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NicoGurianFirstEssay 6 - 27 Mar 2015 - Main.HenryRoss
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Abdallah - thanks for commenting. I think you ask the key question that the piece leads up to. I think the first point is that incarceration for what are considered low-level offenses needs to be drastically reduced if not abolished. If you look at the majority of people who are in Rikers based on low-level offenses, for instance, you find that the majority of them have either mental health problems or completely lack stable housing (or both). For these people, the "punishment" of jail time does nothing but (a) make their mental illnesses worse and (b) not address the underlying social, economic, and cultural forces that brought them into their situation in the first place. And I think it goes without saying that the prison system overall needs reform - we read about abuse from prison officials almost every day. Your point about "extreme" cases is probably the hardest? My gut says that there is still a role for incarceration for some people - especially people we think might be "Dangerous" again. But this is surely hard to quantify - and, more broadly, maybe I'm falling prey to my own faults/insecurities in wanting this type of punishment, too. I'd be curious to hear your take!
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> | COMMENT (Henry Ross) - Nico argues convincingly that a propensity to "split" our individual selves (and society) into "law-abiding citizen" and "felon" drives mass incarceration. I think we should keep that hypothesis in mind in when thinking about the practical advice Abdallah is seeking. Assuming that Nico's identification of the splitting phenomenon as the source of the problem is correct, I see several questions that need answers before we can start talking about specific legislative policies. (1) Is our concern that people subconsciously split themselves into good and bad? (2) If that is the concern, is there anything we can do to prevent splitting? As Jack's psychoanalyst discovers in Something Split, making people aware of their split nature may not produce good results either. (3) Or is the concern instead with how people subconsciously distinguish between good and bad when they inevitably do split (e.g., "I'm not the kind of bum who would smoke marijuana")? After all, this type of self-delusion might sometimes be desirable (e.g., "I'm not the kind of person who would rape") (4) Shouldn't we be more concerned about the "splitting" that drives recidivism? Or at least, isn't presenting the issue that way more palatable than telling "law-abiders" about their own mens rea? Nico, you seem to suggest that recidivism results from those whose prison experiences facilitate splitting in the opposite direction (e.g., "I'm locked up, so I'm a felon for life"), yet your essay focuses on the psyche of the law-abiders. (5) Is the law powerful enough to redefine our (the law-abiders' and the felons') subconscious categories of good and bad (e.g., will people stop thinking marijuana is bad if we stop imprisoning people for it)? If deterrence theory is a hoax, we may be skeptical of the ability of the law to influence our thinking in this regard too. (6) Sweden, pre-Reagan America, and many others seem to have promoted splitting in a socially desirable direction without having to lock away two or three million inmates as foils. Do places with less of an incarceration problem have less of a "civil war" (in Judge Day's words) going on, and is that because the criminal laws don't feed it? I've gone on too long already...
A quick word on the original premise--are Nico's divisions and Judge Day's similar "civil wars" the direct outgrowth of psychological, subconscious splitting at the individual level? I think Eben expressed some skepticism about this idea a couple weeks ago, and I hope we can give it a closer look in class sometime soon. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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