America’s New Form of Punishment

“At about 12.40 pm on 2 January 1996, Timothy Jackson took a jacket from the Maison Blanche department store in New Orleans, draped it over his arm, and walked out of the store without paying for it. A few months later Jackson was convicted of shoplifting and sent to Angola prison in Louisiana. That was 16 years ago. Today he is still incarcerated in Angola, and will stay there for the rest of his natural life having been condemned to die in jail. All for the theft of a jacket, worth $159” (The Guardian News). Jackson’s case is just one more of many others trapped in the new racial caste system of the United States.

The new racial caste system of the United States functions through the mass incarceration of African Americans and minorities convicted of minor drug crimes. Mass incarceration has dramatically increased the Prison Industrial Complex and this has dipped as the perfect punishment to maintain a system of racial control. Michel Foucault explains on “Discipline and Punish” how rehabilitation, punishment and distribution are essential tools to penalize and finish creating a form of social control. Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness highlights the American criminal justice system as the new disciplinary system. Although in principle, all Americans deserve equal rights and opportunities. The new system of mass incarceration has failed egalitarian democracy and as a result, it has created another form of social control through racial profiling.

America’s reliance punishment through mass incarceration is another form of social control. Punishment is very often the solution for everything and it is normally used as a tool to control people. Since punishment is the perfect tool to control people as well as to “lower” crimes, the government focuses more on generating laws of punishment instead of creating programs to prevent these crimes. That is why today the United States has more prisons than education systems.

Mass incarceration functions as a legal punishment for criminals who are targeted as a danger to society and it generates different levels of punishment based on race and class of the individual. According to Alexander, the term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system, but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison.” It is unjust and unethical to measure the level of punishment based on physical appearance and social class of the individual. Instead the individual should be punished according to the level of damages that they have committed. Punishment inside the prison is already a penalty. Then former prisoners come out of prison to confront the prison label.

The prison label prevents social mobility for the formerly incarcerated. Once an individual is marked with a criminal label there is no possibility to remove it. A former criminal will carry the prison stamp everywhere. It does not matter how much time a person spent paying off his sentence or the minor of the crime committed, the stigma will always be there. The lack of opportunities are off limits and it seems like they no longer belong to society. Not only does a former criminal have to deal with the prison label, but they have to struggle for survival; and the exclusion of society. When a person no longer has the support of people around and no doors open, his only chance to survive is to go back to his criminal lifestyle. Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion.

It is necessary to punish Jackson and other individuals for their crimes with the right punishment ignoring their race or class. Sometimes it is a matter of lack of opportunities to survive that takes people to commit minor crimes. Punishment people with a life sentence after a three strike minor crime it is kind of unjust. The U. S. government should focus more on lowering the crimes instead of incrementing mass incarceration. Perhaps, creating more programs that offer opportunities such as jobs and education would lower crimes and allow criminals social mobility in search of a proper life.