Prison, Harper and the Carceral State

Given the Conservative majority in Parliament, the omnibus crime bill is virtually a done deal. It's ambition is hard to overstate - the reforms, taken together, represent both a vast expansion of the Canadian penal system and a shift in the principles that underpin it - we have both an estimated $1 billion per year increase in spending to pay for 2,700 new prison spots and the imposition of tougher sentencing requirements to fill them. It should be pointed out that these changes are not prompted by any uptick in Canadian criminality - indeed, after peaking in the early nineties, the violent crime rate has been on a 20 year decline.

The inspiration for these reforms comes clearly from south of the border. The American penal system is famous for having the highest incarceration rate in the world (more than twice that of the next Western country on the list, Latvia) and for its harsh sentencing procedures, to say nothing of the brutal conditions that prevail in maximum security prisons, where prison rape is a matter of course. For all its ferocity, the American penal system is simultaneously one of the least effective in the world, if effectiveness is measured in crime rates and recidivism. So why emulate what looks to be a failed model, and which has drawn the condemnation of no lesser a Canadian conservative than Conrad Black (who knows a thing or two about US prisons)?

There are two possible motivations underpinning that decision: either the reforms reflect a Conservative embrace of the ideas behind American penal practice, or they represent a cynical attempt to emulate Republican political gains through law-and-order posturing. I don't know which is worse.

At rortybomb, Mike Konczal has a series of posts outlining the main currents of American conservative thought about crime (here, here and here). You should read the whole thing, but here's the gist:

A lot of conservative energy, thought, money, infrastructure, ideology and worldview is built around the idea of a high prison population, harsh sentencing minimums, and a casual disregard towards the idea of “Rights” in the maintenance of order...

[One major school of conservative thought about crime] is Incapacitation Theory, a theory that says, in the words of James Q. Wilson: “Wicked people exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people.”

In short, criminals - "wicked people" - are natural offenders, essentially different from decent people, and can only be kept from committing crime by "incapacitation," effectively incarceration. Note that since their problem is being "wicked," they are fundamentally incapable of reform or rehabilitation, and must always be the objects of state surveillance and coercion. In other quotes pulled from Wilson, a key conservative intellectual, Konczal makes it clear that he explicitly links "wickedness" with low socio-economic status. Incapacitation theory ends up justifying a law-and-order policy explicitly targeting a segment of the poor population for preemptive monitoring, profiling and, should they step out of line, harsh punishment, including complete separation from the broader community. This is a bleak vision, and something of a self-fulfilling prophecy - the harsh treatment meted out to American convicts renders them less and less able to transition to the legitimate economy (they are often explicitly barred by state law from dozens of professions) and more and more likely to return to crime once outside. Enough such individual stories and you create an entrenched criminal underclass, which must (under conservative theory) be met with even harsher repression. The theory is twisted, and so it also twists the world when applied.

The alternative view is that the reforms are motivated by cynical political calculation. Regardless of their failure to decrease crime or improve security for Americans, law-and-order policies have proven very effective at mobilizing support for conservative electoral campaigns ever since the sixties. Further, their popularity and salience is more or less perennial - once primed to fear ubiquitous crime, a large and electorally valuable chunk of the public stays scared regardless of the movement of crime statistics or the conclusions of penal policy experts, instead tuned in to the occasional sensational criminal outburst breaking out in the mass media. Further, once the issue is framed in terms of "criminals vs. law abiding citizens," the opponents of punitive criminal reform are effectively disarmed, risking association with child molesters and murdersome drug gangs through their opposition to tough-on-crime policies. Perhaps the whole law-and-order approach is all about creating this permanent winning conservative issue, and the $1 billion per year of extra spending and 4,000 more inmates nationwide are just a by product.