“Post-Modern Effects of Criminal Justice Policy: Urban
Policing, Prison Privatization & 21st Century Crime Control”
A Presentation to the
Faculty Seminar on Post Modern Thought
University of North Florida
September 22, 2000
by
Michael A. Hallett, PhD.
University of North Florida
Introduction
In my introductory remarks last time, I flippantly said that the real
reason I’m here is that I hate post-modernism and that by virtue of
the “return of social theory,” I thought that much of the spirit of
liberalism had been redeemed. Given that Post Modernism
seemingly has conceded that its own claimsmaking about social
life is also a rather swashbuckling embodiment of discursive
power-relations—not itself free from the burdens of linguistic
turning and imperfect speech situations—we can now “return to
social theory”—albeit in a different way.
So let me clarify my introductory statement by saying that it is not
Post-Modernism I hate, as much as where I perceive that Post
Modernism leaves us—in the no win situation of simultaneously
being fearful to proclaim the Southeast Asian sex trade sexist and
inhumane, while simultaneously using jargonistic and
impenetrable speech, to pat ourselves on the back for not being
colonialists. To be “frankly ethno-centric,” while being sensitive to
the suffering of “others”—in the worst sense of the term
“others”—is still, it seems to me, not only redemptive of the spirit
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of liberalism, but is indeed a shade of liberalism itself (in both the
worst and the best senses.
So it is in this way that I perceive we are “After” Post
Modernism—with the return of narrative—leaving us with the
THREEFOLD TASK OF SOCIAL THEORY AFTER
POSTMODERNISM:
1.
2.
3.
to clarify the epistemic claims we make and positions we
take by producing interpretations and explanations of society
& culture;
to articulate the normative assumptions that are involved in
this project;
to mediate between specialized scientific professions
“experts” and the wider public sphere.
Its great for all of us to have an opportunity to share insights into
this theme by drawing on examples of our own work. I hope to
show how it is true for the discipline of criminal justice that
“science, rhetoric, and politics” overlap, instead of forming clearly
demarcated social spheres.
POST MODERNISM AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE
It is impossible, of course, to discuss social control and post
modernism without Foucault. Discipline & Punish was the first
“postmodern” book I read. Foucault is deeply suspicious of the
Enlightenment project of “reason” and “science,” arguing that the
more pervasive “disciplines” of order, the less necessary the public
use of force “punishment” becomes. The goal is not to punish but
to “correct”—to gain compliance through the hidden and removed
use of punishments by “experts”—rather than through the overt
use of force by the state continually.
This makes punishment more palatable and, therefore, the exertion
of power in social control, more acceptable. As David Garland
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writes (1990): “In this sense, power operates through individuals
rather than against them” (138). So that for Foucault, “systems of
production, of domination, and of socialization fundamentally
depend upon the successful subjugation of bodies—that bodies be
mastered, subjugated to training—and the object of this training is
to render them docile.”
Now, for Foucault, this docility is not the direct product of the use
of punishment, but rather a byproduct of disciplinary logics and
technologies running rampant in society. In other words, Foucault
argues that while there may be no isolated conspirators (e.g.
capitalists) there is indeed a conspiracy—the inner conspiracy of
knowledge-power and technology in the social control of bodies.
So Foucault is pretty explicit that power is indeed exerted in
punishment, but not in the traditional ways we might think. In
short, it is better to “discipline” than to “punish.”
Well, I am interested in this “training” as well, and some of my
work over the past few years has focused on the ways punishment
is “made acceptable” to the American public, as promoted by
special interests and “experts.”
OVERHEAD III: COPS—“The most punishing hour on
Television”
The first example of my work I’d like to share comes from a
project I titled “Backstage with COPS”—where myself and a
colleague went “backstage” with the production crews filming
COPS episodes in Nashville to explore the meanings of the show
for officers (some of whom were our former students).
At the end of the Hacking chapter, the discussion turns to the
notion of a “matrix.” Here, “constructionists” are said “to maintain
that classifications are not determined by how the world is, but are
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convenient ways in which to represent it. …Facts are the
consequences of the ways in which we represent the world” (33).
He’s talking here, of course, about “benchmarks” in the hard
sciences—questioning whether they are “constructed” or “real.”
