the Shackle Report

In a recent editorial, the NY Times reported the annual rise in US incarceration and its ballooning costs:

Nationwide, the prison population hovers at almost 1.6 million, which surpasses all other countries for which there are reliable figures. The 50 states last year spent about $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987.

… Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan and Oregon devote as much money or more to corrections as they do to higher education.

It went on to say that most policy makers know that there are better, cheaper, more socially productive ways to deal with lesser offenders, but that the privatization of the prison industry has created a (seemingly) unbeatable lobby for senseless cruelty and waste.

Yet the NYT’s explanation — that our lust for punishment is economically determined– undervalues the power of our confusion between law, justice and vengeance. From the “closure” victims seek in death penalty cases to Spitzer’s popularity as a wiretapping scourge, and his humiliation as a wiretapped hypocrite — we all seem hell-bent on revenge against those who make us feel violated and afraid. We aren’t looking for justice in these situations, so much as we’re looking to justify a little sadistic fun.

In old westerns the good sheriff had the guts to face down the vengeful mob, to send the pitchforks home, cool their blood lust, make them wait for a fair trial. Vengeance was the enemy in those tales, an intoxicating demon. Law was the sober contract that rescued civilization from savagery. But now we’ve gotten into the pitchfork habit We haven’t been bought out by the punishment lobby so much as turned on by it, tempted and seduced.