The New Gaol

Published date01 March 2016
Date01 March 2016
DOI10.1177/0002716215604122
Subject MatterIV. The Future of Decarceration
280 ANNALS, AAPSS, 664, March 2016
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215604122
The New Gaol:
Seeing
Incarceration
Like a City
By
JONATHAN SIMON
604122ANN The Annals of the American AcademyThe New Gaol
research-article2015
Since John Howard’s (1777) condemnation of local places
of detention at the end of the eighteenth century, the goal
of prison reform has been to replace local jails with their
porous boundaries and mixes of troubled citizens, with
austere and complete “total institutions.” The current crisis
of mass imprisonment is an opportune moment to rethink
this strategy. In particular, California’s Correctional
Realignment law represents a provocative counter note to
the historic link between progress in prison reform and
state administration. This article proposes that we see
crime, mental illness, and incarceration less like a state
(Scott 1998) and more like a city (Valverde 2011). When
we do, the jail emerges as a potentially equilibrium solution
to the problems of mental illness, crime, and incarceration.
Keywords: mass incarceration; prison reform; jails;
seeing like a state; seeing like a city; total
institutions
After Mass Incarceration
The crisis of mass incarceration unfolding today
in the United States is unsettling decades of
Jonathan Simon is the Adrian A Kragen Professor of Law
at UC Berkeley School of Law, a member of faculty of the
Jurisprudence and Social Policy program, and currently
serves as faculty director of the Center for the Study of Law
& Society. Jonathan’s scholarship concerns the role of crime
and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies.
His past work includes two award-winning monographs
Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the
Underclass (University of Chicago 1993, winner of the
American Sociological Association’s sociology of law book
prize, 1994) and Governing through Crime: How the War
on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created
a Culture of Fear (Oxford University Press 2007, winner of
the American Society of Criminology, Hindelang Award
2010). His most recent books are The Sage Handbook of
Punishment and Society (Sage 2013) (edited with Richard
Sparks) and Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable
Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (New
Press 2014). Jonathan has served as the editor-in-chief of
the journal Punishment and Society, and is a reviewer for
numerous law and society and criminology journals. He
blogs at prawsblawg, governingthroughcrime, and you can
follow him on twitter @jonathansimon59.
Correspondence: jsimon@law.berkeley.edu
THE NEW GAOL 281
policy consensus (Gottschalk 2015; Aviram 2015; Simon 2014). During the mas-
sive build-up of the prison population since the 1970s (Travis, Western, and
Redburn 2014), all aspects of criminal justice were transformed into instruments
designed to move people as rapidly as possible and for as long as possible into
prisons (Stuntz 2011; Alexander 2010; Simon 2014). With that policy now
increasingly condemned as irrational, racially marked, and inhumane, we face a
once in a generation opportunity to rethink the overall goals of the criminal jus-
tice system and the place of local, state, and federal institutions. Chances are we
will stay too close to powerfully established assumptions and expectations of
these institutions rather than experiment too radically. As much as we need
research on policy alternatives and their performance on central measures like
recidivism, we also need renewed efforts to restate and reaffirm the values that
underlie constitutional criminal justice, a task on which social science, jurispru-
dence, and the humanities all have important contributions to make (Travis,
Western, and Redburn 2014, chapter 12). This article undertakes one such
experiment, by asking how we might reimagine the jail not as it has been for the
past two centuries, and especially under mass incarceration as a way station
toward state prison, but as a central custodial institution to manage social prob-
lems where they live, at the city and county1 level. I do not mean to suggest that
social problems like poverty, chronic illness, or over criminalization originate at
the local level. Indeed, the political-economic, cultural, and legislative dynamics
that produce these problems operate nationally or even globally, and solutions to
these problems are likewise best sought there. My claim is that these problems
are experienced or “lived” at the local level. We are likely to experience deindus-
trialization, for example, not in the shifting statistics on global manufacturing, but
in the appearance of blighted areas where dynamic factory districts once stood.
To the extent that incarceration is one tool to manage (not prevent or resolve)
these problems as they play out in the lives of actual people, local control over
incarceration may be an important check on its excessive use.
In what follows, I suggest why mass incarceration and correctional realign-
ment are the right place and time for this “academic” exercise; how we might
learn something from seeing crime, mental illness, and incarceration more “like
a city” (Valverde 2011) instead of “like a state” (Scott 1998); and how we might
use incarceration differently if we prioritized the goals of cities over the goals of
states.
Part I. Mass Incarceration as a Crisis of the
Prison as a State Institution
Nationally, the perceived excess and unfairness of mass imprisonment is leading
to a broader conversation about criminal justice reform than any imaginable even
a few years ago (Gottschalk 2014; Aviram 2015). In California, the prolonged
humanitarian crisis inside the state prison system exposed to the nation by the
United States Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Plata (2011) decision has

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