2 of 4

Harsh Justice Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide by James Q. Whitman Oxford Univ. Press, 2003

The most troubling question, though, may not be what happens when two million people are incarcerated, but what happens when many of them get out. Those mandated sentences of the 1990s can be self-defeating; by law, more prisoners serve full sentences, with no chance of earning early release and thus less reason to try. "When offenders have 'done their time,' they are released no matter what level of support is available to them or how prepared they are for release," writes Joan Petersillia in When Prisoners Come Home.6 More than 50% of those released are expected to return to prison.

Nor is preparation for release a priority; funding for vocational and educational prison programs declined in the get-tough 1990s, potentially leaving prisoners less socially functional upon their release than when they committed their crime. Caseloads for parole officers have nearly doubled, leaving less time for counseling parolees (and leading to a rise in the number of parolees returned to prison on "technical violations"—non-criminal acts such as missing a meeting with a parole officer).7 Longer sentences mean more time spent amid the harshness of prison culture, the darkness and intricacies of which have been knowledgeably mapped for would-be prison evangelists by Lennie Spitale in Prison Ministry.

Indeed, the very word "rehabilitation," freighted as it has come to be with utopian left-wing ideals, has fallen out of fashion (though as Ann Chih Lin argues in Reform in the Making, this reflects the mistake of expecting prison education programs to be effective even in climates of mutual hostility between prison staff and inmates). Something seems out of balance when state governments, as they did in the 1990s, increase spending on prisons while cutting spending on schools. The prison system's resulting purpose—and apparent abandonment of its "correctional" mission—was summarized by a headline in the Atlantic Monthly: "Catch and release."8

Only in America, James Whitman and T. Richard Snyder might say, would such a dysfunctional system flourish. The two seemingly ameliorating factors in America's get-tough criminal justice climate—democracy and Christianity—may only make things worse. Whitman raises the question of why America, with its egalitarian character, has a harsher criminal justice system than Europe, whose governments have a more brutal history. The difference, he says, is that Europe used to have lenient punishment for the upper classes and degrading punishment for the lower classes. As it democratized, it democratized up, so to speak; now everyone enjoys relatively lenient punishments. America, on the other hand, never had any light punishment to standardize.

Protestant Christianity is another culprit in America's harsh justice system, charges Snyder in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment. You would think, he says, that a society shaped by Christian principles would be marked by grace and forgiveness. Instead, "Most of us want those who have done wrong to be punished—not healed, but punished." Having alluded to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and like Weber exaggerating the role of those frowning Puritans in forming our social order, Snyder submits a familiar grievance against Calvinism: "If we believe that all persons are essentially corrupt save for the extraordinary intervention of God's grace in their lives, it is a simple step to think that those who are … in trouble with the law, or different from us in any way … are somehow evil." There but for the grace of God go I, we say, paraphrasing 16th-century English martyr John Bradford's confession upon seeing fellow prisoners led to the gallows. But what Bradford intended as an affirmation of commonality with the criminal changes in our mouths, Snyder says, expressing our "thinly mask[ed] smugness and an underlying sense of superiority."

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page