prisons_a_social_crime_and_failure_goldman

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2023

Lisa Tessman (2016: 164) recounts the case of a Jewish mother, running from Nazis, who faced a terrible choice. She could (a) drown her infant, or (b) accept the virtual certainty that her baby’s cries would doom the refugee group she was fleeing with. Given those options, (b) is worse. Still, preemptively drowning a baby—indeed one’s own baby—is a terrible act. To make sense of cases like this, Tessman turns to the concept of moral failure: an act that violates an important moral value such that the loss cannot be fully redeemed by gains elsewhere. I will argue that criminal justice needs a moral framework like Tessman’s. It needs to make sense of the fact that some options are genuinely better than others, without letting honorifics like ‘justice’ obscure the equally important fact the best available option might be terrible. More specifically, I will argue that when punishment involves prison, as it often does, it is a moral failure. It can be justified only in the sense that preemptively drowning an infant can be justified: like the fleeing mother, society might on some terrible occasions find itself with no better alternative.

Res Philosophica, 2020

Philosophers working on torture have largely failed to address the widespread use of torture in the U.S. prison system. Drawing on a victim-focused definition of torture, I argue that the U.S. prison system is a torturous institution in which direct torture occurs (the use of solitary confinement) and in which torture is allowed to occur through the toleration of sexual assault of inmates and the conditions of mass incarceration. The use and toleration of torture expresses and reinforces the moral exclusion of those subjected to it, particularly African Americans. Importantly, this moral exclusion and the experience of torture may be created and reinforced through institutional practices independently of the intentions of individuals acting within those institutions. By prioritizing torture victims' experiences and severing the link between torture and intention, my account forces a recognition that, far from being inconsistent with U.S. values, torture is deeply embedded within U.S. institutions. The torture debate in philosophy has focused almost exclusively on the use of torture in the context of terrorism. Authors defending the possibility of justified torture, such as Jeff McMahan (2018), Fritz Allhof (2012), and Uwe Steinhoff (2013), often make use of hypothetical cases such as 'ticking bomb' scenarios to defend the view that torture could in rare cases be justified. Other authors have critiqued the use of these hypotheticals for being unrealistic, misleading, and irrelevant to the realities of torture. 1 This back-and-forth between defenders of torture in ticking bomb cases and critics of such cases has effectively defined the contours of the torture debate in America since 9/11. This debate is characterized by an individualized narrative of torture that renders torture simultaneously hypervisible by asking us to consider whether torturing this person (whether real or hypothetical) is permissible yet makes the reality and true scope of torture invisible.

This article explores the manner in which the narratives in the Prison Noir volume (2014) edited by Joyce Carol Oates bring into view the limits and abusive practices of the American criminal justice system within the confines of one of its most secretive sites, the prison. Taking an insider’s perspective - all stories are written by award-winning former or current prisoners - the volume creates room for the usually silent voices of those incarcerated in correctional facilities throughout the United States. The article engages the effects of “prisonization” and the subsequent mortification of inmates by focusing on images of death and dying in American prisons, whether understood as a ‘social death,’ the isolation from any meaningful intercourse with society, as a ‘civil death,’ the stripping away of citizenship rights and legal protections, or as the physical termination of life as a result of illness, murder, suicide or state-sponsored execution.

Punishment and Society, 2022

Written by two religion scholars, Break Every Yoke is a wide-ranging profile of religion's significance to prison abolitionism. Focused on American mass incarceration, and critical of the secular state's options as well as ongoing calls for prison reform, the book argues that religion is not only helpful in the abolitionist effort, but essential-carrying with it more radical visions capable of leveling the current prison system. Beyond a utilitarian vision, Dubler and Lloyd understand that mass incarceration emerged in the same cultural moment as the big box store and megachurch. Thus they seek to present not only how religion can assist abolitionism, but also how religiously-inclined prison reformers ought to embrace abolitionism as the only way to meaningfully address the prison problem. Committed unequivocally to prison abolitionism (emphatically: not reform), the authors illustrate visions of how the modern world might be remade if deeper, more radical religious roots are drawn from and appropriated. These roots hail not from the litany of secular approaches to mass incarceration, they argue, nor from carefully curated and often repressed domesticated forms of religion, but from the fervor of genuine religious faith; or, they curiously suggest: at least 'something closely related to religious faith' (p. 10). The book's passionate argument and plea is that 'without getting religion-and igniting whole religious communities with abolitionist fire-prison abolition will never acquire its necessary force' (p. 11). The first chapter opens with this argument, accepting nothing less than full-blown prison abolitionism as the only possible way to rethink the prison, with the assumed necessity of incarceration being so deeply ingrained into today's understandings of justice. Lest the argument for abolitionism-shutting down every jail and prison-seem superficial or mere posture, the book's core (chs. 2-4) provides historical exposition fleshing-out what the authors call 'the spirit of abolition.' The exposition carries insights into rationale from normative theological views and material expressions of religion, with the authors claiming to be working not as historians proper, but as scholars of culture, of religion, and as genealogists. This shapes the book's argument, charting how the Civil Rights Era's political pressures once required religious fervor supported by theological arguments. But these vanished after the Civil Rights Era, giving rise to the 'political theology' that built mass incarceration.

A critical account of prisons as places of suffering and death, with a focus on self-inflicted deaths and prison officers.

2013

Handbook of Prisons, 2007

Punishment & Society, 2017

Joshua M Price's Prison and Social Death is an important contribution to prison abolition's vision of a radically different future. The book begins with an epigraph from Raymond Santana, who spent five years in prison before the exoneration of the Central Park Five: ''I didn't realize the social death that we were given at the sentence. This wasn't a five to fifteen or five to ten; this was a life sentence, a death sentence, in a sense.'' 1 When I first read this book, it felt important and even critical that Price's work began by echoing the analysis of social death that comes from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. When I re-read the book after the election of Donald Trump, its opening passage made all too clear the stakes of the current political moment. I was reminded, in the opening reference to the Central Park Five, of Trump's full-page advertisements in New York newspapers in 1989, which called for reinstating the death penalty for the five Black and Latino youth arrested in the case, and of how he continued, during the 2016 campaign, to criminalize the exonerated. Speaking to CNN, Trump stated that despite their release from the civil status of guilt and imprisonment, ''They admitted they were guilty. The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous . . .'' 2 Making visible the ease and ambiguity of the space between guilt and innocence, Trump's unbridled use of racism to encourage the execution of actually innocent Black and Latino youth is part of a much longer history of punishment as a kind of ''life sentence.'' Price's book works to unpack this deeply racialized regime of punishment in the United States through a rich and detailed account of the practices of dehumanization and alienation in American jails and prisons. Price began this work as a project of ''solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research,'' that would examine how the health care of incarcerated people might provide ''an entry point to understand the social condition of incarceration,'' and ''throw. . . into relief questions of isolation and support'' (p. 10). The project shifted from one documenting the health care of incarcerated people as part of a larger system of deprivation through prison conditions, to one that sought to examine the continuing presence of the prison in the lives of the formerly incarcerated. In his ethnographic and activist work around prison conditions and the conditions of reentry, Price began to understand how social and civil death regulate the lives of the convicted, the exonerated, and even the innocent.

2011

This essay is about my interactions with two prisoners in California prisons who are serving a sentence of "Life Without Parole." The essay discusses the inmates' views on the death penalty, evil, and human nature.