He proposes a synthesis, stating: “the result may be particularly
strong interactions. What was known about people of a kind may
become false because people of that kind have changed in virtue of
what they believe about themselves. I have called this the looping
effect of human kinds” (34)
As many have noted, the media play not simply a reporting role
but a defining role in shaping public understanding about social
issues, particularly crime and justice. As George Gerbner has
famously stated: “The more television we watch, the more we
believe the world to be like that portrayed on television.” 93
percent of Americans say that their number one source of
information about crime and justice is “television.”
The GOAL of our project “Backstage with COPS” was twofold:
1. To assess the extent to which officers who appear in reality
television programs such as COPS believe that the portrayal
of police work on the show is an accurate or otherwise useful
portrayal;
2. to draw on the sociological literature of Dramaturgy and
Police Subculture to dig deeper to try and assess the
consequences of “reality television” for Police Subculture
itself.
A couple of things are going on here:
1.
Media production companies, like the one that produces
the show COPS, are offering—up front—full editorial
control of the footage that ultimately gets broadcast, to
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police officials themselves (talk about propaganda)
because producers want that actual footage (car
chases/flashing lights) and this cannot be attained without
the cooperation of the police;
2.
police are now more thoughtfully than ever before
orchestrating what Peter Manning calls the “police
occupational mandate” (meaning that police strategically
orchestrate a presentation of self that is salient for both
police subculture and the television-watching public).
This is a new frontier, we concluded, in that police departments
have been traditionally resistant to the intrusion of the media into
their daily operations. The police are now more strategically than
ever before using the mass media to orchestrate public support for
law enforcement. In short, police administrators are now allowing
media personnel into the formerly-taboo backstage regions of
police work (I.e. in the cruiser itself) in order to foster a public
image of police work that is supportive of the police occupational
mandate: “the dangerous and heroic enterprise of crook-catching
and the watchful prevention of crimes” (Manning, 1997).
OVERHEAD: SURVEY FINDINGS OF COPS RESEARCH
If mass media do play an active role in the shaping of perceptions
about crime—then it seems to me we have a responsibility to
question, examine, and account for that portrayal. We have
defined crime for the past twenty years by relying on the most
visible and publicly exploitable facets of the crime problem:
violence and drugs--while largely ignoring discussion of the
deeper underlying causes of crime. COPS and other lawenforcement based “reality programs” offer up a sanitized version
of the “official” police worldview: that not-yet-convicted suspects
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are to be treated as dangerous predators and that more law
enforcement and punishment are the answer for the crime problem.
I think this is an example of work that contributes to at least the
third of the “threefold tasks of social theory”: to mediate between
specialized scientific professions—“experts”—and the wider
public sphere.”
***IF POLITICS IS PERCEPTION, AND IF MOST
AMERICANS REALLY DO RELY ON THE MEDIA FOR
THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THE CRIME PROBLEM, THE
QUESTION I THINK THIS COPS RESEARCH RAISES
ABOUT CRIMINAL JUSTICE IS: TO WHAT EXTENT
DOES “REALITY” EVEN MATTER? ***
PRISON PRIVATIZATION
The next example of my work I’d like to share is a project titled: “
“Race, Crime, and the Cultural Politics of Prison Privatization,”
which attempts to synthesize my experiences researching and
fighting the implementation of “prison privatization” in various
places around the country. I’ve been a consultant to several labor
unions and state legislatures on issues related to privatization.
In my most recent prison privatization project, I’m exploring the
strategic use of cultural messages about race, crime, and
punishment employed by a private prison corporation seeking to
secure a contract for managing an entire state prison system. The
research employs a “culturalist” perspective on law “in” society to
demonstrate the role cultural messages play in the social policy
debate about prison privatization. In this view, the creation and
operation of law occurs as much from the “bottom up” as it does
from the “top down,” with legality being “co-produced” by myriad
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relational contingencies impacting all users of law, whatever their
social or formal legal position.
Of particular interest to those taking a “culturalist” perspective are
the oft-found “taken-for-granted” assumptions about law as these
operate both in relation to and outside of the influence of formal
legal institutions and authorities (e.g. assumptions about “early
release” of convicted murderers inside a capital jury {Steiner,
Bowers & Sarat 1999}; in the decision making of would-be
adoptive mothers and birthmothers and their shared fear of
becoming “ex-mothers” {Yngvesson, 1997}; and in the
discretionary processes of agents of the criminal justice system
{Ferguson & Musheno, 2000}).
