Critical Criminology 12: 221–242, 2004. Ó 2004 Kluwer Law International. Printed in the Netherlands.
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THEORIZING RACE AND IMPRISONMENT: TOWARDS A NEW PENALITY* MARY BOSWORTH Wesleyan University
Abstract. This article compares historical and contemporary notions of race in France, England and Wales, and the United States, in order to explain each nation’s prison population. It seeks to demonstrate how the distinct interpretations and ways of documenting race in each place correspond with an over-representation of specific populations in that nation’s prison system. After describing the prison population in each country, the paper analyzes the historical and cultural construction of ideas of race in France. Of particular importance is the Enlightenment and the 19th century love of taxonomy that articulated, mapped and reified Otherness and which is also considered to be the birth of prison and criminology. Thus, the genealogical approach may provide a new understanding of the conceptual and practical interdependence of race and imprisonment, which is then applied to the U.S. and England. This paper aims to help criminologists move beyond merely documenting the over-representation of minorities to critiquing the structures of race and punishment, grounded in colonialism and slavery, that serve to legitimate strategies of social control.
Research demonstrates with increasing clarity a troubling connection between race and punishment. This relationship manifests itself in numerous ways, primary among which is the simple fact that prisons in most countries incarcerate disproportionate numbers of minority women and men. Yet, there is little consensus about the causes of such differential imprisonment rates. Notwithstanding the large number of studies documenting the demography of penal populations (Sabol 1989; Blumstein 1993; Mauer 1999; Austin et al. 2001) and the impact of race on sentencing (Peterson and Hagan 1984; Free 2001), policing, and crime rates (Jefferson and Walker 1992; Chan 1997), criminologists show little sign of agreeing over why there are so many people of color in prison. Most commonly, criminological debates hinge on whether the justice system is racist. Authors interested in this topic have asked a variety of *I would like to thank Biko Agozino, Sophie Body-Gendrot, Michal Bosworth, Anthony Gerbino, Paul Leighton and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Fordham University which partially funded the research for this paper through a Faculty Research Fellowship, and the staff at the Maison Suger in Paris who provided accommodation and research support for the French component of this study.
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questions, such as whether police target minorities, whether judges are more punitive when dealing with people of color, and whether prison or probation officers vary their treatment depending on the race or ethnicity of the offender. Undoubtedly, sociologists and criminologists provide vital empirical information about race and the criminal justice system, and about the epistemological connections between race and imprisonment. Without such accounts, the scope of the over-representation of minorities in all parts of the justice process would remain unknown and unacknowledged. Even so, an understanding of the relationship between race and the prison can only proceed so far utilizing this approach since it ignores the ideological, as distinct from practical, ways in which ideas of difference underpin and, in turn, are reinforced by the criminal justice system. This paper compares prison populations and ideas of race in France, England and the U.S., in order to map out the beginnings of a theoretical analysis of the relationship between race and punishment. It examines the historical roots of ideas of race in France before outlining how such an approach may help explain the over-representation of minorities in English and U.S. prisons. Each nation in this study utilizes distinct rationales and terminology about race and difference. The basic premise of this paper is that these ideas may explain, at least in part, the specific characteristics of each country’s penal populations. In France, for example, where North Africans and their children tend to concentrate in the nation’s penal institutions, the term race is avoided altogether in favor of discussions about foreigners and citizens. In England, where members of former colonies are incarcerated at higher rates than others, race is generally interpreted in terms of an overarching national identity that is based on the successful performance and adoption of certain cultural beliefs and activities. Finally, in the U.S., where African-American prisoners are so over-represented, race is generally considered to be binary, referring either to Black or white. These conceptions of race are not the same and underscore the point that ‘‘it is worse than useless in the present political environment to assume a single monolithic conception of race that exists in the same form in every society’’ (Solomos and Back 1995: xi). Rather, in each country, specific groups such as foreigners, former colonial subjects and their children, and African-Americans are defined as social problems. These populations then become stigmatized, subject to state control and then over-represented in the nation’s prison system. This article sets out the beginnings of a wider research project by providing a context in which to interpret prison statistics. Following
