Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1ACs
Obviously dont read both racism and gender pick one and
then read framing.
1AC Racism
Harsh sentencing laws render those who commit minor crimes
dangerous felons who are now barred from mainstream society and
relegated to second-class status.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel universe in
which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and privileges of
citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits. It does not matter whether you have
actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you
are branded a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008,
there were approximately 2.3 million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering
5.1 million people under "community correctional supervision"i.e., on probation or parole.89
Merely reducing prison terms does not have a major impact on the majority of
people in the system . It is the badge of inferiority the felony record that
relegates people for their entire lives, to second-class status . As described in
chapter 4, for drug felons, there is little hope of escape. Barred from public housing by
law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to
"check the box" indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for
nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of professions, people whose
only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount of drugs for
recreational use find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and
economypermanently.
Director of Howard Clinical Law Center's Public Service Program, Spring 1997, THE
INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION ON THE ELIMINATION OF ALL FORMS OF RACIAL
DISCRIMINATION (CERD): ARTICLE: Codification or Castration? The Applicability of
the International Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination to the
U.S. Criminal Justice System, Howard Law Journal, 40 How. L.J. 641
Statistics reveal that African Americans are far more likely to be physically abused
and/or murdered by police officers charged to protect them. n157 Indeed, by the
admission of some police officers, race is [*671] used as a determinative factor in
deciding who to follow, detain, search, and arrest. n158 The lengthy history of police
brutality against people of color is legion, and is still very prevalent today. The Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division receives about 8,000 complaints each year, with 75 to 85 percent of them
involving problems with police. Most of these allegations are made by people of color. n159 " Police
brutality
as it relates to African Americans and minorities is real," observed Congressional
Black Caucus Chairperson Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA). " The bigger and
blacker you are, the more at risk you are ." n160 On March 3, 1991, eighty-one
seconds of videotape filmed by a private citizen brought into national focus the
blatant police brutality that is a tragic part of the African American experience.
Rodney King, unarmed and clearly no visible threat to the fifteen or more policemen that surrounded him,
received fifty-six blows and electric shocks from four White police officers. n161
Beamed into homes across the country was the image of Sergeant Stacey Koon twice firing a 50,000volt Taser "stun gun" at the prostrate King, while three other members of the LAPD "took
turns kicking him and smashing him in the head, neck, kidneys and legs with their
truncheons." n162 As a result of this severe beating, King received 11 skull fractures, a crushed cheekbone, a
broken ankle, internal injuries, a burn on his chest, and brain damage. n163 Unfortunately, this was not the first, nor
Research has shown that a variety of factors contribute to the problem of police brutality, including racism and
prejudice, unfettered police discretion, the infamous police "code of silence," inadequate discipli- [*672] nary
measures by police departments and administrators, and the ineffectiveness of current remedies. n165
There is, of course, an official explanation for all of this: crime rates. This explanation has tremendous appeal
before you know the factsfor it is consistent with, and reinforces, dominant racial narratives about crime and
students tend to sell to each other.16 Rural whites, for their part, don't make a special trip to the 'hood to purchase
marijuana. They buy it from somebody down the road.17 White high school students typically buy drugs from white
classmates, friends, or older relatives. Even Barry McCaffrey, former director of the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, once remarked, if your child bought drugs, "it was from a student of their own race
The notion that most illegal drug use and sales happens in the ghetto is
pure fiction. Drug trafficking occurs there, but it occurs everywhere else in America as well. Nevertheless,
black men have been admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is
more than thirteen times higher than white men. 19 The racial bias inherent in the
drug war is a major reason that 1 in every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006,
compared with 1 in 106 white men.20 For young black men, the statistics are even worse. One in 9
black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five was behind bars in 2006 , and
far more were under some form of penal control such as probation or parole.21 These gross
generally."18
racial disparities simply cannot be explained by rates of illegal drug activity among African Americans.
The criminal justice system serves as a gateway into the larger system
of institutionalized racism and mass incarceration that permanently
marks people of color as members of Americas under caste.
Michelle Alexander 10, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
It may be helpful, in attempting to understand the basic nature of the new caste system , to
think of the criminal justice systemthe entire collection of institutions and
practices that comprise itnot as an independent system but rather as a gateway
into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization.
This larger system, referred to here as mass incarceration, is a system that locks
people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars
and virtual wallswalls that are invisible to the naked eye but function nearly as
effectively as Jim Crow laws once did at locking people of color into a permanent
second-class citizenship. 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 . Once released, former
prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent
social exclusion. They are members of America's new undercaste .
a huge percentage of them are not free to move up at all. It is not just that they lack
opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law
from doing so. And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed to prevent their mobility. To put
the matter starkly: The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of
the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The
system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a
caste system than a system of crime control. Viewed from this perspective, the so-called
underclass is better understood as an undercastea lower caste of individuals who
are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Although this
new system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and
maintains racial hierarchy much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Cro w (and
slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies,
customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status
of a group defined largely by race.
2010, The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.,
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf
Saying that colorblindness is the problem may alarm some in the civil rights
community, especially the pollsters and political consultants who have become increasingly influential in civil
rights advocacy. For decades, civil rights leaders have been saying things like "we all want a
colorblind society, we just disagree how to get there" in defense of race-conscious
programs like affirmative action or racial data collection .35 Affirmative action has been framed
as a legitimate exception to the colorblindness principlea principle now endorsed by the overwhelming majority of
the American electorate. Civil rights leaders are quick to assure the public that when we reach a colorblind nirvana,
brown men not as black and brown, but simply as menraceless menwho have failed miserably to play by the
and social arrangements. We have become blind, not so much to race, but to
the existence of racial caste in America.
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
*edited for gendered language
Prisons are places of intense brutality, violence, and dehumanization .70 In his seminal
study of the New Jersey State Prison, The Society of Captives, sociologist Gresham M. Sykes carefully
exposed how the fundamental structure of the modern U.S. prison degrades the
inmates basic humanity and sense of selfworth .71 Caged or confined and stripped of
his [their] freedom, the prisoner is forced to submit to an existence withou t the
ability to exercise the basic capacities that define personhood in a liberal society.72
The inmates movement is tightly controlled, sometimes by chains and shackles, and
always by orders backed with the threat of force ;73 his [their] body is subject to
invasive cavity searches on command;74 he [he/she] is denied nearly all personal
possessions; his [their] routines of eating, sleeping, and bodily maintenance are
minutely managed; he [he/she] may communicate and interact with others only on
limited terms strictly dictated by his jailers; and he [he/she]is reduced to an
identifying number, deprived of all that constitutes his [their] individuality.75 Sykess
account of the pains of imprisonment76 attends not only to the dehumanizing
effects of this basic structure of imprisonmentwhich remains relatively unchanged from the New
Jersey penitentiary of 1958 to the U.S. jails and prisons that abound today77 but also to its violent
effects on the personhood of the prisoner:
become a widely tolerated and regular part of the rhythm of prison life ,91
yet this basic structure of prison discipline in the United States entails profound
violence and dehumanization ; indeed, solitary confinement produces effects
similar to physical torture. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian first introduced to the
psychiatric and medical community in the early 1980s that prisoners living in isolation
suffered a constellation of symptoms including overwhelming anxiety, confusion,
hallucinations, and sudden violent and self-destructive outbursts.92 This pattern of
debilitating symptoms, sufficiently consistent among persons subject to solitary confinement (otherwise known as
the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has found that certain U.S. practies of
solitary confinement violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman and Degrading Punishment.94 Numerous psychiatric studies likewise
corroborate that solitary confinement produces effects tantamount to torture .95
Bonnie Kerness, Associate Director of the American Friends Service Committees
Prison Watch, testified before the Commission on Safety and Abuse in Americas Prisons that while
visiting prisoners in solitary confinement, she spoke repeatedly with people who
begin to cut themselves, just so they can feel something. 96 Soldiers who are captured in war
the Special Housing Unit (SHU)), gave rise to the designation of SHU Syndrome.93 Partly on this basis,
and subjected to solitary confinement and severe physical abuse also report the suffering of isolation to be as awful
Solitary confinements justification and presumed efficacy flows from the assumed legitimacy of prison confinement
understood to be legitimate, solitary confinement merely applies the same approach to discipline within prison
walls.
give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other
people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the
slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the
persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that
the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself]
himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable
negativity of the condition of the dominated ; that is it illuminates in a certain
sense the entire human condition . The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and
always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from
animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge.
However, it remains true that ones moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice
among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking,
that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism
the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing
injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think
that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of
remaining the strongest.
One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society
contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat
others with respect so that they treat you with respect. Recall, says the bible, that you were
once a stranger in Egypt, which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger
rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, 2010, p. 93-6
The Prison Label Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five
years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately
350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime
rates. Yet
it has been changes in our laws particularly the dramatic increases in the
length of prison sentencesthat have been responsible for the growth of our prison
system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in
the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing
policy changes .88 Because harsh sentencing is a major cause of the prison
explosion, one might reasonably assume that substantially reducing the length of
prison sentences would effectively dismantle this new system of control . That
view, however, is mistaken . This system depends on the prison label, not prison
time. Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel
universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and
privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits . It does not matter
whether you have actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you are branded
a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008, there were approximately 2.3
million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering 5.1 million people under community correctional
According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study, about 30 percent of released prisoners in its sample were
rearrested within six months of release. 90 Within three years, nearly 68 percent were rearrested at least once for a
new offense.91 Only a small minority are rearrested for violent crimes; the vast majority are rearrested for property
all. As a result, they are far more likely to be arrested (again) than those whose behavior is not subject to constant
scrutiny by law enforcement. Probationers and parolees are at increased risk of arrest because their lives are
governed by additional rules that do not apply to everyone else.
thousands of people are released from prison every year, only to find themselves locked out of the mainstream
society and economy. Most ultimately return to prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Others are released
again, only to find themselves in precisely the circumstances they occupied before, unable to cope with the stigma
unnecessary suffering caused by this system, but it will not disturb the closed
circuit. Those labeled felons will continue to cycle in and out of prison, subject to
perpetual surveillance by the police, and unable to integrate into the mainstream
society and economy. Unless the number of people who are labeled felons is
dramatically reduced, and unless the laws and policies that keep ex-offenders
marginalized from the mainstream society and economy are eliminated,
the system will continue to create and maintain an enormous undercaste.
1AC Gender
Contention __ is Gender
Prisons are running rampant with sexual victimization, female
prisoners suffer brutal treatment equivalent to torture in
maximum security facilities
Dave W. Frank, 14, Attorney at Christopher C. Myers & Associates , Ohio
Northern UniversityClaude W. Pettit College of Law, 2/14/14, Commentary:
Abandoned: Abolishing Female Prisons to Prevent Sexual Abuse and Herald an End
to Incarceration, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1322&context=bglj
A few months before the U.S. Department of Justices 2012 inspection of Julia
Tutwiler Prison for Women,65 it released the first national survey to
comprehensively document the extent of sexual abuse in U.S. prisons.66 In this
report, the Department of Justice relied on reports by former prisoners rather than
reports by prison officials67 or inmates still in prisona departure from the methods
used in previous national surveys. 68 The 2012 survey gave a clear picture of what
many had suspected:69 Prisoners commonly suffer brutality [that] is the
equivalent of torture. 70 Within the U.S. system of mass incarceration, nearly one
out of six women and close to one out of ten of all prisoners has been sexually
victimized,71 according to the Justice Department.72 Anal tearing, vaginal tearing,
chipped teeth, and lost teeth are the most common injuries experienced by former
prisoners who report sexual victimization.73 Among former prisoners who reported
unwilling sexual activity with staff, approximately one quarter were coerced into
such activity through blackmails or bribes by staff, and nearly one half were coerced
through offers of favors or special privileges by staff.74 Sexual victimization by staff
most often occurs in a closet, office, or locked room, while inmate-on inmate
assault, which constitutes the majority of victimization, most often occurs in the
victims cell.75 A Human Rights Watch report affirmed that being a woman
prisoner in a U.S. state prison can be a terrifying experience. 76 Further,
the likelihood of female prisoner sexual victimization, according to the DOJ survey,
generally increases in accordance with the length of prison sentences and level of
confinement.77 The majority of sexual abuse occurs in prisons , a much smaller
percentage occurs in local jails, and almost none occurs at post-release community
treatment facilities.78 Female sexual victimization, accordingly, is highest in
maximum-security facilities like Tutwiler and lowest in facilities that allow daytime
release. 79 A prisons ability to control, confine, and inspect a prisoner necessarily
defines its ability to abuse her body.80 Efforts toward reform that intensify or
expand incarceration only recast the problem.81 If prison is the total governance of
the prisoner, greater control of physical bodies will not reduce the instance of a
problem shown to increase with a punishments severity. Unlike the U.S. Prison Rape
Elimination Act, the U.K proposal would by its nature end sexual abuse in female
prisons and drive incarceration and punishment into obsolescence.
male
correctional employees have vaginally, anally, and orally raped female
prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them. We found that in the course of
committing such gross mis- conduct, male officers have not only used actual or
threatened physical force, but have also used their near total authority to provide or
deny goods and privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other
cases, to reward them for having done so. In other cases, male officers have violated their most
basic professional duty and engaged in sexual contact with female prisoners absent
the use of threat of force or any material exchange. In addition to engaging in sexual relations
with prisoners, male officers have used mandatory pat-frisks or room searches to
grope women's breasts, buttocks, and vaginal areas and to view them
inappropriately while in a state of undress in the housing or bathroom areas. Male
correctional officers and staff have also engaged in regular verbal degradation
and harassment of female prisoners, thus contributing to a custodial
environment in the state prisons for women that is often highly sexualized and
excessively hostile."
thus recapitulating the familiar violence that characterizes many women's private lives: We found that
debilitating symptoms, sufficiently consistent among persons subject to solitary confinement (otherwise known as
the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has found that certain U.S. practies of
solitary confinement violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
the Special Housing Unit (SHU)), gave rise to the designation of SHU Syndrome.93 Partly on this basis,
Solitary confinements justification and presumed efficacy flows from the assumed legitimacy of prison confinement
understood to be legitimate, solitary confinement merely applies the same approach to discipline within prison
walls.
the call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot
ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and
practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that
retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls . The destructive combination of
racism and misogyny, however much it has been challenged by social movements, scholarship, and art
over the last three decades, retains all its awful consequences within women's prisons. The
Because
The prison system turns female prisoners into fallen women whose
only purpose is domestic service and subjugation to men.
