2-3pages essay book review
A JOHN HOPE FRANKLlN (ENTER BOOK
BORKNV5143
M30
Punishing the Poor
l!J ZAPADOCESKA UNIVERZITA v PLZNI Univerzltnr knihovna
NENICMNE I
2
The Criminalization of Poverty in the Post-Civil Rights Era
In his lecture course on socialism, Emile Durkheim contends that the state is "not an enormous coercive power, but a vast and conscious organization" capable "of an action at once unified and varied, supple and extensive."· Historical experience shows that these two aspects are by no means incompatible, and that a state apparatus can very well be both at the same time. Such is the case at the dawn of the twenty-first century with the United States, where, notwithstanding the virulently antistatist ambient discourse, public force understood il1 the strict sel1se plays an increasingly decisive role in the patterning and conduct of national life.
Over the past three decades, that is, since the race riots that shook the ghettos of its big cities and marked the closing of the Civil Rights revolution, America has launched into a social and political experiment without precedent or eqUivalent in the societies of the postwar West: the gradual replacement of a (semi-) welfare state by a police and penal state for which the criminalization of marginality and the punitive con- tainment of dispossessed categories serve as social policy at the lower end of the class and ethnic order. To be sure, this welfare state was, as we shall note shortly, notably underdeveloped compared to its Euro- pean counterparts. For a number of well-known historical reasons, the sphere of citizenship is particularly constricted in the United States, and the ability of subordinate categories to mal,e themselves heard, severely circumscribed.·· Rather than of a welfare state, one should
°Emile Durkheim, Socialism, ed. and intra. Alvin \Y/. Gouldner, pref. Marcel Mau55 (New York: Collier, 1962), 43. My translation. This neo-Hegelian conception is fur- ther elaborated in a set of little-known papers on the state gathered in Te.t:tes, val. 3, FOllctiol1S soda/es et institutions, ed. Victor Karady (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975), chap. 2, in which Durkheim argues that the modern state must increasingly orient its action toward the legal regulation of societallife, thus joining through a normative route with Max Weber's positive view of the pivotal place of the law in contemporary political rule .
•• Among these reasons, which are closely interhvined, figure the rigid ethnoracial division inherited from the era of slavery, the "frontier" tradition and the pervasiveness of moral individualism, the decentralization of the political and bureaucratic fields, and the fierce suppression of unions fostered by the strong integration of the capital-
42 CHAPTER TWO
speak here of a charitable state inasmuch as the programs aimed at vulnerable populations have at all times been limited, fragmentary, and isolated from other state activities, informed as they are by a moralistic and moralizing conception of poverty as a product of the individual failings of the poor.' The guiding principle of public action in this do- main is not solidarity but compassion; its goal is not to reinforce social bonds, and still less to reduce inequalities, but at best to relieve the most glaring destitution and to demonstrate society's moral sympathy for its deprived yet deserving members.
Moreover, the hypertrophied penal state that is bit by bit replacing the rump social-welfare state at the bottom of the class structure-or supplementing it according to a gendered division of labar-is itself incomplete, incoherent, and often incompetent, so that it can fulfiIJ neither the unrealistic expectations that have given birth to it nor the social functions that it has as its mission to shore up. And it is hard to see how its development could go unchecked indefinitely, since in the medium run it threatens to bankrupt the large states that lead the pack in the frantic race to hyperincarceration, such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida.' Lastly, notwithstanding the thunder- ing proclamations of politicians from all sides about the necessity to "end the era of Big government" - the cheery chorus of Clinton's State of the Union address in 1996-the US government continues to pro- vide many kinds of guarantees and support to corporations as well as to the middle and upper classes, starting, for example, with home- ownership assistance: almost half of the $64 billion in fiscal deduc- tions for mortgage interest payments and real estate taxes granted in 1994 by Washington (amounting to nearly three times the budget for public housing) went to the 5 percent of American households earning more than $100,000 that year; and 16 percent of that sum went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers with incomes exceeding $200,000. Over seven in ten families in the top 1 percent received mortgage subsidies (averaging $8,457) as against fewer than 3 percent of the families below the $30,000 mark (for a paltry $486 each).' This fiscal subsidy of $64 billion to wealthy home owners dwarfed the national outlay for welfare ($17 billion), food stamps ($25 million), and child nutrition assistance ($7.5 billion).
It is the thesis of this book that the United States is groping its way
ist class as early as the end of the nineteenth century. For a comparative perspective, see Gcsta Esping-Andersen, The Three lVor/d!; of\Velfare Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Maurice Roche, Retltillkillg Citize1lSltip: Htel- fare. Ideology, and Change ill klodem Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 43
toward a new kind of hybrid state, neither a "protector" state, in the Old World sense of the term, nor a "minimalist" and noninterventionist state, conforming to the ideological tale spun by zealots of the market. Its social side and the benefits it dispenses are increasingly secured by the privileged, especially through the "fiscalization" of public support (for education, health insurance, and housing),' while its disciplinary vocation is upheld mainly in its relation to the lower class and subor- dinate ethnic categories. This centaur state, guided by a liberal head mounted upon an authoritarian body, applies the doctrine of "laissez- faire et laissez passer" upstream, when it comes to social inequalities and the mechanisms that generate them (the free play of capital, dere- liction of labor law and deregulation of employment, retraction or re- moval of collective protections), but it turns out to be brutally pater- nalistic and punitive downstream, when it comes to coping with their consequences on a daily level.
This chapter provides a preliminary sketch of the twofold shift that has tipped the balallce of the US bureaucratic field from its protective to its punitive pole when it comes to managing poor populations and territories.4 It argues that the downsizing of the social-welfare sector of the state and the concurrent upsizing of its penal arm are function- ally linked, forming, as it were, the two sides of the same coin of state restructuring in the nether regions of social and urban space in the age of ascending neoliberalism. The gradual rolling back of the social safety net commenced in the early 1970S as part of the bacldash against the progressive movements of the previous decade and culminated in 1996 with the conversion of the right to "welfare" into the obligation of "workfare," designed to dramatize and enforce the work ethic at the bottom of employment ladder. We shall show in the next chapter that the new punitive organization of welfare programs operates in the manner of a labor parole program designed to push its "beneficiaries" into the subpoverty jobs that have proliferated after the discarding of the Fordist-Keynesian compromise. The diffusing social insecurity and escalating life disorders caused by the desocialization of wage labor and
"In The Hiddell Welfare State: Tax £""pellditures and Social Policy ill the United States (Princeton, N.1.: Princeton University Press, 1997), Christopher Howard shows that the social spending of the federal government is increasingly effected in a con- cealed manner, by way of fiscal arrangements that systematically favor business and wealthier households and effectively bypass the poor. In 1995, tax expenditures with social welfare objectives (such as deductions for home mortgage interest and employer-provided pensions) exceeded $450 billion, more than ten times the budget for AFDC and food stamps put together. Nine-tenths of these expenditures benefited the middle and upper classes (compared with two-thirds for official social spending).
44 CHAPTER TWO
the correlative curtailment of social protection, in turn, were curbed by the stupendous expansion of the penal apparatus that has propelled the United States to the ranie of world leader in incarceration. This abrupt rolling out of the penal state will be mapped out in detail in the second part of the book.
Some Distinctive Properties of the American State
To grasp the nature and means of this political mutation, it is indispens- able first to identify the distinctive structural and functional properties of what political scientist AIan Wolfe nicely calls America's "franchise state.'" Here I will briefly emphasize five.
1. A "society Without a state," a society against the state
The first distinctive trait of the state in America has to do with the representation it is given in the national doxa. Just as France has, until recently, thought of itself as a "nation without immigrants," even as its ind~strial, urban, and cultural history has been decisively stamped by the mflux of foreign populations since the end of the nineteenth cen- tury, the reigning civic ideology of the United States has it that it is "a society without a state.'"
. From the Pilgrim fathers to the Bush dynasty, Americans have always VIewed themselves as an autonomous people fundamentally rebellious to any suprasocial authority-save for that of God. This is attested by the many articles in the Constitution that disperse and curb public powers, regarded ex hypothesi as potentially tyrannical, and the ven- omous antistatism of the national political culture. The 1996 campaign for the presidential nomination offered a translucent illustration of this streale: all the candidates claimed that they wanted to "clean up Wash- ington" and the federal government was characteristically presented as a foreign force, if not as the enemy of the people, by those who were its very servants. DUring the 2000 campaign, AIbert Gore Jr.,'the sit- ting vice president for eight years, insisted on locating his campaign headquarters in Tennessee in order to stage his alleged closeness to the "people" and distance from "government elites." even though, as the son of a senator, he had spent his entire life and career in the cor- ridors of power in Washington. Another indicator: Americans were Iileelier to blame the federal government (79 percent), and then '~meri can workers themselves" (75 percent) and their fast-flagging unions
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 45
(62 percent), than they were Wall Stre~t (so percent) for ~e massive destruction of jobs that marked the begmmng of the 1990S.
2. Bureaucratic fragmentation and dysfunctions
The American state is a decentralized network of loosely coordinated agencies whose powers are limited by the very fragmentation of the bureaucratic field and the disproportionate power the latter grants to local authorities. The sharing of budgetary responsibilities and attribu- tions among the various levels of government (federal, state, county, and municipal) is a source of constant dissension and distortion. The result is that there is often an abyss between the policies promulgated "on paper" in Washington and in state legislatures and the services actually delivered on the ground by street-level bureaucracies.'
