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

Should we be having a public debate about whether it’s wise to have more than two million citizens locked up?
Absolutely. As I and others have pointed out, it’s one of the biggest civil rights issues we face in our society. There is no politician that is going to run on the idea that we need to have this discussion, but it was embedded in the Obama campaign with its emphasis on prisoner re-entry and the closing of the war prisons. I’m not sure it has been mobilized in any effective way yet, but the change in administrations was in some ways a potential moment.

Are we are where we’re at today in part due to the failure of rehabilitation?
Science played a role in where we are, but rehabilitation didn’t disappear because of science alone; there was also a cultural and political shift [that began in the 1970s]. When liberal and conservative values merged in a critique of rehabilitation, somehow the more punitive conservative critique came out stronger, and I think liberals are still struggling with how to frame [the debate] in a way that doesn’t sound like an excuse—or being soft on crime.

While a lot of programs have moved away from rehabilitation, it’s still there in a lot of places. And if you talk to people who work in these settings, it’s still highly effective. [The failure of rehabilitation] is one of those myths that circulate in popular culture among people who are distanced from reality.

What are some of the hidden collateral consequences of mass incarceration?
They are all over the map, but we didn’t anticipate a lot of the effects of the war on drugs and sentencing restructuring. Nobody thought we’d imprison more than two million citizens. And we didn’t anticipate the impact on individuals imprisoned for long periods of time for drug offenses and other non-violent crimes. The effects are incredibly dismal in terms of lifetime trajectory. Along with the hard line came restrictions on where returning offenders could live and what social services they could access. In the state of Ohio, in terms of employment, there are over 400 licensure restrictions. Many of the occupational restrictions are occupations for which [prisoners] are being trained.

Meanwhile, one of the other things we’ve been grappling with is that entire families are hard hit, not just the individual who is imprisoned. More than two million children are impacted by incarceration through their parents. Also, in terms of how families are organized, when you have a community that is hard hit by crime and punishment it makes the community really vulnerable, as there aren’t a lot of ways to build formal or informal social supports.

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