*
In April 1997, Tennessee became the epicenter of one of the major
public policy shifts of our time in criminal justice, prison
privatization. That year, facing a projected $100 million budget
shortfall, the Tennessee legislature gave serious consideration to the
largest-ever privatization proposal on record, a contract for
privatizing the entire Tennessee state prison system--with an inmate
population approaching 20,000. On April 29, 1997, executives from
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) escorted key members
of the legislature's Select Oversight Committee on Corrections to a
private meeting at the Crown Plaza Hotel, across from the state
capital in downtown Nashville. News reporters who accidentally
learned of the meeting were politely asked to leave (Wade 1997b).
On April 30, 1997, executives from Wackenhut Corporation arrived
in Nashville to take six members of the House Ways and Means
Committee out to dinner.
OVERHEAD: SUPPLY & DEMAND IN THE PRISON MARKET
The major opponent to the latest effort to privatize Tennessee’s
prison system became the Tennessee State Employee’s Association
(TSEA), for whom the author was a hired consultant during the
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initial stages of the debate and delivered a report to the legislature
against privatization on their behalf (Hallett 1997). The TSEA is a
state employee labor union, roughly 4,500 members of which serve
as correctional officers in the state’s prisons.
We fought them to a draw on three separate occasions, until CCA
finally self-destructed
OVERHEAD OF “HEADLINES”? /Original sponsor of legislation
withdraws support.
*
Norman Rockwell to the Rescue: A Story of Power and the
Strategic Use of Legality
Stinging from the legislative sponsors’ withdrawal of support for
the effort to hand over control of Tennessee’s prison system to
CCA, the company ran a series of eleven full-page ads in (the
Gannett owned) Tennessean, the state’s largest-circulating
newspaper and the state’s “paper of record,” beginning on Sunday,
October 25, 1998 through Thursday, November, 19, 1998 and a
series of television commercials on Nashville stations throughout
the same period.
**[Insert CCA Ads/Rockwell depictions here.]**
In the above advertisements from CCA extolling the virtues of
prison privatization, an African-American woman is depicted as a
teacher at a chalk board, ostensibly teaching CCA inmates in a
CCA classroom. This is a clear rendition of a Saturday Evening
Post cover from October 27, 1917 depicting a child at a chalkboard
writing “Knowledge is power” over and over, as his father
discusses his performance with his teacher (see below). Clearly
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visible on the chalk board in the CCA ad are the terms
“socialization,” “stratification,” and “family.” “Socialization” is
defined as “the process by which an individual learns the customs
of his or her society.” Not surprisingly, the definition of
“stratification” provided on the board is not one involving
capitalistic exploitation of the surplus population or laboring
masses, but “the division of society into various classes based on
income, education, and values.” Finally, “family” is defined as “a
family…of a mother…” Conspicuously missing from this phrase
are the words “and father.” Above the teacher are the words
“Education,” “Counseling,” “Religion.”.
Put another way, in the midst of a profoundly damaging crisis of
legitimacy, the continued over-incarceration of mostly non-violent
minority offenders by a for-profit corporation is justified in
traditional value-laden terms: “values,” “family,” “customs”-asserted by an African-American, 70 percent of CCA’s inmate
population. Alas, a traditional criminological argument: in order to
reduce crime, the society itself is not what needs changing, it is the
itinerant criminal in the custody of the well-meaning corporation
needing “socialization” in order to accept the “stratified” order and
be instilled with “family” values.
Indeed, as Jan Cohn notes in her history of the Saturday
Evening Post, for which Rockwell was the key illustrator:
The Post was conceived by both (George Horace) Lorimer and
(Cyrus H.) Curtis as the medium of an American
consciousness. Geographically, as a national magazine, it was
intended to transcend local markets dominated by newspapers.
Intellectually, as a general-interest magazine printing both
fiction and non-fiction on a wide variety of subjects, it was
designed to reach audiences ignored by “highbrow” magazines
like Harper’s and the Atlantic. Commercially, as a magazine
that carried national advertising and allied itself with the
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newest business economics of standardization and national
distribution, the Post was created to echo and reinforce in its
contents the emerging concept of America as a nation unified
by consumption of standardized commodities (Cohn 1989: 9).