The related absence of a tradition of public service and of stable channels for the recruitment and oversight of civil servants, especially in higher offices, means that the administrative apparatus is directly subjected to the forces of money, on the one hand, and to the brute de- mands of Ifelectoral patrimonialism/' on the other. Thence the bureau- cratic incoherence and ineptitude that often preside over the design and implementation of national and local policies.' It also helps ac- count for the extreme porosity of the public-private divide: according to a century-old tradition, updated by the "War on poverty" during the 1960s, a large share of social programs aimed at the lower class (such as the "Head Start" preschool plan or support for orphans and child protective services) is subcontracted to private and nonprofit agencies, which distribute and administer them in the name of the national col- lectivity. The historically entrenched pattern of reliance on the com- mercial and third sectors for carrying out many welfare duties of the state has created a vast and intricate mesh of organizations and interest groups "dedicated to preserving the private tilt of US social policy,"1O which further complicates the landscape ofIarge-scale public provision and creates an institutional terrain very propitious to efforts at further privatization of its activities.
3. A dual state, or the great institutional-rum-ideological bifurcation
Since the foundational era of the New Deal, the social action of the US state has been split into two hermeticaIIy sealed domains that are sharply distinguished by the composition and political weight of their respective "clienteles" as weli as by their ideological charge.ll The first
46 CHAPTER TWO
strand, under the heading of "social insurance," is responsible for the collective management of the life-risks of wage earners-unemploy_ ment, sickness, and retirement. In principle, everyone with a stable job is entitled to participate in these programs and enjoys benefits construed as the just counterpart to their contributions (but we shall see shortly that this principle is in practice routinely violated in the lower tiers of the job market). The second plank, designated by the loathsome idiom of "welfare,"" concerns only assistance to dependent and distressed individuals and households. Its recipients are submitted to draconian conditions (of income, assets, marital and familial status, residence, etc.) and are placed under a harsh tutelage that clearly demarcates them from the rest of society and effectively mal,es them second-class citi- zens, on grounds that the support they receive is granted without an offsetting contribution on their part, and thus threatens to undermine their "work ethic."
Historically, the main beneficiaries of the "social insurance" side of the US social state, such as the Social Security retirement fund, have been men (as full-time workers and heads of house holds), whites (who have long cornered the lion's share of stable jobs in the industrial and service sectors), and the' families of the labor aristocracy and the middle and upper classes. Although public assistance programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, income and in-kind grants to destitute single mothers with young children) reach a broad public thatis majority white-more than one American household in four was on the "welfare" rolls at some point during the 1980s"-in the popuJar imagination their clientele is essentially made up of urban minorities and dissolute women living off the nation in the manner of social para- sites.
4. A residual welfare state
The American state is the prototype of the "residual welfare state"" to the extent that it offers support only in response to the cumuJative failures of the labor market and the family, by intervening on a case-by- case basis through programs strictly reserved for vuJnerable categories that are deemed "worthy": ex-workers temporarily pushed out of the wage-labor market, the handicapped and severely disabled, and, subject to varying restrictive conditions, destitute mothers of young children." Its official clientele is thus composed of "dependents" from working- class backgrounds, low-pay workers, the unemployed, and families of color, who have no influence upon the political system and, by the same token, no means of protecting their meager prerogatives.
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 47
The United States thus presents the paradox of a nation that vener- ates children but has no family support or education policy, so that one child in four (one black child in two) lives under the official "poverty line"; a country that spends vastly more than any of its competitors on healthcare as a percentage of its GDP, yet leaves some 45 million people (including 12 million children) without medical coverage at anyone
. time; a society that sacralizes work, yet has no national framework for training or supporting employment worthy of the name. All because "state charity" has for its primary objective bolstering the mechanisms of the market and especially imposing the tough discipline of deskilled wage labor upon marginal populations."
5. A racial state
Finally, the United States sports the highly distinctive property of being endowed with a racial state in the sense that, much like Nazi Germany and South Africa until the abolition of apartheid, the structure and functioning of the bureaucratic field are thoroughly traversed by the imperious necessity of expressing and preserving the impassable social and symbolic border between "whites" and "blacks," incubated during the age of slavery and subsequently perpetuated by the segregationist system of the agrarian South and the ghetto of the Northern industrial metropolis.' The pervasiveness and potency of this denegated form of ethnicity called "race" as a principle of social vision and division that effaces, ideologically and practically, the insuperable contradiction between the democratic ideal founded on the doctrine of the natural
·We return, in the third part of this book (chapter 6), to the historical sequence of "peculiar institutions" that, since chattel slavery, have kept bladcs in a marginal and dependent position and there discover that the task of defining, containing, and controlling the casualized fractions of the African-American proletariat now befalls in part to the prison.
The theoretical and empirical relevance of the parallelism between the United States, Nazi Germany, and South Africa, which might shock gentle souls raised in the Tocquevillian tradition, is immediately evident upon reading Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, Tlte Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1991); George M. Fredridcson, White Supremacy: A Compara- tive Stlldy ill Americal1 and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Joe! Williamson, The Crucible a/Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). In this perspective, the trajectory and operation of the US Leviathan differs sharply from the modal path of the Western bureaucratic state, contrary to the thesis advanced by Goldberg that maJces the modern state and race coeval and virtually coextensive with each other. David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell,2002).
48 CHAPTER TWO
rights of the individual and the persistence of a caste regime, is essen- tial to understanding the initial atrophy and accelerating decay of the American social state in the recent period on the one hand, and the stupefying ease and speed with which the penal state arose on its ruins on the other.
Indeed, the originary caesura of the national social space into two communities perceived as congenitally disjoint and inherently unequal, between which the other components of the US ethnic mosaic are in- serted (Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, according to the official taxonomy), overdetermines the design and implementation of public policy in all domains. The white-black cleavage infects the national po- litical culture and distorts the electoral and legislative game at the local as well as the federal level, from campaign fund-raising to the drawing of districts, the rhetoric of candidates for office, the formation of legis- lative factions and alliances, to the manufacturing oflegislation." From its origins, this rigid partition has also thwarted the unification and organization of the working class. Together with the strong integration of the capitalist class at the onset of industrialization, it accounts for the absence of union mobilization of an oppositional kind and, by the same token, for the feeble political oversight of the markets for labor, capital, and public goods."
Lastly, through the intercession of regional cleavages, racial division anchors the teratological development of a welfare state split into two blocs, one turned toward whites and the middle and upper classes, the other aimed at blacks and the unskilled working class during the foundational era of the New Deal no less than during the expansionary period of the 1960s; and it underpins the tilting, over the ensuing two decades, from the assistantial to the penal management of poverty, mis- perceived as a problem affecting blacks first and foremost." The ethnic division of the proletariat and the structural dualism of the semiwelfare state contribute to perpetuating the racialization of politics, which in turn feeds the retreat from civic participation, facilitating the strangle- hold of corporations and wealthy funders on the electoral syst~m.
Rolling Back the Charitable State
These distinctive characteristics explain why, although social inequality and economic insecurity increased sharply during the closing three decades of the twentieth century," the American charitable state has steadfastly reduced its perimeter of operation and squeezed its modest budgets so as to allow for the explosive increase in military spending
THE CRIMINAL1ZATION OF POVERTY 49
Table 1. Decrease in welfare payments to poor single mothers (AFDC)', 1975-95
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995
current dollars 221 264 350 399 432 435
Constant dollars 221 190 165 144 128 119
Change 100 86 75 65 58 49.8
• Median payment for a family of four
SOURCE: Committee on Ways and Means, US House of Representatives, 1996 Green Book (Washington, D.e.: U.S. Government Prlnting Office, 1997), 443-45, 449·
and the extensive redistribution of income from wage earners toward firms and the afiluent fractions of the upper class. So much so that the "War on poverty" has given way to a simile war agai/lSt the poor, made into the scapegoats of all the major ills of the country" and now sum- moned to care for themselves lest they be hit by a volley of punitive and humiliating measures intended, if not to put them back onto the narrow path of precarious employment, then at least to minimize their social demands and thus their fiscal burden.
Impaired by the administrative and ideological split between "wel- fare" and "social insurance," stigmatized by their close association with the demands of the black political movement, and tarnished by the notorious inefficiency of the agencies responsible for implementing them, programs targeted at the poor were the first victims of the socio- political reaction that carried Reagan to power in 1980 and then fos- tered the success of Clinton's "New Democrats."" Although the cost of AFDC never reached 1 percent of the federal budget, every government since )immy Carter has promoted its reduction as a top priority. And they have very largely succeeded at the level of recipients (see table 1): in 1970, the median AFD C payment for a family of four without any other source of income was $221 per month; in 1990, this sum reached $432 in current dollars, or $128 adjusting for inflation, corresponding to a net decline in purchasing power of 42 percent. By 1995, on the eve of its elimination, the AFD C package came to a paltry $435, or $110 in 1970 dollars, representing a real drop of more than one-half.
Moreover, these nationwide statistics conceal sharp regional dispari- ties (see table 2). Social assistance was always significantly higher in the urban and industrial Midwest and Northeast, the historic cradle of both the working class and the black ghetto, than in the South, where poverty is more prevalent still and the social safety net virtually non- existent. Thus, in 1996 the maximum monthiy allowance for a family of three came to $577 in New York and $565 in Boston, as against a
50 CHAPTER TWO
Table 2. Maximum AFDC payment for a family of three in selected states, 1970 -96'
% change in
1970 1980 1990 real value,
1996 1970-96
New York (City) 279 394 577 577 -48 Michigan (Detroit) 219 425 516 459 -4B Pennsylvania 265 332 421 421 -60 Illinois 232 288 367 377 -59 Texas 148 116 184 lB8 -6B Mississippi 56 96 120 120 -46
• In dollars per month
SOURCE: Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives, 1996 Green Book (Washington, D.C.: US Government J.lrinting Office, 1997), 459, 861, 921.
mere $120 in Mississippi, $185 in Albert Gore's Tennessee, and $188 in George W. Bush's Texas. But the decline in real terms was catastrophic
everywhere, ranging from one-half in Michigan to two-thirds in Texas. In 1970, the AFDC package covered a national average of 84 percent of the "minimal needs" officially entitling one to public assistance; by 1996, this figure had fallen to 68 percent; in Texas, this ratio had plummeted to 25 percent (compared to 75 percent a quarter-century earlier).
