In any case, this is the standard conception of the criminal. After all, when you imagine someone committing a crime, it generally isn't a white woman wearing khaki pants and a blazer. In all likelihood, when you picture a thief or a murderer, it's a poor, ethnic male who probably looks out of place in white suburbia or higher SES neighborhoods. This is the common meme in our society and its one that perpetuates the idea of necessity being "tough on crime". This is an easy position for political figures to take, considering no one particularly cares for crime, but the underbelly of this message is that being tough on crime involves transforming the "rabble" into people who are inoffensive to the rest of society (i.e. inoffensive to those with actual political power).
Even if this were not an incredibly flawed notion, would sending these people to prison be the best way to achieve real reform? Consider what happens when someone has a criminal record. They are shamed in courts. They are put in prison to which is attached to great social stigma. Convicted felons have an infinitely harder time finding a job that would afford them a living wage. Job and college applications have spaces where one must disclose any crimes or infractions one has previously been convicted of. Felons have their voting and many other civil rights stripped from them. And all this serves to do is take someone who was in all likelihood living in unfortunate circumstances and place them in even worse ones. As George Bernard Shaw writes in The Crime of Imprisonment, "Evidently your deterrence does not deter. What it does do is torment the swindler for years, and then throw him back upon society, a worse man in every respect, with no other employment open to him except that of fresh swindling."
Many of the prisons in northern Europe have begun to operate by the principle of approximation--the idea that life within penal institutions should resemble life in the outside world as closely as possible. They also take precautions to protect people from public shaming and other forms of degradation that are typically associated with incarceration in America. I have witnessed reactions of surprise to outright dismay at some of the images of Norwegian prisons that are more akin to a vacation cottage than the highly rigid and secure penal institutions of the United States. How could they allow people who have done wrong to experience such lavish lifestyles, these people seem to ask. They don't deserve that kind of treatment. And yet, with a recidivism rate of less than 30%, it's difficult to argue with the results of these types of programs. When someone who commits a crime is dehumanized and stigmatized, what reasons do they have to try and participate in a society that has clearly shunned them?
Let's think back to the type of people more likely to end up in prison. Minorities are much more likely to end up in prisons than their white counterparts, even for similar crimes. I suspect many of the people who read this blog, at the very least, know someone (quote/unquote) who has, at one point in their life, smoked marijuana. The punishment for misdemeanor possession of marijuana in Tennessee can be a sentence of up to a year in prison. And yet, the person with economic power is much more likely to receive a fine or a light slap on the wrist than someone from a poor ethnic neighborhood. Even if both are arrested and charged, the person with economic power is more likely to be able to navigate the legal system in that they are going to be able to pay for bail, hire a lawyer, and pay any fines levied on them. The poor person does not have these luxuries and is thus infinitely more likely to end up in jail for an identical crime. And like that, the prison becomes a home for someone who has lost what little they already had. After doing his time, he is released into a world that is distrustful and disdaining of him. Perhaps he has lost his home during his time in prison and is now subject to being convicted of crimes like vagrancy and loitering. He returns to jail. Thus, the cycle of imprisonment begins for a person who did nothing we don't expect from thousands of college kids on any given day.
In this way, the prison has a vested interest in not reforming its prisoners, as the longer and more frequently they can fill their cells, the more economic power they wield. When private prisons hold contracts with the government that assure them at least a 90% occupation rate over 10 years, there is no reason for the jailers to make any real attempt to reform the prisoners in any authentic way. Thus the prison becomes like the bureaucracy, expanding and creating reasons to justify its own existence. The poor and socially-offensive are permanently branded as criminals so as to justify their forced segregation from the rest of society. Punitive measures in the name of reform become nothing more than social politics and exercises in discipline and conformity.
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