"Who Belongs in Prison?"

The title of this post is the headline of this first-rate New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik discussing lots of aspects of modern criminal justices systems and a lots of first-rate recent books about these systems. (Emily Bazeon's great new book titled "Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.") I recommend the lengthy piece in full, and the subheadline summarizes just one of its themes: "A truly just system must do more than protect the rights of the innocent; it must also respect the humanity of the guilty." Here is a small excerpt from a long piece:

The heroic rhetoric of class warfare that sometimes inflects these books can mask the truth that the progress in the past decade concerning the crisis of incarceration has in large part been made on classically American reformist terms.  As Bazelon ably reports, the reality of the anti-incarceration movement in this country is that rich philanthropists have been footing much of the bill, prompted simply by evident injustice.  George Soros’s foundations have poured millions into supporting anti-incarceration initiatives, and so, astonishingly, have the Koch brothers — some libertarians really do like to see people at liberty, it seems. 

But what all of these efforts appear to have in common is an attempt to move us out of the crisis of incarceration by moving us past the question of “guilt,” making us see that the categories of guilty and innocent, whether applied to the wrongdoer or to the one done wrong, miss harder social truths, and replace empathy with bureaucratized vengeance. “The crime is what you did, it’s not who you are” is an aphorism of anti-incarceration activists, and this perspective enlivens almost all the reformist literature.

And so the plethora of new books can sometimes seem to sit just outside the hardest issue.  The hardest cases aren’t those of harmless victims of mandatory-minimum laws....  The cases that test our convictions involve offenders whose crimes have had real social and human costs. What do we do about the violent carjacker, the armed robber, the brutal assailant?  Such people exist, of all kinds and colors, and wishing away the problem of impulsive evil by assimilating it to the easier problem of our universal responsibility for social inequities doesn’t help solve it.  It’s often said that white-collar criminals should not be treated better than no-collar ones, and yet the taste for punishing the white-collar miscreant is no less vindictive — indeed, there’s depressing social-science research showing that, once people are made aware of the inequities of the American criminal-justice system, they want even harsher penalties for white-collar offenders.  We should all be in this misery together.