Yet impoverished families must first succeed in receiving the meager assistance to which they are legally entitled. The second technique for shrinking the charitable state is not budgetary but administrative: it consists in multiplying the bureaucratic obstacles and requirements
imposed on applicants with the aim of discouraging them or strildng them off the recipient rolls (be it oniy temporarily). Under the cover of ferreting out abuses and turning up the heat on "welfare cheats," public aid offices have multiplied forms to be filled out, the number of documents to be supplied, the frequency of checks, and the criteria for periodically reviewing files. Between 1972 and 1984, the number of "ad- ministrative denials" on "procedural grounds" increased by almost one million, two-thirds of them directed against families who were' fully within their rights?' This practice of bureaucratic harassment has even acquired a name well known among specialists, "churning," and it has given rise to elaborate statistics tracking the number of eligible claim- ants on assistance whose demands were unduly rejected for each pro- gram category. Thus, whereas 81 percent of poor children were covered by AFDC in 1973, over 40 percent did not receive the financial aid to
which they were entitled fifteen years later. In 1996, at welfare's burial,
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 51
tl'mated that every other poor household in America did not it was es eive benefits for which it was eligible,
rec I h' hih F' all" there remains the third and most bruta tec mque, w c con-m I' d th h' 't f simply eliminating public aid programs, on groun s at t elr
SISSO , f ' ients must be snatched from their culpable torpor by the stmg 0
reclp f ' 'I't' I 'ty "'0 hear the chief ideologues 0 Amencan SOClOpO I ICa re-neceSSl . 1.1 • • • , Charles Murra" Lawrence Mead, and Damel Patnck Moym-action, I' .
han, the pathological "dependency" of the poor stems from their moral dereliction, Absent an urgent and muscular intervention by the state to check it, the growth of "nonworking poverty" threatens to bring about nothing less than "the end of Western civilization,"" At the start of the
. os several formerly industrial states with high unemployment and 199 , . hi Ill" d M' h' urban poverty rates, such as Penn~ylvan1a, 0 0, mOlS, an le 1-
an, unilaterally put an end to General Assistance, a locally funded grogram oflast resort for the indigent-overnight in Michigan, after a ~rief transition period in Pennsylvania, This resulted in the dumping of one million aid recipients nationwide,
In 1991, Republican John Engler became governor of the predominantly Demo- cratic state of Michigan by running on an aggressive antiwelfare platform. He im- mediately ordered that the Department of Social Services be renamed the Family Independence Agency and AFOC retitled the Family Independence Program. Even
though expenditures for General Assistance had already plunged from $342 mil- lion in 1985 to $217 million, Engler invoked the need to balance the state budget and to prevent the formation of a permanent class of "able-bodied" scroungers to slash that budget to a meager $37 million in 1992, before abruptly terminating the program in 1993,25 By contrast, that year Michigan spent $1.32 billion to incar- cerate 44,000 convicts, and each prisonerwas estimated to cost eleven tImes the average allowance given to a welfare recipient.
The suppression of General Assistance instantly cut from all assistance some 82,000 adults (receiving an average of $226 a month), half ofthem indigent blacks
living in the collapsing city of Detroit, Some 7,700 recipients were then discreetly transferred to a newly created program called State Family Assistance and another 4,500 to State Disability Assistance, while others fought to try and gain access to other governmental support, forced to play a cruel game of "welfare musical chairs" to subsist, So-called "dependency" receded but hardship remained largely untouched, with 34 percent of African Americans in the state living under the official poverty line three years later," Engler then parlayed his image as a tough "reformer" (Le., cutter) of public aid into reelection and an acclaimed nomination on President Clinton's bipartisan advisory panel on welfare reform. He joined
52 CHAPTER TWO
governorTommYThomp~on of Wisconsin as a national champion in the political crusade to dismantle welfare.
Out on the West Coast, Los Angeles County combined all three major strategies for downsizing the welfare state in response to booming need and rising pub- lic expenditures: cutting the value of aid packages, springing neW administrative hurdles to ration services, and eliminating programs. In the 1980s, quality control campaigns, the punctilious micromanagement of cases, and the consolidation of offices across neighborhoods combined to produce rising rates of bureaucratic disentitlement. In 1993, the County deleted General Assistance, and by 1997 all remaining programs had been rolled up under workfare (called CalWorks) with reduced payments and strict time limits, producing a new "local regulatory" apparatus for the management of disruptive poverty, wedding "the convolution of Franz Kafka with the misery of Charles Dickens.""
The downsizing of America's charitable state has proceeded across a broad front and has not spared the privileged domain of social pro- tection. In 1975, the unemployment insurance scheme established by the Social Security Act of 1935 covered 76 percent of wage earners who lost their jobs. By1980 that figure had fallen to one in two due to state- mandated administrative restrictions and the proliferation of "contin- gent" jobs; and in 1995 it approached one worker in three. While cover- age shrank, for twenty years the real average value of unemployment benefits stagnated at $185 per week (in constant dollars of 1995), clis- bursed for a meager fifteen weeks, giving most jobless people "on the dole" incomes putting them far below the poverty line."
The same trend applies to occupational disability, for which the rate of coverage dropped from 7.1 workers per thousand in 1975 to 4.5 per thousand in 1991. Lil(ewise for housing: in 1991, according to official figures, one in three American families was "housing poor," that is, un- able to cover both basic needs and hOUSing costs, while the homeless population numbered between 600,000 and 4 million. Meanwhile, the federal budget for social housing plummeted from $32 billion in 1978 to less .than $10 billion a decade later in current dollars, amoJnting to a cut of 80 percent in real dollars." At the same time, Washington eliminated funding for general revenue sharing, local public works, and urban development grants, as well as drastically pared most programs aimed at reintegrating the unemployed. When the Comprehensive Education and Training Act (CETA) program was terminated in 1984, over 400,000 public jobs for unskilled people disappeared. In 1975, the federal government devoted $3 billion to providing job training to 1.1 million poor Americans; by 1996, this figure had fallen to $800 million
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 53
. (in constant dollars), barely enough"to cover ~29,~00 trainees .. r:rean- time, budgets allocated to financing summer Jobs for underp~l'":leged youth were cut by one-third and the number of their beneficmrles by
one-half." But it is at the municipal level that the concerted attack on urban
and social policy was most ferocious. Using the pretext of the fiscal crisis triggered by the exodus of white families, middle-class revolts against taxation, and the drying up of federal ~ubsidies, American cit~es sacrificed public services essential to poor nelghborhoods and theIr m- habitants-housing, sanitation, transportation, and fire protection, as well as social assistance, health, and education. They diverted a grow- ing share of public monies toward the support of private co~mercial and residential projects that promised to attract the new servIce-based corporations and the affluent classes." This shift was justified by invo- cation of the alleged efficiency of market mechanisms in the allocation of city resources and federal funds. And it was greatly facilitated by the rigid racial segregation of the American metropolis, which sapped the collective capacity of poor residents by fracturing them along the calor line. A single example suffices to indicate the devastating effects of this turnaround: while the costs and profits of free-market medicine soared, in Chicago the number of community hospitals (Le., those accessible to people without private medical coverage) slumped from 90 in 1972 to 67 in 1981 to 42 in 1991. By that year, outside of the dilapidated and overcrowded Cook County Hospital, no health center in the entire city provided prenatal support to mothers without private insurance. In 1990, the director of Chicago'S hospitals announced that the public health system was a "non-system on the brink of collapse," fundamen- tally incapable of fulfilling its mandate. That this declaration elicited no response from city and state officials and administrators speaks vol- umes about the indifference with which the rights and well-being of the urban poor are regarded." The fact that the dispossessed fanillies of Chicago are disproportionately black and Latino (from Mexican and Puerto Rican parentage) is key to explaining their civic invisibility.
The consequences of the withdrawal of the charitable state are not hard to guess. At the end of 1994, despite two years of solid economic growth, the Census Bureau announced that the official number of poor people in the United States had surpassed forty million, or 15 percent of the country's population- the highest rate in a decade. In total, one white family in ten and one African-American household in three lived below the federal "poverty line." This figure conceals the depth and intensity of their dereliction inasmuch as this threshold, calculated ac- cording to an arbitrary bureaucratic formula dating from 1963 (based
54 CHAPTER TWO
on family consumption data from 1955), does not take into account the actual cost ofliving and the changing mix of essential goods, and it has been drawn ever lower over the years: in 1965 the poverty line stood at about one-half of the national median family income; thirty years later it did not reach one-third,' Comparative analysis reveals that, despite a notably lower official unemployment rate, "poverty in the United States is not only more widespread and more persistent, but also more severe than in the countries of continental Europe."33 In 1991, 14 percent of American households received less than 40 percent of the median na- tional income, as against 6 percent in France and 3 percent in Germany. These gaps were considerably more pronounced among families with children (18 percent in the United States versus 5 percent in France and 3 percent for its neighbor across the Rhine), not to mention single- parent families (45 percent in the United States, 11 percent in France, and 13 percent in Germany), This is hardly surprising when the mini- mum hourly wage is set so low that an employee working full-time year-round earned $700 per month in 1995, putting him 20 percent below the poverty line for a household of three, and when public aid is calculated to fall well below that wage rate in order to avoid creating udisincentives" to work: 34 the maximum AFDC cash payment in the median state in 1994 came barely to 38 percent of the poverty line and reached only 69 percent when combined with the value of food stamps and other in-kind support,
The degradation of employment conditions, shortening of job ten- ures, drop in real wages, and shrinldng of collective protections for the US working class over the past quarter-century have been brought about and accompanled by a surge in precarious wage work. The num- bers of on-call staff and day laborers, "guest" workers (brought in through state-sponsored programs of seasonal importation of agricul- turallaborers from Mexico or the Caribbean, for instance), office- or service-workers operating as subcontractors! compulsory part-timers, and casual staff hired through specialized "temp" agencies have all in- creased much more quicldy than other occupational categories since
"For years, US social scientists have called for an overhaul of this flawed defini- tion of poverty. finding it in turn outdated, unreliable, and invalid. In 1995, the Panel on Income and Family Assistance of the National Research Council officially recom- mended its revamping, but to no avail. For a provocative discussion of the theoretical and methodological issues involved in designing a multidimensional index of poverty understood as civic (in)capacity sensitive to historical and comparative variations and able to capture the depth of deprivation and the effects of state transfers, see David Brady, "Rethinking the Sociological Measurement of Poverty," Social Forces 81, no. 3 (March 2003): 715-52.
