The American Police State

http://chronicle.com/article/The-American-Police-State/142965/

by danso • 13 years ago

271 182 13 years ago

spodek• 13 years ago

Men like him lived a paradox. The penal system was supposed to shape them up. But its tentacles had become so invasive that the opposite happened. Goffman argues that the system encourages young men to act shady—"I got to move like a shadow," one of Mike's friends told her—because a stable public routine could land them back behind bars.
Take work. Once, after Mike was released on parole to a halfway house, he found employment at a Taco Bell. But he soon grew fed up with his crowded house and decided to sleep at his girlfriend's. That resulted in a parole violation. When Mike went back to the Taco Bell to pick up his paycheck, two parole officers arrested him. He had to spend another year upstate.

This passage described a poor black man in Philadelphia -- the tip of the iceberg in the story. Today I happened to read about Toronto's mayor and couldn't help compare the two.

Toronto's mayor is on video smoking crack, is drunk and disorderly in public, shoves (assaults?) a grandmother, more, and isn't even removed from office, let alone arrested.

How can anyone have faith in such a system with such gross inequalities? The differences in cities and countries pale in comparison to the differences in treatment between the two people.

EDIT: a couple comments point out the differences between the U.S. and Canada police forces. Fair enough, but as different as Toronto and Philadelphia may be and as different as Canada and the U.S. may be, I can't imagine those differences are lost on the men jailed for smaller infractions, asking "What does it take for a rich, white guy to have to go to jail? ... Why should I bother trying to stay out if nothing I can do can keep me out?" I'm sure we could just look at police on Philadelphia's Main Line, maybe ten minutes away, to find similar effects to avoid the U.S./Canada comparison.

alexeisadeski36• 13 years ago

Canadian and US law enforcement are pretty different...

Edit - response to your edit: The US white incarceration rate is ~5-7x the total incarceration rate in Canada.

bediger4000• 13 years ago

Great, I did not know that. Which one works better? That is, which style of law enforcement produces a safer civil society?

tobyjsullivan• 13 years ago

Not to downplay the inequalities that exist on both sides of the border, but don't underestimate the differences between the United States and Canada - especially when it comes to things like drug enforcement and the prevalence and nature of ghettos.

janj• 13 years ago

I've noticed many airports have HSBC plastered all over the walls. This has been amusing to me after it came out that HSBC runs the world's largest money laundering operation for drug cartels. It's surreal thinking about how TSA and customs will put away recreational drug users for life but the bank that funds the largest drug cartels operates out in the open. Our system is broken at every level.

Wingman4l74• 13 years ago

(For those interested in more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering)

Never mind the fundamental fact that if your fine was less than the profit you gained from your illegal activity, you can just write it off as a business expense. Fines have to be punitive or they will have no effect; it's simple math.

rdtsc5• 13 years ago

Not sure what Canada's crack smoking, grandmother-shoving mayors have to do with this. I am sure African warlords do worse, and Russian mafia is in bed with their government. The story is about the US justice system.

freehunter• 13 years ago

Wait, Canada isn't a US state?

pandaman• 13 years ago

A rich black guy, Eric Holder, had been found in criminal contempt of Congress (I have a vague idea what it is but it sounds more serious than grandma-showing), he is still free and keeps his job. So it takes as much for a rich white guy to go to jail as takes for a rich black guy to go to jail.

thebooktocome• 13 years ago

Criminal contempt of Congress carries a jail term between one and twelve months, and a fine between $100 and $1000.

Suffice it to say, it isn't very serious.

Holder is still free because it's unclear from a constitutional standpoint where Congress got the authority to hold anyone in contempt, let alone a member of the Executive.

thenerdfiles15• 13 years ago

1. [Not^] all rich guys should not^ go to jail.

2. Eric Holder is rich.

3. Eric Holder should not go to jail.

— http://www.fallacyfiles.org/scopefal.html

[^]: It is not the case that...

JonFish85• 13 years ago

"Why should I bother trying to stay out if nothing I can do can keep me out?"

