Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States
366
Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States
366eBook
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Overview
“You should definitely read this book… What really struck me in reading Beyond These Walls was that Tony Platt had very seriously and carefully considered the contributions of social movements—feminist, queer, disability, and labor.” —Angela Davis
Beyond These Walls is an ambitious and far-ranging exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States.
Beyond These Walls traces the disturbing history of punishment and social control, revealing how the criminal justice system attempts to enforce and justify inequalities associated with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Prisons and police departments are central to this process, but other institutions – from immigration and welfare to educational and public health agencies – are equally complicit.
Platt argues that international and national politics shape perceptions of danger and determine the policies of local criminal justice agencies, while private policing and global corporations are deeply and undemocratically involved in the business of homeland security.
Finally, Beyond These Walls demonstrates why efforts to reform criminal justice agencies have often expanded rather than contracted the net of social control. Drawing upon a long tradition of popular resistance, Platt concludes with a strategic vision of what it will take to achieve justice for all in this era of authoritarian disorder.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250085122 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 366 |
| File size: | 50 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
STATE OF INJUSTICE
Why we need a broad vision and deep history in order to understand the current state of criminal injustices in the United States.
Stand too close to horror, and you get fixation, paralysis, engulfment; stand too far, and you get voyeurism or forgetting. Distance matters.
— Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge
ANYTHING BUT
In December 2006 the South Salt Lake Police Department received an anonymous tip that a local residence was being used for drug dealing. After a week of surveillance, tracking suspected buyers as they came and went, the narcotics detective Douglas Fackrell stopped and interrogated Edward Strieff on suspicion that he had purchased illegal drugs. When Fackrell learned from a dispatcher that Strieff had an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic violation, the detective searched him and found methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.
This kind of police activity happens thousands of times every day in the United States: cops stopping and searching poor people on the flimsiest of excuses, behaving in ways that would get the officers in trouble if they treated the rich and middle class in the same way. These arbitrary street stops are the bread and butter of police work. They typically occur anonymously, hidden from justice, their outcomes predictable: the police chalk up another successful arrest. With the help of a publicly paid lawyer the defendant pleads guilty in order to receive a reduced sentence. And the poorhouse jails effortlessly stay jam-packed.
What was unusual about this case was that, a decade later, the arrest of Edward Strieff generated a remarkable dissent from a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Occasionally the smooth process of punishment without trial is interrupted when the police carelessly treat a big shot as though he is a powerless nonentity or when a public defender, despite being hard-pressed for time and resources, takes a case to trial or, even more rarely, appeals a legal decision to a higher court.
What happened to the retired tennis star James Blake is an example of the police roughing up the wrong African American. In 2015 a New York officer, James Frascatore, mistook Blake for another black man suspected of credit card fraud and slammed Blake to the ground outside a hotel. Unlike the overwhelming majority of black men who have been similarly accosted, Blake made his experience a public matter and eventually settled with the city for damages. He also had the resources and patience to file a grievance of police misconduct with the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board, a process that took more than two years to complete, and concluded with the prosecutor asking only for Frascatore to be docked ten days of vacation pay. Even this kind of token victory is a rarity.
Edward Strieff is the one-in-a-million defendant who had the good luck to be represented by a public defender who saw an opportunity to raise a constitutional challenge to the misuse of police power. Typically, defendants like Strieff end up in jail unable to make bail, and sooner or later they plead guilty rather than do "dead time" while waiting for their case to be decided. Contrary to the widely held impression — derived from police procedurals and courtroom dramas on television — a trial by jury is rare, and a debate about constitutional issues provoked by an illegal arrest is even more rare.
Strieff was not a typical defendant. At the time of his arrest, as the brief by his lawyer, Joan Watt of the nonprofit Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association, stated, the police "had no idea whether Strieff was a short-term visitor, or a permanent resident, or the pizza delivery man." She moved to suppress evidence gathered during the stop on the ground that the police had exceeded their authority. Utah's Supreme Court agreed, finding that Strieff's Fourth Amendment right to security against unreasonable search and seizure had been violated. But on appeal the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5–3 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, upheld the power of the police to stop and search people on the street on the basis of nothing more than a hunch and an outstanding traffic ticket. Strieff's guilt was affirmed.
The decision of the Supreme Court was expected, given its long-standing tendency to make it difficult for civilians to prevail in complaints against the police. What stands out in the Strieff case, however, was Justice Sonia Sotomayor's brutally frank and caustic dissent. Although Strieff is white, Sotomayor used the occasion to express her views about police and race as well as class. "Writing only for myself," she noted, the police treat too many people as though they are "second-class citizens," and "it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this kind of scrutiny."
