Editor's Introduction Social Harmony and Disruption: Order with Minimal Prison, Domination, or Violence

• Date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12206
• Published date: 01 November 2017

The AMERICAN JOURNAL of

ECONOMICS and SOCIOLOGY

Published Q U A R T E R L Y in the interest of constructive

synthesis in the social sciences, under grants from the

FRANCIS NEILSON FUND and the ROBERT SCHALKENBACH

FOUNDATION. Founded in 1941

Volume 76 November 2017 Number 5

Editor’s Introduction

Social Harmony and Disruption:

Order with Minimal Prison, Domination,

or Violence

Introduction

In modern societies, certain types of social infractions are met with

punishment by the state. The normal method of punishment is

prison. There is seldom an occasion when that situation comes

under challenge. There is talk of prison reform to make it more

humane, and there are debates about how prisons should be oper-

ated and financed. In the United States and some other countries,

the extreme racial imbalance of the prison population is noted as

prima facie evidence of structural biases in the justice system. There

is considerable disagreement about which types of actions should

be considered criminal and therefore punishable by imprisonment.

But the one constant in all of these discussions is the idea that

prison is an appropriate public method of dealing with crime.

Recent research indicates that imprisonment may be counter-

productive from a social perspective: the social costs almost cer-

tainly outweigh the benefits. Incarceration is supposed to prevent

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 5 (November, 2017).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12206

V

C2017 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

crime by isolating criminals and by deterring potential criminals, but

it may not actually work. The longer people spend in prison, the

higher the chance they will commit another crime (Mueller-Smith

2015a: 9). In addition, prison imposes huge social deficits. The cost

of putting someone in prison includes not only operating the prison

itself but also damage to relatives and community members, plus

the lost earning potential of the inmate. Muller-Smith (2015b: 39)

estimates the benefit to society of incarcerating a person for two

years is around $5,000, and the social cost is around $100,000. That

lopsided ratio produces a crude and inefficient system that may not

even deliver the basic benefit (security) that it offers.

Nevertheless, prison is treated as an inevitable part of modern life

in much the same way war is. Everyone agrees that causing unjusti-

fiable harm to other people is morally wrong, but both war and

punishment are justified as necessary evils. The basic model is that

harmony is the normal state of society. If someone disrupts that har-

mony, either a lone perpetrator or a foreign army, then violence is

considered an appropriate way to restore harmony. The model

ignores the fact that war and punishment teach soldiers and inmates

to solve problems with violence, which may lead them to become

the source of further disruption. In other words, some violence is

endogenous because the system itself contributes to violence. The

role of prisons and military action in creating a culture of violence is

seldom factored into evaluations of those institutions. Instead, we

tend to operate on the assumption that causation is linear, not recur-

sive. We mostly see that prisons prevent crime by separating crimi-

nals from society. But prisons are also quite capable of recruiting

petty offenders into a life of serious crime or destroying life chances,

leaving crime as the only remaining option.

The authors in this issue do not aim to offer utopian visions of

how society might function without prisons or coercion. Instead,

each of them asks a narrower set of questions that can help us

understand the potential and the limitations of alternatives to institu-

tionalized punishment, coercion, and violence in specific settings.

No one proposes to abolish prisons or to eliminate military prepara-

tions, but they each raise questions about the injustice and ineffi-

ciency of current methods of maintaining order in society, and those

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology1088