Death and Other Penalties

Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration

Lisa Guenther, Scott Zeman, Geoffrey Adelsberg

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780823265312
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Mass incarceration is one of the most pressing ethical and political issues of our time. In this volume, philosophers join activists and those incarcerated on death row to grapple with contemporary U.S. punishment practices and draw out critiques around questions of power, identity, justice, and ethical responsibility.This work takes shape against a backdrop of disturbing trends: The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country in the world. A disproportionate number of these prisoners are people of color, and, today, a black man has a greater chance of going to prison than to college. The United States is the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty, even after decades of scholarship, statistics, and even legal decisions have depicted a deeply flawed system structured by racism and class oppression.Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation of prisoners as workers and as "raw material" for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition.The resulting collection contributes to a growing intellectual and political resistance to the apparent inevitability of incarceration and state execution as responses to crime and to social inequalities. It addresses both philosophers and activists who seek intellectual resources to contest the injustices of punishment in the United States.

NOTES

FOREWORD: LIFE AND OTHER RESPONSIBILITIES

Joy James

1. When the Secret Service attempted to intimidate antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells from publicly denouncing the mass execution of black soldiers, she dared the federal agents to arrest her and they subsequently departed. Since Wells’s crusades against extrajudicial killings, campaigns have expanded against all forms of death and other penalties. The approaching fortieth anniversary of the 1976 reinstitution of the death penalty following its 1972 abolition is an occasion for reflection. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling created a reprieve for Angela Y. Davis, as a political prisoner—Governor Ronald Reagan was seeking the death penalty against Davis based on Jonathan Jackson’s taking of hostages and subsequent deaths, including that of the teenager, caused by gunfire from California prison guards. With the ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional, Davis was released on bail and effectively worked with her defense committees to be acquitted of all charges. Jonathan’s older brother, prison theorist George Jackson, author of Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye, was killed by prison guards while Davis was imprisoned.

2. “Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz,” this volume.

3. Statement on Solitary Confinement, presented June 2012. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin chaired a hearing on solitary confinement in the federal prison system. “Statement on Solitary Confinement,” this volume.

4. “Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry,” this volume.

INTRODUCTION: DEATH AND OTHER PENALTIES

Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman

1. Children’s Defense Fund, “The Cradle to Prison Pipeline, Summary Report” (2009). http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/cradle-prison-pipeline-report-2007-full-highres.html.

2. See, for example, David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Jennifer Culbert, Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). The most important Supreme Court cases on racism and the death penalty are Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972) and McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987).

3. Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh” Punishment & Society 3 (January 2001): 120. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010). David Garland, Peculiar Institution.

4. David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: The Free Press, 1997).

5. See Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).

6. http://www.prisonradio.org/media/audio/memories-maroon-mumia-abu-jamal.

EXCAVATING THE SEDIMENTATIONS OF SLAVERY: THE UNFINISHED PROJECT OF AMERICAN ABOLITION

Brady Heiner

The research for this chapter was supported by a faculty research grant from California State University, Fullerton. I would also like to acknowledge the participants of the Philosophy Department Colloquium Series at CSU Fullerton and the students from my Social and Political Philosophy courses, for providing feedback on earlier versions of this work. Special thanks are due to Christopher Muller for assistance in data mining and generating Figures 3–5, to the inspiring students from my advanced directed study course on “Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolitionism”: Jesus Herrera Rivera, Alejandro Fernandez, Marissa Piña, and Eric Tafolla, and to Jesus for also providing invaluable research assistance.

1. Elliot Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998), 21.

2. Carol S. Steiker, “Capital Punishment and Contingency,” Harvard Law Review 125 (2012): 760–787.

3. Roy Walmsley, World Prison Population List, 9th ed. (London, UK: International Centre for Prison Studies, King’s College, 2010): http://www.idcr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/WPPL-9–22.pdf.

4. I use the term racialized to capture the “discursive process by which particular groups have been classified as non-white; specific meanings have been attached to those groups, and those meanings have been used to support the hierarchical distribution of power, land, and resources.” See Addie C. Rolnick, “The Promise of Mancari: Indian Political Rights as Racial Remedy,” N.Y.U. Law Review 86 (2011): 965n31; and more generally Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

5. E. Ann Carson and William Sabol, Prisoners in 2011 (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2012): http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p11.pdf.

6. Caroline W. Harlow, Education and Correctional Populations (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage, 2006).

7. I write “at the time of their arrest,” because many imprisoned persons throughout American history, from Malcolm X to Stanley “Tookie” Williams, pursue and actualize their education while incarcerated. This possibility has been thwarted since the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994) eliminated prisoners’ eligibility for Pell Grants, causing most of the over seven hundred postsecondary degree-granting programs in existence in prisons at that time to close. See Caroline W. Harlow, Education and Correctional Populations (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003); and Laura Gorgol and Brian Sponsler, Unlocking Potential: Results of a National Survey of Postsecondary Education in State Prisons (Washington, DC: Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2011).

8. Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

9. Joy James, The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (New York: SUNY Press, 2005).

10. Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Marie Gottschalk, “The Past, Present, and Future of Mass Incarceration,” Criminology and Public Policy 10, no. 3 (2011): 483–504; Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (2010): 703–758; Heather Ann Thompson, “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 8, no. 3 (2011): 15–45.

11. Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998): 74–95; “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 39–52; “Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 61–73; “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 96–107; “Incarcerated Women: Transformative Strategies,” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir 1, no. 1 (1996): 21–34; “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” Color Lines, September 10, 1998; Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); Brady Thomas Heiner, “‘From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison’: Angela Y. Davis’s Abolition Democracy,” in Radical Philosophy Today, Volume 5: Democracy, Racism, Prisons, ed. Harry van der Linden (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2007): 219–227.

12. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” Representations 92 (2005): 1–15.

13. Joy James, The New Abolitionists, Joy James (ed.), Unfinished Liberation: Policing and Imprisonment, a special issue of Radical Philosophy Review 3, no. 1 (2000).

14. Dorothy E. Roberts, “Constructing a Criminal Justice System Free of Racial Bias: An Abolitionist Framework,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 39 (2007): 261–285.

15. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).

16. Loïc Wacquant, “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” Theoretical Criminology 4 (2000): 377–389; “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3 (2001): 95–134; “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the United States,” New Left Review 13 (2002): 41–60.

17. Colin Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” R...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Life and Other Responsibilities
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Death and Other Penalties
• Legacies of Slavery
• Death Penalties
• Rethinking Power and Responsibility
• Isolation and Resistance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index