Angela Y. Davis 03, Professor of Feminist Studies at University of CA Santa Cruz,
2003, Are Prisons Obsolete?, http://www.feministes-radicales.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/11/Angela-Davis-Are_Prisons_Obsolete.pdf
According to dominant views, women convicts were irrevocably fallen women ,
with no possibility of salvation. If male criminals were considered to be public individuals who had
simply violated the social contract, female criminals were seen as having transgressed
fundamental moral principles of womanhood. The reformers, who, following
Elizabeth Fry, argued that women were capable of redemption , did not really contest
these ideological assumptions about women's place. In other words, they did not
question the very notion of "fallen women." Rather, they simply opposed the idea
that "fallen women" could not be saved. They could be saved, the reformers contended, and toward
that end they advocated separate penal facilities and a specifically female approach to
punishment. Their approach called for architectural models that replaced cells with
cottages and "rooms" in a way that was supposed to infuse domesticity into prison life. This
model facilitated a regime devised to reintegrate criminalized women into the
domestic life of wife and mother . They did not, however, acknowledge the
class and race underpinnings of this regime. Training that was, on the surface,
designed to produce good wives and mothers in effect steered poor women (and
especially black women) into "free world" jobs in domestic service . Instead of stay-at-home skilled
wives and mothers, many women prisoners, upon release, would become maids, cooks,
and washerwomen for more affluent women. A female custodial staff, the reformers also argued,
would minimize the sexual temptations, which they believed were often at the root of female criminality.
incubates rape culture. Statistics on UK prison rape are more vague than in the US, with Justice Secretary
Christ Grayling blocking a Howard League investigation into the issue - the Ministry of Justice says questions about
assault are intrusive. Research suggests guards routinely sexually coerce women prisoners (a third of who are
survivors of sexual abuse). There are also revelations of endemic sexual assault and harassment of women
sites of systemic sexual violence does not establish that immediate abolition would lead to quantitatively fewer
The question is then if these carceral functions cannot provide the framework
for eliminating rape and assault, what alternative structures can be established?
One option is restorative justice, involving facilitated meetings between the
perpetrator and victim - to enable answers for any questions the victim has of the
perpetrator, or acknowledgement of the harm caused. The New Zealand-based Project Restore
rapes.
is prominent in advocating this approach, which stems out of Maori accountability practices. In theory, this might
provide some conciliation - equilibrium can be restored to the disrupted families, communities, and networks, if only
by having the perpetrator acknowledge fault. However, even Project Restore concedes the limits of such an
approach. It does not, by itself, create conditions that enable safety and resistance to violence and oppression - or
provide reparations to victims. Indeed, these projects gained traction within neoliberal approaches seeking cheaper
alternatives to incarceration. Even the name, 'restorative justice, reveals the limits of its intended effect. Rather
than accountability for the victim and recognition of their needs, the peace of communities and families that failed
Another alternative is
'transformative justice', which focuses on developing 'community accountability'
structures to disrupt cycles of abuse and assault. This framework has been developed by women
to protect the victim from violence is intended to restore things as they were.
of colour-led US groups like INCITE!, Sista II Sista, and Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), who organise
'Transformative justice' is centred in developing the community's autonomy in order to prevent violence. It sees
retribution as reactive, and incarceration as unable and incapable of unpacking more difficult questions about state
violence, or the complicity of communal networks that feel obligated to intervene to stop drink driving, for example,
but not child abuse. But a 'transformative' solution cannot simply involve a sentimentalised restorative justice
system with a neoliberal renovation i.e. one that prioritises restoring unequal power relations for the sake of 'peace'
or expense, or transferring arbitrary judicial functions to communities, assuming this accounts for all of the
survivor's needs.
between masculine and feminine elements. In chapter 3 Smuts' holism, the general systems theory and the
Chinese I Ching (yin/yang) schemes were suggested as possible alternatives. They present a shift from a
reductionist to a holistic perception of reality, hence all three models would logically include the perception of
Much
of the current" unmanageability" of contemporary life in patriarchal societies, (d), is
then viewed as a consequence of a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events,
and experiences that reflect historically male-gender identified beliefs, values,
attitudes, and assumptions. Included among these real-life consequences are
precisely those concerns with nuclear proliferation, war, environmental
patriarchy and leads to dysfunctional behaviors of nations and ultimately to international unmanageability.
destruction, and violence toward women , which many feminists see as the
logical outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is often only through observing these
dysfunctional behaviors-the symptoms of dysfunctionality that one can truly see that and how patriarchy serves to
maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is understood as a dysfunctional system, this "unmanageability"
can be seen for what it is-as a predictable and thus logical consequence of patriarchy.'1 The theme that global
environmental crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and logical consequences of sexism and
patriarchal culture is pervasive in ecofeminist literature (see Russell 1989, 2). Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak, for
instance, argues that " militarism
rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, 2010, p. 93-6
The Prison Label Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five
years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately
350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime
it has been changes in our laws particularly the dramatic increases in the
length of prison sentencesthat have been responsible for the growth of our prison
system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in
the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing
policy changes .88 Because harsh sentencing is a major cause of the prison
explosion, one might reasonably assume that substantially reducing the length of
prison sentences would effectively dismantle this new system of control . That
view, however, is mistaken . This system depends on the prison label, not prison
time. Once a person is labeled a felon, he or she is ushered into a parallel
universe in which discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and
privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits . It does not matter
rates. Yet
whether you have actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you are branded
a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008, there were approximately 2.3
million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering 5.1 million people under community correctional
According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study, about 30 percent of released prisoners in its sample were
rearrested within six months of release. 90 Within three years, nearly 68 percent were rearrested at least once for a
new offense.91 Only a small minority are rearrested for violent crimes; the vast majority are rearrested for property
all. As a result, they are far more likely to be arrested (again) than those whose behavior is not subject to constant
scrutiny by law enforcement. Probationers and parolees are at increased risk of arrest because their lives are
governed by additional rules that do not apply to everyone else.
and behavior (such as a prohibition on associating with other felons), as well as various requirements of
probation and parole (such as paying fi nes and meeting with probation offi cers ), create opportunities for
arrest. Violation of these special rules can land someone right back in prison. In fact, that is what happens a good
deal of the time. The extraordinary increase in prison admissions due to parole and
probation violations is due almost entirely to the War on Drugs. With respect to parole, in
1980, only 1 percent of all prison admissions were parole violators. Twenty years later, more than one third (35
percent) of prison admissions resulted from parole violations.93 To put the matter more starkly: About as many
people were returned to prison for parole violations in 2000 as were admitted to prison in 1980 for all reasons.94 Of
all parole violators returned to prison in 2000, only one-third were returned for a new conviction; twothirds were
returned for a technical violation such as missing appointments with a parole offi cer, failing to maintain
employment, or failing a drug test.95 In this system of control, failing to cope well with ones exile status is treated
like a crime. If you fail, after being released from prison with a criminal recordyour personal badge of inferiority
to remain drug free, or if you fail to get a job against all the odds, or if you get depressed and miss an appointment
with your parole offi cer (or if you cannot afford the bus fare to take you there), you can be sent right back to prison
thousands of people are released from prison every year, only to find themselves locked out of the mainstream
society and economy. Most ultimately return to prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Others are released
again, only to find themselves in precisely the circumstances they occupied before, unable to cope with the stigma
Plan Texts
Thus the plan: The United States Federal Government should
abolish federal prisons.
Framing
Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and
perpetuates societal inequality by evaluating utility as a whole
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel,
Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs,
Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely
undermines the force of any claim that utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine,
based in some notion of equal concern and respect for persons . But let us assume Kymlicka
can restore his thesis by insisting that it concerns, not utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more
limited thesis about political morality. (Here I pass over the fact that none of the utilitarians he relies on to support
his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as purely political. The drift of modern utilitarian theory is just
Still, let us assume it is as a doctrine of political morality that utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as
Even in this form it cannot be that maximizing utility is "not a goal" but a "byproduct," "entirely derived from the prior requirement to treat people with equal
consideration" (CPP, p. 31) Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is best seen as an egalitarian doctrine, then there
equals.
is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP, p. 35, emphases added). But how can this
be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter occupying a universal
point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume, for
example, that equal consideration requires maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal
division is to be construed); or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in more equitable distributions
than the aggregate)? Or, why not suppose equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each
person's interests (by for example, determining our resources and then satisfying some set percentage of each
person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian principle: equal consideration means adopting
measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these rules is a better explication of
equal consideration of each person's interests than is
effect collapses distinctions among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing individuals'
"interests" as their actual (or rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and measuring according to
intensity, why not construe their interests lexically, in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to
use Scanlon's terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are more basic needs? Equal consideration would
then rule out satisfying less urgent interests of the majority of people until all means have been taken to satisfy
everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally, what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that requires
maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual
to say we ought
to give equal consideration to everyone's interests does not, by itself, imply much of
anything about how we ought to proceed or what we ought to do. It is a purely
formal principle, which requires certain added, independent assumptions, to yield any substantive
conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures maximize is not a "by-product" of equal
consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated into the
procedure. That (2) individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires
or preferences, all of which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual
welfare or the human good: a person's good is defined subjectively , as what he wants or
would want after due reflection. Finally (3), aggregation stems from the fact that, on the classical view, a
single individual takes up everyone's desires as if they were his own,
sympathetically identifies with them, and chooses to maximize his "individual"
utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls says of the classical view, Hare "extend[s] to
utility maximization? Or why does it not require sharing a distribution? The point is just that,
society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflat[es] all persons into one
through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are independent premises
incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism and its decision procedure, then
maximizing aggregate
more accurately describe the utilitarian principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's
interests, but instead equal consideration to equally intense interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in
substantive equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal concern
in utilitarian procedures. Having in effect read persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In
the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed
against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of
Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger
defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs . During World War II, native
Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by
the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can
apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the
many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not
almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put
forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and
bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical
efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a
normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no
better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a
willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of
it is possible to
counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems
nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons
to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for
sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress . It is
easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk
about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands
of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when
that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human
provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral
dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the
precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a
right to lifethen how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process,
destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of
survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival.
It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if, because human
beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they succeeded in not doing so.
justified if necessary to avoid a calamity and unjustified if the product of an act of profitless carelessness, but
nature and extent of the underlying benefits of the risky action are fre
quently unknown to the risk bearer so that he cannot know whether or not
he is being wronged. Furthermore, even when the gain that lies behind the risk is wellknown, the status of a risk bearer is insecure because individuals can justifiably
be inflicted with ever greater levels of risk in conjunction with increasing
gains. Certainly, individual risk bearers may be entitled to more protection if the risky action exposes
the
many others to the same risk, since the likelihood that technological risks will cause greater harm
increases as more and more people experience that risk. This makes the risky action less likely to be
A strategy of weighing gains against risks thus renders the status of any specific risk victim substantially
contingent upon the claims of others, both those who may share his victim status and those who stand
to gain from the risky activity. The anxiety to preserve some fundamental place for the individual that
cannot be overrun by larger social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has aptly termed the
evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net of pleasure over
goal of maximizing
some mea sure of utility obscures and diminishes the status of each
individual. It reduces the individual to a conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles,"
but does not count for anything independent of his monitoring function.61 It also produces moral
requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to maximize utility,
since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken
into account, the individual is expendable . Counting pleasure and pain equally across
pain, or the satisfaction of desires.60 Whatever the specific formulation, the
individuals is a laudable proposal, but counting only plea sure and pain permits the grossest inequities
In sum,
utilitarianism makes the status of any individual radically contingent . The
among individuals and the trampling of the few in furtherance of the utility of the many.
individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status con tributes to increasing total utility.
Otherwise, the individual can be discarded.
tradition, the crucial criteria for assessing risks derive from the impact of those risks on risk victims, and the criteria
are defined independently of the benefits flowing from risk creation. To be plausible, such a program cannot totally
prohibit risk creation, but the ostensible advantage of this program over utilitarianism is that risk creation is
circumscribed by criteria exclusively derived from considerations of the integrity of the individual, not from any
balancing or weighing process.65 The root idea is that nonconsensual risks are violations of "individual entitlements
to personal security and autonomy."66 This idea seems highly congruent with the ideology of environmentalism
expressed in our national legislation regulating technological risk. Indeed, two scholars have recently suggested a
modern rendering of Kant's categorical imperative: " All
Case 2AC
Abolition Solvency
Abolition is a gradual process, that will transform criminal law
and peoples livelihoods
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
If prison abolition is conceptualized as an immediate and indiscriminate opening of
prison doorsthat is, the imminent physical elimination of all structures of incarcerationrejection of
abolition is perhaps warranted. But abolition may be understood instead as a
gradual project of decarceration, in which radically different legal and institutional
regulatory forms supplant criminal law enforcement. These institutional alternatives
include meaningful justice reinvestment to strengthen the social arm of the
state and improve human welfare; decriminalizing less serious infractions ;
improved design of spaces and products to reduce opportunities for offending;
urban redevelopment and greening projects ; proliferating restorative forms of redress;
and creating both safe harbors for individuals at risk of or fleeing violence and
alternative livelihoods for persons otherwise subject to criminal law
enforcement. When abolition is conceptualized in these termsas a transformative goal
of gradual decarceration and positive regulatory substitution wherein penal
regulation is recognized as morally unsustainable then inattention to abolition in
criminal law scholarship and reformist discourses comes into focus as a more
troubling absence.16 Further, the rejection of abolition as a horizon for reform mistakenly
assumes that reformist critiques concern only the occasional, peripheral excesses of
imprisonment and prison-backed policing rather than more fundamentally
impugning the core operations of criminal law enforcement , and therefore requiring a
departure from prison-backed criminal regulation to other regulatory frameworks.
our focus must not rest only on the prison system as an isolated
institution but must also be directed at all the social relations that support the
permanence of the prison. An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for
imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of
questioning why "criminals" have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of
human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical
criminologists have long pointed out that the category "law- breakers" is far greater than the
category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us
have broken the law at one time or another. Even President Bill Clinton admitted that he had
smoked marijuana at one time, insisting, though, that he did not inhale. However, acknowledged disparities in the
intensity of police surveillanceas indicated by the present-day currency of the term "racial profiling" which ought
to cover far more territory than "driving while black or brown"account in part for racial and class-based disparities
in arrest and imprisonment rates. Thus,
there is the question of how to treat those who assault the rights and
bodies of others. Many organizations and individuals both in the United States and other countries offer
alternative modes of making justice. In limited instances, some governments have attempted
to implement alternatives that range from conflict resolution to restorative or
reparative justice. Such scholars as Herman Bianchi have suggested that crime needs to be defined
in terms of tort and, instead of criminal law, should be reparative law. In his words,
"(The lawbreaker) is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a
debtor, a liable person whose human duty is to take responsibility for his or her
acts, and to assume the duty of repair.
justice systems,
decisions contribute to steep rise in inmate population and costs, February 27,
2015, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/factsheets/2015/02/federal-prison-system-shows-dramatic-long-term-growth
From 1980 to 2013, the number of offenders incarcerated in federal prisons
increased from approximately 24,000 to more than 215,000, making the federal
system the largest in the nation .1 Policy choices contributed significantly to this
expansion as lawmakers added criminal laws to the books, lengthened sentences,
and abolished parole.2 To accommodate the growing inmate population, the number of federal
prisons nearly tripled, driving a surge in corrections spending.3 Taxpayers spent almost as
much on federal prisons in 2013$6.7 billionas they spent to fund the entire U.S.
