what has the "tough on crime" approach to sentencing done?
By Shari Stone-Mediatore, Ph.D.
Protecting the rubber of our communities is a genuine business concern for many Americans. But what if the policies implemented in the name of public safety were doing the reverse? What if they were generating insecurity for many of u.s.?
Since the 1970s, public safety in America has been pursued through "tough-on-law-breaking" policies: stiff criminal codes, long prison sentences, laws that facilitate law search and seizure, laws that arrive more difficult to challenge a wrongful conviction, and stringent parole boards. As a consequence, more than 2 million Americans are now warehoused in U.S. jails and prisons. Nearly 160,000 of them are sentenced to spend their unabridged lives backside confined, some for crimes committed (or allegedly committed) when they were under eighteen.
Studies do non show that tough-on-crime policies have improved security. And, in some ways, tough-on-crime policies have made Americans insecure. For case, laws that brand it easier to arrest for gang action and loitering have put people from low-income neighborhoods at risk of arrest for activities equally beneficial every bit continuing past their flat with friends or waiting for a autobus.
Aggressive prosecution besides has backlogged criminal courts, requiring people without bail to be kept in unsafe jails for long periods (sometimes years) every bit they wait for trial. Indigent people are receiving increasingly inadequate legal counsel, because the number of public defenders has not increased to serve the greatly increased number of people being prosecuted. Meanwhile, recent laws restrict a person'south ability to challenge a wrongful conviction, fifty-fifty when it is due to clear attorney negligence.
Within prisons, prisoners have piffling protection against abuse. Beatings, shootings, macing, and rape of prisoners past guards are censored from public view. Even in the rare cases when videotapes of such incidents are leaked to the public (as, for instance, in the case of Kalief Browder), guards are rarely held accountable. With picayune accountability, guards can too send an imprisoned person to solitary confinement for years or even decades. Over 80,000 Americans are now confined to solitary units, where they spend 23 to 24 hours a day lone in cells that are no larger than 8 past 10 anxiety, in conditions that past Un standards constitute torture. These units also threaten public safe insofar as the guards who work there showroom high levels of alcoholism and spouse corruption.
Information technology's easy for those of u.s.a. in more than privileged groups to exist indifferent to the plight of people who are incarcerated. Unless nosotros pursue an incarcerated "pen-pal" or volunteer to teach in a prison house (for which we can exist dismissed for being "inmate friendly"), we likely will never communicate with a prisoner. We can forget that these are human beings—sometimes people who are dangerous and demand to be contained—but often the mentally sick, young adults whose simply family unit have been gangs, and people without acceptable legal representation. Not hearing their voices or knowing their stories, we can reduce them to stereotyped images of thugs or "bad hombres" whom we can lock up, strip of legal protections confronting violence past prison officers, and forget.
The American image of the "monster-criminal" has a specific history. The notion of essentially malignant beings who stands opposed to respectable social club has roots in the 19th-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who used at present-discredited notions of racial and sexual divergence to theorize "the criminal human being." This notion was reimagined in America in the 1970s, when politicians found it useful to raise the specter of "the criminal" to promote an calendar of aggressive incarceration that served both to detract attention from social problems and to control disgruntled social groups.
Today, the prototype of "the monster-criminal" is popularized past the news media, which sensationalizes the abjection of people in police custody. Videos of handcuffed defendants paraded before news cameras and objectified mugshots reduce defendants to debased "others," even before their trials.
The American fascination with "monster-criminals" fifty-fifty reveals itself in the recent trend of Halloween haunted houses that advertise themselves as "haunted prisons" and offer costumed "convicts" for Halloween entertainment.
America's "monster-criminal" is class- and race-specific. For instance, African Americans do not use or sell drugs whatever more than than whites merely are targeted by law and incarcerated for drugs at much greater rates. Co-ordinate to a new study of Chicago's criminal courts, stark class divisions between courtroom professionals and people in custody accept allowed judges and attorneys to refer to defendants every bit "scum," "bad guys," and "mopes" (an epithet signifying lack of work ethic and inherently culpability), even earlier their trials.
Tellingly, tough-on-crime practices are rarely applied to people of more privileged groups. When the privileged are arrested, their crimes tend to be distinguished as "white-neckband crimes." They tend to receive limited sentences in federal prisons, upon completion of which they are chosen "sometime white-collar criminals." More than a few have been invited to speak about business ethics at major universities. This has immune people like Walter Pavlo (bedevilled of a $half-dozen meg fraud scheme) to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees while information technology has spared many of the states from imagining someone like ourselves as a "bad person."
The same opportunity to acquire from mistakes and re-integrate into society is not afforded to less privileged people, whose brushes with the police often earn them decades-long sentences and permanent demonization.
When we recognize how our own cultural processes accept conjured upward "the monster-criminal" and how our social reality blurs the lines between victim and criminal, police force and violence, our tough-on-crime policies seem to offering simply a charade of prophylactic. Backside the charade are tough questions about how we can achieve genuine security for all Americans.
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Shari Stone-Mediatore is Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan Univeristy. She is the writer of Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Source: https://www.owu.edu/news-media/from-our-perspective/tough-questions-for-tough-on-crime-policies/
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