Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on mass incarceration in America has been widely, and deservedly praised for its full-throated indictment of the prison system.
Gopnik notes that the U.S. keeps 6 million people under correctional supervision (prison, parole, and probation), which is more than the Soviet gulag held at its height.
Prison is supposed to isolate antisocial people so the rest of us don’t have to deal with them. Yet, with so many people spending so much of their lives behind bars, prisons have insinuated themselves into our culture in subtle ways:
Wealthy white teenagers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
Ironically, reformers envisioned prison as a more humane alternative to capital and corporal punishment. However, our ability to lock people up vastly exceeds our capacity to keep them safe inside, thereby making a mockery of the concept of “custody.” Prison rape is so widespread that sexual victimization has become a de facto part of a sentence. Gopnik writes:
The normalization of prison rape — like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows — will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.
Gopnik also takes on the private prison industry, writing, “No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America.” The document warns CCA investors that drug decriminalization and immigration reform could cut into profits because such policies would reduce the demand for new prisons.
Towards the end of the essay, Gopnik asks what kinds of crime-fighting tactics might reduce our dependence on incarceration. After what I’d just read, I was surprised to find him speaking up for stop-and-frisk policies:
Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened — “hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk” — “designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it — that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already.
Gopnik argues that stop-and-frisk could be improved by stopping people for real crimes.
At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets — to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime.
But crimes are not “the occasion for stop-and-frisks.” The whole point of stop-and-frisk is that you can get stopped and frisked for essentially no reason. If the officer had probable cause, it wouldn’t be a stop-and-frisk.
The NYPD stopped and frisked 601,055 people in 2010, 85% of whom were black or Latino, and 86% of whom were completely innocent. Gopnik seems awfully cavalier about the admission that the main goal of stop-and-frisks is not to stop crime today, but rather to find a pretext to gather the fingerprints of people who have not yet committed a serious crime. If that’s the motive, then stop-and-frisk isn’t about crime prevention at all, it’s about facilitating future incarceration.
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