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Garland (2001: 2), researchers must always ask what are the social and historical processes that gave rise to our present ways of controlling crime and doing justice? Because, however, criminologists should not follow Garland’s silence about race, of particular importance to this project is the connection between the social and historical construction of particular identities and imprisonment. The point is not to establish a simplistic causal relationship between race and incarceration, but rather to try to map some of the complex ways in which, over time, nations construct specific ideas about race and identity that, in turn, are used to justify methods of social control. Examining the relationship between race and imprisonment conceptually, rather than just documenting empirical data, requires a theoretical framework. One possible approach would be to take a genealogical perspective like Paul Gilroy and others who argue that we must look to eighteenth and nineteenth century work on reason and science to understand contemporary views of race (Young 1990; Gilroy 1993, 2000; Omi and Winant, 1994; Taguieff 1998). Reconfiguring Foucault’s work on the genealogy of knowledge with which criminologists have long been familiar, Gilroy (2000: 58) writes that: the modern, human sciences, particularly anthropology, geography, and philosophy, undertook elaborate work in order to make the idea of ‘race’ epistemologically correct. This required novel ways of understanding embodied alterity, hierarchy, and temporality, It made human bodies communicate the truths of an irrevocable otherness that were being confirmed by a new science and a new semiotics just as the struggle against Atlantic racial slavery was being won. While earlier cultures referred to supposed physical differences among populations, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century love of taxonomy articulated, mapped and reified such differences to a previously unknown extent. Hierarchies were consolidated in which certain groups, usually those defined as non-white, were at the bottom. Inevitably, the qualities of these groups became associated with criminality and deviance, with the result that their populations became subject to increased social control and punishment. Gilroy’s history of race clearly dovetails with Foucault’s (1979) depiction of the birth of the prison by suggesting that the modern articulation of racial Otherness may parallel that of criminality. If this is the case, then it may be that race and the prison are linked in far more complex and lasting ways than mere descriptions of disproportionate incarceration rates can explain.
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Such a view may help interpret France’s current prison population and provide a blueprint for understanding the relationship between race and punishment elsewhere. Just as punishment is an expression of historically-contingent sensibilities, so too do ideas of race, of difference, of Other and of belonging, play into strategies of how to respond to crime. These ideas, in other words, fundamentally legitimate the prison and thus may help explain the popularity of the current culture of control.
Imprisoning Difference: Comparing France, England and the United States Before surveying the intellectual roots and shape of ideas of race in France, England and the United States, it is helpful to describe the penal and general populations in each place. Only in this way is it possible to make clear the scope of the over-representation of minorities. Rather than viewing such figures as an end in themselves, however, they should be interpreted as a backdrop to further analysis. In France, 47,837 individuals were incarcerated within the 186 prisons that made up the nation’s penal system at the end of 2000, representing a decline of 7 percent from the previous year. Just more than one fifth (21.4 percent) of this total population were foreign, approximately twice as many as were in the general population (Ministre de la Justice 2002: 11–16). Beyond these figures, little more can be said with certainty about the race or ethnicity of France’s penal population because statistics are not gathered on such matters. Instead, only two official categories of inmates exist: citizens and foreigners. Unlike France, official statistics in England and Wales provide considerably more detail about a number of ethnic populations in prison and in the wider community. First, according to Census 2001, 92.1 percent of the population is white, 4 percent are South Asian, 2 percent are Black, 1.2 percent are mixed, 0.4 percent are Chinese and 0.4 percent are Other. Members of former colonies, as well as more recent immigrants make up 7.9 percent of the total population. Second, out of a total prison population of 64,600 at the end of 2000, 19 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women belonged to ethnic minorities. Twelve percent of men were identified as Black, 3 percent as South Asian and 4 percent as Chinese and ‘Other’. Nineteen percent of the women were black, 4 percent were South Asian and 2 percent were Chinese or other (Elkins and Olagundoye 2001). Overall, eight percent of the men and 15