A leading scholar in the area of prison privatization recently pointed
out that Prudential Securities, in a 1997 analysis of the profit
potential of the private prisons market, identified four key threats to
the industry for investors: 1) falling crime; 2) shorter prison terms;
3) alternatives to incarceration; 4) changes to mandatory sentencing
laws for drug crimes (see Gilbert, 2000). Of course, knowing what
we know about crime--that both incarceration and victimization
occur disproportionately among the poor--privatization as a solution
to over-crowded and costly prisons leaves the fundamental structure
of society unaddressed, and, in this case, the fountain of all profits-ever increasing populations of uneducated surplus population to be
incarcerated for drug crime--conveniently intact (Irwin & Austin
1996).
Cultural and political forces struggle to create sensibilities
and ways of feeling among the social groups which they
address. In much the same way, the penal sensibilities of a
society can be gradually heightened or else eroded by means
of governmental example and political persuasion.
David Garland, Punishment and Culture:
The Symbolic Dimension of Criminal
Justice
The private prisons industry is one that rises and falls on a stockin-trade of human beings, most of whom are dark skinned and
poor. By drawing on the merchantile symbolism of Norman
Rockwell, I believe these advertisements speak volumes about
Garland’s contention that “culture”—particlularly in a capitilist
system such as ours, and a for-profit operation such as private
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prisons—may be understood to be an important element worthy of
mediation between “experts” and the “wider public sphere.”
Conclusion:
It seems to me that the real positive impact of post modernism on
the humanistic and social sciences over the past twenty-five years,
is an explicit reckoning of the fact that race, class, and gender
differences in outcome measures (e.g. infant mortality, education,
longevity, income) are not simply the byproducts of an unfair
system—but that notions of race, class, sexuality, and gender are,
in fact, themselves part of the mechanism of oppression as it has
always operated. The “social construction of X” involves the
construction of things to be taken for granted—as much as the
construction of things problematic. Examination of both of these
things, is our project. This still seems to me, though, to be (an
important) refinement of pre-existing liberal inclinations.
References
Ferguson, Jennifer L. & Michael Musheno (2000).
“Teaching with stories: Engaging students in critical selfreflection about policing and injustice.” Journal of Criminal
Justice Education.
Vol 11, No. 1, pps. 149-165
Foucault, Michel (1979).
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: Pantheon
Garland, David (1990).
Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Gilbert, Michael (2000)
"How much privatization is too much privatization of criminal
justice services?" In: Privatization of Criminal Justice: Past,
Present, and Future. David Shichor and Michael Gilbert,
Editors. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing
Hallett, Michael A. & J. Frank Lee (2000).
“Public Money, Private Interests: The Grassroots Movement
Against CCA in Tennessee.” In: Privatization in Criminal
Justice: Past, Present, and Future. David Shicor & Michael
J. Gilbert, Eds. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co.
pps. 227 – 244.
Hallett, Michael A. (1997).
Report to the Tennessee Legislature/Select Oversight
Committee on Corrections: Statement on the Proposal to
Privatize Tennessee Prisons. Nashville, TN: Tennessee State
Employees Association. Authored report, assisted in
development of counter-strategy to proposal, testified at
public hearing. Tennessee State Employees Association. May
1997 Testimony before Tennessee State Legislature/Select
Oversight Committee on Corrections "Statement on the
Proposal to Privatize Tennessee Prisons." May 15, 1997.
Tennessee State Employees Association
Hallett, Michael A. & Dennis Powell (1995).
“Backstage with COPS: The Dramaturgical Reification of
Police Subculture in American Crime Info-tainment.”
American Journal of Police, Vol. XIV, No 1, pps 101-129.
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Irwin, John and James Austin (1997)
Its About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge (2nd
Edition). Boston, MA: Wadsworth.
Manning, Peter (1997).
Police Work: The Social Organization of Policing. Prospect
Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Steiner, Benjamin D., William Bowers, & Austin Sarat (1999)
“Folk Knowledge as Legal Action: Death Penalty Judgements
and the Tenet of Early Release in a Culture of Mistrust and
Punitiveness,” Law & Society Review
Wade, Paula (1997) April 20
Insider Job? Secrecy Clouds Prison Privatization, The
Commercial Appeal: A-6.
Yngvesson, Barbara (1997)
“Negotiating Motherhood: Identity and Difference in ‘Open’
Adoptions,” 31 Law & Society Review 31
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