the default setting of life in a republic. Depriving people of their liberty was a serious matter. Monarchies made no such presumption. People were subjects in monarchies, not citizens. Liberty could be taken away at the pleasure of the monarch. To be sure, the prerogatives of the British monarch had diminished since the days of Henry VIII. Yet the mindset of a monarchy remained fundamentally different from that of a republic.

There was another factor, more economical than political. For most people in most of human history, a guarantee of food and shelter at someone else’s expense would have been judged a prize rather than a punishment. Liberty counted less than basic security, the latter in the form of the necessities of daily life. But America was prosperous, and those necessities were easier to acquire, to the point where they were almost taken for granted. Liberty rose in comparative value.

Prisons largely replaced corporal punishment, the oldest form of criminal sanction. Corporal punishment is cheap and quick. People in non-rich societies understandably opposed spending scarce resources warehousing miscreants. Societies of nomads couldn’t be bound to particular places of incarceration.

Enslavement was another precursor to imprisonment as punishment for crime. The sale of convicts into slavery solved the cost problem; in fact a government could turn a profit on its prisoners. This created an incentive to acquire more prisoners to sell into slavery. Similar incentives gave rise to raids of the sorts that furnished slaves to the slave trades of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In America in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Convicts in the South were thereafter rented out to plantation owners to work in conditions almost indistinguishable from slavery.

Monetary fines, sometimes in the form of seizure of assets, have been yet another alternative to imprisonment. Again this works better in rich countries than in poor ones, and better with rich prisoners than with poor ones. The poor can’t pay fines and have no assets worth seizing.

The adoption of imprisonment as the main form of punishment is often seen as a mark of evolution toward human rights. Enslavement has become sufficiently odious that it’s practiced openly nowhere on earth. Corporal punishment is often accounted barbaric. In 1994 a diplomatic fuss developed between the United States and Singapore when an American student in Singapore was convicted of vandalism and sentenced to six strokes of a cane. The American president, Bill Clinton, after acknowledging Singapore’s right to its own laws and their enforcement, called the sentence “extreme.” Members of Congress sent a letter to the Singapore government requesting clemency.

Singapore defended its policy. Singaporeans were proud of the order and safety of their city-state, and they deemed firm treatment of vandals essential to maintaining this condition. More than a few contrasted their clean, graffiti-less city to American cities and recommended caning for America. Observers in various countries puzzled that Americans complained about a few cane strokes in Singapore even as they executed dozens of prisoners a year in the United States.

More than a few Americans sided with Singapore. In letters to editors and calls to talk radio shows, contributors  said America ought to adopt Singapore’s no-nonsense approach to crime.

The Singapore government ultimately reduced the number of strokes to four. The punishment was carried out, and the student was sent back to America, where he was interviewed on numerous television and radio shows.

In the last decade or two, following conspicuous examples of police brutality, a movement to abolish prisons has emerged in America. Most prison abolitionists appear to be moved more by concerns about racial and economic inequities in who gets imprisoned than by a philosophical or economic objection to imprisonment per se. The prison abolitionists deemphasize punishment in favor of rehabilitation for offenders and decriminalization of the activities for which many are convicted.

The movement hasn’t caught on broadly. Too many people believe criminals need to be punished. And they aren’t willing to bring back the alternatives used in the past.

There’s a final thread to the discussion, peculiar to a capitalist economy like America’s. Imprisonment supports a large industry that employs lots of people and yields reliable returns to investors. Corporal punishment is nowhere near so lucrative as the prison-industrial complex.

Prison abolitionists note the irony. Prisons originally were slow to arrive because they cost too much; now they’re slow to leave because they pay too much.

Irony wins few argument when material interests are at stake. The future of prisons in America seems as solid as the walls of the prisons themselves.