Drawing on a long tradition of African American critics of racial injustice — from W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin to Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates — and expressing herself with a passion not usually heard from the highest court in the land, Sotomayor declared:
This case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by the police are "isolated." They are the canaries in the coalmine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.
Justice Sotomayor's "countless people" make up a sizable segment of American society. Police arrest about fourteen million people annually in the United States; sixty-five million people have a criminal record; and at least twenty million have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. On a single day state and federal prisons and local jails hold 2.3 million people; another 3.7 million are on probation, and 840,000 are on parole, subject to restrictions and conditions that limit their civil rights.
That means nearly seven million people are enmeshed in criminal justice institutions that employ, at a minimum, another 4.3 million people as police and guards and in other capacities at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Compared with other nations, the United States is an outlier in its reliance on prisons and jails. By 2015 thirty-one American states had the highest incarceration rates (per 100,000 population) in the world, higher even than Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country identified by Human Rights Watch as having one of the world's most repressive regimes. Thirty-eight states lock up a larger proportion of their residents than El Salvador, a country recovering from a civil war and dealing with one of the highest homicide rates in the world.
When you look carefully, the inequities are blatant: macho policing that is routinely indifferent to human rights in impoverished communities and that reduces citizens and residents to objects of fear and loathing; astonishing cruelties that characterize day-to-day life in jails and prisons, including widespread use of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation in violation of international human rights standards; taken-for-granted and clearly evident institutionalized racism that confirms the widespread prejudice that people of color are the most criminal, most dangerous, and most deserving of social exclusion and persistent distrust.
African American, Latino, Native American, and poor white communities carry the heaviest burden of punishment. By 2014 African Americans, who comprise about 13 percent of the U.S. population, dominated prison statistics: they are incarcerated in state prisons nationwide at five times the rate of whites, and they account for 35 percent of people in prison and jail, 48 percent of those serving life sentences, 56 percent of those sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, and 42 percent of death row prisoners. Although men comprise the overwhelming majority of prisoners, 30 percent of the world's incarcerated women are in the United States, and African American women's rate of imprisonment is twice that of white women.
Most people in the United States are so used to thinking of criminal justice institutions as reserved for the desperate and marginalized, and of criminality as the monopoly of poor folks that these attitudes appear to be predetermined and the way the world works rather than the product of specific historical developments and a double standard that routinely exempts corporate and government perpetrators from punishment.
In 2012 a U.S. Senate committee carried out an exhaustive investigation of illegal operations by the global bank HSBC. After reviewing 1.4 million documents and interviewing seventy-five witnesses, the committee concluded that the bank had reaped massive profits by laundering billions of dollars for drug cartels, pariah states, and organizations linked to terrorism. Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, which is implicated in tens of thousands of murders, even designed a special cash box that was compatible with HSBC's teller windows. The bank's malpractice was not simply a matter of negligence or poor oversight of low-level functionaries but rather stemmed from systematic criminal behavior approved by top executives. "This is something that people knew was going on at that bank," said then-senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chaired the investigation.
Yet nobody went to prison. Nobody was even criminally prosecuted. HSBC's chief executive officer said he was "profoundly sorry," and the corporation paid a $1.9 billion fine that represents about four weeks' worth of profits from its forty million customers worldwide.
In 2016 Wells Fargo was implicated in similar conduct when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed that the bank had created as many as 3.5 million deposit and credit-card accounts without the knowledge or permission of consumers. Employees described a toxic work atmosphere in which they were pressured to meet impossible sales goals. "If one of your tellers took a handful of $20 bills out of the cash drawer," Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told the bank's CEO during a congressional hearing, "they'd probably be looking at criminal charges for theft. They could end up in prison. But you squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket." Wells Fargo responded by firing 5,300 mostly low-level employees, paying a fine of $185 million, and forcing CEO John Stumpf to resign. In 2018 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau added a $1 billion fine that was more than triply compensated by the windfall benefit from the Trump administration's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. No Wells Fargo executives have been criminally prosecuted.
What Sotomayor calls a "carceral state," with its obsessive attention to cataloging the dangerousness of working-class communities and turning a blind eye to crimes in high places, was long in the making and involves a wide range of enthusiastic participants. The blame cannot be heaped only on the Trump administration, which came to power dedicated to unleashing the police "to do their job the way they know how to do it," for the Strieff decision was issued during the Obama presidency amid much talk about criminal justice reforms. Several government investigations already had exposed police lawlessness, and Black Lives Matter activists had forced the world to pay attention to what was happening on city streets.