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percent of the women were foreign nationals (Home Office 2000). These figures have remained more or less stable over some years, with minorities generally serving longer sentences than whites and committing different types of offences. Finally, nowhere are the problems of race and imprisonment more apparent than in the US where, since 1989, the numbers of Black prisoners have surpassed those of whites (Wacquant 1999a: 63). In the figures released by the U.S. Department of Justice for year end 2000,1 Black non-Hispanics made up 46 percent and Hispanics counted for 16 percent of the total prison population of 1,381,892. White non-Hispanics represented only 36.0 percent (Beck and Harrison 2001). In addition, minority women of all groups are filling the nations prisons most rapidly of all. These figures need to be examined in light of the most recent census, where 75.1 percent of the population classify themselves as white, 12.3 percent as Black, 5.5 percent as Other, 2.4 percent as mixed race, 3.6 percent as Asian, 0.9 percent as Native American and 0.1 percent as Native Hawaiian or other pacific islander; 12.5 percent of the total population consider themselves to be Hispanic or Latino, (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). Although the relationship between the prison and the politics of difference varies from country to country, the widespread over-representation of minorities in penal systems in France, England and the U.S. suggests that ideas of race and difference have become necessary for the prison in all three nations. While race, alone, does not fully explain the ongoing legitimacy of imprisonment, it may provide some of the answer since, without the presence of so many women and men of color, it is unclear, how the prison, in its current form, could survive. The so-called prison–industrial complex, which has convincingly been shown to connect disparate industries, markets and sources of power throughout the modern capitalist state, in some sense may need hierarchies of race and identity, to ensure a perpetual army of laborers and clients. Could the U.S., for example, sustain its current criminal justice system, if one out of four African-American men of a certain age were not under some form of incarceration or surveillance? Would the system survive economically? Or, what if young white men were being imprisoned at the same rate? Would society countenance such practices of confinement? Delving deeper into such questions requires turning to the literature on race in each country to see how current beliefs and categories of difference evolved.
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France: The Rights of Man Unlike the United States and England and Wales, and as previously mentioned, France measures only two classes: citizen and foreigner. This is an important distinction since the citizen/foreigner dyad is even less fixed than the social construction of race elsewhere. Definitions of race and ethnicity change over time, but the move from foreigner is made more fluid still by gaining citizenship. The characterization of identity as primarily an issue of citizenship is usually held to have emerged during the French Revolution, and retains a strong ideological hold in contemporary French life (Abou 1992; Schnapper 1994). There is, in fact, great hostility towards other ways of conceiving of difference as witnessed in the failure of the recent attempts to introduce affirmative action. ‘Positive discrimination’ as it is more commonly called, has made little headway (Calves 1999). Despite some shifts, such as the recent introduction of parity regulations for women in political parties, French society remains mistrustful of special interest groups or identity politics of any sort. Much of the ideological power of the citizen/foreigner dyad in France derives from the manner in which citizenship poses as a color-free and supposedly un-biased term. It can be earned. Yet throughout history, certain groups have always had difficulty being conjoined with the ideal of citizen. First, Black slaves in the French Caribbean and, later, North African Colonial subjects were denied the full rights of citizenship. Following the end of slavery, inhabitants of Martinique, Guadaloupe and other colonies became officially French citizens yet, as much work has shown, only at a certain psychological and emotional cost (Fanon 1963, 1967; Pluchon 1984). Indeed, the more recent former colonial subjects from North Africa are still fighting for these rights, since many in the 1980s refused to relinquish their Algerian citizenship in order to qualify for French nationality. Non-citizens may be searched by police for documents at any time (GISTI 1999: 97–102). Those without documents (sans papiers) may be deported, and while in France, are ineligible for medical care, education and housing. They are also over-represented in prison, making up an estimated 30 percent of the population in Paris’ main prison for men, La Sante´ (Vasseur 2000: 118). According to statisticians Kensey and Tournier (1997: 25), the disproportionate number of foreigners in prison is ‘‘entirely due to foreigners without residence or work permits’’ whose number increased by 180 percent from 1984 to 1995, as compared to an