Well, for starters, living by the conditions of the parole... I'm not trying to be too snarky about it, but given the choice of "fed up with a crowded house" and the chance of going back to prison for a year, the choice seems evident.

The question is whether the person really cares. Stuck in a crowded apartment, maybe it was a calculated risk: I can either get away with it, or I'll go back to the big house. In the end, maybe he doesn't feel that he lost that much.

angersock• 13 years ago

"living by the conditions of the parole"

That's well and good, but there are numerous shit luck things that can happen that might result in a technical parole violation, right?

girvo2• 13 years ago

If only it was that simple. Life isn't, unfortunately, but parole expects it to be.

rangibaby• 13 years ago

I've come to a realization that rules and laws only apply to the "little people".

squozzer2• 13 years ago

"What does it take for a rich, white guy to have to go to jail?" Ripping off other rich white guys, e.g. Bernie Madoff.

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

>How can anyone have faith in such a system with such gross inequalities?

The system is working as designed and as intended.

I think people need to rid themselves of this romantic notion that the government serves "the people" and cops in particular are supposed to protect the innocent. Both of them are ridiculously childish beliefs. The reality is much harsher. Adam Smith laid it out more than two centuries ago in his book Wealth of Nations:

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

bayesianhorse2• 13 years ago

Engineers tend to overestimate the impact of "intentions" on "systems" as big and complex as societies and economies. I doubt that the results the US is seeing were indeed foreseen and designed by anyone.

And I would like to add that civil governments also protect the poor from the rich. Just look at undemocratic systems to see who needs protection from whom.

onetwofiveten2• 13 years ago

I think that romantic notion is just a part of childish naivety. When most people grow up they realise the government doesn't serve the public's interests. However, I don't think we should abandon the romantic notion that the government SHOULD serve the people. It's not entirely clear how to make that happen (or if it is possible), but I think along with social change, technology could help (e.g. crowdsourced political debate, security for whistleblowers, personal surveillance, etc.) So I'm all for hackers being a bit idealistic :)

johnchristopher3• 13 years ago

I think people need to rid themselves of this romantic notion that the government serves "the people" and cops in particular are supposed to protect the innocent. Both of them are ridiculously childish beliefs. The reality is much harsher.

That may be so. But if we don't stick to these ideals and try to enforce them again, and again, and again we'll end up for sure in a much worse situation.

thenmar• 13 years ago

I don't think it's reasonable at all to reduce the entire function of modern government to a platitude written 200 years ago.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

I agree with the "those who have some property against those who have none at all" part, but in modern times the "rich against the poor" doesn't hold as strongly, given the existence of the middle class.

But in a way isn't it tautological? If you create a system of "private property" obviously it's a system to protect those who have property from those who don't. The same thing is true for systems to protect bodily integrity. Obviously they protect those who are strong from those who are not.

I think the "romantic notion" that people need to lose is that the civil government is some neutral level playing field, even in theory. Giving preference to certain kinds of people is part of the system by design.

mcv• 13 years ago

I think people need to rid themselves of this romantic notion that the government serves "the people" and cops in particular are supposed to protect the innocent. Both of them are ridiculously childish beliefs.

They may not be true in the current system, but the problem is with the system, not with those beliefs. The government should serve the people, and the cops should protect the innocent. That they don't, is a sign of corruption in the government and the police force. It needs to be fixed.

grecy2• 13 years ago

Toronto's mayor is on video smoking crack, is drunk and disorderly in public, shoves (assaults?) a grandmother, more, and isn't even removed from office, let alone arrested.

How can anyone have faith in such a system with such gross inequalities?

I couldn't agree with you more.

Every time I see a celebrity, or politician, or insanely rich person breaking the law it disgusts me. Not only are they not arrested and punished for their crimes as everyone else would be, but the media actually celebrates their flouting the law.

I'm only 31 and I honestly think the system is too far broken. I personally believe we're heading for some massive, massive upheaval.

alexeisadeski36• 13 years ago

They are the often singled out for harsh punishment, actually.

