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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Post subject: The 'tough on crime' con |  |
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https://newmatilda.com/2016/08/03/tough-crime-con-costs-fortune-never-kept-us-safe/
| Quote: | Prison, in the words of Michel Foucault, is the ‘darkest region in the apparatus of justice’. Even in the early 1800s, when prisons first began to replace torture and public execution as the primary means of state-administered punishment, they were widely condemned as ineffective in reducing the crime rate or preventing recidivism, and seen to actively reproduce the very circumstances that caused antisocial behaviour in the first place.
The arguments against prison are not new, but they are all the more imperative now in the wake of the outcry about conditions in juvenile detention centres in the Northern Territory. While effective and humanitarian alternatives to prison exist, so ingrained is the idea of incarceration as evidence of the administration of justice that we often find it difficult to conceive of any other way of appropriately responding to crime.
Yet it is the interests of politicians and big business that drives investment in prisons, detention centres and other ‘correctional’ infrastructure. The basis on which deterrence arguments are constructed is astoundingly flimsy: literally no empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that locking people away modifies behaviour for the better or acts as a deterrent.
[...]
Cycles of abuse are not broken in prison; if anything, they are entrenched. Prisons are closed environments in which the vulnerable and the predatory are forced to intermingle, and are themselves places in which crime not only frequently occurs but is routinely ignored, such as violence and sexual violence – under-researched, underreported, estimated to occur at a frightening rate and yet widely accepted by the public as a kind of informal administration of justice.
This cycle of abuse includes the entrenched persecution of marginalised groups. The massive overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in the prison system is comparable to that of the Black population in both the USA and the UK. The detention centres operated under the Australian government’s watch on Manus Island and Nauru are exclusively designed for the indefinite incarceration of already-persecuted peoples who have, crucially, committed no crime whatsoever.
As Foucault argued, ‘all [prison’s] functioning operates as an abuse of power’.
The existence of alternative justice programs such as the CREDIT and CoSA should be exciting. They open the door to the beginning of a truly social, humanitarian justice system. They show us that it’s possible to build a world without the state-sanctioned violence and abuse that is inherent in the very structure of the prison system, and which we saw splashed across our television screens last week.
But that world won’t exist unless we fight for it. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| Post subject: | |
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| David wrote: | https://newmatilda.com/2016/08/03/tough-crime-con-costs-fortune-never-kept-us-safe/
| Quote: | Prison, in the words of Michel Foucault, is the ‘darkest region in the apparatus of justice’. Even in the early 1800s, when prisons first began to replace torture and public execution as the primary means of state-administered punishment, they were widely condemned as ineffective in reducing the crime rate or preventing recidivism, and seen to actively reproduce the very circumstances that caused antisocial behaviour in the first place.
The arguments against prison are not new, but they are all the more imperative now in the wake of the outcry about conditions in juvenile detention centres in the Northern Territory. While effective and humanitarian alternatives to prison exist, so ingrained is the idea of incarceration as evidence of the administration of justice that we often find it difficult to conceive of any other way of appropriately responding to crime.
Yet it is the interests of politicians and big business that drives investment in prisons, detention centres and other ‘correctional’ infrastructure. The basis on which deterrence arguments are constructed is astoundingly flimsy: literally no empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that locking people away modifies behaviour for the better or acts as a deterrent.
[...]
Cycles of abuse are not broken in prison; if anything, they are entrenched. Prisons are closed environments in which the vulnerable and the predatory are forced to intermingle, and are themselves places in which crime not only frequently occurs but is routinely ignored, such as violence and sexual violence – under-researched, underreported, estimated to occur at a frightening rate and yet widely accepted by the public as a kind of informal administration of justice.
This cycle of abuse includes the entrenched persecution of marginalised groups. The massive overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in the prison system is comparable to that of the Black population in both the USA and the UK. The detention centres operated under the Australian government’s watch on Manus Island and Nauru are exclusively designed for the indefinite incarceration of already-persecuted peoples who have, crucially, committed no crime whatsoever.
As Foucault argued, ‘all [prison’s] functioning operates as an abuse of power’.
The existence of alternative justice programs such as the CREDIT and CoSA should be exciting. They open the door to the beginning of a truly social, humanitarian justice system. They show us that it’s possible to build a world without the state-sanctioned violence and abuse that is inherent in the very structure of the prison system, and which we saw splashed across our television screens last week.
But that world won’t exist unless we fight for it. |
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What's wrong with the world that we prefer to engage with someone's pastiche to reading Discipline and Punish? It isn't like (that particular) Foucault is difficult. |
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