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overall expansion of the prison population by 29 percent (Kensey and Tournier 1997). Even with appropriate visas, non-citizens tend to occupy the lowest echelons of the workforce and the housing market. So too do children of immigrants and former foreigners who have adopted French citizenships. The stigma of difference, it seems, is difficult to erase (Bataille 1999: 288). On the Origins of Race in France Despite official silence over race/ethnicity, French scholars have contributed greatly to our understanding of difference. From Beauvoir’s (1954) ground breaking account of gender in The Second Sex, French theoretical literature has been marked by its investigation of the Other (Schnapper 1998). To appreciate French intellectuals’ concern with alterity, one need only consider Fanon’s (1967) deeply personal discussion of the psychological effects of French racism and colonial practices or Kristeva’s (1998) psychoanalytic account of the role of the foreigner. Rather than portraying the foreigner as simply someone without the rights or responsibilities of the citizen, work by Kristeva and Fanon suggests that non-citizens literally and figuratively embodies the fears of French society. Their work reveals the dark underbelly of the citizen/ foreigner dyad, where the stranger inspires mistrust and hatred in the mainstream, and is engaged in a constant but futile search for belonging. In their work, the foreigner becomes the metaphor for personal and social insecurity as well as the catalyst for anger. Barred from assimilation because of skin color, or because of religious or cultural practices, the foreigner remains at the margins of French society. Such hostility towards foreigners is often attributed simply to the New Right or other conservative groups. According to Fanon (1967), however, it lies at the heart of European civilizations like France, since colonialism and slavery would not have been possible without it. This view is further developed in the large body of historical research that exists on France’s slave trade and empire (for a primary source account see DuTertre 1973; see also Pluchon 1984). Historians working in this field argue that the colonialism of the past continues to shape popular and social representations of the Other today. As Bataille (1999) proposes, while history cannot completely account for contemporary forms of racial discrimination, it nonetheless assisted in the construction of a social order based on racial differences. Above all, such scholarship suggests that any contemporary exploration of race relations must take note of the past in order to understand
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how ideas of difference have been written into many cultural and intellectual traditions. Most radically, this view has lead to an increasing revisionism about the egalitarianism of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, suggesting that these events, which usually signal a shift to modernity, may have deliberately excluded those who were not white, setting up an unequal system of power relations that lasts to the present day. France, like all major European powers pursued an aggressive policy of colonialism and slavery well into the nineteenth century. These practices created major ideological problems for the Revolutionaries since they contravened many of the basic tenets of the Rights of Man. As one author put it in 1789, the very year of the French Revolution, ‘‘the slave trade is an embarrassment to humanity, a strike against our nation, it is in open contradiction with our principles and our constitution’’ (Lescallier 1789: 23). Despite such staunch criticism, most commentators, including Lescallier, were limited in their demands to slave holders because they were concerned about the economic problems that immediate freedom for all slaves would cause for French colonies. Rather than urging instant, universal manumission, they generally proposed that children of slaves should be free, while current slaves should continue to work for a period of years (see also, Socie´te´ des Amis des Noirs 1790). Reflecting this ambiguity within the Revolution, the mainland (or metropolitan) response to slavery was inconsistent. For example, in 1802 while the Revolutionaries initially supported Toussaint and his followers in St Domingue (Haiti), Napoleon sent armed forces to try to take back the island. His attempts and those under the Restoration to reinstate slavery in the French Caribbean were moderately successful and slavery was not fully outlawed until the 1840s (Blackburn 1988). Examining primary and secondary historical sources reveals how the best ideals of citizenship and equality could be compromised by racism. Just as feminist theorists and historians have argued that the Enlightenment failed to include women as citizens with full rights (Fraisse 1994; Bosworth 2001), so too does this scholarship suggest that the Enlightenment excluded people of color. Given that criminology and the prison are usually understood to have emerged from many of these same historical and intellectual developments, such views have dramatic implications for an understanding of race and imprisonment. Yet, French criminologists have made little of them. Instead, in their accounts of the prison, they tend to concentrate on the effects of economic deprivation, the urban-rural divide, or occasionally, on gender (Combessie 1996; Marchetti 1996; Rostaing 1997).