See: Celebrities Lohan & Hilton & Martha Stewart, all singled out for harsher punishment than normal.

Politicians Cunningham, Spitzer both given harsher punishment (or more ink) than a typical person would get.

Rich people like the entire Enron board, telecom CEOs, numerous lawyers and execs you've never heard of charged with insider trading, trivial securities infractions, trivial tax infractions, and hounded.

whiddershins2• 13 years ago

Cameron Douglas, serving a 10 year sentence for nonviolent offenses.

http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/michael-dougla...

saraid2163• 13 years ago

How can anyone have faith in such a system with such gross inequalities?

Keep in mind that you only consider these to be travesties because you're in the 21st century. You've had the benefit of hundreds of years of philosophy and public discussion, now passed onto you as an obvious truth. That would seem like a perfectly sensible inequality to someone three hundred years ago, who wouldn't.

It would also seem like a perfectly sensible inequality to a lot of people today. These are the same people who will back tough-on-crime bills and political platforms. Not politicians, who are taking up their vote. Find these people. Talk to them. Figure out how to convince them. Show them the human faces and human stories. Explain the systemic problems that are causing this. Bring them over.

Break the support for these policies.

likeclockwork• 13 years ago

That would seem like a perfectly sensible inequality to someone three hundred years ago, who wouldn't.

That would depend on which side of the inequality they were on, would it not?

rayiner2• 13 years ago

This passage described a poor black man in Philadelphia -- the tip of the iceberg

It's not the tip of the iceberg, it's the base of the pyramid.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

isn't even removed from office

Canadian here. I know this isn't the point of your post but I feel obliged to make excuses for the fact that Toronto's mayor has not been removed from office. The reason Toronto City Council and the Ontario Provincial Government don't have the power to do this is that under the parliamentary traditions on which the Canadian political system is based, it is inconceivable that a politician could behave in so utterly disgraceful a manner and not have the basic human decency and shame to resign on his own volition.

Also, for what it's worth, Canada's record of judicial fairness with respect to race is not much better than America's, and our Conservative Federal Government has adopted an American-style tough-on-crime stance that has embraced mandatory minimum sentences and so on - some of which has already been declared unconstitutional.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/minimum-gun-sentence-ruled-unc...

xacaxulu• 13 years ago

Alice Goffman might be one of the bravest women of our generation. She's a true revolutionary.

chris_mahan• 13 years ago

I've put her book in my amazon shopping basket. Will pick it up when available.

jboynyc• 13 years ago

In the meantime you can read her ASR article, which someone was kind enough to make available here: http://www.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/Goffman_ASR_09.pdf

tga_d• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but that is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, she was very brave for wilfully going into that sort of an environment, and a very intelligent person. But remember that there are thousands who live in a similar manner in just that city alone - people who have been living in these environments for their entire lives, and who come to much of the same conclusions that she has, only without academic language or a parent's name. After a run-in with law enforcement that left me with a bitter taste (I was arrested for a crime I wasn't guilty of), and seeing first hand many of the horrors of the justice system I had only heard or read about, I asked a friend of mine who had spent a decent amount of time in jail what he thought the justice system believed it doing for him by sentencing him. He responded that jail time was never about changing the people inside, it was about how everyone else felt outside. This is arguably the entire premise of Goffman's work: the police crack down on frankly minor charges in predominantly black areas has nothing to do with actual safety or reform for those individuals. "But after braving violence and intimidation to get this story, Goffman now faces a different challenge. How can she keep the focus on black poverty, and not her own biography?" Indeed. No, Alice Goffman is neither the "one of the bravest women of our generation" nor a "revolutionary," she's an academic who is well-off enough to get in the paper and sell books. Who knows, maybe her book could be the "Silent Spring" of the prison-industrial complex, but don't deify her like that - it belittles the people who actually do get coerced, imprisoned, and killed for living their lives.

