Trouble In Mind Leon Litwack Thesis

So the task faced by the penal apparatus in the neoliberal era has been not only to instill work discipline and to make the labor power of the unwilling people socially useful,the criminal law and the daily work of the criminal courts are directed almost exclusively against those people whose class background, poverty, neglected education, or demoralization drove them to crime, or otherwise led them to engage in provoking public behavior liable to attract police attention and to trigger apprehension and arraignment.Close-up study at ground level converges with correctional statistics to confirm that the mass of people processed through jails in the United States are nearly exclusively of lower class provenance, detached and disreputable persons who are arrested more because they are offensive than because they have committed crimes, and because they lack the economic and status resources to avoid getting caught in the penal dragnet and escape short-term detention.

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This ratio has similarly dropped for property crimes such as burglary (from 4.1 to 3.0) and theft (from 3.7 to 3.1).

Second, the rate of incarceration for African Americans has soared to astronomical levels unknown in any other society, even the Soviet Union at the zenith of the Gulag or South Africa at the acme of the violent struggles over apartheid.

social divisions no less than to material interests rooted solely in class cleavage, chief among them the enforcement of ethnoracial or ethnonational borders geared towards the preservation of group honor and a sense of social superiority that is an essential part of the hard-core reality of social structures of inequality., explaining the astounding upsurge in black incarceration in the past three decades as a result of the obsolescence of the ghetto as a device for caste control and the correlative systemic need for a substitute apparatus for keeping (unskilled and unwanted) African Americans in their place, i.e., in a subordinate and confined position in physical, social, and symbolic space.

I further argue that, in the post-Civil Rights era, the remnants of the dark ghetto and the fast-expanding carceral system of the United States have become tightly linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion.

Likewise, inmates throughout Western Europe are overwhelmingly drawn from the deskilled and precarious fractions of the working class.

But this does not mean that the penal apparatus cannot be trained also on stigmatized and marginalized groups based on social principles of vision and division other than class.

In four short decades the ethnic composition of the U.

S carceral stock , turning over from 70% white at the mid-century point to nearly 70% black and Latino today, although the ethnic distribution of criminal activity did not change change fundamentally during that period.

In 10 of the 38 states in which this black-white disparity has grown, African Americans are imprisoned at more than ten times the rate of their compatriots of European origin.

The political elite of the country is well placed to take note of the phenomenon since the jurisdiction that sports the highest racial gap in the land is none other than the District of Columbia, where blacks were 35 times more likely than whites to be put behind bars in 1994.