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Those interested in the contemporary repercussions of the issues considered by historians of slavery must turn either to contemporary sociological investigations of the meaning and experiences of citizenship and immigration or to the more general body of work in urban sociology. Studies of the former tend to concentrate on France’s role in the European community. Scholars in this field have proposed that the new European identity, elsewhere often referred to as Fortress Europe, has been formed in opposition to other nations. They conclude that, as a result, in almost all European nations over the last ten years, most of the social problems have been attributed by popular sentiment and government officials to clandestine immigration or to foreign-born youth (Palidda 1999). Within France, the immigrant or foreign-born youth who receive the most negative attention of this kind are individuals from former colonies in Algeria, Morocco and other North African (maghre´bin) countries. As much urban sociology has revealed, they are often viewed as the source of violence and disorder in French cities. Following a rash of urban unrest in the early 1990s, many sociologists have turned their attention to life in industrial towns like Strasbourg and Mulhouse and in the poor suburbs (banlieux) on the outskirts of big cities like Paris and Lyon. Scholars in this rather densely populated and divided field argue, among other things, over whether the nation is witnessing a cultural importation of U.S.-style ghettos and ethnic tension (Body-Gendrot 1998, 1999; Wacquant 1999c). While there is little agreement over the causes or even the form of such unrest, these studies provide some of the greatest detail available on the treatment of minorities in France (for a general summary of many different related issues, see Bourdieu 1993). Most significantly such accounts suggest that views about crime and delinquency, as well as practices of policing and punishment, are shaped in part by the vestiges of colonialism. Those interested in how these ideas shape and underpin the contemporary prison must combine the theoretical conclusions of urban sociology with details from some of the few ethnographic and autobiographical accounts of racist practices and beliefs within the nation’s penal system. Two recent instances of this type of literature can be found in Vasseur’s (2000) account of daily life in La Sante´ prison, and Moumen-Marcoux’s (1998) portrayal of the lives of young HIV-positive maghre´bins in the French penal system. Vasseur (2000), for example, regularly describes troubled race relations among inmates in La Sante´. She also observes in passing that, along with other French prisons, La
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Sante´ separated inmates from one another on the basis of skin color and ethnicity as late as the 1990s. In her ethnographic study, Moumen-Marcoux (1998) emphasizes the impact of prejudice and race relations upon young North Africans’ offending and incarceration. She explains their delinquency through strain theory as a response to competing forces of society, tradition, public, private, etc. She notes that their disempowerment and marginalization within mainstream society leaves few options for legitimate achievement. In her opinion, their criminal activity is a mode of resistance, while their punishment is a forcible reminder of the nation’s overarching power. By subsuming discourses of race within those of citizenship, France somewhat conveniently presents itself as a nation without prejudice. Yet, historical and sociological literature, while limited, reveals that race does indeed play an important, if hidden, role in penal institutions. In particular, it suggests that forms of treatment based on skin-color that, in other countries would have raised considerable outcry, in France often occur without comment. A pertinent example of popular prejudice and fear was provided in 2002 when the National Front leader JeanMarie Le Pen defeated the former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the presidential run-off. It appears that in a society so committed to the citizen/foreigner dyad, France may simply have veiled the oppression they had hoped to eradicate. England and Wales: Justice and Fairness in a Multicultural Society2 If, in France, tradition dictates that difference is subsumed within a discourse on citizenship, in England it is shaped by ideas of national identity. As a consequence, views and constructions of race in England lie somewhere between France and the U.S. In common with the United States, statistics are routinely collected which differentiate between racial and ethnic groups in the general population and in such specific institutions as prisons, schools and hospitals. Like France, much of the analysis that is subsequently made about this data is posed in terms of citizenship and immigration. These categories, however, are not presented as mutually exclusive. Rather, they are interpreted both in opposition to, and as part of, an amorphous, though powerful vision of national identity that, because of its valorization of certain cultural and historical traditions, excludes recent immigrants or descendants of foreigners.
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This construct of national identity leads some to comment that being Black is inconsistent with being British (Agozino 2000b: 370). As Gilroy (1987: 45) notes: the politics of race in [Britain] is fired by conceptions of national belonging and homogeneity which not only blur the distinction between race and nation, but rely on that very ambiguity for their effect this nation is represented in terms which are simultaneously biological and cultural. Consequently, certain individuals, generally those from former colonies, or those who are not white, may fall short of being ascribed a truly British identity irrespective of their citizenship. This suggests that, in England, the politics of race has historically been understood not just as a matter of procedural justice in which individuals have varying rights and responsibilities depending on their legal status as citizens or foreigners, but, in a more agonistic fashion, as one of belonging. As the conservative politician Enoch Powell stated in 1968, ‘‘the West Indian does not by being born in England become an Englishman. In law, he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or Asian still’’ (Powell in Gilroy 1987: 