Department of Justice in 1980, after adjusting for inflation.4 Despite these expenditures, recent data show
that a third of all offenders who leave federal prisons under community supervision return to custody for violating
the terms of their release.5
More Util
Owning oneself is a moral imperative utilitarianism imposes
interpersonal obligations to society, which destroys morality
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Our primary duty isn't to treat people as equals, but to bring about valuable
states of affairs" (LCC, p. 27). It is difficult to see, Kymlicka says, how this reading of
utilitarianism can be viewed as a moral theory. Morality, in our everyday view at
least, is a matter of interpersonal obligations-the obligations we owe to each other.
But to whom do we owe the duty of maximizing utility? Surely not to the impersonal
ideal spectator . . . for he doesn't exist. Nor to the maximally valuable state of affairs itself, for states
value.
of affairs don't have moral claims." (LCC, p. 28-29) Kymlicka says, "This form of utilitarianism does not merit serious
consideration as a political morality" (LCC, p. 29). Suppose we see utilitarianism differently, as a theory whose
"fundamental principle" is "to treat people as equals" (LCC, p. 29). On this egalitarian reading, utilitarianism is a
procedure for aggregating individual interests and desires, a procedure for making social choices, specifying which
trade-offs are acceptable. It's a moral theory which purports to treat people as equals, with equal concern and
respect. It does so by counting everyone for one, and no one for more than one. (LCC, p. 25)
related to the kind of objection raised by Rawls, which I will consider shortly. Suppose we have two fathers-Andy and
Bob. Suppose further that they are alike in all relevant respects, both have three children, make the same salary, have the
same living expenses, put aside the same amount in savings, and have left over each week fifteen dollars. Suppose that every week
Andy and Bob ask themselves what they are going to do with this extra money, and Andy decides anew each week (AU) to divide it
equally among his three children, or he makes a decision to always follow the rule (RU) that each child should receive an equal
percentage of the total allowance money. Suppose further that each of his children receive five degrees of pleasure from this and no
pain. Suppose on the other hand, that Bob, who strongly favors his oldest son, Bobby, decides anew each week (AU) to give all of
the allowance money to Bobby, and nothing to the other two, and that he instructs Bobby not to tell the others, or he makes a
decision to follow the rule (RU) to always give the total sum to Bobby. Suppose also that Bobby gets IS units of pleasure from his
allowance and that his unsuspecting siblings feel no pain. The end result of the actions of both fathers is the same-IS units of
pleasure. Most, if not all, of us would agree that although Andy's conduct is exemplary, Bob's is culpable. Nevertheless, according to
both AU and RU the fathers in question are morally equal. Neither father is more or less exemplary or culpable than the
good, or the total aggregate satisfaction, as was the case for those young Aztec women chosen by their society
each year to be sacrificed to the Gods for the welfare of the group.
'In one year, 43,000 people were cited for breaking "quality
of life" laws in San Francisco. People who are cited usually have to pay a fine. If they can't pay the fine,
they are put in jail. .Homeless people in Baltimore, for example, spend an average of 35 days
per year in jail. 'Because some homeless people end up having criminal records,
they have an even harder time finding housing and jobs.
of cardboard probably would be.
'"Quality of life" laws also target queer youth . They are fined or jailed
just for being outside. 'Policing and surveillance often target public displays of
affection by queers. Cops often read transgendered people as sex workers. '49% of
attacks on transgendered people in San Francisco are committed by police. .Prisoners are forced into
living conditions segregated "male" and "female." . A prisoner who doesn't identify
with either of those gender labels, or who identifies with a gender that guards and
police don't agree "match" the prisoner's genitals, is often forced into solitary
confinement or a cell with people of different genders . However prisoners are
classified, it's not based on their choice, or with concern for their safety. 'People using hormones are
often denied access, or regular access, to hormones in prison. 'Queer people in
prison are at high risk of verbal and physical abuse, from guards and other
prisoners.
youth are queer.
Social/Enviro problems
Prisons are also social and environmental catastrophes---purposely
built in poor communities of color, they use water and land, only to
give back sewage and hazardous chemicals.
Andrew Cohen 13, fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, legal analyst, and
contributing editor at The Atlantic, 12-14-13, Government Watchdog: We Have a
Growing Federal Prison 'Crisis',
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/government-watchdog-wehave-a-growing-federal-prison-crisis/282341/
ENVIRONMENI'AL RACISM CAN MEAN NOT ENFORCING ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS, when people of color are the ones
mostly harmed. It can also mean choosing to build toxic waste disposal sites only in communities of color.
town. 'In Mendota California, the Federal Bureau of Prisons refused to translate its 1000 page environmental impact
report into Spanish. 8696 of Mendota residents are native Spanish speakers. IT's IMPORTANT THAT WE
UNDERSTAND WHY PRISONS MAKE BAD NEIGHBORS. It's not because of the peo- ple who are locked inside. It's not
prison
buildings themselves are environmental haz- ards. . Prisons use up scarce water
resources and create huge amounts of sewage waste. 'To dispose of waste
products, boilers in prisons can burn coal and diesel. These release the same
chemicals as hazardous waste incinerators. .Prison guards usually commute to the
prison from dozens of miles away. This creates huge amounts of air pollution. This is
because of the prisoners' family members (who rarely move to the prison town anyway). It's because
one of the reasons why the San Joaquin Valley in California (which has several prisons) surpassed Ins Angeles as
Financially inefficient
The Federal Bureau of Prisons is financially inefficient---it has received
an increase in inmates and a decrease in funding
Andrew Cohen 13, fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, legal analyst, and
Anyone who has studied the politics of crime control knows that it is driven at least
as much by anger and fear as by careful cost-benefit calculations.16 Policy makers
can talk openly about the costs and benefits of , say, increasing the speed limit on
highways, but no one says publicly that there is an optimal level of rape and
murder. It is not surprising then, that our actual policies depart substantially from the results
we would attain if we focused solely on economic efficiency. For example, Bruce
Western estimates that from 1993 to 2001, increases in incarceration rates
produced a 2 to 5 percent drop in serious crime at a cost of $53 billion .17 This figure
represents just the direct economic costs of imprisonment. It includes none of the huge
costs to individual lives and communities imposed by our gargantuan imprisonment
program. Whether any particular drop in crime is worth the cost obviously depends on how one values crime
avoidance, but almost everyone would say that this is an exorbitant price to pay for
relatively insignificant benefits. Of course, not everyone agrees with Westerns analysis,18 practice of
incarcerating superannuated prisoners who continue to serve very long sentences into their dotage involves a great
deal of waste.19
Topicality
Prisons = Surveillance
Surveillance means to keep watch over prisoners and prisons
Random House Dictionary 15, accessed at
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/surveillance on 7/6/15
surveillance
noun
1.a watch kept over a person, group, etc., especially over a suspect , prisoner, or
the like:
The suspects were under police surveillance.
2. continuous observation of a place, person, group, or ongoing activity in
order to gather information:
video cameras used for covert surveillance.
See also electronic surveillance.
3. attentive observation, as to oversee and direct someone or something:
increased surveillance of patients with chronic liver disease.
The prison context affords very little privacy, and in Durham the women are confined together, for long periods at a
time, in a small unit that permits low opportunities for seclusion. As
are also under constant surveillance by staff. Of particular concern to the women was the
censorship of all mail, both in and out of the prison, and the close supervision of visits. Together,
these measures were said to severely inhibit meaningful communication with family and friends and to deny the
women any opportunity to reveal their emotions to those closest to them.
are under the legal authority of the federal government. This excludes private
facilities under exclusive contract with BOP.
Imprisoned population
The population of inmates confined in prison or other facilities under the jurisdiction of the state or
Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Imprisonment rate
The number of prisoners under state or federal jurisdiction sentenced to more than one year, per
100,000 U.S. residents.
Incarcerated population
Incarcerated population is the population of inmates confined in a prison or a jail. This may also include
halfway-houses, bootcamps, weekend programs, and other facilities in which individuals are locked up
overnight.
Institutional corrections
Institutional corrections refers to those persons housed in secure correctional facilities. There are many
different types of correctional facilities, operated by different government entities. Local jails are
operated by county or municipal authorities, and typically hold offenders for short periods ranging
from a single day to a year. Prisons serve as long-term confinement facilities and are only run by the
50 state governments and the federal Bureau of Prisons. Private correctional facilities also operate
under contracts for a wide variety of local, state and federal agencies. Other correctional facilities are
operated by special jurisdictions such as the U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. territories and federal agencies
such as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Jurisdiction
Jurisdiction generally refers to a unit of government or to the legal authority to exercise governmental
power. In corrections, it refers to the government which has legal authority over an inmate (state or
federal). Prisoners under a given state's jurisdiction may be housed in another state or local
correctional facility.
Jurisdiction count
Includes prisoners under legal authority of state or federal correctional authorities who are housed in
prison facilities (e.g., prisons, penitentiaries and correctional institutions; boot camps; prison farms;
reception, diagnostic, and classification centers; release centers, halfway houses, and road camps;
forestry and conservation camps; vocational training facilities; prison hospitals; and drug and alcohol
treatment facilities for prisoners), regardless of which state they are physically held in. This number
also includes prisoners who are temporarily absent (less than 30 days), out to court, or on work
release; housed in local jails, private facilities, and other states' or federal facilities; serving a sentence
for two jurisdictions at the same time. This count excludes prisoners held in a state or federal facility
for another state or the Federal Bureau of Prisons. However, prisoners housed in another state and
under the legal authority of the governing state are included.
Movement
In corrections, a movement refers to an admission or a release from a status such as prisoner, parolee,
or probationer. Unless specifically noted, a transfer between facilities does not count as a movement.
Operational capacity
The number of inmates that can be accommodated based on a facility's staff, existing programs, and
services.
Parole
Parole refers to criminal offenders who are conditionally released from prison to serve the remaining
portion of their sentence in the community. Prisoners may be released to parole by a parole board
decision (discretionary release/discretionary parole), according to provisions of a statute (mandatory
release/mandatory parole), through other types of post-custody conditional supervision, or as the
result of a sentence to a term of supervised release. In the federal system, a term of supervised
release is a sentence to a fixed period of supervision in the community that follows a sentence to a
period of incarceration in federal prison, both of which are ordered at the time of sentencing by a
federal judge. Parolees can have a number of different supervision statuses including active
supervision, which means they are required to regularly report to a parole authority in person, by mail,
or by telephone. Some parolees may be on an inactive status which means they are excluded from
regularly reporting, and that could be due to a number of reasons. For instance, some may receive a
reduction in supervision, possibly due to compliance or meeting all required conditions before the
parole sentence terminates, and therefore may be moved from an active to inactive status. Other
supervision statues include parolees who only have financial conditions remaining, have absconded, or
who have active warrants. Parolees are also typically required to fulfill certain conditions and adhere to
specific rules of conduct while in the community. Failure to comply with any of the conditions can result
in a return to incarceration.
Prison
Compared to jail facilities, prisons are longer-term facilities owned by a state or by the
Federal Government. Prisons typically hold felons and persons with sentences of more than a
year; however, the sentence length may vary by state. Six states (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont,
Delaware, Alaska, and Hawaii) have an integrated correctional system that combines jails and prisons.
There are a small number of private prisons, facilities that are run by private prison corporations whose
services and beds are contracted out by state or federal governments.
Prisoners
Prisoners are inmates confined in long-term facilities run by the state or federal
government or private agencies. They are typically felons who have received a sentence of
incarceration of 1 year or more. (Sentence length may vary by state because a few states have one
integrated prison system in which both prison and jail inmates are confined in the same types of
facilities.)
PTX - AFF
Plan NOW
The time is NOW, Obama is already speaking about the issue of
prisons
Angela Davis, 14, leading advocate for prison abolition, a professor emerita at
University of California, Santa Cruz, and the subject of the recent documentary,
"Free Angela and All Political Prisoners," 3/6/14 Angela Davis on Prison Abolition,
the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldnt Wait on Obama,
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/6/angela_davis_on_prison_abolition_the
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, yes. I think that this is a pivotal moment. There are openings.
