“Slow-Motion Violence”
What is it about the “the slow-motion violence of mass incarceration that enables it to elude our moral immune system”? Adam Gopnik reflects on his recent piece on the moral failure of America’s prison system for the New Yorker, which has drawn both praise and criticism. His closing words widen the scope:
The moral failings of advanced liberal societies, not least this one, tend to be slow-motion sins. We don’t stone the adulterer or hang the sodomite or massacre the restive inner-city residents. We allow the atmosphere to be filled with greenhouse gases; we allow the hypertrophic growth of inequality; we let the prison population grow to the size of a megalopolis. And the key is that there’s no particular moment when they happened, no single event to expose and decry.
Read Notes on “The Caging of America” here. Original article here.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)
Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.
Graph of the Day: Is Big City Crime Moving to the Suburbs?
By Benjamin Landy (Via Blog of the Century)
“For two decades, American inner-city crime has been dropping,” writes Century Foundation Fellow Patrick Radden Keefe in next week’s New York Magazine. “But if our major metropolises are so safe today, how do we account for the fact that Newburgh, whose residents could comfortably transplant into any small pocket of Manhattan […] is struggling to cope with a deadly gang war, open-air drug markets, and citizens who are justifiably afraid to walk the streets—the very ‘big city’ problems, in other words, that our actual big cities appear to have licked?”
It’s a question for which sociologists have no easy answer. Across the country, violent crime has fallen to its lowest levels in 31 years, “upending”—as Keefe points out, “the bedrock sociological correlation between tough times and higher crime.” Yet crime rates have not fallen nearly as fast in most of America’s suburbs, leading some to wonder whether once dangerous places like New York City have become safer simply by exporting gang violence into outlying suburbs and small cities like Newburgh and Poughkeepsie.
A recent report by the Brookings Institution offers some clues. Researchers Elizabeth Kneebone and Steven Raphael looked at FBI and U.S. Census Bureau data for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2008, and found that while violent crime fell substantially—21 percent on average—there was significant variation between cities and suburbs. Surprisingly, crime rates dropped by nearly a third in cities, but only 7 percent in suburban areas. While city crime rates remain higher than in the suburbs, the gap narrowed dramatically between 1990 and 2008, with urban crime falling from 2.8 to just twice the rate in the suburbs.
Over the eighteen years that were studied, urban populations continued to become decentralized, with key demographic groups moving to mature and high-density suburbs. For instance, while nearly two thirds of African Americans lived in primary cities in 1990, by 2005-2009 only half remained. The poor and Hispanic populations also crossed a significant threshold during that period, with the majority shifting from urban to suburban centers.
However, the Brookings study found no correlation between the demographic migration of minorities and the change in crime rates. In fact, the association between crime and the proportion of the population that is black, Hispanic, poor, or foreign born actually decreased substantially. From 1990 to 2008, the strength of the relationship between the share of black residents and property crime decreased by half, and that between Hispanic residents and violent crime nearly disappeared.
How then to explain the exceptional violence of small cities and suburbs like Newburgh? With little evidence to suggest that the decentralization of poor and minority populations is contributing to higher crime in traditionally safe exurban locations, sociologists and criminologists are, for the moment, left scratching their heads.
To learn more, check out TCF Fellow Patrick Keefe’s article in the upcoming issue of New York, which looks more closely at the struggle to combat crime in Newburgh, New York—and asks whether incarceration itself may actually be accelerating crime in this small city.