46). Indeed, for many years, British citizenship was accorded to people of different cultures, language and tradition all over the globe. The British Empire, stretching from Australia and New Zealand in the South Pacific, through the Indian Subcontinent and parts of Asia, all the way to African and beyond, consolidated seemingly infinite diversity into a whole. As Said (1993, 1995) and Cannadine (2002) argue, although in very different ways, colonialism and Empire create identity. For Said (1995) the British Empire (like the French one) designated and defined Others by which the Occident could know itself. For Cannadine, there was a looser attempt at assimilation of difference into Britishness that relied just as much on ideas of class and status as it did on race or difference. In either case, identity may not simply be equated with race or color, but is connected to culture, power (both of self-definition and economic), and belonging. Other historical sources uphold this complex view of the role of race in British society. Thus, the women in Webster’s (1998) evocative analysis of female immigration to England in the two decades following WW2, describe how, educated on Imperial ideas of Britain as the mother country they expected to feel at home when they arrived. Despite their citizenship as British subjects these women often found their
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reception in Britain less than welcoming as they encountered entrenched hostility and racism which made it difficult to make friends, find housing and participate in satisfying employment (Webster 1998). The Color of Crime and Justice in Contemporary England In terms of criminology, Rowe (1998) and others (Gilroy 1987) argue that ideas of national identity and belonging helped define crime and disorder as racial problems in the 1970s and 1980s. Rowe (1998) thus reports how the media and the police described the urban disorders in Bristol, Brixton and elsewhere as deviations from the fundamental national character. He points to similar interpretations of unrest throughout Britain’s history to argue that this view did not emerge solely from Thatcherism and the New Right as others claim (Hall et al. 1978; Gilroy 1987). Rather, the tendency to racialize disorder in Britain, according to Rowe (1998), relates to a cultural tradition defining the law and the legal system as a symbolic form of the nation. Such conceptual analysis of the relationship between race and crime has not trickled down to prison literature in England outside the work of a few commentators (FitzGerald and Marshall, 1996; Agozino 1997). Instead, criminological discussions of race remain bound up in considerations of street crime and the police. Such interest was recently renewed by the government inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence (Macpherson 1999; on this case see also, Agozino 2000a). Lawrence, a young Afro-Caribbean man, was killed in a racially motivated attack in 1993 in London by a group of white youths. Not one of his killers was convicted for his death. Blaming the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in London for the failure to convict the perpetrators, Sir William Macpherson, who chaired the inquiry into the policing of Lawrence’s murder, fell short of accusing any individuals officers involved in the case of direct racism. Rather, he argued that the general incompetence and attitude of the MPS rested upon the existence of widespread institutional racism. According to Macpherson, racism exists within all organizations and institutions; it infiltrates the community and starts amongst the very young. His primary recommendation for the MPS is to increase their trust in while gaining the confidence of minority communities. This, he suggests they do in a number of ways. First, the police must recruit more minorities so as better to reflect the communities in which they work. Likewise, he calls for a review of all race
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training in the force and a renewed commitment to such programs for officers at all levels. For Macpherson (1999), in other words, part of the solution to institutional racism lies in recognizing diversity. The police force’s weakness, he seems to suggest, lies in its cultural insensitivity. However, at the same time, Macpherson also emphasizes issues more generally associated with traditional liberal philosophy that leaves little room for cultural differences. In particular, he argues, as others have before him when describing recent problems in the English prisons (Woolf 1991; Sparks et al. 1996), that the criminal justice system suffers from a legitimacy deficit brought on by a perceived lack of fairness (Macpherson 1999). Without fair treatment, he argues, there can be no just policing and thus no legitimate law enforcement. In many ways, of course, Macpherson is right. The police, prisons, and the criminal justice system at large must recognize difference while remaining fair and consistent in their treatment. The difficulty, of course, lies in putting both goals into practice in a country where an idealized and unitary notion of national identity remains so embedded across a range of cultural institutions. Justice and difference, it seems, remain mutually exclusive. The United States’ Politics of Difference In discussions of race, the U.S. stands at an opposite pole to France. Eschewing the binary categories of foreigner and citizen, identity in the U.S. is interpreted largely in terms of difference. Rather than viewing themselves as part of a larger whole, citizens are commonly asked to differentiate themselves from one another as members of ethnic and racial groups when they fill out a variety of forms. The options they may choose to select change over time as racial and ethnic categories constantly expand (Rodriguez 2001). At first glance, the sheer array of possible categories, most commonly listed as Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Other, suggest a many-hued society. Indeed, as the statistics from the 2000 Census demonstrate, the United States in many places is remarkably heterogeneous. At the same time, however, the U.S. remains segregated to an extent far greater than many other comparable nations. As study after study reveals, color, language, economics, and nationality, act as seemingly impermeable barriers, keeping people not just in different categories in statistical instruments, but in different jobs, houses, and schools (Massey and Denton 1993).
