Occupy Wall Street and the American Penal System

In a discussion about the Occupy Wall Street movement with Kai Hsu and Professor Drabinski we began to consider the possible similarities that exist between the Occupy Wall Street movement and our investigation of the American Penal system. While the specific issues in question are not identical, both investigations deal with parallel problems in the structure of our society. According to the Occupy Wall Street website the Movement “is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.” In particular the Movement is attempting to “expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future”(www.occupywallstreet.org). Through demonstrations and occupations in different cities around the world Occupy Wall Street is accomplishing just what it is has said it wants to do—expose the possibility that financial corporations have too much influence on the political process and have taken the power out of the hands of the voting citizen. It is well know that corporate America exercises large amounts of resources in order to lobby the government to secure legislation that will benefit business. What this movement illustrates is a growing belief amongst the public that this influence has gone to far. All citizens in a democracy want to believe that the government is organized for the people and to benefit the common good. Occupy Wall Street demonstrates that a significant number of Americans may no longer believe this promise blindly.

How is Occupy Wall Street similar to the American Penal System? Citizens of the United States believe that the justice system operates to protect each individual just as the government is presumably built to serve the common good. What can be discovered through closer investigation is that there are a host of issues that call into question the ability of the American justice and penal systems to protect and punish each individual equally. At its roots the justification for punishing people with imprisonment is based on the belief that as a result of certain actions people should lose the right and freedom to participate in normal society. In her book Golden Gulag Ruth Wilson Gilmore breaks down changes in the political economic landscape of California to find an explanation for the explosion in modern rates of incarceration and find a basis for claims that the justice system operates under a system of racial, political, corporate and socio-economic bias and influence.

It is the common belief, as Gilmore describes, that the dominant explanation for prison growth over in the last few decades is as follows: “crime went up; we cracked down; crime went down” (17). However looking at a few main arguments behind this dominant explanation (for these arguments see Golden Gulag pages 17-20) and their underlying weaknesses, Gilmore questions the relationship between crime and crackdown leading her to suggest that the true order of events is: “crime went up; crime came down; we cracked down” (20). It would then follow that there are a number of ulterior motives or alternative explanations for the rise in the level of incarceration in California and across the United States—Gilmore provides four. The first explanation accuses a form of racial cleansing—a pattern of racially charged lawmaking, policing, and selective prosecution—has resulted in a large spike in the populations of African Americans and other minorities in prison. Two other explanations focus on the pursuit of profits. Private prison corporations lobby the government to be stiffer on crime in order to profit on the higher numbers of inmates and similarly more inmates offer the government “more potential for pulling surplus cash out of (public) prisons” (22). The third view Gilmore offers is prison growth was triggered in order to provide industry and create jobs for struggling rural American communities. Finally a further explanation is the normalization of prison and “its perpetually expanding use as an all-purpose remedy for the thwarted rights of both prisoners and harmed free persons” (23). Gilmore also provides skepticism to these explanations and is critical of over-simplified or logical solutions.

These brief examples I have outlined only scratch the surface of Gilmore’s overall investigation however as she digs deeper she further emphasizes the interconnectedness of the justice system, politics, and the economy which only reveals additional similarities with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The astonishing economic success of the past two decades (80’s & 90’s) led politicians to remove restrictions on business, and expand the reach of booming financial firms that would allow our economy to continue to grow at a powerful and unstable pace. Eventually our economy spiraled out of control, brought on by the burst of a housing price bubble in 2007. Growth and instability of a different era (the late 1960’s) is what Gilmore believes ultimately led to detrimental changes to the justice system. “Today’s political-economy super-structure is grounded in the radical failures and counterrevolutionary success of an earlier era.”; “The instability that characterized the end of the golden age of American Capitalism provides a key” (26).

The recent economic recession is an event that made it very difficult to ignore certain failures of our government in regulating capitalist activity and even exposed areas where corporations can have an inappropriate amount of influence. The unstable economic conditions were not necessarily brought on by current action but instead are borne out of past legislation. This recession has impacted our society to such a degree that movements such as Occupy Wall Street are looking to spread awareness and make a change. Is it possible that in the future we may see a similar event shake the American justice system enough to invoke the same type of awareness? People such as Ruth Gilmore and Michelle Alexander are providing the texts that are beginning to expose possible cracks in the foundation of a system that is integral to our society and we trust to be reliable. The Occupy Wall Street Movement can be used as an example of what might be necessary to create awareness and promote change before an event as significant as the economic recession forces us to act.

Plea Bargain Supreme Court Cases

Here is a link to an article I just saw on the New York Times website:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/us/supreme-court-to-hear-cases-involving-bad-advice-on-plea-deals.html?_r=2&hp

The article discusses the issue of plea bargains and whether or not a lawyer’s mishandling of a plea bargain entitles a defendant to a retrial. Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard two cases involving plea bargains. In one case, Anthony Cooper was told to reject a plea bargain of four to seven years because his lawyer told him that he could not be convicted of attempted murder, since the woman that he allegedly shot was hit below the waist. After trial, he was sentenced to 15 to 30 years. In the other case, Galin E. Frye was never even informed that the prosecutor had offered him ninety days in prison for driving without a license. When his case went to trial, he was sentenced to three years.