And I think its very important to point out that people have been struggling over
these issues for years and for decades. This is also a problematic moment. And
those of us who identify as prison abolitionists, as opposed to prison reformers,
make the point that oftentimes reforms create situations where mass incarceration
becomes even more entrenched; and so, therefore, we have to think about what in
the long run will produce decarceratio n, fewer people behind bars, and hopefully,
eventually, in the future, the possibility of imagining a landscape without prisons,
where other means are used to address issues of harm, where social problems, such
as illiteracy and poverty, do not lead vast numbers of people along a trajectory that
leads to prison. JUAN GONZLEZ: Im wondering, in termthe first term of
President Obama was often referred to by some through the myth of post-racial
America, represented by the election of President Obama. But even he has shied
away, until recently, dealing with some of the racial inequities of our system,
especially the prison system. Im wondering if you can see a movement or
transformation in the president himself in how he deals with some of these issues?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, this is his second term. He really has nothing to lose. And it
really is about time that he began to address what is one of the most critical issues
in this country. Its pretty unfortunate that Obama has waited until now to speak
out, but its good that he is speaking out. And I think we can use this opportunity to
perhaps achieve some important victories.
Plan Popular
Bipartisan support for decarceration, Republicans have been
getting on board with the Dems
Ovetta Wiggins, 6-18, reporter for the Washington Post, 6/18/15, How
covers political news. He was previously a congressional reporter forThe Hill and a
Washington correspondent for The New York Sun, 7/10/15, Is This Obama's Moment
for Criminal-Justice Reform?,
http://www.govexec.com/management/2015/07/obamas-moment-criminal-justicereform/117481/
no shortage of proposals for reform in recent years, Congress has done
virtually nothing. That may, finally, be about to change, as an emboldened
President Obama eyes what might be the last major addition to his domestic legacy
in the White House. Speaking at a press conference last week, the president was asked how he might
Yet despite
follow the remarkable string of victories he earned in late June, which included a congressional win on trade, a pair
of legacy-setting Supreme Court decisions, and a widely-praised eulogy in Charleston. He ticked off several
unchecked boxes on his economic agenda, including a major infrastructure bill and enactment of his proposals to
soon likely to commute the sentences of dozens of nonviolent drug offendersan act of presidential clemency
unprecedented in scope that would seek to galvanize the push for reform in Congress.
Reform Popular
Federal prison reform popular, Horowitzs statement is enough
to sway opposition to reform
Andrew Cohen, 14, commentary editor of the Marshall Project, the legal analyst
for 60 Minutes and CBS Radio News, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, and
a contributing editor at The Atlantic, 11/17/14, Obamas Prison Crisis,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/17/a-crisis-at-the-bureau-of-prisonspersists-says-doj-watchdog
Legislation Key
Prisons are becoming increasingly expensive due to the
growing population, and programs to decrease the expense
are not effective- continued legislative reforms key
Andrew Cohen, 14, commentary editor of the Marshall Project, the legal analyst
for 60 Minutes and CBS Radio News, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, and
a contributing editor at The Atlantic, 11/17/14, Obamas Prison Crisis,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/17/a-crisis-at-the-bureau-of-prisonspersists-says-doj-watchdog
Horowitz didnt mince words, either, about what is costing so much. The federal
prison population is aging at a fast pace. From FY 2009 to FY 2013, the population
of sentenced inmates age 50 and over in BOP-managed facilities increased 25
percent, while the population of sentenced inmates under the age of 30 decreased
by 16 percent, he notes. As a result, the cost for providing healthcare services to
inmates increased 55 percent from FY 2006 to FY 2013. And here is his kicker:
The BOP spent over $1 billion on inmate healthcare services in FY 2013, which
nearly equaled the entire budget of the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) or the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). And if it is not elderly prisoners
its those who are sick. New prescription drug treatments, particularly for chronic
hepatitis C (HCV), could exponentially increase costs in the coming years , Horowitz
warns. The BOP currently spends $6,600 per patient for a standard HCV treatment
regimen. However, the treatment regimen newly approved by the Food and Drug
Administration could cost an additional $20,000 to $40,000 per patient meaning
that the BOP could face additional costs for these patients of approximately $220
million to $440 million. What to do about all this? Horowitz says the Bureau of
Prisons has to do more to release ill or elderly prisoners through the use of its
Compassionate Release Program, which the Office of Inspector General determined
in April 2013 was poorly managed and implemented inconsistently. Horowitz also
says the Bureau of Prisons now must do more to release inmates back to their
native countries through the International Prisoner Transfer Program, which the
Inspector General determined in December 2011 was not being efficiently
administered by federal prison officials. Combine a renewed commitment to these
existing programs with legislative and administrative sentencing reforms , Horowitz
asserts, and the costs of federal prisons will begin to ease . What he is saying, year
after year it seems, is that we need to make sure that fewer Americans are being
sent to federal prison while sending home more quickly those who no longer need
to be there. This is what Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, meant when he
told me Monday afternoon that the policies that created these costs have been
disproven and are simply unjust.
Crime DA AFF
create opportunities for arrest. Violation of these special rules can land someone
In fact, that is what happens a good deal of the time. The
extraordinary increase in prison admissions due to parole and probation violations is
due almost entirely to the War on Drugs. With respect to parole, in 1980, only 1 percent of all prison
probation officers),
admissions were parole violators. Twenty years later, more than one third (35 percent) of prison admissions resulted
from parole violations.93 To put the matter more starkly: About as many people were returned to prison for parole
violations in 2000 as were admitted to prison in 1980 for all reasons.94 Of all parole violators returned to prison in
2000, only one-third were returned for a new conviction; two-thirds were returned for a technical violation such as
In this
system of control, failing to cope well with one's exile status is treated like a crime . If
missing appointments with a parole officer, failing to maintain employment, or failing a drug test.95
you fail, after being released from prison with a criminal recordyour personal badge of inferiorityto remain drug
free, or if you fail to get a job against all the odds, or if you get depressed and miss an appointment with your
parole officer (or if you cannot afford the bus fare to take you there), you can be sent right back to prisonwhere
Empirics prove---the PIC only increases rates of recidivism--releasing prisoners early has been found to decrease the
reoccurrence of crime.
Mark Morris, 76, editor of Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, part
of the Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976, Instead of Prisons: A
Handbook for Abolitionsists,
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter2.shtml
One commonly cited occurrence which illustrates the dubious nature of the
protection theory followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1963 known as Gideon v.
Wainwright, which affirmed the right of indigent felony defendants to counsel. Those
convicted without counsel and sent to prison were ordered released. As a result, the State
of Florida released 1,252 indigent felons before their sentences were completed .
There was fear that such a mass exodus from prison might result in an increase in
crime. However, after 28 months, the Florida Department of Corrections found that
the recidivism rate for these ex-prisoners was only 13.6 percent, compared to 25
percent for those released after completing their full sentence s. An American Bar
Association committee commenting on the case observed: Baldly stated, . . . if we, today, turned loose
all of the inmates of our prisons without regard to the length of their sentences, and
with some exceptions, without regard to their previous offenses, we might reduce the
recidivism rate over what it would be if we kept each prisoner incarcerated until his
sentence expired. [66] For more than a century, statisticians have demonstrated
that regardless of imprisonment, the crime rate remains constant . Removing some
few people from society simply means an unapprehended majority continue in
criminal activity. If that one to three percent who end up in prison were released, they would not significantly
increase the lawbreaking population.
2004, Mass I Imprisonment a and t the L Life C Course: Race a and C Class I
Inequality i in U U.S. I Incarceration, AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2 2004,
VOL. 6 69 (April: 151169)
Edited for gendered language.
Imprisonment significantly alters the life course. In most cases, men [and women]
entering prison will already be off-time . Time in juvenile incarceration and jail and
weak connections to work and family divert many prison inmates from the usual
path followed by young adults. Spells of imprisonmentthirty to forty months on average
further delay entry into the conventional adult roles of worker, spouse and parent .
More commonly military service, not imprisonment, is identified as the key institutional experience that redirects
life trajectories (Hogan 1981; Elder 1986; Xie 1992). Elder (1987:543) describes military service as a legitimate
timeout that offered disadvantaged servicemen in World War Two an escape from family hardship. Similarly,
imprisonment can provide a chance to re-evaluate lifes direction (Sampson and Laub 1993, 223; Edin, Nelson, and
the effects of imprisonment are clearly negative. Exprisoners earn lower wages and experience more unemployment than similar men
who have not been incarcerated (Western, Kling and Weiman 2001 review the literature). They are
also less likely to get married or cohabit with the mothers of their children (Hagan and
Dinovitzer 1999; Western and McLanahan 2000). By eroding employment and marriage
opportunities, incarceration may also provide a pathway back into crime (Sampson and
Laub 1993; Warr 1998). The volatility of adolescence may thus last well into midlife among
men serving prison time. Finally, imprisonment is an illegitimate timeout that confers an enduring stigma.
Employers of low-skill workers are extremely reluctant to hire men [people]with
criminal records (Holzer 1996; Pager 2003). The stigma of a prison record also creates legal
barriers to skilled and licensed occupations, rights to welfare benefits, and voting
rights (Office of the Pardon Attorney 1996; Hirsch et al. 2002; Uggen and Manza 2002). In short, going to
prison is a turning point in which young crime-involved men [ex-prisoners] acquire a
new status involving diminished life chances and an attenuated form of citizenship.
Paranal 2001). Typically, though,
The life course significance of imprisonment motivates our analysis of the evolving probability of prison
incarceration over the life cycle.
rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, 2010, p. 89-90
Once convicted of felony drug charges, ones chances of being released from the
system in short order are slim, at best. The elimination of judicial discretion through mandatory
sentencing laws has forced judges to impose sentences for drug crimes that are often longer than those violent
criminals receive. When judges have discretion, they may consider a defendants background and impose a lighter
penalty if the defendants personal circumstances extreme poverty or experience of abuse, for examplewarrant
it. This flexibilitywhich is important in all criminal casesis especially important in drug cases, as studies have
indicated that many drug defendants are using or selling to support an addiction. 75
Referring a defendant
to treatment, rather than sending him or her to prison, may well be the most
prudent choicesaving government resources and potentially saving the defendant
from a lifetime of addiction. Likewise, imposing a short prison sentence (or none at all) may increase the
chances that the defendant will experience successful re-entry. A lengthy prison term may increase
the odds that reentry will be extremely difficult, leading to relapse, and reimprisonment. Mandatory drug sentencing laws strip judges of their traditional role
of considering all relevant circumstances in an effort to do justice in the individual
case.
Myth: Prisons protect society from "criminals." Reality: Prisons fail to protect
society from "criminals," except for a very small percentage and only
temporarily. Prisons "protect" the public only from those few who get caught
and convicted, thereby serving the primary function of control over certain
segments of society. According to Norman Carlson, director of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons, "The goal of our criminal justice system is to protect law-abiding
citizens from crime, particularly crimes of violence, and to make them secure in
their lives and property." [59] Despite shifts in "correctional" emphases,
The failure of prisons to protect is bound up with the reality of who actually
gets caught. According to the system managers, true protection would
require a high degree of effectiveness. [60] The system, however, is highly
ineffective. Few lawbreakers are apprehended and most studies show that
only one to three percent of all reported crime results in imprisonment. In one
study, out of 100 major crimes (felonies): 50 were reported to the police; suspects
were arrested in 12 of the cases; six persons were convicted; one or two went to
prison. [61] Those who find themselves entrapped in the criminal (in)justice
raised: "Better to be protected at least from that small minority of lawbreakers who
are convicted." What, then, is the nature of this protection ? Society may have
and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is
overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than
prevent it. Their very nature insures failure. -Corrections, National Advisory
Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, p. 597 People who feel
reassured by the high walls of the prison, its sentries, control towers and its
remoteness from population centers are naive. Most prisoners leave their
institutions at some point. In the United States, 95 percent are released after
accept the fact that there is no such thing as good and bad torture; no such thing as
a good prison. We must accept the fact that they must be emptied . Once we set
that as a goal we can begin to act." Lowe's plan calls for (1) a moratorium on all
prison sentences beginning immediately. (2) Attorneys and judges would propose
and structure alternative sanctions. (3) Victimless crimes would carry no more
sentences. (4) No prison sentences at all would be allowed until the government
proves beyond a reasonable doubt that they have tried alternatives unsuccessfully.
(5) Attorneys would be required to present alternatives to the court and (6) all
probation reports would recommend alternatives. Lowe further advocated dividing
current inmates into four classes with an equal number of task forces of law
enforcement officials, aided by citizens, assigned to administer a weeding out
process and administration of punishments. Each task force to start at once: (1)
The first group-approximately 15 to 20 percent of the prison population- perpetrators
of "victimless crimes" such as gambling, prostitution, marijuana use and
homosexuality-would be identified and released from prison immediately. Release of
this group should take less than a year. (2) The second group-between 45 and 55
percent of the prison population-persons who even prison officials would clearly
consider releasable, offenders of nonviolent crimes such as crimes against property
without weapons or violence, would be released from prison and allowed to
complete their term of sentence by performing a public service to society and,
where applicable, specific restitution to their victim(s). This task force could
accomplish its purpose within five years. (3) Lowe believes that of the remaining
30 percent, about half are borderline cases and eventually releasable. The third task
force, then, would cull out this 15 percent for in-community sanction s, "not taking
chances of releasing anyone who is a physical danger." Lowe recommends a seven
year weeding out process for this group. (4) The fourth group, the final 15 percent,
should be given full medical and psychological study. In the new environment some
knowledge may result on how to deal with such persons and hopefully how to
prevent others from following their patterns. A ten year transition period for
this last group's transfer would be required. And the prisons could be
closed.
have lengthened. They are now among the longest served anywhere in the world.
