Fascinating. When I searched Grits' archives, for whatever reason, I found that here, too, the first use of "mass incarceration" was in 2007. Before that, the blog pretty uniformly applied the term "over-incarceration" to the same concept. I couldn't begin to tell you where I picked up the term. By the time Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in 2010, the term was in frequent use on this blog.
My guess: Perhaps the term's wider usage stemmed from 2007 congressional hearings titled "Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost?" Bruce Western used the term in a New York Review of Books article earlier that year. The earliest Grits use I can find was from February 2007 referencing the spread of immigration detention facilities. The first use of the term on the blog was actually by a commenter, Rev. Alan Bean of Friends of Justice, the month before.
¿Quien sabe? Funny how terms creep up on you. Without seeing the data, I wouldn't have guessed the usage was that recent.
At a symposium at Huston Tillotson University in Austin earlier this year an academic offered the term "hyper incarceration." I like it too. We have become a society with too little practice at the social art of intervention, mediation, and reconciliation. We rely too heavily on the so-called justice system to settle our differences. Hyper-prosecution has replaced other humane ways of addressing our human problems.
ReplyDeleteThe United States has 5% of the world population...but 25% of the world prison population. So much for the Land Of the Free....
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure where I picked up the term. I was talking to Michelle Alexander before her book came out; but not that early. Maybe I invented the term . . . just kidding.
ReplyDeleteThere was a symposium at the Institute for Law and Society at NYU in 2000. The title included the term and led to a volume edited by David Garland the following year.
ReplyDeleteOne phrase I don't hear too often is "prison-industrial complex." Maybe because it was coined by Angela Davis?
ReplyDeleteWarehousing human beings...when it is the societal imperative to just get rid of people, regardless of the costs, while disregarding the potential benefits of rehabilitation or forgiveness.
ReplyDeleteAgreed.. and so upsetting..we are losing out on people that could actually function in society with rehab, that could be forgiven for their wrong and benefit their families by being assisted rather than cut off and thrown away. .that's what we do with these prisoners.
Delete@11:22, I would argue that that's also because "prison industrial complex" is a less precise fit for the situation than its older cousin, the "military industrial complex." With state prisons we're dealing mostly with government agencies, not private contractors like the ones that dominate DOD. The private prisons have some clout, but you notice Texas closed two of them in 2013.
ReplyDeleteTo me, "mass incarceration" is an historically accurate description, basically an observation. "Prison-industrial complex," by contrast, is a loaded term (barely) hiding a raft of unsubstantiated assumptions.
It would be interesting to know exactly when the criminal defense niche was allowed to be infiltrated by Fake CDLs in conjunction to exactly when the implementation of the so-called Art of avoiding jury trials aka: 'Plea Bargain', (The Texas TapOut) was endorsed by the criminal defense lawyers association / Bar, and those charged with overseeing the state's courts.
ReplyDeleteThrow in the exact date in which the political war was declared by the R's on the weakest links in society (unemployed, young, with long hair and facial hair, tattoos etc...) that were found to be in possession of and / or near drugs or weed and / or seeds and / or roaches and / or empty beer cans and maybe just maybe we'll know the answers.
Now, all we need is a graph addressing the rise of the practice of - "Mass Plea Bargaining" where judges line up male & female Inmates side-by-side in front of the bench, allowing an entire group to be in on each others cases as they turn into Defendants (while ADAs cross out Not Guilty and pen in nolo contendere underneath). The Chron had a front page photo of it going down in real time not too long ago, and the criminal defense associations and Bar offered up nothing.
When 95 percent of them are pussies with law degrees in a saturated market and have a zero Defense all the way to a jury verdict record, you get silence with a side of condoning. The rest should be embarrassed enough by now to the point of calling Bullshit and stationing each courtroom entryway in efforts to prevent the fakers & shakers from taking criminal cases by asking for credentials and reporting infiltrators to the Bar. Simply handing out yellow cards was weak and had no lasting effects except for the ongoing laughter. Thanks.
Just to add to the comment by the person who pointed out the NYU symposium - In the 2001 Garland-edited volume, Garland defines mass incarceration in a way that I think has sometimes been missed. It involved both a dramatic increase in the rate of incarceration and size of the incarcerated population, as well as the “systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population.” There's some debate over whether "mass incarceration" or Wacquant's "hyper-incarceration" (because of the super-targeting of a particular sub-group) are better descriptives. Certainly, though, it seems that "mass incarceration" has gained the most rhetorical traction.
ReplyDeleteThanks 1:36/10:37, I didn't know about Garland's 2000-01 usage. Still, there were years after that when it wasn't used at all. I do think it's more likely that the congressional hearing explains the big bump in use beginning in '07 - those are national events which, even when they don't pass bills, can help define terms of debate among opinion leaders on emerging issues.
ReplyDelete