In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander explains how prevalent plea bargains are in the criminal justice system as a tool for securing high conviction rates and federal funding. The two Supreme Court cases discusses in this article could be important in developing regulations (or not) for the plea bargaining process and making people more aware of the mechanism that accounts for the vast majority of convictions. Although not discussed in the two Supreme Court cases, it is interesting to consider the lifetime disenfranchisement of felons that Alexander describes. When urging their clients to accept a plea bargain, do the majority of public defendants explain that they will be labeled felons for the rest of their lives and denied housing, employment and the right to vote? It seems as though the answer is no, given the seeming lack of information given to defendants during the plea bargain process. Should lawyers be required to inform their clients of the long-term social and economic consequences of being labeled a felon? I think so. Does the absence of such information constitute incompetent litigation? Yes. Yet, we must keep in mind that public defenders often work with low budgets and overwhelming caseloads. For this reason, we need to recognize that Public Defenders Offices play a critical role in our criminal justice system and are well deserving of resources. Furthermore, I find it disconcerting that the issues of lifetime disenfranchisement and the associated apparatuses of mass incarceration were omitted from the article. This omission is indicative of the lack of candid discourse about the current penal system and its use as a tool of systematic repression. We must look at not only the time served, but also the long-term effects of being labeled a “felon” when considering the true weight of sentences. Accordingly (hopefully as a stepping-stone to an honest discussion and dismantling of the system of mass incarceration), we should require that all lawyers inform their clients of such.

Television and Prisons

The combination of television and prison is something that intrigues me. Naturally when one thinks about media and prison they may be inclined to think about how the prison system has been represented in different films or television. While it is true media can offer the ‘outside’ world a look within prisons it is much more compelling to think about how media and in particular television is literally the window through which the ‘inside’ world experiences or has knowledge of the ‘outside’ world. Having never spent time within such a facility it is difficult to say I know the role television plays for inmates nevertheless it is an interesting dynamic for one to think about.

Television programs are created for the purpose of entertainment and information and each program is created with a specific demographic or audience in mind. People watch television for a variety of reasons at many different points in their day. Television for a prisoner would seem to serve a much different purpose. Firstly, there doesn’t seem to be any programming created specifically for prisoners. We can assume that different individuals inside a prison will fall into different demographics just as they would on the outside. However, this assumption ignores the fact that being inside a prison is an entirely different demographic in itself. Secondly, prisoners watch television in a ‘non-appointment’ way. Many incarcerated individuals do not have the freedom to tune in to their favorite show or follow along with the newest series. Finally, the thing that makes television sustainable—the advertisements—are not useful to prisoners who are no longer regular consumers, unable to walk down to the local store and buy the product or use the service that is being advertised. In prison the purpose of television has been stripped to its roots—entertainment and information.

As entertainment television could be used as distraction or escape. To many individuals in society television functions as an escape from their daily lives, utilized for distraction or the pure enjoyment it offers. Serial programs invite us into their world and we become lost in their adventures while programs such as sporting events offer amusement and engagement. As information television becomes an interesting tool for prisoners. It offers a prisoner information and perspective on what is happening in the world that they are not a part of and may never be a part of again. It could be argued that since what is happening outside the prison walls is not directly affecting them inside it is not really necessary information to their lives at all. While this may make sense, no individual ever wants to be considered separate from society. (Is this thought—denying prisoners information about what is going on outside prison walls—unconstitutional or inappropriate?) In addition is it a conscious thought in a prisoners mind that what they are seeing on television is occurring outside the walls of the prison? If so it might then follow that the world of television functions to further emphasize to the individuals incarcerated the separation between the prison world and the outside world. In an essay titled Teetering on the Brink Between Life and Death from the book Live from Death Row Mumia Abu-Jamal communicates the role television plays within Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institute at Huntington:

TV is more than a powerful diversion from a terrible fate. It is a psychic club used to threaten those who dare resist the dehumanizing isolation of life on the row. To be found guilty of an institutional infraction means that one must relinquish TV.

After months or years of noncontact visits, few phone calls, and ever decreasing communication with one’s family and others, many inmates use TV as an umbilical cord, a psychological connection to the world they have lost. They depend on it, in the way that lonely people turn to TV for the illusion of companionship, and they dread separation from it. For many, loss of TV is too high a price to pay for any show of resistance (8).

The discussion about television in prison can give rise to questions about rehabilitation. If the goal of prison is to rehabilitate individuals so that they may contribute to society television could play a role. Simply allowing individuals the opportunity to sit around and watch television may cause one to question the difference between prison and mass people storage. Nevertheless, if prisoners are eventually expected to re-join society it would seem important for them to be allowed access to television or other forms of media to maintain an understanding of society and continue to be a part of society as a whole in at least an informed way. The function of television could be considered necessary to provide this link between the prisoner and the outside world, without television the walls of a prison might be that much more opaque.

Billions Behind Bars

As it turns out we are not the only ones thinking about the American penal system. Next week on October 18th, 2011 at 9 pm EST CNBC will be airing an investigative documentary, “Billions Behind Bars: Inside America’s Prison Industry”. Below is a description of the program from the CNBC website.

“Billions Behind Bars: Inside America’s Prison Industry,” a CNBC original documentary, goes behind the razor wires to investigate the profits and inner-workings of the multi-billion dollar corrections industry. With more than 2.3 million people locked up, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. One out of 100 American adults is behind bars – while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison. This reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. The states and the federal government together spend roughly $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people work in the industry.

A direct link to the documentary’s website http://www.cnbc.com/id/44762286/ provides some interesting articles, videos and information that the show has complied. Being particularly interested in the economics behind the penal system I look forward to seeing and discussing this program.

This documentary can also be interpreted as an interesting example of the role that the media plays in shaping our impression and thoughts on the prison system. Primetime programs and documentaries such as this one are sometime difficult to take critically and free from influence by the account or opinions being presented.