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Ironically, at least one of the causes of such division may be found in the intellectual and ideological views thought to champion racial equality through identity politics. Although identity politics ostensibly promises sensitive understanding of the specificity of people’s needs and experiences, it has often been accused of creating insurmountable boundaries and barriers between groups and individuals (Mercer 1994; Hall and du Gay 1996). Within feminism, this issue became the cause ce´le´bre of the 1980s as theorists fought over the strengths and limitations of essentialism and difference in order to identify the subject of feminist theory and action (Schor and Weed 1994). Feminists argued that identity categories achieve their meaning, in large part, by what they are not. That is to say, to be a woman, means, among other things, not to be a man; to be gay suggests not straight; to be Black requires one not to be white. Consequently, as it was in many early feminist accounts of gender, difference often becomes fixed and immutable in discussions of race. One crucial result of this approach has been that in many areas of scholarship and daily practice a black/white binary has been established which not only excludes other races, but also those of biracial heritage. Despite the undeniably mixed nature of U.S. society that is derived not only from the effects of slavery but also from centuries of immigration, color is often presented as a determining characteristic of identity. According to Patterson (1998: 240), in this oppositional relationship of color, the Afro-American lies at the heart of Euro-Americas conception of itself as a race, as a culture, as a people, and as a nation. Blackness is the canvas against which whiteness paints itself, the mirror in which the collective eye sees itself, the catalyst in which this great mass culture explosively creates itself. Such a view obtains part of its rationale, as the history of slavery and subsequent racist social institutions makes clear, in the so-called onedrop rule, where blackness was ascribed to anyone thought to have had any Black ancestor. While primarily relevant in the Segregated South, where this rule was written into law and where the stain of blackness determined where citizens could sit on the bus and which school they could attend, the reification and connection between race and blood that it implied has echoes throughout the U.S. (Davis 1991; Omi and Winant 1994). It has penetrated mainstream society through various historical pathways including slavery, the Jim Crow laws, and the ghetto, each of which has served, structurally, economically and
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culturally, to keep Blacks and whites divided. More recently, it has reappeared in arguments about IQ and affirmative action. As in France, historians and other scholars suggest that slavery set up certain ideas of race that remain pervasive and destructive in the U.S. today. In Rituals of Blood, Patterson (1998) articulates this approach most dramatically through detailed descriptions of lynchings which he claims left deep psychological scars on Blacks and whites alike. Messerschmidt (1997) takes a similar approach to lynching arguing that it shaped white Southern masculinity. According to Patterson (1998), problems besetting Afro-American families today can be traced directly to the institution of slavery. In his view, Afro-American men were particularly devastated by slavery because of what he calls the ethnocidal assault of gender roles, especially those of father and husband, leaving deep scars in the relations between Afro-American men and women (Patterson 1998). Although elsewhere Patterson (1997) highlights the importance of not assuming that all Afro-American families and individuals are oppressed at all times, he calls on scholars everywhere to explore in more detail the enduring effects of slavery today. Such views have marked the criminal justice system in many ways, causing an increasing number of social commentators to argue that the U.S. criminalizes color (Wacquant 1999b), Thus, for example, recent investigations into law enforcement agencies nationwide have demonstrated that police routinely target black drivers for stop and searches on the highways and streets of the U.S. (Miller 1995). Similarly, in New York, Cincinnati, Los Angeles and elsewhere police departments stand accused of injuring, killing and framing men of color (for an account of the situation in New York see Harring 2000). All in all, it seems that W.E.B, DuBois’ twentieth century notion of the color line is an enduring problem for the U.S. in the twenty-first century. Race and Punishment in the US: An Unbroken Line with Slavery? The effects of such views on prison, however, remains under-theorized. Typically, the war on drugs is proffered to explain the over-representation of minority women and men in the nation’s penal facilities. Only in some historical accounts have the connections between slavery and the penitentiary been noted (Lichtenstein 1996; Oshinsky 1997; Myers 1998). Oshinsky (1997), for example, in his best-selling account of Mississippi’s plantation penitentiary, Parchman Farm, describes how
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the institution resolved both racial and economic tensions after the end of slavery: In less than a decade, Parchman had become a giant money machine: profitable, self-sufficient, and secure. For Southerners of both races, it represented something familiar as well. Parchman was a powerful link to the past a place of racial discipline where blacks in striped clothing worked the cotton fields for the enrichment of others. And it would remain this way for another half-century, until the civil rights movement methodically swept it away. In many ways, French sociologist Wacquant (2000) takes up where Oshinsky ends his analysis. Using broader brush strokes befitting a more theoretical analysis rather than a purely historical one, Wacquant traces the shift from slavery to Jim Crow Justice to the Ghetto and then to the prison. In each case, he argues that the social institution in question works to divide Blacks from whites while exploiting their labor. Thus, while it is difficult to trace an exact line between slavery and the prison, these scholars indicate numerous overlaps and similarities. Given the diversity of the incarcerated population in the U.S., similar analysis needs to be conducted for other minority groups. Ross (1998) for example, in her text, Inventing the Savage, goes some way towards tracing connections in contemporary treatment of Native Americans with the U.S. colonial past. Despite the rapidly growing population of Latina/os, however, little work has been done on their experiences. Just as in the wider society, race in U.S. criminology, is all too often conceived as Black and white.
