"Lawbreaking behaviors persist after imprisonment, intensify and spread as an effect of the pathology of the prison regime. The outcome is predictable. Depriving individuals of all responsibility does not and cannot teach individual responsibility. Caging persons while intermittently threatening them with further violence and deprivation cannot teach them respect for others' rights.
"Yet, the prison regime abolishes self-directed action as well as respect for other humans. To imagine that such a system can evolve responsibility or civility is obviously delusional. From the standpoint of scientific reason, what more efficient method could there be for constructing a sociopathic character?
"From the standpoint of normative structure, how can the removal of all civil rights and responsibilities with force and contempt as the ruling currency of interaction, ever develop anything but a similar culture in those regulated in this manner? Such a system is bound to create monsters or human wrecks, and it does"What most needs reform, we must eventually come to ask, the prison population, or the prison system itself?"
If the prison system is so blatantly ineffective, then why is it moving forward, (especially with the growth of private prisons), seemingly immutable and stronger than ever? Why has American society-at-large chosen to keep this system in place without seriously considering - even on an experimental basis - potentially more effective alternatives?
Erich Fromm, a world-renowned psychologist and author asked this same question as early as the 1920's, and continued to discover answers for the next five decades. In his writings on crime Fromm argued that the criminal justice system functions in an ideological manner to divert the general population's anger from being directed at the exploitive economic system in which they live, and toward crime and the criminal.
Potentially destructive energy is redirected away from the dominant classes that have created - and continue to perpetuate - the established system. Mass resentment can be expressed in a manner harmless to the state, in much the same way that "war-fever" in a society can be used to shore up the political status quo.
It is especially fitting that measures ostensibly aimed at increasing public safety today are labeled "the war on crime." Fromm also argued that the criminal justice system in a class society serves to bind the masses to the state - essentially as an overarching father figure - through punishing criminals and at times extending mercy to repentant offenders.
Although finding answers at variance with Fromm's, Foucault, too, asked what the hidden functions of the modern prison might be. He unearthed a wealth of data which documented that since the early 1800's it had been frequently argued that prison did not lower the crime rate, and that it actually produced deviance. Yet, he concluded, "for the past 150 years, the proclamation of its failure has always been accompanied by its maintenance."
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