The state of injustice is attributable in part to right-wing politicians in both parties who clamor for tough measures, and to the self-interest of professional functionaries who personally benefit from the business of policing and guarding human misery. Among those functionaries are George Zoley, chief executive of a private prison company who personally made $9.6 million in 2017, and the psychologists James Mitchell and John Jessen, whose business received more than $75 million from the CIA to devise "enhanced interrogation techniques" for extracting information from suspected terrorists. They signed off on tormenting prisoners with sleep deprivation, cells filled with mice, naked humiliation, and physical pain. We learned the details of this abuse when some of Mitchell and Jessen's victims, who had been held in a secret American prison in Aghanistan, sued for compensation and won a settlement.
But the problem is not limited to a few bad apples such as Mitchell and Jessen. It is endemic, not selective.
Do not forget the gun manufacturers, prison builders, and surveillance system engineers who service and profit from public agencies, and the knowledge professionals who articulate the logic of punishment.
A city of intellectuals, researchers, policy makers, experts, educators, bureaucrats, and pundits is necessary to figure out the details, make the plans, manage operations, and come up with a plausible rationale for why poor and working-class people are more despicable than those who commit war crimes, cover up government malfeasance, and defraud the public.
To insulate the know-how from its human impact demands a cold, calculating disengagement not unlike what is required to launch a drone or function like the technocrat in Franz Kafka's fictitious penal colony who created a sophisticated machine to forcibly tattoo the names of crimes on prisoners' bodies until they slowly bleed to death.
A real-life architect in Arizona plans a prison in which windows are virtually eliminated and incarcerated bodies are moved "without creating situations in which inmates are together"; a technology company in San Diego invents a long-range acoustic device capable of blasting demonstrators with earsplitting noise, the sonic equivalent of a fire hose; and business consultants market "spit bud" masks that prevent prisoners from hawking at guards and stackable bunks so that more prisoners can be crammed into less space.
Medical and legal functionaries debate which drugs produce the best way to execute people, and the legal system orders the execution of seventy-five-year-old Tommy Arthur, who had been on Alabama's death row for thirty-four years.
The carceral state puts to work a public relations guru in Hawaii who advises the police to call the homeless "residentially challenged" as they issue them tickets for sitting on the sidewalks in tourist zones; a sheriff's SWAT team in rural Georgia that boasts an armored Humvee, machine guns, a door-breaching shotgun, and flash-bang grenades to carry out no-knock search warrants; and counterterrorism experts who are eager to construct ways of dividing "the civilian world into two, separating the trustworthy cooperators from the non-cooperators," and to teach government agencies how "to watch and track everything that moves."
Despite so much purposeful rationality, "the 'system' itself may be mad," says the anthropologist Lorna Rhodes in her frank description of a maximum-security prison. Here the lockdown and isolation of prisoners for twenty-three hours a day, constant surveillance, and electronic control of movement generate "raging, depressed, or hallucinating men who 'knot up' within the tiny confines of their cells" and make themselves into sites of resistance by hurling body fluids at guards, thereby finding in their desperation a way to violate the prohibition on human contact.
Rhodes' insights about the immaculately maintained twenty-first-century, high-tech prison that does its best to drive convicts crazy reminds me of Charles Dickens' visit in 1842 to Pennsylvania's Eastern Penitentiary. The writer, like many European intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth century, visited the United States to investigate the American political experiment and report to his readers, who were curious for news about innovations in the New World. Several European governments and U.S. states, facing the need to modernize dilapidated prisons or build new ones, wanted to know in particular about the effectiveness of innovative American penitentiaries on the east coast in making prisoners economically productive and submissive workers, just as experts from around the world were dispatched to the west coast more than a century later to investigate California's efforts to rehabilitate and depoliticize activist prisoners. The United States has always been in the business of exporting its criminal justice policies and institutions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Beyond These Walls"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Tony Platt.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
I
1 State of Injustice 3
2 Double System 25
II
3 Except For 57
4 On Guard 84
5 The Insecurity Syndrome 117
III
6 The Perils of Reform 149
7 Radical Visions 175
IV
8 The Distant Present 205
9 Limbo 227
Author's Note 257
Resources 265
Appendix 277
Acknowledgments 285
Photo Credits 289
Notes 291
References 335
Index 365