Conclusion: Re-lmagining Race and Imprisonment In his recent book The Culture of Control, Garland (2001) seeks to explain the punitive turn most Western Societies have taken over the past decades. Representative of the cutting edge of thinking about punishment, however, Garland is strangely silent about race. He is not alone. For too many criminologists, the over-representation of minorities in prisons across the world is merely happenstance. Even where racial disproportionality is recognized, the most common explanations are usually found in the war on drugs, both in the policing strategies and sentencing practices that accompany it (Mauer 2001). Discussions of this phenomenon, particularly in its effect on the
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incarceration rates of women, are well rehearsed and do not need to be restated here (Bush-Baskette 1999). What this work does not explicate, however, are any historical roots of the problems, nor the complacency of the general public about such sentencing policy. Why is there not more outrage and concern about the high rates of young Black men being incarcerated under these laws? Is there, in other words, something expendable about this young minority population? Does prison seem to be the right place for them? If so, why? Rather than searching for a single reason for racism, such as in the war on drugs, for example, it may be that notions of race have simply been written into the entire notion of punishment itself. As Omi and Winant observe (1994: 158), race is present in every institution, every relationship, every individual. This is the case not only for the way society is organized spatially, culturally, in terms of stratification, etc. but also for our perception and understandings of personal experience. The question then becomes how to see it. Was race written into punishment at the birth of the prison, or is it a more recent phenomenon, reflecting the role of the prison as receptacle for the underclass? How does it connect to economics and class? Are all minority groups equally as vulnerable to the forces of social control? Whatever the form and origin of ideas of race, criminologists need to interrogate the intellectual roots and underpinnings of ideas of difference in societies to see how they reinforce current penal practice. While some have already documented connections between slavery and the birth of the prison (Sellin 1976; Oshinsky 1997; Myers 1998; Wacquant 2000), more work needs to be done on the effects of colonialism and immigration. In each case, the additional influence of gender needs also to be revealed. Such demands are complicated, since, as this paper has shown, not only do prison populations vary across cultures and nations, but so too do ideas of race and difference. Thus, according to Cannadine (2002), while overall the rulers of the British Empire saw their foreign subjects as inferior, they dealt with them on a day-to-day basis according to a regimented hierarchy, inviting some to participate as full members of the ruling class in government and social events. Similarly, notions of race are constructed in many different ways: both officially and culturally. Do the boxes people tick on a census determine their treatment at the hands of police? Or is there a much more subjective interpretation of identity going on? Though the
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examples of everyday racism experienced by African-Americans in the U.S., irrespective of their personal status in society, suggests a fairly well-defined problem with skin color, clearly more attention needs to be given to demarcating the actual constructions of race under analysis. Considering the historically contingent and socially constructed nature of race takes criminologists away from familiar territory. However, mapping the ideological connections between ideas of race and the prison is crucial if we are to challenge the legitimacy of the current system. If we can show that race is indeed a social construct, and that it is dependent in part upon the prison, while the prison relies on it as well, then we may be able to reinvigorate current understanding of crime and punishment around the world.
Notes 1. This year is being used as the comparison since it is the period for which the most recent official statistics in France are available. 2. While socio-politically one nation, Britain contains three different legal and penal systems in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England and Wales. For the purpose of this paper all prison data will refer only to England and Wales.
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