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 55
temporary help leading the pack at a ye,arly clip mid-:197'Os11-0-'dWa"yJ'0I1e il1 three Americal1s il1 the taborforce IS a 11011-
percent, .. such insecure work must clearly be understood , wage earnel . d 'h ocio
'al c f subemployment solidly roote m t e new s - " erenm !orID 0 . 35
." P , I d cape of the country and destmed to grow, economIC an 5
, field observations and in-depth interviews with the directors ~nd DraWing on 'Robert Parker has deciphered the process of normallza-
If oftemp agenCieS, 'I t sta , e labor in the United States recorded by longitudlna aggrega e , of precariOUS wag H' t dy
tlon h h a detailed anatomy ofthe temporary employment sector, IS s u f data tb r~~: revealing title of "Flesh Peddlers and Warm Bodies:'" This sect~~ 0 goes Y k t h been booming' its turnover wentfrom $547 million h mployment mar e as' , h tee $ b'll' in 1980 to $16,8 billion twelve years later, while t e num- 'n 1970 to 3,1 I IOn , I" Thus I employees increased tenfold to reach 1.5 mlllon In 1993· , ber of temp~~~;gest employer is no longer General Motors (the world's largest the count~y s f revenue) but Manpower Incorporated, a multinational temp company In terms 0 I . untries and whose
ncy that hires out the services of 500,000 peop e In 34 co . h age 0 outlets saw revenues grow byan average of7 percent per year In t e 1980,S, "~:ada s "normalized" insecurity can be found throughout the US econ,o~y: I~ N , Y t'lons ofthe leading sectors like finance and real estate, In Insur the maJor corpora If' I '
and hospitals, agriculture and computers, nuclear powerand 0 Ice c ean~~g, ance . ta'11 trade transportation, universities (one-half of the teac mg not to mention re I ) d even at staffin higher education work part-time or on temporary contracts, an
. 37 th heart of public bureaucracies, , I ~he ex ansion of contingent employment is not a cyclical ~r. cO~Jun:rura
p I' k d to the adaptation of firms to a context of CrISIS, Since It can phenomenon In e , f b ' be observed during periods of recovery as well as in receSSions, Far ~oml e,ln~ the roduct of an impersonal process, inexorably connected to te~ no ogtc~
p business mergers and the internationalization of economiC campetl- ~hanges'h d 'I ant med{a and the political vision would have it, itis the result tlon ast e om n . st tegy
f "new employer strategy of externalization of the workforce and ItS CDsts-a, ra o d b ublic authorities and powerfully reinforced by the active mar-
~:~~~:;~m;o;aryemployment agencies, Its impulse com~s neither::o~;~~s~~ ni n nor the labor market but mainly from domestic supply, T ,
compe [ 0 I s was aimed above all at the maxl- nessrestructuring ofthe 1980s and ear y 1990 , 'of labor and
"flexibilization" of the workforce by compressing the Unit cost h ~:nating workers' rights in order to give (back) to firms fuller contr:i o,~~~ ~h:
arameters of employment, henceforth treated as "adjustment vana es I . P uest for short-term financial returns. American corporations have thus/onsl
s -
~ntly used the threat of layolfs, rather than improved wages and bene Its, as a
56 CHAPTER TWO
means of motivating their increasingly insecure workforce and extracting labor concessions. 39
Not surprisingly, the casualization of jobs affects first and foremost women the youngest and oldest workers, and finally unskilled blacks and Latinos livin~ in the inner cities, for wham it has translated into an unprecedented social re- gression: a draconian cut in incomes and decline in living standards (a temporary worker typically earns around one-third o!the wages of a permanent employee), a reduction of social and medical coverage to a bare minimum (when they still exist), a severe narrowing of the temporal and occupational horizon, a fraying of social relations at work, the deskilling of jobs, and an almost total 1055 of control over one's activity. By fragmenting the workforce, the institutionalization of job insecurity also thwarts traditional forms of collective action and thus serves as a battering ram to further assault the social benefits of workers who are still pro- tected.
olO This means that inSEcurity eventually promises to seriously affect not
only temporary employees but all wage earners, including the middle managers who currently defend it and are implementing it with zeal.
The United States boasts an official unemployment rate markedly lower than those of the major European (Quntries: in July 1996, as Congress voted to delete, welfare, it stood at 5.4 percent, half the average for the continent. But this artifice of social accounting-the US Labor Department uses one of the most restrictive definitions of unemployment, regarding any job-seeker who worked a single hour or more in the course of the previous month as "employed" and overlooking jobless workers deemed "discouraged"" -cannot conceal the fact that, over the past fifteen years, three out offour Americans experienced or were directly touched by the social ignominy of layoffs: 20 percent personally lost a permanent job, 14 percent saw this fate strike a memberof their household, and 38 percent a parent, friend, or neighbor. Moreover, 14 percent changed jobs for fear that their post might get eliminated. The result is that fully one-half of Americans worry that unemploy- ment will befall them, and 37 percent feel that their job situation is insecure. How could they not when 3.4 million employees were laid off in 1994 alone, amid the return of prosperity, as against2.6 million during the recession of1982? And while working~class families remain the main victims of ongoing economic restructur~ ing, it is among the middle classes that the anxiety-and shame-over downward mobility reaches its apex.
-Thus, in October 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the effective number ~f jobless Americans to be 17 million, whereas the official unemployment rate pubhshed by the Labor Department (based on the computations of the self-same Bureau of Labor Statistics) came to only 8.8 million. Massimo Calabresi, "Jobs in an Age of InseCUrity," Time .Magazine, 22 November 1993.
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 57
. During the 1980s and 1990S, mass layoffs became a privileged instru- ent for the short-term financial management of US firms," so that
:e country's middle and managerial classes made the bitter discovery of 'ob insecurity during a period of sturdy growth. The return of eco- no~c prosperity to the United States was thus built on a spectacular degradation of the terms and conditions of employment: between 1980 and 1995, 41 percent of "downsized" employees were not covered by unemployment insurance and two-thirds of those who managed to find new work had to accept a position with lower wages. In 1996, 82 per- cent of Americans said that they were prepared to work longer hours to save their jobs; 71 percent would consent to fewer holidays, 53 percent to reduced benefits, and 44 percent to a cut in pay." The absence of collective action in the face of stock-market-driven layoffs is explained by the congenital wealmess of unions, the lock that corporate finan- ciers have placed on the electoral system, and the power of the ethos of meritocratic individualism, according to which each wage earner is
responsible for his or her own fate. . Failing a language that could gather the dispersed fragments of per-
sonal experiences into a meaningful collective configuration, the diffuse frustration and anxiety generated by the disorganization of the estab- lished reproduction strategies of the American middle classes have been redirected against the state, on the one side, which was accused of weighing on the social body like a yoke as stifling as it is useless, and, on the other, against categories held to be uundese111ing/' or suspected of benefiting from programs of affirmative action, henceforth perceived as handouts violating the very principle of equity they claim to advance. The former tendency expressed itself in the pseUdo-populist tone of electoral campaigns during the closing decade of the century, in which politicians near-unanimously directed a denunciatory and revanchist discourse against Washington's technocrats and other bureaucratic "elites" -of which they are typically full-fledged members-and public services-whose personnel and budgets they promised to "trim." The second tendency is evident in the fact that 62 percent of Americans are opposed to affirmative action for blacks and 66 percent are against affirmative action for women, even in those cases where it is proven that those helped were targets of discrimination, while two Americans in three wish to curtail immigration, even as 55 percent concede that immigrants tal,e jobs nationals do not want (precisely because they are overexploitative)." This is the logic according to which in 1996, con- firming its historic role as the nation's bellwether, California abolished the promotion of "minorities" in higher education and excluded so-
58 CHAPTER TWO
called illegal immigrants from all public services, including schools and hospitals.
Whence, finally, the national hysteria around the problem of "wel- fare" that led to the public aid "reform" of 1996, which we shall anal . d ·l·th yze In some . ~t~' In e next chapter. Hypocritically entitled the "Personal Resp~nslbihty ~nd Work ~pp~rtunity Act," it amounted to abolishing the nght to aS51stance and Instituted forced deskilled wage labor as the sole means of support on the pretext of setting tl,e indigent back onto the road to "independence." Sacrificing the poor-and especially the black urban subproletariat, incarnation and scapegoat of all the coun- try's ills-to exorcise the worries of the middle and working classes over their future is once again to ask those who are the living negation of the ':American dream" to suffer for their alleged alterity so that, in spite of everything, the country may uphold its faith in the national myth of prosperity available to all.
Rolling Out the Penal State
How to stem the mounting tide of dispossessed families, street dere- licts, alienated jobless youth, and the despair and violence that intensify and accumulate in the neighborhoods of relegation of the big cities? At all three levels of the bureaucratic field, county, state, and federal, the American authorities have responded to the rise of urban disloca- tio~s-fo~ which, paradoxically, they are largely responsible-by devel- OpIng their penal functions to the point of hypertrophy. As the social s~fety net of the charitable state unraveled, the dragnet of the puni- tive state was called upon to replace it. Its disciplinary mesh was flung throughout the nether regions of US social space so as to contain the disarray a~d t~rmoil spawned by the intensification of social insecurity and margmallty. A causal chain and functional interlock was thus set into motion, whereby economic deregulation required and begat social welfare retrenchment, and the gradual maleeover of welfare into work- fare, in turn, called for and fed the expansion of the penal apparatus.