(4) Procedural due process. When decisions are being made affecting a person's
liberty, it is essential that the relevant evidence and arguments be fairly tested for
accuracy. Without procedures insuring due process, it is unlikely the truth will be
found. Richard McGee, for 23 years director of the California Department of
Corrections and one of the strongest advocates of indeterminate sentencing and the
medical model, did a complete about face when he finally realized its basic
assumptions had been proven false. In an interview with an ex-prisoners' group, he
advocated abolishing indeterminate sentences along with parole boards: Those are
the most radical things I've said in some time .... I was an early advocate of the
indeterminate sentence ... but I have reversed myself completely .... We assumed
we knew how to treat criminality but we found out we don't know ... we let people
believe that we know when a prisoner should be let go . The mistake made in
pushing for indeterminate sentencing is that we used a false analogy , a medical
analogy. The assumption was that a prison is like a hospital, where the inmate is
cured and released when the doctors, or the prison officials, say so. But prison
officials don't cure prisoners and it is the parole board, not the officials,
who decide when a prisoner is released ... the indeterminate sentence has
proven out generally, to mean an increased sentence , roughly 24 to 40 months
more time, for the prisoners ... with abolition of the indeterminate sentence and of
the parole board, we should give it all back to the courts who are equipped by
training to deal with it. -The Outlaw, July 1974 Voices against indeterminacy
Many other prisoner-related groups and organizations advocate abolishing
indeterminate sentences and/or the present parole system. Among them:
Whatever sanction or short sentence is imposed is to be fixed by law. There is to
be no discretion in setting sentences, no indeterminate sentences, and
unsupervised street release is to replace parole." -Struggle for Justice, p. 144 The
Western Association of Prisons in America completed a four-day meeting on
September 16 with a call for the elimination of parole and use of the indeterminate
sentence. Any release from an institution should be "a complete discharge, rather
than a conditional release," stated the association. Claiming the indeterminate
sentence has left administrators with too much discretion to authorize an
individual's release, the association alleged that it has "encouraged excessive and
unequal confinement in the name of treatment." To counteract the indeterminate
sentence, the organization called for a reduction in the maximum terms associated
with some crimes and advised that standards be set and adhered to. -Free World
Times, October 1973 Indeterminate sentences must be ended. Maintaining
incarceration because it is predicted that the prisoner presents some future danger
must also come to an end. -Statement of Ex-Prisoners Advisory Group, Toward a
New Corrections Policy: Two Declarations of Principles The indeterminate sentence
has not had the salutary effects predicted. Instead it has resulted in the exercise of
a wide discretion without the guidance of standards and in longer periods of time
served in prison .... There should, therefore, be strict limitations on the judicial and
quasi-judicial exercise of discretion in the fixing of terms of imprisonment; the
definite sentence would automatically eliminate administrative parole board
procedures which now consist largely of an untrammeled discretion which reduce
prisoners to little more than supplicants. The ultimate goal should be no
indeterminacy whatsoever in sentences. -A Program for Prison Reform, p. 12 The
interim or transitional replacements for the old systems of indeterminate sentences
and parole are crucial. Even minor legislative revisions to criminal codes drastically
affect the lives of millions of individuals who are caught in the criminal (in)justice
systems. Thus, proposed interim penal codes must be carefully scrutinized and
approved by those whose lives are directly affected. In 1975 there appeared to be
a healthy movement developing toward abolishing indeterminate sentences and
parole. Examining some of the issues raised by results in Maine and California helps
us to define some of the paradoxes and problems inherent in interim reforms.
A group of national lawmakers are working to eliminate the use of the federal prison
system for minor drug offenders, submitting a proposal earlier this week aimed at
designating these facilities for serious offenders only. On Thursday, Representatives
Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and Bobby Scott of Virginia introduced a bill that
some are calling one of the most groundbreaking pieces of sentencing reform to
ever be considered in the United States. The bill, which is called the Safe,
Accountable, Fair, and Effective (SAFE) Justice Act of 2015, would begin to chip
away at the federal prison crisis across the nationa problem that has manifested
over a 500-percent upsurge in incarceration rates over the past few decades. The
goal of the latest measure is to do away with federal sentences for minor drug
possession by allowing those cases to be dealt with on a state-by-state basi s. It also
seeks to put restrictions on mandatory minimums, setting aside these penalties for
major drug traffickers, while only applying life sentences for the most abominable
cases. The bill would also expand on compassionate release programs for low-risk
elderly and terminally ill offenders. The SAFE Act simply begs the reduction of
over-federalization and over-criminalization by providing more flexibility between
state and federal law when it comes to prosecuting drug-related crim e. The proposal
encompasses numerous factors, ranging from the creation of a citizen complaint
process to establishing probationary sentences, all in an effort to diminish prison
overcrowding and to save citizens billions of dollars. Taxpayers will pour $6.9
billion into the Bureau of Prisons this year, with substantial increases each year into
the foreseeable future unless Congress fixes the system, former U.S.
Representative Newt Gingrich and political activist Pat Nolan wrote in The
Washington Times. The inspector general of the Department of Justice has
said that this level of spending is 'unsustainable.' Federal prisons are
squeezing out spending for counterterrorism agencies, victim services,
the FBI, and other important crime-fighting initiatives. " Perhaps most
importantly, this bill would ensure that citizens who buy drugs on the black market
would no longer be in violation of federal law. Offenders would simply be held
accountable under the statutes of their respective state. This combined with the
reduction of mandatory minimum sentences, in theory, could be sufficient enough
to drastically reduce the number of people stuck in U.S. penitentiaries for drug
crimes. Today, we know what works in the correctional field and what doesnt, and
the debate is no longer about whether we need reform, Gingrich and Nolan
continued. There is bipartisan consensus that reforms are imperative. Now is the
time for conservatives to lead the charge." This legislation has bipartisan backing,
as well as the support of all of the usual suspects, including Families Against
Mandatory Minimums and the American Civil Liberties Union.
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
If there are indeed some small subset of people properly denominated the
dangerous few, they are only those who are intent on perpetrating acts of vicious
harm against others such that they are an imminent threat to all those around them
regardless of their circumstances. An abolitionist framework is not necessarily committed to
denying the existence of these dangerous few persons, though the dangerous few
are vastly outnumbered by many millions of nondangerous individuals
living under criminal supervision and any such dangerousness on the part of those incarcerated
currently is exacerbated by features of prison society that a wider embrace of an abolitionist ethic and framework
We might expect the origins of the word "danger" to be related to... its current use
in denoting physical objects and events that might damage property or injure
people. Surprisingly ... the term seems to have shaped out of linguistic roots that
signified relative position in a social structure , a relationship between roles on a
power dimension. The root is found in Latin in a derivative of dominium, meaning
lordship or sovereignty .... The implication ... leads us ... into the conception of
danger as a symbol denoting relative power in social organization .... Those persons
or groups that threaten the existing power structure are dangerous. In any historical
period, to identify an individual whose status is that of member of the "dangerous classes," (i.e., the classes that
threaten the dominium or power structure) the label "criminal "has been handy. -Theodore R. Sarbin, The Myth of
People do not come into the world labeled "chattel " and "not
chattel," "schizophrenic" and "not schizophrenic," " dangerous" and "not dangerous."
We-slave traders and plantation owners, psychiatrists and judges- so label them.
-Thomas Szasz, "On Involuntary Psychiatry," New York Times, August 4, 1975 Prisons have been used to
limit the movement of persons labeled as "dangerous," "psychotic" or "disturbed," a
labeling process which began in the community, in the bad schools and continued
thru each stage of the criminal justice system. The result has been the destruction
of thousands of lives. We have been so concerned with containment, with limiting
movement, that we haven't looked for the real troubles in people, in communities,
in our social and economic system. -John Boone, Former Director of Corrections, State of
the Criminal Type, pp. 16-17
Massachusetts, Fortune News, May 1975 It is no wonder that today preventive detention proposals are so intensely
opposed by Black organizations. They recognize correctly that their movement for freedom and self-determination
is seen as "dangerous" by established white America. We approach the concept of "dangerousness" with
considerable skepticism, for it has little meaning apart from its social and political concept. -Struggle for Justice, p.
78 Men in prison are dangerous because they are threatened with sophisticated forms of extinction in the hands of
simple minded wage earners who claim they are "only doing their duty" or "just following orders" as five or six of
them are wrestling you to the floor to stick a needle in your arm or ass. -Howard A. Lund, prisoner, NEPA News,
March 1974 The defenders of these treatment models refuse to acknowledge that society, thru its injustices which
are magnified inside prison walls, remains the principle impetus to violent behavior. Almost inevitably, those
prisoners who refuse to accept the authoritarian, dehumanizing conditions of prison and who organize disruptive
political behavior, exhibit repeated, angry "acting out" behavior, and flood the courts with litigation are the
prisoners deemed candidates for DSU (Departmental Segregation Unit) or other "special offender" programs.
-Donna Parker, NEPA News, June 1974
Terrorism DA
AT: Terrorism DA
The discourse of terrorism is inexorably linked with our
critique of the racist construct of the criminal- the DA links to
our critique.
Angela Davis 11, professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons,
and Torture (Open Media Series), ebook no pages
In your essay Race and Criminalization you write: The figure of the criminalthe racialized
figure of the criminalhas come to represent the most menacing enemy of
American Society. Virtually anything is acceptabletorture, brutality, vast
expenditures of public fundsas long as it is done in the name of public safety. Do
you think the terrorist is our new racialized criminal? I remember that when I wrote that
essay I was thinking about the criminal as surrogate for communist in the era of law and order . I thought
about this new discursive figure of the criminal, which absorbed much of the
discourse of the communist enemy. In the aftermath of 9/11, the figure of the
terrorist mobilizes collective fear in ways that recapitulate and consolidate
previous ideologies of the national enemy. Yes, the terrorist is the contemporary
enemy. The rhetoric, the attendant anxieties, and the diversionary
strategies produced by the deployment of the figure of the terrorist are very
similar to, and rely in very concrete ways on, the production of the criminal
as pervasive threat.
Reform CP - AFF
Perm Do Both
The idea of abolition does not exclude reform but instead
views it as a stepping stone to complete abolition.
Angela Y. Davis 05, Professor in the History of Consciousness program at the
Reform Fails
Only complete abolition of federal prisons solves--imprisonment is inextricably linked to violence and
depersonalization.
Allegra M. McLeod 15, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center,
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
It is insufficient to simply seek to reform the most egregious instances of violence
and abuse that occur in prison while retaining a commitment to prison backed
criminal law enforcement as a primary social regulatory framework. Of course, less violence in these
places would undoubtedly render prisons more habitable, but the degradation associated
with incarceration in the United States is at the heart of the structure of
imprisonment elucidated decades ago by Sykes: Imprisonment in its basic structure entails
caging or imposed physical constriction, minute control of prisoners bodies
and most intimate experiences , profound depersonalization, and
institutional dynamics that tend strongly toward violence . These
dehumanizing aspects of incarceration are unlikely to be meaningfully eliminated in
the U.S., following decades of failed efforts to that end, while retaining a
commitment to the practice of imprisonment. This is especially so in the United States for reasons
related to the specific historical and racially subordinating legacies of American incarceration and punitive policing.
Two hundred and forty years of slavery and ninety years of legalized segregation,
enforced in large measure through criminal law administration, render U.S. carceral
and punitive policing practices less amenable to the reforms undertaken , for example, in
Scandinavian countries, which have more substantially humanized their prisons.127
numerous topics, including the prison system, LGBT issues (particularly trans
politics), class privilege, and organizational development/strategic planning, April
2010, Against a Better Prison: Gender Responsiveness and the Changing Terrain of
Abolition, http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1415&context=etd_hon_theses
Reformist activism builds on a few basic premises that determine the types of
changes that are included on reformist agendas. Of course, there is no single
reformist perspective on the prison system that can be assessed as a coherent
whole: reformist organizations and campaigns vary widely in the extent of their
critiques of the prison system and in the changes they call for. However, for the
sake of this project, I am defining reformist work according to the interpretations
of the prison system that inform it. There are a few key premises that I will focus on
in my discussion of gender responsiveness, and which I propose are inherent in all
reformist perspectives: namely, that the harms of imprisonment are indicators of
flaws (or brokenness) in the prison system, and that prisons can be improved in
order to function more effectively or more justly. 83 A reformist perspective
conceptualizes prisons as perfectible and often pursues changes that aim to make
prisons better. This language is ubiquitous in theories of gender responsiveness.
In the preface to the report Gender-Responsive Strategies, authors Bloom, Owen,
and Covington summarize their findings: Policies, programs, and procedures that
reflect these empirical, genderbased differences can accomplish the following:
Make the management of women offenders more effective . Enable correctional
facilities to be more suitably staffed and funded. Decrease staff turnover and
sexual misconduct. Improve program and service delivery. Decrease the
likelihood of litigation against the criminal justice system. Increase the genderappropriateness of services and programs. (Bloom, Owen, and Covington 2003, vi,
emphasis added) The preface concludes, Managing women offenders more
effectively in correctional settings and providing more effective programs and
services will benefit the women, increase community safety, and help build a more
effective criminal justice system (viii, emphasis added). This is quintessential
reformist language. Its repeated deployment of words like effective, improve,
and manage speaks to its underlying conception of the prison system as an
imperfect but redeemable set of institutions. Moreover, there is a clear investment
in maintaining the institutional stability of both individual prisons and the prison
system more broadly. While the report gestures briefly to the reality of sexual abuse
(misconduct), it seems that the authors are more concerned with minimizing staff
turnover, securing suitable funding for prisons, and decreasing litigation than they
are with addressing deplorable conditions facing prisoners. This position belies the
investment that gender responsiveness, and many other reformist programs, has in
bolstering the prison system against external threats. The effort to improve
prisons stems from a slippage whereby the harms associated with imprisonment are
attributed to the failures or ineffectiveness of the 84 prison system . Staff abuse,
insufficient health care, corruption, lack of oversight, and high recidivism
rates are all understood to be symptoms of a system that is working
incorrectly . Gender responsiveness theories are situated firmly within these
assumptions, asserting that the criminal legal system is failing women. GenderResponsive Strategies is filled with such examples. Because most prison
classification schemas and risk assessments were originally designed for men,
women are often overclassifiedthat is, placed in higher security facilities than
their actual level of violence or escape potential should call for (Bloom, Owen, and
Covington 2003, 19). Prison staff are inadequately trained to address female
offender issues (16). Womens prisons have fewer programming opportunities than
mens prisons. Staff sexual misconduct is a serious issue in womens prisons (25).
Since most women in prison are mothers, imprisonment poses a strain on family
relationships and increases the pressure during reentry when women are released
from prison.
