incarceration rate is up 355% but why?
Michael Moore makes a poignant point about the state of American prisons and juvenile facilities through his reportage of juvenile hall in Wilkes-Barre, Pensilvania, which has the highest percentage of children locked up. With the federal and state endorsement of privatization and free enterprise, private companies were able to build and even run juvenile centers. By partnering up with the local judge, who had been payed behind the scene by the owner of this center for ramping up his conviction rate, PA Child Center was able to make tens of millions of dollars directly from the county citizens' tax money. (Moore, 2010)
While there are rather obvious consequence of neoliberal policies found in our justice system as pointed out by Moore, what Ruth Gilmore talks about in The Golden Gulag is something that requires a little more time and attention to detail in order to understand how the matrix of capitalism and neoliberal policies factor into our faulty justice system. As we know from the previous pages, neoliberal policies dramatically changed the location of capital. As the economy changed from manufacturing and production based to information and service based, capital also moved, leaving surplus capacity, labor, and money which used to be part of the production based economy. Such idleness is not to be condoned in a capitalistic society where all resources need to be fully utilized so as not to disrupt the flow of capital. Therefore, when the supply side Republican regime took over California, they started pouring tax payers' money into building prisons, which brings in work and money to previously bustling agricultural towns. Much like the way the judges of Wilkes-Barre took part in the capitalistic venture of juvenile facility owners, the legislators and judges of California also helped to keep the prison business running by creating and passing laws that rounded up the numbers of inmates.
Despite the fact that crime rate and substance use had been on the decline for quite some time, the legislators clamored for fighting crime. The outcomes of their "war on crime" were legislations such as the infamous three-strike law or the sentence enhancement laws that channeled (certain) people into prisons. In addition, other legislations registered gang-members to the state-wide database and whenever these alleged gang-members were brought in, they faced more severe sentences and punishments. Furthermore, the second version of three-strike law "sets no age, temporal, or jurisdictional limitations on priors, which allowed prosecutors to use their power to wobble charges in order to make current misdemeanor into felonies and therefore strikable" (Gilmore, 108). Through deregulation and promotion of private interests, even our justice system came to serve the capitalistic needs of re-channeling idle labor(ex-farmers and manufacturers) and idle space(previous sites of production and manufacturing) so that certain people can benefit at the expense of socioeconomically disadvantaged people.
And we see the references to this prison fix throughout The Wire.
While there are rather obvious consequence of neoliberal policies found in our justice system as pointed out by Moore, what Ruth Gilmore talks about in The Golden Gulag is something that requires a little more time and attention to detail in order to understand how the matrix of capitalism and neoliberal policies factor into our faulty justice system. As we know from the previous pages, neoliberal policies dramatically changed the location of capital. As the economy changed from manufacturing and production based to information and service based, capital also moved, leaving surplus capacity, labor, and money which used to be part of the production based economy. Such idleness is not to be condoned in a capitalistic society where all resources need to be fully utilized so as not to disrupt the flow of capital. Therefore, when the supply side Republican regime took over California, they started pouring tax payers' money into building prisons, which brings in work and money to previously bustling agricultural towns. Much like the way the judges of Wilkes-Barre took part in the capitalistic venture of juvenile facility owners, the legislators and judges of California also helped to keep the prison business running by creating and passing laws that rounded up the numbers of inmates.
Despite the fact that crime rate and substance use had been on the decline for quite some time, the legislators clamored for fighting crime. The outcomes of their "war on crime" were legislations such as the infamous three-strike law or the sentence enhancement laws that channeled (certain) people into prisons. In addition, other legislations registered gang-members to the state-wide database and whenever these alleged gang-members were brought in, they faced more severe sentences and punishments. Furthermore, the second version of three-strike law "sets no age, temporal, or jurisdictional limitations on priors, which allowed prosecutors to use their power to wobble charges in order to make current misdemeanor into felonies and therefore strikable" (Gilmore, 108). Through deregulation and promotion of private interests, even our justice system came to serve the capitalistic needs of re-channeling idle labor(ex-farmers and manufacturers) and idle space(previous sites of production and manufacturing) so that certain people can benefit at the expense of socioeconomically disadvantaged people.
And we see the references to this prison fix throughout The Wire.
From the wire
In episode 8 of season 4, Carcetti, now a mayor-elect, is riding around with the Eastern district police officers on a drug bust. The police officers go undercover only to "lure" what appears to be a working class individual who accepts the police officers' offer to deliver drugs in exchange for money. Here, we not only see the ineffectiveness of the Baltimore police department but also the way in which our society has redefined crimes. As Gilmore mentions in her book, the "war on drug" campaign has led us to incarcerate people on minor charges such as possession of drugs. Not only has the drug usage been going down, which obsoletes the whole outcry against drugs in the first place, incriminating people on minor charges such as possession leads nowhere in tackling the supposed drug problem in our society. This makes one wonder, what is the objective behind the new laws that put people such as the poor man in the above scene to prisons? Is it really to curb the drug trade? Or is it to sustain our one-stop remedy for unemployment for the redundant population?
In this scene from episode 5 of season 3, Cutty is trying to "stay on the straight" by working as a gardner after he gets out of the prison. However, he is frustrated by the kinds of jobs that he is able to get and quickly realizes that staying on the straight would mean a meager existence. After this scene, Cutty turns back to the life of a gangster(fortunately only for a brief period). The truth is that ex-convicts are forever denied a chance to succeed everywhere they turn. Even when they try to seek a legal employment, they are not able to because of their priors. Through the neoliberal policies that have turned every aspect of our society marketable--including prisons--,the legislations that seek to increase the prison population, especially among people of color, have increased the number of people who will turn to the underground economy even more so than had they not been to prisons in the first place.