The deployment of this state policy oJ criminalization oJ the conse- quences oJ state-sponsored poverty operates according to two main modalitie~. The fir.st and least visible one-except to those directly af- fected by It-consIsts in re0115anizingsocial services into an instrument oJ surveillance and control of the categories indocile to the new eco- nomic and moral order. Witness the wave of reforms adopted between 1988 and 1995 in the walee of the Family Support Act by some three dozen states that have restricted access to public aid and made it con-
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 59
Pholding certain behavioral norms (economic, sexual, upon u . d h '1' educational, etc.) and upon perfornung onerous an Un:"-
hllLre;aUL:ra,t'ic obligations. The most common of these reqUlre- . ulate that the recipient must accept any job ar assimilated
stip d I' d' ' offered to her, whatever the pay an war <lng con ItlOflS, on forsaking the right to assistance ("workfare"). Others index the
assistance received by the families to the school attendance ,arrlO
unt 'fD'their children or teenage recipient ("Iearnfare"), ar peg them
o in pseudo-training programs that offer few if any skills job prospects." Yet others establish a ceiling on th~ cash value of
or set a maximum duration after which no support Will be accorded. Jersey in the mid-1990S, for instance, AFDC benefits were ter-
minated if an unmarried teen mother did not reside with her parents (even in cases where the latter had thro~n her o~t), and the amount she received was capped if she begat add,tlOnal children.
The insufficiency and inefficiency of forced-work programs are as l' as their punitive character. While such programs are periodi-
garmg . . f"d d "'d callyvaUllted as the miracle cure for the epidemiC 0 epen ency Sal to afflict the American poor, none of them has ever allowed more than a handful of participants to escape destitution. The reasons for their failure are several: the jobs proposed or imposed are too precarlOus and ill paid to offer a platform for economic autonomy; they do not provide medical coverage or child care assistance, ~aking employment both risky and prohibitively costly for mothers With yOUllg offspnng; the workplaces are physically and emotionally degrading; and a ma- jority of "welfare mothers" already work while receiving aid in the first place." At best, such programs replace "dependency" on means-tested state programs with "dependency" on superexploitativ~ empl~yers at the margins of the labar market, supplemented by fragile family net- works, and illegal street commerce where accessible, a combination that nearly guarantees continued poverty. But precisely: it will be shown in the next chapter that workfare policy does not aim to reduce poverty but seeks only to diminish the visibility oJt"e poor in the civic landscape and to "dramatize" the imperative of wage labar by issuing "a warning to all Americans who were working more and earning less, if they were working at all. There is a fate worse, and a status lower, than hard and
d' I "46 unrewar mg war Co • The long train of welfare reform measures also extols and embodies
the new paternalist conception of the role of the state in respect to the poar, according to which the conduct of dispossessed and dependent citizens must be closely supervised and, whenever necessary, corrected through rigorous protocols of surveillance, deterrence, and sanctionl
60 CHAPTER TWO
Table 3. Numberofinmates in federal and state prisons, 1970-95 (in thousands)
change 1970-95
1970 1980 1990 1995 (%)
Total 199 320 AmlllalgrOlvth ill
743 1078 442
preceding decade (96) -1.2 6.1 13.2 9 Blacks 81 168 366 542 569 Allllual gIVwtlz for
blacks (96) -0.7 10.8 17.9 9.7
SOURCE: Bureau ofJustice Statistics, Historical Corrections Statistics ill tlte United States, 1850-1984 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. 1986); idem., Pris- oilers ill 1996 (Washington, D.C.: Governn:tent Printing Office, 1997).
very much like those routinely applied to offenders under criminal justice supervision. The shift "from carrots to sticks," from voluntary programs supplying resources to mandatory programs enforcing com- pliance with behavioral rules by means of fines, reductions of benefits, and termination of recipiency irrespective of need, that is, programs treating the poor as cultural similes oJ criminals who have violated the civic law of wage work, is meant to both dissuade the lower fractions of the working class from making claims on state resources and to forCibly instill conventional morality into their members.' And it is instrumen- tal in embellishing the statistics of public aid offices by "dressing up" re- cipients as workers while trapping the assisted population in the urban wastelands set aside for them.
The second component of the policy of punitive containment of the poor is massive and systematic recourse to incarceration (see table 3). Confinement is the other technique through which the nagging prob- lem of persistent marginality rooted in unemployment, subemploy- ment, and precarious work is made to shrink on-if not disappear from-the public scene. After decreaSing by 12 percent during the
"'This moral agenda is frankly laid out by the ideologues of state paternalism: "The social problems associated with long-term welfare dependency cannot be addressed without first putting the bral,es on the downward spirals of dysfunctional behavior common among so many reCipients . ... Character is built by the constant repetition of diverse good acts. These new behavior-related welfare rules are an attempt, long overdue in the minds of many, to build habits of responsible behavior among long- term recipients; that is, to legislate virtue." Douglas J. Besharovand Karen N. Gardiner, "Paternalism and Welfare Reform," The Public Il1terest 122 (winter 1996): 70-84, cita- tion p. 84.
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 61
1960s, the population condemned to serve time in state prisons and federal penitentiaries (excluding detainees held in city and county jails, awaiting judgment or sanctioned with short custodial sentences) ex- ploded after the mid-seventies, jumping from under 200,000 in 1970 to nearly one million in 199s-an increase of 442 percent in a quarter- century never before witnessed in a democratic society. Like the so- cial disengagement of the state, imprisonment has hit urban blacks especially hard: the number of African-American convicts increased sevenfold between 1970 and 1995, after falling 7 percent during the pre- vious decade (even though crime rose rapidly during the 1960s). In each period, the growth rate of the black convict population far exceeded that of their white compatriots. In the 1980s, the United States added an average of 20,000 Mrican Americans to its total prisoner stock every year (over one-third the total carceral stock of France). And, for the first time in the twentieth century, the country's penitentiaries held more blacks than whites: African Americans made up 12 percent of the national population but supplied 53 percent of the prison inmates in 1995, as against 38 percent a quarter-century earlier. The rate of in- carceration for blacks tripled ill olllya dozen years to reach 1,895 per 100,000 in 1993-amounting to nearly seven times the rate for whites (293 per 100,000) and twenty times the rates recorded in the main European countries at that time.47
We will track down the sources and modalities of this astronomical increase in the prison population in detail in chapter 4 and demon- strate in particular that it is utterly disconnected from crime trends. In chapter 6, we will moreover show how the sudden growth of the prison relates to the crumbling of the urban ghetto as physical con- tainer for undesirable dark bodies. Here we want simply to note that a major engine behind carceral growth in the United States has been the "War on drugs" -an ill-named policy since it refers in reality to a gue- rilla campaign of penal harassment oflow-Ievel street dealers and poor consumers, aimed primarily at young men in the coilapsing inner city for whom the retail trade of narcotics has provided the most accessible and reliable source of gainful employment in the wal<e of the twofold retrenchment of the labor market and the welfare state:" It is a "war" that the authorities had no reason to declare in 1983, considering that marijuana and cocaine use had been declining steadily since 1977-79 and that the supply-reduction approach to drug consumption has a long and distinguished history of failure in America." And it was fully
""The Reagan administration's declaration of a war on drugs resembles Argentina's declaration of war against Nazi Germany in March 1945. It was late and beside the
62 CHAPTER TWO
predictable that this policy would disproportionately strike lower-class African Americans insofar as it was directly targeted on dispossessed nelghborhoods in the decaying urban core.
!he. rationale f~r this narrow spatial aiming of a nationwide penal drIve IS easy to dIsclose: the dark ghetto is the stigmatized territory where the fearsome "underclass," mired in immorality and welfare de- pendency, was said to have coalesced under the press of deindustrial_ ization and social isolation to become one of the country's most urgent
topics of public worry:" But it is also the area where police presence is particularly dense, illegal trafficking is easy to spot, high concentrations of young men saddled with criminal justice records offer easy judicial prey, and the powerlessness of the residents gives broad latitude to re- pressive a~tion. It is not the War on drugs per se, then, but the timing and selectIve deployment of th.at policy in a restricted quadrant located at the very bottom of social and urban space that has contributed to fill- ing America's cells to bursting and has quicldy "darkened" their occu- pants.
One indicator of volume: in 1975 one federal inmate in four was behind bars on a narcotics conviction; twenty years later, that figure had reached 61 percent. Meanwhile, the popUlation confined by the Federal Bureau of Prisons had qua- drupled to approach 90,000, making it one of the largest correctional systems in the world when it had been a minor auxiliary to the US carceral apparatus until Reagan entered the White House (see table 4).
One indicator of racial disparity: the ratio of black to white arrest rates for drug- related offenses was 2 to 1 in 1975; fifteen years later it had zoomed to 5 to 1, even though the relative propensity of blacks and whites to use drugs had not changed. More shockingly, the arrest rate of white juveniles fordrug infractions, which had
been dropping steadily from a high of 310 arrests per 100,000 since 1975 con- tinued to sag on the same slope after the launching of the War on drugs to 'reach
a low of 80 per 100,000 in 1991-meaning that white teenagers were left entirely untouched by that aggressive penal campaign. By contrast, the drug arrest rate for black minors, which had dropped parallel to that of whites from 250 perlOo,ooo
In 1979 to some 185 in 1981, made an abrupt U-turn in 1983 and rocketed to pass 460 per 100,000 by 1989, at the height of the 50-called war." Clearly, young black men from the ghetto were the prime quarry of the aggressive rolling out
point. .. : It was welll:nown among public officials and drug policy scholars that drug use was In steep dechne .... Only the willfully blind could have failed to know that no wa.r was needed." Michael Tonry, .Malign Neglect: Race, Class, alld Pllllislllllellt ill America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 83 and 91.