Attempts to reform the prison system are likely to fuel the prison system
because of the perverse incentives that structure our political system. Prison
guards, private prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America,
contractors that provide services in prisons, and firms that profit off prison labor are
all concentrated interest groups that benefit from incarceration. Meanwhile, the
costs of operating prisons are widely dispersed across a population that has little
incentive to research prisons and largely thinks prisons are necessary for their
protection. Those most substantially harmed by the prison system are prisoners ,
who are not able to vote or go lobby their representatives. Felon
disenfranchisement limits their political power even after they are released from
prison. Their family members and neighbors have their political power limited,
because prisoners are often counted on the census for the area they are
incarcerated, not the area they were forcibly taken from. This means that regions
that profit from prisons have increased political representation, while regions that
are scarred by mass incarceration are disenfranchised. This phenomenon is called
prison based gerrymandering. Political incentives have given us a prison system
that may be immune to humane reform. Given the violence and harm caused by the
prison system, the goal should be something more radical: prison abolition. We
should use every tool at our disposal to help keep people out of the states brutal
prison system. This can mean filming cops, helping people encrypt possibly
incriminating communications and transactions, or urging juries to nullify unjust
laws. We should support those caged by this system. This can mean writing them
letters or donating to their legal defense fund or commissary. But perhaps most
importantly, we should acut to end the states monopoly on law, security, and
justice. As Bruce Benson documents in The Enterprise of Law, prisons and criminal
law displaced a system of customary tort law. A customary legal system based on
restitution for victims was replaced by an authoritarian system that diverted
resources towards the states rulers and their cronies. That authoritarian plunder is
precisely how our current justice system operates, and it has disastrous
consequences. Police have incentives to focus on victimless crimes like drug
dealing and sex work, because investigating such crimes allows them to profit from
civil asset forfeiture in a way they cannot in rape or murder cases. This emphasis on
vice crimes leads to discriminatory enforcement and the criminalization of
entrepreneurship that is essential for some peoples survival, particularly those who
are excluded from the formal economy. Moreover, criminal law is not based on
demonstrating harm, but on state edict. Therefore, a litany of crimes can be created
on the whims of rent seeking special interest groups and moralist busybodies alike.
So we see a long parade of bootleggers and Baptists producing authoritarian law
after authoritarian law, filling the states cages. Ultimately, this leaves many
people unable to rely on the states system of law enforcement. Communities of
color see police as an occupying army rather than their protectors. Drug dealers
and sex workers are surely unable to trust police, as their professions are treated as
crimes. Immigrants fear that contact with police means they will be swept up by the
federal governments Secure Communities program and deported. Surveys show
that a majority of transgender individuals are uncomfortable seeking police
assistance. Sexual assault survivors correctly fear that police will dismiss them and
victim blame them. If a rape kit is taken, it will likely join a massive backlog of
untested rape kits while police resource are funneled towards militarization and vice
enforcements lucrative legal plunder. Prison abolitionists should create
entrepreneurial alternatives to the states monopoly on law, security, and justice.
The Audre Lorde Project in New York City runs the Safe OUTside the System
Collective[5] to help combat hate violence without calling the police. Such
community projects are one way to fill the void. Private security firms are another.
Cryptography and other innovations have potential to help us build the new law in
the shell of the old faster than we ever could before. The states legal system is a
predatory system. It is a system of plunder and violence that exacerbates
inequality, ruins lives, and enables the very crimes it claims to punish. Its time to
abolish prisons. And to abolish prisons, we must abolish the state.
AT: PICs
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
In contrast to leading scholarly and policy efforts to reform criminal law, abolition decidedly does not seek
merely to replace incarceration with alternatives that are closely related to imprisonment, such
as punitive policing, noncustodial criminal supervision, probation, civil
institutionalization, and parole.25 Abolition instead entails a rejection of the
moral legitimacy of confining people in cages , whether that caging is
deemed civil or whether it follows a failure to comply with technical terms of
supervised release or a police order.26 So too the positive project of abolition addressed in this Article is
decidedly not an effort to replicate the institutional transfer that occurred in the
aftermath of the deinstitutionalization of mental institutions.27 An abolitionist
framework requires positive forms of social integration and collective security that
are not organized around criminal law enforcement, confinement, criminal surveillance, punitive
policing, or punishment.
2015, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, UCLA Law Review, 62 UCLA L. Rev.
1156 (2015), http://www.uclalawreview.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/06/McLeod_6.2015.pdf
In short, there are many who have committed acts of violence but who, under
circumstances of social coexistence enabled by positive abolition, would pose no
threat of harm to themselves or others. A commitment to any significant
decarceration, let alone abolition, entails more than simply eliminating
incarceration for nonviolent, nonserious, nonfelony convictions ,63 or less
serious felony convictions classified as violent.64 Even people convicted of serious,
violent felonies are not properly understood as the dangerous few and should be
able to live their lives outside of cages. A commitment to any significant degree of
decarceration requires a willingness to abandon managing perceived risks of violence by banishing and relegating to civil death any person convicted of serious
crime. Reducing social risk by physically isolating and caging entire populations is
not morally defensible , even if abandoning such practices may increase some
forms ofsocial disorder.
If there are indeed some small subset of people properly denominated the
dangerous few, they are only those who are intent on perpetrating acts of vicious
harm against others such that they are an imminent threat to all those around them
regardless of their circumstances. An abolitionist framework is not necessarily
committed to denying the existence of these dangerousfew persons, though the
dangerous few are vastly outnumbered by many millions of nondangerous
individuals living under criminal supervision and any such dangerousness on the
part of those incarcerated currently is exacerbated by features of prison society that
a wider embrace of an abolitionist ethic and framework would improve. Because any
such dangerous few persons constitute at most only a small minority of the
many millions of people under criminal supervision in the United States
the one of every thirty-five American adults under criminal supervision of some
form65the question of the danger these few may pose can be deferred for some
time as decarceration could by political necessity only proceed gradually. And so the
question of the dangerous few ought not to eclipse or overwhelm the urgency of a
thorough consideration of abolitionist analyses and reformist projects of
displacement of criminal regulation by other regulatory approaches.
AT: Kritiks
AT: Neoliberalism
Prisons have evolved alongside neoliberalism-the plan strikes
against the critical neoliberal tenant of personal
responsibility
Lex Horan, 10, skilled in facilitating conversations and trainings around
numerous topics, including the prison system, LGBT issues (particularly trans
politics), class privilege, and organizational development/strategic planning, April
2010, Against a Better Prison: Gender Responsiveness and the Changing Terrain of
Abolition, http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1415&context=etd_hon_theses
Many thinkers have pointed to a complex intersection of factors that gave rise to
the prison boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Their analyses call attention to state and
market restructuring in the face of political and economic crisis and imprisonment
as a state response to threats raised by social movements of the 1960s. The prison
system as we know it today has been created alongside (and many would argue, as
a part of) U.S. economic and political shifts towards neoliberalism that began in the
early 1970s. The neoliberal turn can be traced to political and economic crises of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Christian Parenti argues that the expansion of
police forces and prisons must also be situated as a response to the domestic
economic and social crises 60 that faced the United States beginning in the late
1960s. Parentis sketch of the United States in the early 1970s emphasizes that
labor had made unprecedented gains in bargaining power that threatened the
owning class, and the revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s were significant cause
for alarm for the political establishment (Parenti 1999). To manage the dual threats
of the economic crisis of stagflation and the menace of political power of labor
and Black liberation struggles, Nixon began to slowly turn the country on a
trajectory that Ronald Regan would pick up in the 1980s. Locked together at the
core of this shift were enormous cuts to social spending and unprecedented new
investments in police and prisons. Neoliberalism was the political-economic order
inaugurated through these changing state and private priorities. In A Brief History
of Neoliberalism, David Harvey defines neoliberal ideology as the belief that
human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
private property rights, free markets, and free trade (Harvey 2005, 2). Although
neoliberal rhetoric calls for freedom from state intervention, the neoliberal state
takes an active role in creating new markets, sustaining apparatuses like the
military, police, and prisons to protect capital, and managing frequent economic
crises. Harvey characterizes the neoliberal turn in terms of a massive statefacilitated upward redistribution of capital: Redistributive effects and increasing
social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as
to be regarded as structural to the whole project (16). While the neoliberal state
is clearly an active one, it is also characterized by a staunch disavowal of big
government, synonymous with any state programs oriented towards public
wellbeing. Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this the antistate state, a 61 formation that
rejectsboth in rhetoric and policystate programs and activities that work to
AT: Law K
We must call upon the law to change the prison industrial
complex
Angela Davis 11, professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the
Of course we
must call upon law both at the national and international level, but we should also
recognize the limitations of law. The myriad legal challenges to the death penalty have not yet
prison, but more frequently than not, these reforms have ultimately solidified the institution.
succeeded in abolishing it. I would agree that we have a stake, but do we have the means of challenging the
actions, if we dont have the law? I dont know. Im somewhat ambivalent here because I dont know whether I am
from ideological consensus. As someone who has been involved in work against the prison system for quite a
number of years, I think we need to urge individuals and organizations already committed to working against the
race and class inequalities and the generalized repression produced by the domestic prison to reframe their antiprison work in order to address and oppose the ongoing atrocities in U.S.-controlled detention centers in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantnamo Bay.
Prisons - Neg
Case Answers
General
Education is an alt cause to prisons, schools are feeder
institutions for jails and creates the justification for the use of
prisons
Erica R. Meiners, 07, Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Studies, College of
Education, Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty Affiliate Latino and Latin American
Studies, and Faculty Affiliate Justice Studies, 3/26/07, The Right to be Hostile:
Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies, Google Books pg. 7 & 8
Expanding what counts as education reform is central to prison abolition, not solely
because of my location as a preservice teacher educator, but because schools are
"feeder institutions" for jails and prisons. Architecture, curriculum, socialization
processes, and literally the presence of police or other structures that serve only
punitive functions at specific schools results in the outcome that select youth are
prepared through schools to be institutionalized. When children attend schools
that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and
intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison. If this is the
predicament we face today, what might the future hold if the prison system
acquires an even greater presence in our society? In the nineteenth century,
antislavery activists insisted that as long as slavery continued, the future of
democracy was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprison activists insist
that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long overdue abolition of the prison system. (Davis, 2003, 38-39) Davis's suggestion is that
education reform is not just a central component of rethinking our
systems of punishment and justice, but also our democracy . This book is
written for educators in order to consider our collusion, active and passive, in
maintaining practices that perpetuate relationships between schools and jails and to
start conversations that imagine futures without overflowing punitive institutions.
Abolitionism Fails
Prisons keep people safe, there is no evidence that proves
alternatives to the prison system are effective
Robert Whelan, 04, deputy director of Civitas, a community of researchers and
This is where I find abolitionism frustrating: the project of prison abolition seems like
an end-state rather than an end-in-view. It deliberately ignores (1) the wishes of
victims, citizens, and even many of the incarcerated (all of whom are understood to
be duped and epistemically blinded by the ideology of carcerality unless they adopt
abolitionism.) It doesnt start with our current carcerality and work away
from it, but rather starts with a rejection of the current context and the
constraints it creates (2). Its inflexible (3) in the sense that it does not allow that
some limited carcerality (a la Norway?) might still be reasonable. Though theres the
sense that that is the direction that abolitionism must proceed, it does not currently
emphasize the development of the skills and abilities (4) that alternatives to
incarceration would require. And though it does aim to foreclose carcerality forever,
I do think abolitionists are most concerned to promote plurality, cooperation, and
empowerment (5) for some of the most dominated people in our world today, which
is why I cant help feeling the pull of abolition even as the other objections I mention
raise red flags. Meliorism, on the other hand, has all the problems that the
abolitionists describe. Reformers work with and within the system to resist it, which
requires all sorts of rhetorical and practical compromises. By chipping at the edges
and living too comfortably with constraints and realism, (2) meliorists leave the
status quo mostly untouched. We adopt democratic projects and processes (1), but
leave the fundamental injustices in place. We develop capacities (4) but usually we
cant create the institutions and conditions (5) where those capacities will be
actualized. We are, at base, flexible (3) with evil, and thereby compromised by it,
while the righteous know that evil requires inflexibility and even sacrifice. Angela
Davis puts it this way at the start of Are Prisons Obsolete?: As important as some
reforms may be-the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in womens
prison, for example-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the
stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. Debates about strategies of
decarceration, which should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison
crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center stage. The most
immediate question today is how to prevent the further expansion of prison
populations and how to bring as many imprisoned women and men as possible back
into what prisoners call the free world.' No reformer wants to produce the
stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond prison, but much of the rest of Daviss
book is devoted to the claim that reform is inextricable from that consequence.
Ultimately, she equates prison reform with the absurdity of slavery reform.
Americas prisons are historically and in current practice entangled with the Black
Codes, the convict-lease system, Jim Crow, sexism, and antiblack racism; therefore,
reformers are merely (hopefully unknowingly) fluffing the pillows while white
supremacy and patriarchy is maintained: If the words prison reform so easily slip
from our lips, it is because prison and reform have been inextricably linked since
the beginning of the use of imprisonment as the main means of punishing those
who violate social norms. Yet consider: Davis assumes that the majority of the
increase in incarceration has been driven by the drug war , and that alternatives to
incarceration will foreground drug treatment and decriminalization of drugs. In fact,
though the largest group ofarrests are tied to drug use, the largest group of
prisoners are incarcerated for violence; this reflects sentencing differences and the
kinds of treatment diversion programs for which she call s. Theres good evidence
that the drug war, poverty, and racist policing produce some of that violence, but
not all of it. Plus, prison populations are already shrinking , but at least some of this
decline is due to the increase of post-release strategies that export carceral logics
into a parolees (or even an unindicted suspects) everyday life. The goals of
decarceration can fall into the logic of carcerality as easily as the goals of reform . So
how much really separates reformers from abolitionists? A reformer might call for
the restoration of prison education and voting rights, for the creation of schools that
teach rather than prepare students for prison, for decriminalization and treatment of
drug abuse, for poverty-reduction and racial justice, while still thinking that certain
kinds of violence should lead to coercive detention, that restorative justice has
dangerous implications when applied to cases of sexual assault or organized
violence.
Util
The impossibility to attain knowledge of every outcome or
abuse leaves utilitarianism as the only option for most rational
decision-making
Goodin 95 Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social
Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge University
Press, Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy pg 63)
My larger argument turns on the proposition that th ere is something special about the situation of
public officials that makes utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes
them adopt a form of utilitarianism that we would find more acceptable) than private individuals. Before proceeding
their
situations that makes it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt
a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first the argument from necessity. Public
officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very
with that larger argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special about public officials and
special sort at that. All choices-public and private alike- are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But
conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each
There is a
tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of
September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the
would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism.
starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West
September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and
Because
it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a
good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence.
Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped . Second, it would mean
with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion.
frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist
practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or
criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work.
Race
The neg politicizes Identity by submitting the past as a
reminder of the failure of history. Simultaneously they
politicize their own identity in relationship to those histories.
They perpetuate the foundation of an identity based in injury,
which creates disciplinary regimes that neutralize difference
and reinscribe domination, turns all the method and the case.
Brown, 1995 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science and Rhetoric at UC-Berkeley, States of Injury: Power
and Freedom in Late Modernity, published by Princeton UP, p. 65-66)
politics makes clear politicized identity's imbrication in disciplinary power, as well as the way in which, as Foucault
reminds us, disciplinary power "infiltrates" rather than replaces liberal juridical modalities. 20 Recently, the city
council of my town reviewed an ordinance, devised and promulgated by a broad coalition of identity-based political
groups, which aimed to ban discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of
"sexual orientation, transsexuality, age, height, weight, personal appearance, physical characteristics, race, color,
creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, marital status, sex, or gender. "21 Here is a perfect instance of
the universal juridical ideal of liberalism and the normalizing principle of disciplinary regimes conjoined and taken
up within the discourse of politicized identity. This ordinance-variously called the "purple hair ordinance" or the
"ugly ordinance" by state and national news media-aims to count every difference as no difference, as part of the
seamless whole, but also to count every potentially subversive rejection of culturally enforced norms as
themselves normal, as normalizable, and as normativizable through law. Indeed,
through
the
Gender
Gender is not the root cause of environmental degradation
such claims are simplistic and wrong
Fox 98 Center for Environmental Studies
Fellow @ Cent. Env Studies, The Deep-Ecology-Ecofem debate, in Environmental Philosophy ed.
Zimmerman, p 232-3
To begin with, deep ecologists completely agree with ecofeminists that men have been far more
implicated in the history of ecological destruction than women. However, deep ecologists also agree
with similar charges derived from other social perspectives: for example, that capitalists, whites,
and Westerners have been far more implicated in the history of ecological destruction than precapitalist peoples, blacks, and non-Westerners .21 If ecofeminists also agree with these points, then the question
arises as to why they do not also criticize deep ecology for being neutral with respect to issues
concerning such significant social variables as socioeconomic class, race, and Westernization. There
appears to be two reasons for this. First, to do so would detract from the priority that econfeminists
wish to give to their own concern with androcentrism. Second, and more significantly, these charges
could also be applied with equal force to the ecofeminist focus on androcentrism itself.14 How does
one defend the ecofeminist charge against deep ecology (i.e., that androcentrism is "the real root"
of ecological destruction) in the face of these charges?" For deep ecologists, it is simplistic on both
empirical and logical grounds to think that one particular perspective on human society identifies
the real root of ecological destruction. Empirically, such thinking is simplistic (and thus
descriptively poor) because it fails to give due consideration to the multitude of interacting factors
at work in any given situation. (While on a practical level it can be perfectly reasonable to devote most of one's energy to one
particular 'cause-if only for straightforward reasons to do with time and energy-that, of course, is no excuse for simplistic social theorizing.)
Such thinking falls, in other words, to adopt an ecological perspective with respect to the workings
of human society itself. Logically, such thinking is simplistic (and thus facile) because it implies that
the solution to our ecological problems is close at hand-all we have to do is remove "the real root"
of the problem-when it is actually perfectly possible to conceive of a society that is nonandrocentric,
socioeconomically egalitarian, nonracist, and nonimperialistic with respect to other human
societies, but whose members nevertheless remain aggressively anthropocentric in collectively
agreeing to exploit their environment for their collective benefit in ways that nonanthropocentrists
would find thoroughly objectionable. Indeed, the "green" critique of socialism proceeds from precisely this recognition that a
socially egalitarian society does not necessarily imply an ecologically benign society.
A number of authors have extended the noble savage idea to argue that violence and patriarchy were
late inventions, rooted in either the Western Judeo-Christian tradition or the capitalism to which the former gave
birth. Friedrich Engels anticipated the work of later feminists by positing the existence of a primordial matriarchy,
which was replaced by a violent and repressive patriarchy only with the transition to agricultural societies. The
problem with this theory is, as Lawrence Keeley points out in his book War Before Civilization, that the most
comprehensive recent studies of violence in hunter-gatherer societies suggest that for them was
actually more frequent, and rates of murder higher, than for modern ones. Surveys of ethnographic data
show that only 10-13 percent of primitive societies never or rarely engaged in war or raiding; the others engaged in
conflict either continuously or at less than yearly intervals. Closer examination of the peaceful cases shows that
they were frequently refugee populations driven into remote locations by prior warfare or groups protected by a
more advanced society. Of the Yanomam tribesmen studied by Napoleon Chagnon in Venezuela, some 30 percent
of the men died by violence; the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert, once characterized as the "harmless people,"
have a higher murder rate than New York or Detroit. The Sad archaeological evidence from sites like Jebel Sahaba in
Egypt, Talheim in Germany, or Roaix in France indicates that systematic mass killings of men, women, and
children occurred in Neolithic times. The Holocaust, Cambodia, and Bosnia have each been described as a
unique, and often as a uniquely modern, form of horror. Exceptional and tragic they are indeed, but with precedents
stretching back tens if not hundreds of thousands of years .
problem with the feminist view is that it sees these attitudes toward violence, power, status as wholly
the products of a patriarchal culture, whereas in fact it appears they are rooted in biology. This
makes these attitudes harder to change in men and consequently in societies. Despite the rise of
women, men will continue to play a major, if not dominant, part in the governance of postindustrial
countries, not to mention less-developed ones. The realms of war and international politics in particular
will remain controlled by men for longer than many feminists would like. Most important, the task of
resocializing men to be more like women - that is, less violent - will run into limits. What is bred in
the bone cannot be altered easily by changes in culture and ideology.
I am faced with a
dilemma: If I act, I harm a person in a way that a rational being need not
consent to; if I fail to act, then I do not do my duty to those in need and thereby fail to
On the other hand, I have a duty to do all that I can for those in need. As a consequence
promote an objective end. Faced with such a choice, which horn of the dilemma is more consistent with the
formula of the end-in-itself?
T No Consent
A. Interpretation: Surveillance means the target cannot
consent.
FISA 78 (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Legal Document Outlining
Electronic Surveillance Within The United States For Foreign Intelligence Purposes,
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. 50 us e 1801,
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/STATUTE-92-Pg1783.pdf)//ghs-VA
(f) "Electronic surveillance" means (1) the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other
surveillance device of the contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by
a particular, known United States person who is in the United States, if the contents are acquired by intentionally
targeting that United States person, under circumstances in which a person ' has a reasonable expectation of
privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes; (2) the acquisition by an electronic,
mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire communication to or from a person in the
both the sender and all intended recipients are located within the United States; or (4) the installation or use of an
electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device in the United States for monitoring to acquire information, other
than from a wire or radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of
privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes.
Crime Disad
1NC Shell
Crime is decreasing nationwide
FBI 2013, Federal Bureau of Invesigation Unifrorm Crime Report, 2013, Violent
Crime, https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-theu.s.-2013/violent-crime/violent-crime-topic-page/violentcrimemain_final
In 2013, an estimated 1,163,146 violent crimes occurred nationwide, a decrease of 4.4
percent from the 2012 estimate. When considering 5- and 10-year trends, the 2013
estimated violent crime total was 12.3 percent below the 2009 level and 14.5
percent below the 2004 level. (See Tables 1 and 1A.) There were an estimated 367.9 violent crimes per
100,000 inhabitants in 2013, a rate that declined 5.1 percent when compared with the 2012 estimated rate. (See
Tables 1 and 1A.) Aggravated assaults accounted for 62.3 percent of violent crimes reported to law enforcement in
2013. Robbery offenses accounted for 29.7 percent of violent crime offenses; rape (legacy definition) accounted for
6.9 percent; and murder accounted for 1.2 percent. (Based on Table 1.) Information collected regarding types of
weapons used in violent crime showed that firearms were used in 69.0 percent of the nations murders, 40.0
percent of robberies, and 21.6 percent of aggravated assaults. (Weapons data are not collected for rape.) (See
Expanded Homicide Data Table 7, Robbery Table 3, and the Aggravated Assault Table.)
Mark Moore and Robert Trojaniwikz 1988, A publication of the National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/111459.pdf
When crimes occur-when a ghetto teenager is shot to death in a gang war, when an
elderly woman is mugged for her social security check, when a nurse is raped in a
hospital parking lot, when one driver is punched by another in a dispute over a
parking place, when a black family's new home is vandalized- society's attention is
naturally focused on the victims and their material losses. Their wounds, bruises,
lost property, and inconvenience can be seen, touched, and counted. These are the
concrete signs of criminal victimization. Behind the immediate, concrete losses of
crime victims, however, is a different, more abstract crime problem-that of fear. For
victims, fear is often the largest and most enduring legacy of their victimization. The
raped nurse will feel vulnerable long after her cuts and bruises heal. The harassed
black family suffers far more from the fear of neighborhood hostility than the
inconvenience of repairing their property. For the rest of us---the not-recently, or
not-yet victimized fear becomes a contagious agent spreading the injuriousness of
criminal victimization. The gang member's death makes parents despair of their
children's future. The mugging of the elderly woman teaches elderly residents to
fear the streets and the teenagers who roam them. The fight over the parking place
confirms the general fear of strangers. The harassment of the black family makes
other minorities reluctant to claim their rights. In these ways, fear extends the
damage of criminal victimization.
experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally
insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms.
They are not where the major violence of our society takes place, and the
perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent
deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the
structural violence of this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who
commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning
from those structural causes of violent death that are far more significant from a
numerical or public health, or human, standpoint By structural violence I mean
the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom
rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by
those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstratably
large portion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure is
itself a product of societys collective human choices, concerning how to distribute
the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting
structural with behavioral violence, by which I mean the non-natural deaths and
injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against
individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare,
capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavioral violence
in at least three major respects The lethal effects of structural violence
operate continuously rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides,
executions, wars, and other forms of behavioral violence occur one at a time.
Structural violence operates more or less independently of individual acs;
independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose
decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. Structural violence
is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent)
causes. Neither the existence, the scope and extent, nor the lethal power of
structural violence can be discerned until we shift our focus from a clinical or
psychological perspective, which looks at one individual at a time, to the
epidemiological perspective of public health and preventative medicine. Examples
are all around us. [Continues Page 195] The 14 to 18 million deaths a year
caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year
from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence
to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as
World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those
caused by genocide---or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian
massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two
million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S.
and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to
compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other
words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative
poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 deaths, and every
single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the
world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is,
in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating,
thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetuated on the week and poor every year of
every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of
Uniqueness
Crime is decreasing nationwide
FBI 2013, Federal Bureau of Invesigation Unifrorm Crime Report, 2013, Violent
Crime, https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-theu.s.-2013/violent-crime/violent-crime-topic-page/violentcrimemain_final
In 2013, an estimated 1,163,146 violent crimes occurred nationwide, a decrease of 4.4
percent from the 2012 estimate. When considering 5- and 10-year trends, the 2013
estimated violent crime total was 12.3 percent below the 2009 level and 14.5
percent below the 2004 level. (See Tables 1 and 1A.) There were an estimated 367.9 violent crimes per
100,000 inhabitants in 2013, a rate that declined 5.1 percent when compared with the 2012 estimated rate. (See
Tables 1 and 1A.) Aggravated assaults accounted for 62.3 percent of violent crimes reported to law enforcement in
2013. Robbery offenses accounted for 29.7 percent of violent crime offenses; rape (legacy definition) accounted for
6.9 percent; and murder accounted for 1.2 percent. (Based on Table 1.) Information collected regarding types of
weapons used in violent crime showed that firearms were used in 69.0 percent of the nations murders, 40.0
percent of robberies, and 21.6 percent of aggravated assaults. (Weapons data are not collected for rape.) (See
Expanded Homicide Data Table 7, Robbery Table 3, and the Aggravated Assault Table.)
weapon or serious injury. The rate of violence committed by strangers also declined in 2013.
However, there was no statistically significant change in the rate (7.3 per 1,000 in 2013) of serious violence, defined as rape or
sexual assault, robbery or aggravated assault. In addition, there were no significant changes from 2012 to 2013 in the rates of
firearm violence (1.3 per 1,000), violence resulting in injury to the victim (6.1), domestic violence (4.2) or intimate partner violence
(2.8). Intimate partner violence is violence committed by a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, and domestic violence
includes crimes by intimate partners and family members. In 2013, 1.2 percent of all U.S. residents age 12 or older (3 million
persons) experienced at least one violent victimization, down from 1.4 percent in 2012. About 0.4 percent (1.1 million persons)
victimizations per 1,000 households, driving the decline in the overall rate. In 2013, 9 percent of all households (11.5 million
households) experienced one or more property victimizations. An estimated 46 percent of violent crime and 61 percent of serious
violent crime was reported to police in 2013. A greater percentage of robbery (68 percent) and aggravated assault (64 percent) was
reported than simple assault (38 percent) and rape or sexual assault (35 percent) victimizations. From 2012 to 2013, the percentage
of property crime reported to police increased from 34 to 36 percent. Reported thefts increased from 26 to 29 percent, accounting
for the majority of the increase in the overall percentage of property crime reported to police. About 75 percent of motor vehicle
thefts and 57 percent of burglaries were reported to police in 2013. Other findings from the report includeIn 2013, 10 percent of
During 2013, about 90,630 households and 160,040 persons age 12 or older were interviewed for the NCVS. Since the NCVS
interviews victims of crime, homicide is not included in these nonfatal victimization estimates.