dinkumthinkum3• 13 years ago

Honestly I'm sure it's great and all that but these conclusions are hardly earth shattering. They are basic conclusions educated and uneducated but streetwise people have held for years anyway. Nothing groundbreaking. Sorry to say but the story is what is interesting, not the revelation of the war on drugs or whatever.

wrongc0ntinent• 13 years ago

This is a pretty misleading title. As to its actual subject, best of luck with the book.

edit: Just pointing out the clickbait aspect. It's hyperbole, not the technical usage.

l33tbro• 13 years ago

Bad conversion strategy for the publisher. I was on Amazon ready to buy. Maybe don't publicize this until it's available to the public (book comes out in April next year)

thenerdfiles15• 13 years ago

Right. Okay, Upstartuppers, let's play Reconstruction of the Bottom Line.

Men like him lived a paradox. The penal system was supposed to shape them up. But its tentacles had become so invasive that the opposite happened. Goffman argues that the system encourages young men to act shady—"I got to move like a shadow," one of Mike's friends told her—because a stable public routine could land them back behind bars.

If an African American man walked into your startup, given some negligible* felony history and a "shady look", but showed you an SPA he built in prison, how would the "culture fit" measure factor in your decision procedure to hire him?

*: And [if] you do hire him, do you poke and prod for social metadata until you discover this feature of his personality?

anonyHN3• 13 years ago

I like how you try to tie this into startups (hackernewserizing the thread as it were) Kudos!

thenerdfiles15• 13 years ago

"Did a murderer and a sex offender just save Oklahoma $20 million?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6664588)

Let's connect the dots.

(The obvious follow-up is: Are these men African American?)

((Obligatory response: Point still stands. Change all the variables. Make them androids with upgraded and legally "blessed" virtual mental cores for all I care.))

rdtsc5• 13 years ago

Actually, I think it was an interesting observation. It is a relevant example to illustrate a point. Say, if he was talking in a car mechanics's forum, he would have have used body shop instead of start-up.

The interesting thing is the personal dissonance between ideal principles and concrete experience. Pretty sure most here fancy themselves as not being racists. Going out at night and seeing a group of black young men start crossing the street and heading towards you, would you be scared? Would you be less scared if they were white and wearing argyle sweaters instead of black hoodies and baggy pants? Thinking about it, yeah I would be afraid. Rationally I know I am not a racist but in that case, I can see myself running as fast as I could.

Back to a black person walking into the start-up. Well that is kind of interesting, because of the way it is presented. Walking in? Almost sounds like he "breaks" in? How often do you hire people that just "walk in" to your startup off the street. The hypothetical example is already biased and infused with stereotypes the way I see it. Did we already do a phone Skype interview and passed? Hey he might have a good chance. I also don't see "felonies" as being a clear cut yes or no differentiate. I can see looking more into what those felonies were and balancing it against other aspects.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

What sort of felonies do you consider negligible?

thenerdfiles15• 13 years ago

The only meaningful response is to tell you that your question is rhetorical.

Every product is a snowflake, etc. Your product's brand will inform the structure of the content for that answer.

That said, sprinkle on a little hegemony, you've got yourself State Source (code) — as opposed to Open Source (code).

How should I know ?

whiddershins2• 13 years ago

I would hire him on the spot.

Then again, fully 7 out of 10 people who work for my technology startup are women, so I guess I'm just missing something, or I live in a parallel universe.

thenerdfiles15• 13 years ago

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joy-weese-moll/i-am-not-afraid...

yummyfajitas7• 13 years ago

Depends on the felony. Selling drugs? Fine by me. Theft, fraud, or something involving dishonesty or harming people against their will? Not a chance.

I probably will subject him to extra scrutiny given that different criminal behaviors tend to be correlated, i.e. P(dishonest|drug dealer) > P(dishonest).

In contrast, if they have a postmodernist epistemiology [1] (or even worse, an inconsistent one), they've got no shot. A die hard frequentist would also have a hard time compared to an honest drug dealer.