THE CRIMINALlZATlON OF POVERTY 63
4. Inmates in federal prisons convicted of drug offenses, 1975-95
1975 1980 1985 1990 1995
23,566 27
24,252
25 40,505
34 57,331
52 89,564
61
- Federal Bureau of Prisons Quick Facts 199B (Washington, D.e.: Government SOURCE: '
printing office, 199 8).
of the penal state after the Civil Rights Revolution, just like young black women receiving public aid were the choice figure at the center of the whirling debate
around "welfare reform." In light of the objectives set by its strategists, the Waron drugs has been a spec-
tacularfailure-so say some 80 percent of the country's heads of police polled by the Annual Survey of Police Ch'lefs and Sheriffs after 1995, Since it was declared, the retail price of cocaine has declined continually, the quantities of narcotics in circulation on the streets have increased year after year, and the number of black convicts for drug crimes has swollen without interruption. But it has served well to point the spear of the penal state onto the most wretched segments of the country's urban subproletariat and to erect a public stage onto which politicians could display themselves in the act of delivering an essential service to the hard-
working citizenry: virile protection from street thugs.
Yet, the doubling of the carceral population in ten years, and its tripling in twenty years after the mid-1970S, seriously underestimates the real weight of penal authority in the new apparatus for treating urban poverty and its correlates. For those held behind bars represent only a quarter of the population under criminal justice supervision (see table 5). If one takes account of individuals placed on probation and ex-convicts released on parole, more than five million Americans, amounting to 2.5 percent of the country's adult population, fell under penal oversight by 1995. In many cities and regions, the correctional administration and its extensions are the main if not the sole point of contact between the state and young black men from the deskilled
lower class: as early as 1990, 40 percent of African American males age 18 to 35 in California were behind bars or on probation and parole; this rate reached 42 percent in Washington, D.e., and topped 56 percent in Baltimore." Thus, during the same period when the US state was withdrawing the protective net of welfare programs and fostering the generalization of subpoverty jobs at the bottom of the employment lad- der, the authorities were extending a reinforced carceral mesh reaching
deep into lower-class communities of color.
64 CHAPTER TWO
Table 5. Populations under criminal justice supervision, 1980-95 (in thousands)
% 1980 1985 1990 1995 Change
Probation 1.118 1,969 2,670 3,078 175 Jail 184 257 405 507 142 State and federal prison 320 488 743 851 176 Parole 220 300 531 679 209 Total 1,842 3,013 4,350 5,343 190
SOURCE: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Correctional Popuiations in the United States, 1995 (Washington, D.c': Government Printing Office, 1997).
The financial translation of this "great confinement" of marginality is not hard to imagine. As will be documented fully in chapter 5, to implement its policy of penalization of social insecurity at the bottom of the socioracial structure, the United States massively enlarged the budget and personnel devoted to confinement, in effect ushering in the era of ucarceral big government" just as it was decreasing its com- mitment to the social support of the poor. While the share of national expenditures allocated to public assistance declined steeply relative to need, federal funds for criminal justice multiplied by 5.4 between 1972 and 1990, jumping from less than $2 billion to more than $10 billion, while monies allotted to corrections proper increased elevenfold. The financial voracity of the penal state was even more unbridled at the state level. Taken together, the fifty states and the District of Colum- bia spent $28 billion on criminal justice in 1990, 8.4 times more than in 1972; during this stretch, their budgets for corrections increased twelvefold, while the cost of criminal defense for the indigent (who malce up a rising share of those charged in court) grew by a factor of 24. To enforce the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which envisaged boosting the national carceral population from 9 25,000 to some 2.26 million over a decade, the US Congress forecast expenditures of $351 billion, including $100 billion just for building new custodial facilities-nearly twenty tinles the AFDC budget that year." We shall see in chapter 4 that these predictions turned out to be rather accurate: a decade later the country had doubled its popula- tion under lock, and budgets for corrections were pushing counties and states deep into debt.
Incarceration in America thus expanded to reach an industrial scale heretofore unlmown in a democratic SOCiety, and, in so doing, it spawned a fast-growing commercial sector for operators helping the
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 65'
state enlarge its capacity to confine, by supplying food and cleaning services, medical goods and care, transportation, or the gamut of activi- ties needed to run a penal facility day-to-day. The policyofhyperincar- ceration even stimulated the resurgence and exponential expansion of jails a/1d priso/1s CO/1structed a/1d/or ma/1aged by private operators, to which public authorities perpetually strapped for cells turned to extract a better yield out of their correctional budgets. Incarceration for profit concerned 1,345 inmates in 1985i ten years later, it covered 49,154 beds, equal to the entire confined population of France. The firms that house these inmates receive public monies against the promise of miser's savings, on the order of a few cents per capita per day, but multiplied by hundreds of thousands of bodies, these savings are put forth as jus- tification for the partial privatization of one of the state's core regalian functions." By the late 1990S, an import-export trade in inmates was flourishing among different members of the Union: every year Texas brings in several thousands convicts from neighboring states but also from jurisdictions as far away as the District of Columbia, Indiana, and Hawaii, in utter disregard of fanilly visiting rights, and later returns them to their county of origin where they will be consigned on parole at the end of their sentence.
Now, to turn the penal apparatus into an organizational contraption suitable for curbing and containing social disorders (as opposed to re- sponding to crime) in decaying lower-class and ghetto neighborhoods ravaged by economic deregulation and welfare curtailment required two transformations. First its processing and warehousing capacities had to be vastly expanded. Second, it had to be remade into a flexible, muscular, and efficacious instrument for the tracking and confinement of troubled and troublesome persons caught in the cracks of the dual- ized urban order. Increased reach was achieved by implementing four major penal planles:
1. "Determinate Sentencing": under the sanctioning regime known as
"indeterminate sentencing," put in place across the United States from the
1920S onward, the court condemned an offender to a custodial sentence
defined by a broad bracket (e.g., from two to ten years, or "fifteen to life");
the effective duration of confinement was set later by a parole board, based
on the behavior of the convict and his progress toward "rehabilitation,"
Under the new "determinate sentencing" regime, introduced around 1978-
84, punishment is set once for all in court by the judge within a narrow
range defined by the application of a quasi-mathematical formula: each convict is assigned a number of points, converted into months of reclusion,
computed on the basis of scores corresponding to the seriousness of his
66 CHAPTER TWO
crime, the circumstances of its commission, and his criminal background. At century's turn, twenty-two states applied determinate sentencing and another twenty-two a mixed regime. The main effect of this drastic re- duction of judicial and correctional discretion has been to lengthen the sentences handed down by judges at conviction.
2. "Truth in Sentencing": this policy, applied after 1984 in response to the perceived leniency and inequity of the regime of indeterminate sentencing, stipulates that every convict shall serve a minimum portion of his sentence before he becomes eligible for parole. The threshold is set at 75 percent in four states, 85 percent in thirty states, and 100 percent in four others (Wis- consin even supplements custodial sentences with an automatic period of judicial supervision after release equal to one-fourth of the time spent behind bars). Its implementation entails the amputation of time deducted for "good behavior" and the elimination of parole for violent offenders in four states as well as for all convicts in fourteen states. It primary effect: an automatic lengthening of the sentences effectively served.
3· "Mandatory Minimums": this federal legislation, voted in 1986 for drug crimes, establishes a plank of compulsory and irreducible sanctions for specific offenses, without regard for the injuriousness of the crime, the justice background of the convict, and the circumstances of his ac- tions. In the case of narcotics offenders, for instance, the sanction is set by the amount of drugs involved (measured in grams or feet). Thus the same automatic punishment of a minimum of five years of imprisonment without the possibility of early release on parole is given in federal court for simple possession of one hundred plants of marijuana, one hundred grams of heroin. ten grams of methamphetamine, five grams of cocaine in solid form (crack) or five hundred grams in powder form, and one gram of LSD. In 1988, Congress extended this statute to a long list of crimes committed with a firearm. Its main consequence has been to widen the use of impris- onment and to sharply increase sentences both pronounced and served.
4· "Three Strikes and You're Out": borrowed from the "national pastim~" of baseball (a sport in which the batter who swings and misses the ball thrown at him three times is "out" and loses his turn at bat), this expression refers to the drastic and mechanical enhancement of sanctions inflIcted in cases of recidivism and the implementation of life sentences (or "twenty- five to life") when the accused has committed three serious or specially designated felonies. Such laws were adopted by two dozen states and the federal government in the 19905. They vary greatly by jurisdiction, with California enforcing a particularly brutal version in which over five hun- dred oifenses (including minor misdeeds such as a simple theft in a store) qualify as "third strikes" mandating lifetime imprisonment, and Georgia applying "two strikes and you're out" for seven violent crimes.
THE CR1M1NALIZATION OF POVERTY 67
These four trains of judicial measures illustrate well the flexible, double-sided rationale of penal policy discussed in the prologue, which spans the material and symbolic orders. Thus truth-in-sentencing and mandatory-minimums statutes have primarIly the material effects of reducing systemic discretion and enlarging as well as extending the confinement of whole categories of offenders by sweeping ever-larger numbers oflow-Ievel offenders into the carceral system for longer peri- ods. By contrast, "Three Strikes and You're Out" and simIlarly vengeful laws play essentially the symbolic role of communicating the intense sentiments of public outrage and state severity toward criminals, as in practice their application is sharply limited, and they fail to generate significant numbers of additional incarcerations (except in California, where the very idiosyncratic manner in which the law was drafted and voted has resulted in its "biting louder than it barks," but in that regard it is highly atypical)." As for the determinate sentencing regime, it may be viewed as fulfilling a mix of instrumental and expressive missions: it curtails judicial discretion and escalates the intensity of punishment, bringing the mass of convicts under stiffer correctional control, at the same time as it signifies a newfound collective commitment to moral
austerity and judicial fortitude. Whereas the rolling back of welfare was effected through blanket re-
traction and affected all recipients and would-be recipients indiscrimi- nately, without regard to their needs, options, and location, penal rigor was delivered very selectively in social space. Class and et/mic selec- tiveness was achieved primarily by the targeting of certain geographic zones, which guaranteed that the categories composing their residents would be the primary if not exclusive "beneficiaries" of the newfound policing zeal and penal largesse of the state. It was further enhanced by the multiplication of new law-enforcement tactics and special mea- sures designed for, and deployed specifically in, declining lower-class districts, such as order-maintenance policing (known as "zero toler- ance" in its New York variant, dissected in chapter 8), antigang loitering ordinances, intensive police sweeps through public housing or public schools, and youth curfews."
