Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T19:04:15.616Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Conclusion: Right-Sizing Prison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2011

Bert Useem
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
Anne Morrison Piehl
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

Sanctions, penalties, and the fear of punishment are merely braces and not foundations.

The dominant competitive weapon of the twenty-first century will be the education and skills of the workforce.

The prison buildup movement, we have argued, was a pragmatic effort to deal with an escalating crime rate rather than, as the critics claimed, an irrational expression of a disturbed population or an effort to achieve an otherwise extraneous political agenda. The critics include David Garland and Loïc Wacquant, in a tradition that springs from the work of Michel Foucault. These attributions of irrationality, we found, do not fit the available facts. Yet, more generally, although social movements are pragmatic efforts to create new social forms, they are not deliberative bodies or research seminars. They do not collect evidence on the structures that they are seeking to bring, or have brought, into being. Data analysis (with all its complications) is not part of their “repertoire” for contention. Social movements are rational, but they are not hyperrational. If successful in achieving their immediate goals, they may not know how, or even when, to stop. More prisons, even if effective up to a point, may have exceeded that point during the buildup, as well as damaged society in other ways. The prison buildup movement may have unknowingly gone too far. Although social movements are strong in their mechanisms of mobilization, they have weak brakes.

Type
Chapter
Information
Prison State
The Challenge of Mass Incarceration
, pp. 169 - 180
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×