[MUSIC] Crime and Punishment, An Introduction. Hi. Welcome back. So far in the course, we've considered some basic answers to the question why should we have a state. We've also considered questions about how we should define our political community, how we should govern that political community, and how and whether we should limit the government through constitutions. In this final segment, we'll take up the question, not about the creation of law or the limitations we want to put on the state, but on the question of the enforcement of the law. Particularly, the enforcement of the law against particular individual. So in this discussion, we'll focus on one particular domain of enforcement of general laws against particular individuals, the criminal law domain. It's worth noting at the outset that there're many other domains in which general laws are applied to particular individuals and can be applied against those individuals in ways that great consequences for those individuals. So as we discussed earlier in the class, immigration restrictions are imposed against particular individuals. And other bodies of law, family law, contract law, property law, environmental law, corporate law, all of these can, in some cases be applied against particular individuals, sometimes at the initiative of the state, sometimes at the initiative of private individuals suing one another. In this segment, we'll focus philosophical attention on both crime and on punishment. But more of our attention will be spent on the punishment side. There might have been many other topics that we could cover in the course. I've tried to focus on topics that are both important, in the sense of having very significant real world implications, and which also are ripe for philosophical reflection. So one theme in the second half of the course has been to rethink some of the most common and most omnipresent features in modern legal and political life. We began by thinking about the definition of political community and the justification of political borders and ended up considering radically different options, such as a world government or open borders. We then considered the use of elected political representatives, some of the problems for such systems, and the possibility of using lottery selection rather than elections. And then in this last segment on constitutions, we considered where constitutions get their authority, and some of the tensions that arise for standard systems of constitutions with strong judicial review. So finally, in this segment, we will turn our attention to another central institution in the modern legal and political world. Another kind of omnipresent feature of that world, the prison. As the brilliant and provocative philosopher Angela Y Davis has noted, and this is a quotation, she says in most parts of the world it is taken for granted that whoever is convicted of a serious crime will be sent to prison. So in this segment, we'll think about why that might be, whether that might makes sense, or is morally justified, and what alternatives may be out there. So throughout this discussion, we'll need to keep our eyes on several other impossible to miss features of modern practices of punishment. Namely, the ideas of deviance, so we'll be thinking through what ends up being criminalized, what ends up being punished, and how these things relate to issues like class, culture, and mental health. So deviance, on the one hand, and concerns about oppression on the other. So thinking through how race and class interact with punishment and interact with so-called criminal justice systems. So throughout the course, I've mostly tried to keep the focus as international as I'm able to do so, given the limitations and my education, and my knowledge. I don't know everything about lots of different systems. But I've tried to bring in what I can kind of an international dimension. Because the philosophical issues that are raised, are ones that are raised just about everywhere. And I think it's useful to see them in a non-parochial way, if possible. But in this unit, I'll depart from this a little bit more than I have in the past. I think there's good reason for doing so. So as mentioned in earlier lectures, the United States has a sort of special place with respect towards its practices of crime and punishment. So in particular, although only 5% of the world's population is in the United States, a full 25% of the world's prison population is in the United States. So this makes it special in this kind of bad way. 2.3 million people in the United States are in prison, which gives the United States the highest incarceration rate in the world. And there's a substantial racial dimension to this. So African-Americans make up only 13% of the United States population. But they make up 40% of the United States prison population. It'd be impossible, or at least inappropriate I think, to talk about the philosophy of crime and the philosophy of punishment without discussing this dimension to it. So indeed the prominent legal academic Michelle Alexander has argued that one can trace a direct line from racial slavery in the United States to Jim Crow laws, which kept black of citizens The United States relegated to a kind of second-class status, denying then access to many political institutions, requiring segregated public facilities, and disenfranchising black citizens through racially-enforced poll taxes and literacy requirement. So this was the kind of Jim Crow world that existed post-slavery and before the civil rights movement in the 1960s. And then she argues we can see the extension of this from slavery to Jim Crow to what she calls the new Jim Crow, institutions that center around crimes and imprisonment, but are really accompanied by all these collateral consequences with respect to employment, housing, education, voting rights, jury service, and so on. So as Alexander points out, and here I'm quoting, she says, the stark racial disparities in prison populations cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color. That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities, wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society. So that's Michelle Alexander, on what she calls the new Jim Crow. She argues that the mass incarceration trend of the past 40 years in the United States is not just a side effect of poverty or limited educational opportunities. But is instead a consequence of purposeful governmental policies, and that it's essentially, and here I quote again, a comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow. Perhaps most strikingly, the rise in mass incarceration is not a response to increased crime-rate. Indeed, as Alexander notes, between 1960 and 1990, for example, official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet U.S. incarceration rates quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60%, and the German rate was stable in that period. Okay. So, this brings out something very striking. There's no straightforward relationship between crime and punishment. In particular, societies can differ very much on how much punishment there is while having very similar levels of crime. As the renowned criminologist Michael Tonry put the point in his book, Thinking About Crime, he says, governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates. This is easy to see, if we imagine an example in terms of prison sentences. So two societies may have very similar crime rates, but they'll quickly come to radically different incarceration rates, if in the one society people are given just one year prison sentences for all crimes, and in the other society people are given 20 year prison sentences. If the incarceration levels don't affect the crime levels, and there's a great deal of debate about this, the relationship between those. But there's a lot of evidence that they don't, that incarceration rates don't affect crime rates. Then very quickly, the second society with these 20-year sentences will have a much higher incarceration rate as more and more people start getting these 20-year sentences. So in the next several segments, we'll discuss issues of criminalization and punishment. For both, we'll ask a number of questions. With respect to criminalization, we'll think about what it is that should be criminalized: actions, intentions, thoughts, some combination of these. And we'll ask about what justifies criminalizing anything at all. We'll also discuss what the scope of criminal law should be, whether there are any limits to it, and in particular, what the relationship between criminality and immorality is. We'll cover many of these issues somewhat briefly, spending more time focusing on philosophical issues related to punishment. So there we'll ask when punishment is morally justified, what the purpose of punishment is and should be, and what forms of punishment are morally permissible and morally optimal for achieving the proper purposes of punishment. As I suggested earlier, one consistent question that we'll consider is this one. Why prisons? One of the more striking things that Alexander relates in her book is that, now I'm quoting again, she says, as recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. She continues, prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future. So in 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals manifested this expert consensus when it issued a recommendation, and here I'm quoting from them. That no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed. This recommendation was based on their findings that the prison, the reformatory, and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There's overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it. So it's worth stressing this report was not some radical leftist document. It was sponsored by the United States Department of Justice. They paid for all the work. And the team authoring it was chaired by a former Republican, Governor of Delaware, Russell Peterson. Still, it's stated that it's clear that a dramatic realignment of correctional methods is called for. It's essential to abate use of these institutions. These changes must not be made out of sympathy for the criminal, or disregard of the threat of crime to society. It must be precisely because that threat is too serious to be countered by ineffective methods. So it's very surprising then, that in United States, and really the world, things have gone the exact opposite direction over the past 40 years. Since that report was issued, rather than closing down prisons and thinking about alternatives to incarceration, the number of incarcerated persons in the United States has increased five fold. So throughout these units, throughout this unit, throughout these segments, we'll think about this question. Why prisons? What, if anything, are they for? What should we think of them from a moral perspective? Why do we have them, and what might alternatives to prison look like?
