Failure™ Magazine

The Culture of Punishment

Examining the role of popular culture in shaping America’s policy of mass incarceration.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History, Science & Technology

Why doesn’t society-at-large understand the challenges of day-to-day life inside a prison?
It’s the nature of prisons. They are secretive institutions. But if [ordinary] people were in prison day in and day out, they’d see that it’s mundane and boring, as well as fairly dysfunctional and tragic. It wouldn’t fit a lot of what we imagine in connection with it.

Since most citizens never experience imprisonment, how can we get individuals to reflect on and understand its consequences?
Where I like to position it is in people’s everyday lives. We’re all engaging in tactics that are punitive and we all invoke punishment in work environments. If people come to recognize the way they are coming up against punishment in their own lives, they begin to see themselves less as a potential victim, and more as someone caught up in a lot of social controls. If they move toward that framework they can better understand how someone who is incarcerated would experience that even more intensively.

Does the fact that there’s a prison industrial complex encourage policies that lead to ever-more Americans being incarcerated?
There is a supply and demand issue. If they build it they will try and fill it. In Ohio they built a supermax [Ohio State Penitentiary] in the northern part of the state and couldn’t fill it, so they moved death row there and contracted out to other states.

Because of the economic crisis we are finally going to see some limits in terms of prison construction and the population, but that’s not a questioning or challenging of how we punish.

There is something about punishment that is unique. Once it gets moving—both economically and culturally—it’s hard to shift away from it. It takes on a sense of permanence.

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