The establishment of cwfews, aimed at keeping minors off the streets after nightfall and applied essentially in and around the hyperghetto and poor barrios, is emblematic of the increased propensity of the American state to fling its police and punishment dragnet wider only in those very regions of social space where it is retracting its safety net. Pointing to a rise in violent crime attributable (or reflexively attrib- uted) to gangs, 59 of the 77 largest cities in the country have instituted such prohibitions, half of them between 1990 and 1994. In Chicago,
68 CHAPTER TWO
a municipal ordinance forbids people under age sixteen from being outdoors without proper authorization between 10:30 at night (11:30 on weekends) and 6 :00 in the morning, Criminologists William RuefIe and Kenneth Reynolds observe that this raging epidemic of curfews was "a leap into the unknown," since no one had documented whether these measures reduce delinquency rather than simply displace it." Since the mid-1990S, numerous studies have indeed found that juvenile curfews have no suppressive effect on street crime or juvenile offend- ing and even have serious criminogenic consequences of their own.57
What is certain is that these curfews Significantly increase chances of incarceration for the young residents of poor urban aleas, According to FBI datal some 751000 youths were arrested on this basis in 1992, twice as many as for theft (excluding Cal theft) that yeal, And the rate of juvenile arrests for loitering and curfew violations more than doubled between 1992 and 1997, when it pea!(ed at 700 per 100,000 juveniles," The ability to modulate their implementation at ground level according to the geographic, class, and ethnic origins of those caught by them gives curfews a privileged place in the panoply of new techniques for the pUnitive containment of young men from the neighborhoods of relegation gutted by the neoliberal restructuring of malket and state, Other techniques include "boot camps," the electronic surveillance of offenders, and the increasing diversion of juvenile cases into adult court.
The explosive swelling of the population behind bals, the retraction of vocational and educational programs within prisons, the massive recourse to the most diverse forms of pre- and postcustodia! control, and the multiplication of instruments of surveillance up and down the penal chain, the "new penology" being put in place does not aim at "rehabilitating" criminals, but rather at "managing costs and control- ling dangerous populations"" and, short of this goal, at walehousing them in isolation to mal(e up for the indigence of social and medical services that are neither willing nor able to care for them, The rise of the American penal state thus responds not to rising crime-which was first stagnant and then declined during these three pivotal decades, as we will show in chapter 4-but to the social dislocations caused by the desocialization of wage labar and the retrenchment of the chari- table state, And it tends to become its own justification inasmuch as its crimina genic effects contribute powerfully to the insecurity and vio- lence it is supposed to remedy,
The same congenital properties that inclined the American state to treat the poor in an increasingly stingy manner on the social welfale front after the mid-1970S also predisposed it to behave in generous
THE CRIMINALlZATION Of POVERTY 69
The same overlapping divisions between lower penal front. I d hite and deserving versuS undeserv-
?cil1tdrnidlrue class" blathc (danep':tru~ture and routine functioning of 'bed tn e e If
inscrt ditioned it to distribute ever meager we ale • . field, con
ver lar er doses of punishment at the bottom
,.nits:aflU to mete ,out ~er as agmeans of reasserting the civic impera- 'th"clas> and ethmc or I coincidence of these two complementalY
of work, The temporda 'th the reversal of labor and social trends 'th ch other an Wl h pu Wl ea , any their convergence onto t e same po - deepeni~g l~eq~da~ed urban enclaves, their joint invocation of trapped '~ ~ilapl onsibility and (del merit, and their shared
of indlVldua! resp ful ' Cacie evidence that restric- 'tl\e""'"~" ftute power prtma 1, 'nllniti\'e ethos cons 1 d nsive criminal justice policies are
'al Ifale reforms an expa " ' <;; SOCI we 0 the eneralization of social msecunty In . . state responses t 'a! g d that they must therefore be
the nether regions of US SOCl space an
analyzed together,
The Gaols of the sub'p'rol~tariat: An Experimental Venflcatlon
, e extra enological functions served by the out- It suffices, to discern th P a! aratus even as crime plummeted
d ext ion ofthe US carcer app 'a! fil size ens 60 sketch in broad strol(es the sociologlc ,pro e for over a decade, to d t 't entry point, Whence It turns
'I' t 1 " 't accommo ates a 1 s dd ofthe ' c len eel 'h gl t the country's 3,300-0 h th half million detamees w 0 u th gh out t at e - d th f teen million bodies that pass rou
, 'I ne day-an e our fr Jal s on any ~ fa ty ica! year-are essentially drawn ,om their gates m t~e c~ur~ef~actiOl!: of the working class, and especIally the most malgmallz~ ilies of calor in the segregated cities rav- from the subproletanan fam
f t' f wage labar and social protec-
d b th nJ' oint trans orma IOn 0 . age y e co 'h" I 'ssion of origin, incalceratlDn tion ..... Thus, recovering Its lstonca ml
. e tal{en from a survey, conducted by the federal -The statistics in this section ar MI6 of u representative sample
. [ October 1995 to arc 1 199 , Department of Justice rom .' C I' w'olf Harlow Profile of Inmates 1996
. . ounty Jails. aro me W" • of 6,000 detumees In 431 c . . . 8) For comparisons over time,
(Washington, D.C.~ Bureau of Justlce Spta~~ltlcifS' ,la 9 ,,91I,;mates 1989 and Profile of Jail . lied upon' r0.l' e 0 JI' I '[
these earlier studies were re 'Jr I 8 Survey of Inmates of Loea Jat s D llie Findings om t 1e 197 I) h'l Inmates: Socio- emograp . . Offi 1991 and 1980, respective y ,W 1 e
D C G vernment Prmting ce, h t' at (Washington, . .: 0 -. d £ r comparisons with t e na IOn B ublicatlons were use 0 .
various Census ureau p . I' d h high coefficient of uncertainty oWing S "t' al data of thiS un ave a .' fthe
Population. taus IC .' ducted the characteristics 0 , , d hich the intervieW's are con , to the conditIOns un er W'
70 CHAPTER TWO
serves above all to regulate, if not to perpetuate, poverty and to ware- house the human rejects of the market. In this regard, the gargantuan operation of punishment houses converges with and complements the aggressive rolling out of worlcfare programs.
Indeed, six in ten occupants of county jails are black or Latino (41 percent and 19 percent, respectively), as against 48 percent in 1978, whereas these two communities put together represent barely one-fifth of the national population. lust under one-half held a full-time job at the time of arrest (49 percent), while 15 percent worked "part-time or occasionally" and the remainder were 100ldng for work (20 percent) or economically inactive (16 percent). This astronomical jobless rate is hardly surprising considering the educational level of this population: one-half had not graduated from high school, even though this requires no examination, and barely 13 percent said that they had pursued voca- tional, technical, or academic postsecondary education (compared to one-half of this age category in the country as a whole).
As a result of their marginal position on the deskilled labor market, two-thirds of detainees lived in a household with under $1,000 in in- come per month (and 45 percent in households with under $600), cor- responding to less than half the official pOJlerty lille for a family of three that year-although two-thIrds said that they had received wages. This indicates that the vast majority of the occupants of county jails do come from the ranks of the "worldng poor," that fraction of the worldng class that does not manage to escape poverty although they work, but who are largely ineligible for social protection because they work at poverty- level jobs,' Thus, despite their penury, barely '4 percent received pUblic aid (payments to single parents, food stamps, food assistance for chil- dren) on the eve of their arraignment. If we include the 7 percent re- ceiving disability or retirement benefits and the 3 percent on the unem- ployment rolls, it turns out that less than one-quarter of jail detainees received some government support. The twofold exclusion from stable
population questioned, the sensitivity of some of the items asi(ed, and a lack of preci- sion in the coding of responses. However. the orders of magnitude they establish in the respects that interest us here are sufficiently clear that We can treat them as reliable, especially since other, local inVestigations suggest that this study tends to llJtderesti_ mate the material insecurity and sociocultural destitution of the carceral population.
