The purpose of jails and prisons

The article Go Straight to Jail by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept (The Baffler) discusses the effects of jails on the communities in which they’re located.

“These numbers represent real people—hundreds of thousands of people who are directly impacted by the violence of jail incarceration and detention, millions of people who are affected by the extraction that jail facilitates, and by the violence that is perpetrated on families and communities through policing and incarceration across the varied geography of the United States.”

Jails and prisons are state-sanctioned violence. The society wielding these tools hope that the effect will be to lower the overall level of violence. These measures do not in any way address the conditions that led to the original violence, Instead, the negative consequences aim to reduce the likelihood of that person using violence as a solution to those original, continuing—and likely exacerbated by incarceration—problems. We may not have started it—it’s arguable that society is responsible to a large degree for the violence it not only contains, but can be seen to engender with its policies—but we are definitely participating. It’s a cycle of violence.

“While incarceration has always been wielded as a class-war project […]”

“As John Irwin noted, the jail “was devised as, and continues to be, the special social device for controlling . . . the lowest class of people.””

True. The rich don’t get arrested; they barely even go to jail. They get fined, at worst. Poor people lose their lives for mistakes or as exaggerated reactions to societal transgressions that have far less reach and impact than rich-people crimes. When a poor person robs an apartment, that’s one victim. When a rich person steals a company’s pension fund, that’s thousands of victims. If the poor person is caught, they lose their family, freedom, livelihood, future. If the rich person is caught, they sit out a pre-trial period at their luxurious home or homes, then plea-bargain for a fine and no admission of guilt. Of course they get to keep the money.