“Nowhere else in the democratic world, and at no other time in Western history, has there been the kind of relentless punitive spirit as been ascendant in the United States,” says Todd Clear, co-author of the book The Punishment Imperative.
In an interview with Joe Domanick, the West Coast bureau chief of The Crime Report, Clear “traces the root of American prison policy to racism and the idea of going after the ‘enemy’.”
“It was a relentless pursuit across the country that didn’t happen anywhere else, and was unprecedented in [modern, democratic] history,” Clear said in the March article. Over the past four decades, the U.S. has kept good records of its incarceration numbers.
When pressed to explain this phenomenon, Clear said, “I would point to several arguments.” One is these policies are based on historic racisms, “and were ignited by the racial conflicts that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. Then, through Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and his law and order [presidential] campaign in ’68, being tough on crime began dominating the national discourse, and the imagery was all about black men.”
“Second, young, black, jobless men were a tangible target group that people thought required some new form of social control, and as Michelle Alexander pointed out in [her book] The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration was just another way of dealing with these expendable black people,” he said.
Finally, “Crime was high, people were afraid, and [they were] willing to do anything to lower crime. But they were also concerned about race, and a feeling that [society was spinning out of control.] And in that social-movement context, the tough-punishment concept became associated with being the solution,” Clear explained.
He contends that a number of politicians build platforms on tough sentencing and mass incarceration campaigns. “There was no distinction between political parties.” This was “a simple idea that made sense to people and became a national consensus,” said Clear.
Clear denies the allegation that a community with high criminal activities feels that mass incarceration is doing it a favor. “If you remove a person from a community, you remove all of that person’s activity in the community – the criminal activity that person would do theoretically, but also all of the assets that person would bring, including money, employment and parenting.”
“Going to prison reduces lifetime earnings by 40 percent. If you have a neighborhood where almost all the men have gone to prison, you have a neighborhood where lifetime earnings in that neighborhood is down by 40 percent. So their children, spouses and community have less money,” Clear maintains.
Domanick asked Clear to clarify how the “wars on drugs and crimes” aggravated the sentencing laws in this country. “Calling them wars meant that all the metaphors were about defeating enemies, and I think that was a very significant aspect of what was taking place. Because once you decided that you’re fighting an enemy, they have no rights; they’re heathens who we have to protect ourselves from.”
In addition, “what you had is a fear of crime that can be real, and at the same time a strategy to do something about that fear that has had a profound differential racial impact on people of color.”
Clear goes on to say, “The point is that you can’t produce a [corrections] system as large as ours by focusing just on violent crime. It would never produce [the size of] this prison population. You would have to have policies on drugs, on property crime across the board to produce this prison population.”
“What about the criminal justice industry and their impact on these wars – organizations like the California Corrections Peace Officers and District Attorneys Associations so strongly supporting and driving the crime and drug wars?” asked Domanick.
Clear replied, “They were not principled people looking at the situation and saying we regret that we have to [engage in this extreme punishment], but you know, we have no other choice. Their support was because of economic expedience. Much of this movement was a movement of greed, with lots of people making money off of it. The cost was borne by people in poor communities and people of color.”
As for whether mass incarceration is ending, Clear said, “You don’t see politicians proposing new expansions of their prison systems. Mayors aren’t running on get-tough policies. Other claims are now being made on federal dollars.”
California’s great prison experiment with realignment has forced local governments to reevaluate their justice reinvestment system. Once upon a time, judges were producing the great growth in the prison system. “Now the locals are being forced to make economic, and not just political, decisions,” Domanick concluded.
Clear is dean of the Rutgers University-Newark School of Criminal Justice.
