Justice in This World

Abstract

There is a good case to be made that the American criminal justice system is itself criminal. Up until around 1980, all statistics we have suggest that the incarceration rate varied at around 100 inmates per 100 000 people. After about 1977, and especially after about 1982, the rate began to rise; in 2008 it was over 700 prisoners per 100 000, and while it seems to have begun a modest decline in the past few years, it remains over 700. In this context, “American exceptionalism” is not an overstatement; the United States is effectively the largest incarcerator in the world; the only states near us are Cuba and North Korea. Furthermore, this imprisonment system is hugely racially discriminate: an African-American boy born today in the US has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison. More African-American men were in prison or on parole in 2013 than were enslaved in 1850. Finally, the criminal justice system is fundamentally punitive, not at all reformative. We incarcerate, but we do not correct. US prisons are factories of criminality—the best predictor of whether a person will be arrested in the future is whether that person has been in prison before. An observer from another planet would be well within her rights to say that, while this system bears some relationship to criminality, it produces criminality at least as much as removes it. Considered in itself, the above is terrible enough. But the cruel irony is that this situation has arisen in the face of a huge decline in actual crime rates. From 1993 to 2012, the violent crime rate across the United States dropped by 48 per cent. (And not, by theway, because the criminals have all been lockedup—better policing and changes in demographics have contributed farmore substantively to this change.) The last time violent crimewas at the levels it is at todaywas1963. Still, poll after poll shows that the US population believes crime continues to rise; hardly anyone cares that the system itself is so massively horrific. This makes the moral outrage of American criminal justice also an acute political problem: for how didwe come to be somisled about our situation, and about what we are doing collectively in response to it? Answering this question is not easy. The causes of this condition are many. As the work of scholars such as Marie Gottschalk and Derek Jeffreys makes clear, the United States has long had a troubled history with criminal justice, but recent decades have concocted a new combination of superficial moralism and legalism