·On the one hand, these jobs generally provide neither medical insura~ce nor Social coverage (which depends on the goodwill of the employer), On the other, having a job, and thus an income, however meager, disqualifies them from public assistance and medical coverage for indigent households (public benefits which, in any case, are now very hard to obtain and provide only for strictly limited periods, as we shall document in the next chapter),
THE CRIMINAlIZATION OF POVERTY 71
.. ublic assistance that affects widening sections of the wage work and p . I' the lengthening of careers in the illegal ' proletariat exp ams , , 6 Amencan d ging of the J' ail populatIOn: m 199 d thus the pronounce a 'Thi econom~, an. three was older than 35, twice as many as In 1978. s one det:unee m allels that of persistent offenders and the entrench- aging drrectly par , th I'nner city, where established street ' , al commerce In e , ing of cnmm t e reneurial turn and included more members gangs ~avhe,taIt' ,en.:~ eFo:ti~s as opportunities in the regular economy in thelr t lr Ies dried up," " 'ty f detainees in American jails is matched
The matenal msecun 0 with both only by their social del1udement: only 40 perce~; gr~~~~ 14 percent parents (as against a n~tional av~rage 0~~7g~~:~e~om:' Nearly half were
:;~:~t::~oc~:~~~~~sdr;h:iv~:; p:~atlhgicee:~:~ar:~:;e:;':e~~~; ~;:~;~~~~~ [' , g in public ousmg- d
grew up Ivm dilapl'dation dangerousness, an ' I t due to its extreme , housmg mar (e . 't 62 Moreover, more the double class a~d, c~ste segreganfitlOdn ~htat ~::~:gS ~ p' arent or guardian
thIrd of Jail mmates co eo. thhan ,os~: alcoholic (30 percent) or drug addict (8 percent), Confir~mdg w 0 1 ,. 6 t of them were marne , the fragility of their social ties, a bare 1 percen t" de
ercent for men in their age bracket na lOnWI . compared to 58 p , , 'familiar to detainees in the strict sense
th:te~!!~~ ~~~~~:;~;nt;:e~~7,:ve 01' had ; cl;:.:::~t~~:~~,~:o;e~~ brother, 30 percent; their f~h~~~6J':I:~: ;':d especially gun-related
. cent), The same goes for p Y, id that they had . . e men and one In three women sa
violence, One m run d' their childhood; three per- suffered physical or sexual abuS~re'::~orted being raped as adults, cent of men and one woman m s are low estimates, especially Everything su~gests that these per~:~:a~ready done time behind bars for the men, SInce most mmates . American houses of deten-
al 's quite common m and homosexu rape 1 e inmate in four is sub- tion, where it is estimated that as man~:~~~ordlng to a 1994 survey ject to serious sexual abuse ~~ery ytetahr, C ok County Department of
'd b th head phYSICian a eo, carne ?ut yen admitted to Chicago's jail had prevlOusly Corrections, half of the me It d one in four had been been hospitalized as a result of an assau, ,an rcent of shooting wounded by gunshots at least once, In addition, 60 p~ , childhood,"
" d rsonall witnessed shootmgs durmg elr victims ha pe Y, 'the J'ails of Washington, D,e., t d of detamees entenng A germane s u y £ h d suffered serious injuries unrelated in 1997 found that, one in our h ~ t 'ws with a subsample of these to their incarceratIOn, In-dept m ervle f hooting incident; men found that 83 percent had been at the scene 0 as
72 CHAPTER TWO
46 percent had had a family member killed with a gun (in mast cases during a robbery, assault, ar crossfire); and 40. percent still carried same disability related to. a earlier gunshat waund."
Material insecurity, cultural deprivatian, sacial denudement, physi- cal vialence-the deplorable health af the denizens af America's jails is in tune with their degraded class pasitian and canditian: mare than ane-third (37 percent, campared to. ane-fifth afthe general papulatian) repart that they suffer from physical, psychic, ar ematianal problems seriaus enaugh to. curtail their ability to. wark. This diagnasis is can- firmed by the fact that half af the new entrants into. the carceral system had to. receive treatment upan admissian, aside fram the superficial medical examinatian to. which all "fish" are subjected during the pro- cedures initiating them to. their detainee status.' (Ta this percentage ane can add the 13 percent af jail.inmates injured while behind bars as a result af assaults, riats, and accidents.) And detainees are nat anly mare likely to. be in ill health upan being put under lack; they are also. at inardinately high risk af becomil1g ill while there, as America's Jails and prisans have became gigantic incubators far infectiaus diseases, with prevalence rates af the majar afflictians far exceeding thase af the general papulatian. It is estimated that 20. to. 26 percent af all persans infected with HIV-AIDS in the United States, 29 to. 43 percent afthase detected with the hepatitis C virus, and 40. percent af all thase struck by tuberculasis in 1997 had passed thraugh a carrectianal facility."
It is mareaver well established that American jails have became the shelters af first resart far the mentally ill who. were thrawn anta the streets by haspitals in the wal<e af the massive "deinstitutianalizatian" campaign af the 196as and 197as and far thase who. simply cannat access a grossly defective public health system. It is hardiy surprising then that aver ane-quarter af jail inmates have been treated far mental health prablems, while 10 percent have been previausly admitted to. a psychiatric facility." This is cansistent with clinical studies canducted by medical researchers reparting that 6 to. 15 percent af the clientele af
"The mass processing of detainees at the Los Angeles County jail is depicted in the two ethnographic vignettes of jail intai{e (drawn from fieldwork carried out in the summer of 1998) offered in chapters 4 and 5 (pages 146-50 and 186-91).
"'The proportion of inmates identified as suffering from mental afflictions during admission is deliberately lowered in keeping with the lack of resources available to treat them. As one psychiatrist working at the clinic of the Twin Towers. the recep- tion center of the Los Angeles jail system, explained to me: "\Ve have an instrument [a psychological test] that gives us 6 to 10 percent of serious cases, but the percentage diagnosed really depends on how many beds we have. Ifwe had the room and the staff. we could easily up that figure to 15. :W, or 30 percent."
THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 73
City and caunty jails suffer from severe mental illness (rates far canvicts in prisan range from 10 to. 15 percent), and this rate has increased aver the past two. decades as a result af the dawnsizing af the medical sectar af the state, mare rigid criteria far civil cammitments, and increasingly negative attitudes among the public and the palice.67 The dispropar- tianate rate af street arrests af mentally ill persans cambines in turn with the explasive growth af camputerized criminal recards (analyzed in chapter 5) to. fartify the tendency af the autharities to. divert their treatment from the public health to. the penal wing af the Leviathan.
As they came almast exclusively from the mast precarious strata af the urban proletariat, the denizens af American jails are also., by (sada)lagical implicatian, "regulars" af the carceral system: 59 percent have already experienced detentian, and 14 percent were previausly put on probationJ leaving just under one-quarter who are unovices" to the jailhause. Far, as shall be discussed shartly, the carceral institutian has grown mare alltophagolls. This is attested by the rising share af inmates who. have been repeatedly canvicted: fewer than ane detainee in faur had served three custadial sentences in 1989; seven years later, that figure reached ane-third. Finally, it is significant that 80. percent of tllOse sentenced to. at least ane year of prisan time were defended-if ane can call it that-by public defenders. Only half af the detainees sham af the means to. hire their awn lawyer were able to. speak with caunsel within two. weeks af being lacked up." In fact, it is routine for public defenders to. meet their clients far the first time a few minutes befare they hastily appear together before a judge, since state-appointed lawyers are typically in charge af hundreds af cases at a time. Thus in Cannecticut members af the public attarney's affice, who. afficiate in three-quarters af the state's felany trials, each handle an average af 1,0.45 cases in the caurse af a year. As in many ather jurisdictians, they have filed suit against the agency that emplays them in arder to. campel the state to. disburse the funds needed to. meet its canstitutianal man- date to. provide all the accused with minimal means af defense in crimi- nal caurt." Over the past decade, the casts af indigent defense services have ballaaned aut af cantrol, exacerbating the chronic crisis af legal services far the paar, due nat anly to. the multiplicatian af punitive statutes such as mandatory minimum sentences and long narcotics- related sanctionsJ but also to lIan overall increase in criminal filings and a larger percentage af defendants faund to. be indigent." This canfirms that the penal state is mare aggressively raking the very battam layers of social and urban space?O
The profile in urban marginality drawn from this natianal survey af jail inmates is fully carrobarated by a twa-year field study canducted
74 CHAPTER TWO
by sociologist-and ex-convict-John Irwin, combining direct obser- vation and in-depth interviews with the "fresh fish" caught in the net of the San Francisco jail. Irwin emphasizes that "the persons who fill the jails in the big cities are largely members of the rabble class, that is, persons who are poorly integrated into society and who are seen as dis- reputable": hustlers and hoodlums, derelicts and the mentaliy ill, drug addicts, illegal immigrants, and "corner boys" (working-class youths who hang out in cliques in public places and consort in taverns in low- income neighborhoods). But, more importantly, their arrest and deten- tion, and even their conviction and sentencing to prison, are explained largely by uoffensiveness, as much or more than [by] crime seriousness." Worse still, the police and carceral management of social insecurity certainly has the effect of controlling members of the "rabble" that soil the city streets in the short run, but over time it also "confirms their status and continualiy replenishes their ranks." Aside from the fact that "jail is the primary institution of socialization into rabble existence," the recent campaign of penal harassment of the poor in public space contributes to aggravating the feeling of insecurity and impunity inso- far as it "blurs the distinction between actual crime and what is merely bothersome or offensive."" And it is well suited to diverting public at- tention from white-collar and corporate crime, whose human damage and economic costs are vastly greater and more insidious than those of street delinquency.
Considering that jail detainees form a more diverse and less deprived population than the convicts of state prison, it is clear that, when we are tracking the carceralstock of the United States, we are indeed deal- ing overwhelmingly with the most precarious and stigmatized seg- ments of the urban working class, disproportionately nonwhite, and in a regular if fractious relationship with various public aid programs targeted at the poor, from orphanages and housing to health and in- come support. Whatever offenses they may have committed, their tra- jectory cannot be mapped out and explained within the compass of a "classless criminology."" And, whatever behavioral foibles threw them into the clutches of criminal justice, they issue from and remain 'an in- tegral part of the core population that is the traditional focus of public assistance schemes. This suggests that analysts of the welfare state in America cannot continue to ignore the vast and growing sections of the urban (sub)proletariat that are churning through the penal system, and they must imperatively bring the prison into the picture of the determinants and correlates of marginality and inequality in the age of economic deregulation. Integrating the analysis of penal policy and social policy is ali the more urgent when the welfare rug is being pulled
THE CRIMINALlZATION Of POVERTY 75
nder the feet of the urban poor to be replaced by a trampoline ~mu 'h' d low-wage work and the illegal economy of the street-wh,c IS towar .' f
h t the great "welfare reform" of 1996 entailed. It IS to an analysIs 0 who a "reform" and how it embodies and accelerates the establishment tg th . th t of the new government of social insecurity at we turn tn e nex
chapter.