Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marc Mauer is the executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national organization based in Washington, DC, that promotes criminal justice reform. He is the co-editor (with Meda Chesney-Lind) of Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment and the co-author (with Ashley Nellis) of The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences (all published by The New Press). He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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Race to Incarcerate

New Press

Chapter One

1?Introduction? The Race to Incarcerate

We're on a new higher plateau of crime, which means a new, higher and, I think, permanent prison population. It is very hard for a free society to figure out how effectively to deal with crime rates other than by imprisonment.

?James Q. Wilson

What an interesting populace we have. Nobody seems at all worried by the fact that we have the largest prison population and that it consists preponderantly of young blacks, a whole generation in jail.

?Murray Kempton

In January 1998, the Justice Department issued its semiannualreport on prison populations in the United States, notingthat there had been a five percent rise in the previoustwelve months. Newspapers dutifully reported the story, just asthey had similar rises the year before and the year before that. Infact, by now the story was a quarter century old, with the nationalprison population having risen nearly 500 percent since1972, far greater than the 28 percent rise in the national populationduring that time. In the ten-year period beginning in 1985,federal and state governments had opened a new prison a weekto cope with the flood of prisoners. The nearly 1.2 million inmatesin the nation's prisons was almost six times greater thanprior to the inception of the prison-building boom and representeda societal use of incarceration that was virtually uniqueby world standards. The scale of imprisonment had come a longway since the birth of the institution.

    Two hundred years ago, Quakers and other reformers inPennsylvania had developed the institution of the penitentiary,an experiment in molding human behavior that was befitting ofother innovations in the new democracy of the United States.Derived from the concept of "penitence," the new institutionemphasized having sinners engage in hard labor and reflectupon the errors of their ways.

    Prior to this, the preferred methods of responding to criminalbehavior in both the European nations of the old world and inthe American colonies did not include institutions. The jailsthat existed in Europe and the U.S. served primarily to detaindefendants who were awaiting trial and debtors who had notfulfilled their obligations, and they were not places of punishmentfor felons.

    After a defendant was convicted of an offense, various measureswere employed with the goal of deterring the individualfrom engaging in antisocial behavior in the future. Deviant behaviorwas viewed not as reflecting a flaw in society but, rather,as sinful and pervasive in society. Those who had offended weregenerally subjected to relatively swift and severe sanctions,which often varied depending on one's status in the community.For persons of some means who had committed relatively minoroffenses, fines were frequently imposed as punishment. Lower-statuspersons convicted of offenses?servants, apprentices,slaves, and laborers?were usually subjected to the stocks orpublic whippings. The death penalty was an option in cases asserious as murder, but also for lesser offenses, such as third-timethievery. The use of capital punishment, though, was far lessfrequent in the colonies than in England. Offenders in the colonieswho were not from the immediate community, and sometimesrepeat offenders, were generally subject to banishment.

    Much of the rationale for these various punishments can befound in the nature of the colonial society. In an environmentwhere communities were relatively small and their inhabitantswell known to each other, public approbation and embarrassmentwas seen as capable of shaming the offender into desistingfrom continued illegal activities. Wandering rogues who wentfrom town to town committing crimes were usually banished.Moreover, in a society where labor was in short supply, benefitsto the community were derived from punishments that, beingswift and certain, did not unduly affect the laboring capacity ofthe community.

    After the Revolution, though, new ways of thinking aboutcrime and punishment began to emerge. In 1787, influentialQuakers and other leaders in Pennsylvania, led by Dr. BenjaminRush, organized the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating theMiseries of Public Prisons. A growing sentiment that the deathpenalty and other corporal punishments were barbaric eventuallyled to restrictions or elimination of capital punishment inthe new states.

    But if the death penalty was to be eliminated, or its use greatlyreduced, how would serious offenders be punished? These andother issues were considered by the nation's leaders. Out ofthese deliberations came the notion of the prison as a new formof punishment and deterrence for both capital and noncapitaloffenders.

    The initial experiment in confining convicted offenders tookplace in 1790: it involved converting sixteen cells at Philadelphia'sWalnut Street Jail into housing for felons. This was laterreplaced and expanded upon at the Eastern State Penitentiaryin 1829, which remained in use until 1970. The Pennsylvaniapenitentiary model was based on imprisoning offenders in solitaryconfinement and occupying them with labor and Biblestudy in their cells; those who were unable to read were aided byoutside volunteers.

    Ironically, and in retrospect quite tellingly, the first inmateadmitted to the Eastern State Penitentiary was a "light skinnedNegro in excellent health," described by an observer as "onewho was born of a degraded and depressed race, and had neverexperienced anything but indifference and harshness." Twocenturies later, the confluence of issues of race and class with theprison system have become a fundamental feature of the nationallandscape.

    Variations on the penitentiary model used the basic format ofconfining offenders to solitary cells, but exposing them to a congregatework environment. This approach was pioneered in the1820s by the "Auburn model" in New York State, which requiredinmates to engage in work during the day; prisoners wereprohibited from talking or even exchanging glances. Fierce debatesraged at the time regarding the efficacy of the competingPennsylvania and New York models in controlling crime. However,common to both systems was the belief that the less communicationoffenders had with each other, the less opportunitythere would be to engage in criminal plotting or to reinforceeach other's negative orientation.

    By the mid-1800s, changes in the makeup of Americansociety?no longer a relatively sparsely populated collection ofsmall towns and cities?led to a new consensus regarding howbest to respond to criminal behavior. The demographic andeconomic growth of the nation had spawned increasing concernabout antisocial behavior and ways of maintaining order in anincreasingly fluid society. Out of this came a growing consensusamong leaders of the day regarding the need for an institutionalresponse to potential disorder.

    Looking back on two centuries of the prison in America,what is particularly remarkable is how little the institutionalmodel has changed since the nineteenth century. While...