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Jail them all?
It is now widely conceded that it is not only Guyana that is experiencing a precipitous rise in crimes, but the entire Caribbean region. As with most recent social developments, however, we appear to be following – if not fast, then certainly surely – in the footsteps of the USA.
Their crime wave started to rise in the 1960s and has continued relentlessly upwards since. In our response to the burgeoning crime wave, the majority of citizens have clamoured for a ‘tough-on-crime’ approach which interestingly also follows the American lead.
This approach culminated in a policy of mass incarceration, which in the U.S., has seen almost two and a half million Americans serving time behind bars at present.
While the “jail ‘em” policy might be an improvement on the “hang ‘em high” staple response of its early frontier days, many in the American justice system are questioning the long terms effects of the policy on the very fabric of its society.
While it may seem premature to consider the impact of a high “jail rate” when we do not even appear to have a handle on the apprehension of the criminals themselves, we do believe that the American conclusions would save us a lot of grief in the future. We share some excerpts from a recent report on the American dilemma:
The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective. First, there is the fallacy of “them and us”.
For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them.
The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioural staples of male youth. Most of the crime they commit is perpetrated on each other.
Some young men do become more seriously and persistently involved in crime, but neither the criminal-justice system nor criminologists can predict who those serious offenders will be or when they will stop offending.
Thus the power to police and punish cannot separate us from criminals with great distinction, but instead flows along the contours of social inequality. Visible markers like age, skin colour, and neighbourhood become rough proxies for criminal threat.
As a result, the prison walls did not keep out the criminal predators, but instead divided us internally, leaving our poorest communities with fewer opportunities to join the mainstream and deeply sceptical of the institutions charged with their safety.
Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals.
Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us.
The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation.
The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison boom ignored the great rise in youth unemployment that preceded the growth in murder rates.
They ignored, too, the fact that jobs are not just a source of economic opportunity but of social control that is routine in daily life and draws young men into a wide array of socially beneficial roles.
Lastly, they ignored the bonds of mutual assistance that are only weakly sustained by communities of concentrated poverty.
Thus young men would return home from prison only to easily surmount once again the same stunted social barriers to crime that contributed to their imprisonment in the first place.
The final fallacy of the tough-on-crime perspective is the myth of the free market. The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something for nothing.
For free marketeers, the question was simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor—they did not anticipate that idle young men present a social problem.
Without school, work, or social service, these poor young men were left on the street-corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling fears of crime. The answer surely, is not to attempt to put them all behind bars.
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