Crime DA Links
Statistics prove- prisons are key to keeping crime rates low
David Green, 06, director of think-tank Civitas, a community of researchers and
supporters committed to discovering how best to strengthen democracy, uphold
limited government, maintain personal freedom, achieve opportunity for all, and
encourage free enterprise, 6/20/15, Prison really does work,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-391584/Prison-really-does-work.html
**edited for gendered language**
A sense of deepening crisis hangs over our prison system. While public concern
mounts over short sentences for serious offenders, parts of our political elite and
judiciary express anxiety about the size of the inmate population and the
supposedly excessive use of custody. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers,
claims that our jails are now full to capacity, barely able to cope with current
demands. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, warns that too many criminals are
being sent to prison in the first place. And a large phalanx of lobby groups, such as
the Prison Reform Trust, argues that the jail system only encourages crime by
dehumanising its inmates. It is, to use one of the campaigners' favourite slogans,
'an expensive way of making bad people worse'. But as the problem of
overcrowding becomes more intense, neither the Government nor the judicial
establishment seems willing to contemplate the obvious solution: build more
prisons. This is partly because of the perceived costs, partly because of the Leftwing ideology which holds that prisons in themselves are a bad idea. According to
such thinking, a large prison population should be regarded as a badge of shame in
a civilised society. Wasted But such an outlook is utterly misguided . For the
truth is that prisons are not only the most effective method of protecting the public
from criminal behaviour, they are also, in the long-term, cheaper than the
alternatives. The entire cost of running our prisons is just 2.2billion, barely a
fraction of the cost of the welfare state. To put it in perspective, that is smaller than
the sum wasted every year on benefit fraud. And given that the cost of crime across
the country is estimated at 60billion a year, a prison system for 2.2billion is
surely a bargain. It is absurd to argue that 21st-century Britain, one of the most
affluent countries in the world, with public expenditure now over 520billion per
year, cannot afford to build any more prisons and therefore has to treat convicted
criminals more leniently. Anti-prison campaigners are, of course, fond of claiming
that jail does not work, pointing to the high levels of re-offending among exconvicts. But this is to ignore the crucial point that when a criminal is locked up, it is
physically impossible for him [them] to commit any offences. He[They] may return
to his [their] life of crime once he is [they are] released, but at least when he is
[they are] inside, the public is safe from him [them]. There are sobering statistics
to show just how many crimes he might have committed had he not been locked up.
According to a Home Office survey in 2000, the average inmate committed 140
crimes in the 12 months before his admission into custody. On that basis, if we
locked up 10,000 more offenders a year, we could prevent 1.4 million offences,
saving the public purse a fortune as well as reducing aggravation for law-abiding
citizens. The indisputable fact is that, according to police records and the
authoritative British Crime Survey, crime levels have fallen when more offenders
have been sent to prison. Yet the conjunction of a rising jail population and
declining crime causes the anti-prison brigade to descend into tortuously illogical
thinking and intellectual absurdities as they refuse to face up to the facts. So John
Denham, the normally well-balanced Labour MP who chairs the Home Affairs Select
Committee, absurdly stated at the weekend that he could not see why we were
jailing so many people at a time of falling crime. Is he really so blinded by dogma
that he cannot see that crime is on the way down precisely because more criminals
are being kept off the streets? The lesson of recent history is that prison
works. We should be celebrating that reality by building more jails, not
wringing our hands about overcrowding . It was the Tory politician Michael
Howard who first challenged the progressive consensus. Until he became Home
Secretary in 1993, the conventional wisdom was that rising crime was inevitable
and that the duty of the Government was to keep as many offenders as possible out
of jail. Mrs Thatcher was known as the Iron Lady, but there was nothing tough
about her administration's penal policy. Successive Home Secretaries such as
Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Clarke swallowed the anti-prison line which
predominated at the Home Office, allowing the widespread use of parole, cautions,
executive early release and community sentences and massively extending
criminals' rights through measures such as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
As a result, the crime rate soared.
SCOTUS October 2011, Supreme Court of the United States, Highest Court in
America, FLORENCE v. BOARD OF CHOSEN FREEHOLDERS OF COUNTY OF
BURLINGTON ET AL, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-945.pdf
Experience shows that people arrested for minor offenses have tried to smuggle
prohibited items into jail, sometimes by using their rectal cavities or genitals for the
concealment. They may have some of the same incentives as a serious criminal to
hide contraband. A detainee might risk carrying cash, cigarettes, or a penknife to
survive in jail. Others may make a quick decision to hide unlawful substances to
avoid getting in more trouble at the time of their arrest. This record has concrete
examples. Officers at the Atlantic County Correctional Facility, for example,
discovered that a man arrested for driving under the influence had 2 dime bags of
weed, 1 pack of rolling papers, 20 matches, and 5 sleeping pills taped under his
scrotum. Brief for Atlantic County et al. as Amici Curiae 36 (internal quotation marks
omitted). A person booked on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct in
Washington State managed to hide a lighter, tobacco, tattoo needles, and other
prohibited items in his rectal cavity. See United States Brief 25, n. 15. San Francisco
officials have discovered contraband hidden in body cavities of people arrested for
trespassing, public nuisance, and shoplifting. San Francisco Brief 3. There have been
similar incidents at jails throughout the country. See United States Brief 25, n. 15.
It also may be difficult, as a practical matter, to classify inmates by their current and
prior offenses before the intake search. Jails can be even more dangerous than
prisons because officials there know so little about the people they admit at the
outset. See New Jersey Wardens Brief 1114. An arrestee may be carrying a false ID
or lie about his identity. The officers who conduct an initial search often do not have
access to criminal history records. See, e.g., App. 235a; New Jersey Wardens Brief
13. And those records can be inaccurate or incomplete. See Department of Justice v.
Reporters Comm. for Freedom of Press, 489 U. S. 749, 752 (1989). Petitioners rap
sheet is an example. It did not reflect his previous arrest for possession of a deadly
weapon. Tr. of Oral Arg. 1819. In the absence of reliable information it would be
illogical to require officers to assume the arrestees in front of them do not pose a
risk of smuggling something into the facility. The laborious administration of prisons
would become less effective, and likely less fair and evenhanded, were the practical
problems inevitable from the rules suggested by petitioner to be imposed as a
constitutional mandate. Even if they had accurate information about a detainees
current and prior arrests, officers, under petitioners proposed regime, would
encounter serious implementation difficulties. They would be required, in a few
minutes, to determine whether any of the underlying offenses were serious enough
to authorize the more invasive search protocol. Other possible classifications based
on characteristics of individual detainees also might prove to be unworkable or even
give rise to charges of discriminatory application. Most officers would not be well
equipped to make any of these legal determinations during the pressures of the
intake process. Bull, 595 F. 3d, at 985987 (Kozinski, C. J., concurring); see also
Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U. S. 740, 761762 (1984) (White, J., dissenting) ([T]he
Courts approach will necessitate a case-by-case evaluation of the seriousness of
particular crimes, a difficult task for which officers and courts are poorly equipped).
To avoid liability, officers might be inclined not to conduct a thorough search in any
close case, thus creating unnecessary risk for the entire jail population. Cf. Atwater,
532 U. S., at 351, and n. 22.
AT: Recidivism
Prisons reduce recidivism rates and teach prisoners important
skills to be introduced back into society
Zoe Williams, 10, a Guardian columnist, 12/15/10, Yes, prisons work. No, I am
headed beg for community service in fluorescent tabards is totally specious. The
prison service realised three decades ago that the punitive element could never be
the main point of incarceration, only a side issue. Ken Clarke's aim to change
offenders' lives through education and rehab marks no great departure in
criminological philosophy, merely an attempt to graft the successes of the prison
service on to a cheaper, non-custodial process. And Michael Howard's ideal of
prisons as dank hellholes that really teach bad people a lesson these are a figment
of his imagination.
Impacts
The fear caused by crime results in the further subjugation of
ethnic minorities and would worsen civil rights
Mark Moore and Robert Trojaniwikz 1988, A publication of the National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/111459.pdf
When crimes occur-when a ghetto teenager is shot to death in a gang war, when an
elderly woman is mugged for her social security check, when a nurse is raped in a
hospital parking lot, when one driver is punched by another in a dispute over a
parking place, when a black family's new home is vandalized- society's attention is
naturally focused on the victims and their material losses. Their wounds, bruises,
lost property, and inconvenience can be seen, touched, and counted. These are the
concrete signs of criminal victimization. Behind the immediate, concrete losses of
crime victims, however, is a different, more abstract crime problem-that of fear. For
victims, fear is often the largest and most enduring legacy of their victimization. The
raped nurse will feel vulnerable long after her cuts and bruises heal. The harassed
black family suffers far more from the fear of neighborhood hostility than the
inconvenience of repairing their property. For the rest of us---the not-recently, or
not-yet victimized fear becomes a contagious agent spreading the injuriousness of
criminal victimization. The gang member's death makes parents despair of their
children's future. The mugging of the elderly woman teaches elderly residents to
fear the streets and the teenagers who roam them. The fight over the parking place
confirms the general fear of strangers. The harassment of the black family makes
other minorities reluctant to claim their rights. In these ways, fear extends the
damage of criminal victimization.
Fear of crime will actually increase crime control, this turns the
case
Mark Moore and Robert Trojaniwikz 1988, A publication of the National Institute of
Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/111459.pdf
Of course, fear is not totally unproductive. It prompts caution among citizens and
thereby reduces criminal opportunities. Too, it motivates citizens to shoulder some
of the burdens of crime control by buying locks and dogs, thereby adding to general
deterrence. And fear kindles enthusiasm for publicly supported crime control
measures. Thus, reasonable fears, channeled in constructive directions, prepare
society to deal with crime. It is only when fear is unreasonable, or generates
counterproductive responses, that it becomes a social problem. This paper explores
fear as a problem to be addressed by the police. It examines current levels and
recent trends in the fear of crime; analyzes how fear is linked to criminal
victimization; considers the extent to which fear is a distinct problem that invites
separate control strategies; and assesses the positive and negative social
consequences of fear. It then turns to what is known about the efficacy of police
strategies for managing fear, i.e., for reducing fear when it is irrational and
destructive, and for channeling fear along constructive paths when it is reasonable
and helpful in controlling crime.
paradoxically, the overall capacity of society to deal with crime." This occurs when
the defensive reactions of individuals essentially compromise community life , or
when they exacerbate the disparities between rich and poor by relying too much on
private rather than public security.
Reform CP
1NC
Text: The United States Federal Government should enact the
Public Safety Enhancement Act.
The PSEA will reduce prison sizes, and decrease recidivism;
shields link to crime disadvantage
Andrew Cohen July 18th, 2013, fellow at Brennan Center of Justice, legal analyst
for 60 minutes, For Federal Prison Reform, the Time Has Come,
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/federal-prison-reform-time-has-come,
Every once in a while in law and politics and government you see the coalescence
of opinion around an idea whose time has come. When that happens and it is
rare, especially when it comes to criminal justice its important to mark the
occasion and act upon it because one never knows when the moment is going to
come again.
In just the past week in Washington weve seen from various forces and in various
forms a confluence of support for criminal justice reform that has been a long time
in coming. The case has never been better for legislative reform in federal
mandatory minimum sentencing requirements and for beginning to empty our
overflowing federal prisons of inmates who should no longer be incarcerated.
Last week, on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican lawmaker from Utah,
introduced H.R. 2656, the Public Safety Enhancement Act of 2013, which if enacted
surely will help with the second problem. The measure seeks to implement creative
ways for federal law enforcement officials to determine which inmates can be most
safely and efficiently released from prison. The idea is to reduce the risk of
recidivism while at the same time providing incentive for prisoners to earn time
credits leading to early release.
for 60 minutes, For Federal Prison Reform, the Time Has Come,
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/federal-prison-reform-time-has-come,
The flip side of the coin when it comes to the nations teeming prisons are federal
sentencing rules that have taken discretion away from judges resulting in longer
sentences and onerous burdens upon taxpayers. Here, too, there has been recent
action. On Tuesday, a group of current and former federal judges, prosecutors, law
enforcement officers and others sent an open letter to Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) making a compelling case against mandatory minimum
sentencing laws and in favor of another piece of pending federal legislation, the
Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013. The authors wrote: We believe that this
outstanding achievement is the result of many factors and policies, including
smarter policing strategies and a greater reliance on severe punishment for violent
offenders. At the same time, we agree with Attorney General Eric Holders recent
statement that, Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no
good law enforcement reason. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws are chiefly
responsible for this wasteful use of prison space because they fail to distinguish
between violent, serious criminals and low-level, nonviolent offenders.
CP popular
Reforms are popular support from both sides of the aisle.
Sally Kohn 15, Journalist for CNN, 2-23-2015, Will one man keep Americans
locked up in prison?, http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/23/opinion/kohn-prison-reformgrassley/
Groups as disparate as the Center for American Progress and ACLU on the left and
the Koch Brothers on the right; Republican Sen. Rand Paul and Democratic Sen.
Cory Booker; and over two-thirds of the American people all support major
overhauls to America's criminal justice system . As do, presumably, the 2.2 million
Americans ensnared in our nation's costly and counterproductive current prison
system. So what's stopping reform? One man: Chuck Grassley.
The PSEA will downsize prison costs and also has widespread support from
Republicans
Andrew Cohen July 18th, 2013, fellow at Brennan Center of Justice, legal analyst
for 60 minutes, For Federal Prison Reform, the Time Has Come,
https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/federal-prison-reform-time-has-come,
This bill is an important recognition by members of Congress that many states
have successfully improved public safety and reduced correctional populations
through evidence-based programming, says Lauren-Brooke Eisen, counsel in the
Brennan Centers Justice Program. Implementing a risk and needs assessment tool
to target appropriate programming for inmates should result in better outcomes for
justice involved individuals as well as the community at large. Additionally,
incentivizing behavior with positive outcomes is a key component of this bill and is
backed up by research indicating that positive reinforcements can change
behavior. Importantly, especially for conservatives seeking to reduce the costs of
the nations inmate industrial complex, the Public Safety Enhancement Act is
designed to help address the underlying cost structure of the federal prison
system. You dont need to be an expert in criminal justice to understand the
dynamics here. If we can better identify those federal prisoners who can be safely
released, and if we can help them better prepare for a successful return to society,
we can both cut taxpayer costs and increase the tax base in a particular community.
This legislation wont solve all of the problems of mass incarceration. But it is not a
bad start, especially if lawmakers ensure that federal prison officials are willing and
able to comply with the new rules.