[1] http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html

freshhawk• 13 years ago

Thanks for that link, I've found explaining that difference to people to be difficult sometimes. There is some helpful stuff in there.

erichocean• 13 years ago

Excellent link. Exactly why I read the comments here on HN.

scrabble• 13 years ago

Why does it matter if he's black? I'd probably treat him the same way I would if a white guy with a felony history and a shady look walked in.

And ultimately culture fit is about more than someone's appearance.

eof• 13 years ago

In 2003 I was pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt; I was in Saratoga NY; I had just moved out of my apartment.. having gone to school in Troy, NY and I was working as a "quality assurance analyist" looking for bugs in some lotus software. My license plates were from TX because I never registered in NY; I probably was supposed to, I just never did.

The cop pulled me over and was immediately convinced I was running drugs from Canada to TX. I had been across the border somewhat recenctly, maybe he could see that(?). I had no previous convictions other than a speeding ticket. My car was dirty and filled with crap; but I was pretty clean cut and just came out of an office job like 3 minutes earlier.

I did in fact have a couple pipes and a couple grams of mid grade bud; and I was dumb and didn't insist on my rights and essentially "let" him search my car. I made my mistake when he found the little jar and I got cocky; as NY had recently decriminalized.. so I just told him to give me the ticket and leave me alone.

He promptly arrested me for "driving while ability impaired"; impounded my car, nicked my license, I spent the night in jail, was humiliated, I still can't go back to Canada; I had been detained for 3 hours by the time I was given a 'sobriety' test; I was literally in the police station by then.. reflecting on it, it was clear I was being fucked with; walking a line with my arms spread out, bent ninety degrees at the waist, told to turn around without lifting my feet.

I hired the only lawyer I could afford, who basically did nothing but show up for me; paid him 500 bucks and about that in fines; but it has haunted me ever since.. and I was literally 100% sober in every way. I have never trusted cops since then as a whole; though I have personally come to know a couple that have eased my deep hatred somewhat.

My story here I know isn't directly related to the article; but it was an extreme abuse of power by a cop exerting his authority over what was genuinely a punk-kid; and I just wasn't in a position to do anything about it, both financially and because I didn't know then what I know now.

rdtsc5• 13 years ago

I have personally come to know a couple that have eased my deep hatred somewhat.

I have quite the opposite experience if you wish. I was never personally abused or treated unfairly by the cops during a stop. But, I still distrust cops. If anything because of the ones I met in an informal settings. In my extended family and network of acquaintances there are 3 cops. And 2 of them physically abuse their wives and kids, are very brutal and scary. In fact if I didn't know they are cops they could just as well fit the profile of street thugs.

blhack• 13 years ago

Just to throw another anecdotal counterpoint your way: I also know several cops (detectives and a Sergeant, actually), and they are the definition of good people. the conversations I have with them generally either revolve around the stuff they're doing with their kids (and me trying to get them to some of the youth programs I help with), and them dealing with the frustration of not being able to do enough.

not all cops are good, maybe most of them aren't good. But they definitely aren't all bad, and the good ones hate the bad ones at least as bad as you and I do.

harrylove• 13 years ago

but it was an extreme abuse of power by a cop exerting his authority over what was genuinely a punk-kid; and I just wasn't in a position to do anything about it

This brought up a big one for me. When I was 13 I snuck out of my house one night with some friends. We ran all over the neighborhood and eventually ended up in the empty parking lot of a grocery store. There were four of us, all walking together side by side. I was the youngest.

One of my friends turns around to look behind us and yells out "RUN!" The rest of us turn around to see bright headlights pointed at us. We're not in the nicest of neighborhoods and for all we know, it could be anybody looking to mess with some kids. We panic-scatter and start sprinting in every direction.

Two seconds later, a police car pulls around in front me. I'm completely out of breath, scared out of my mind, and now I know I'm going to be in trouble with my parents because this particular town has a curfew for kids under 18. Two cops get out quickly and approach.

"Why were you running?" yells the big one. This is my first non-friendly interaction with a cop. I'm still out of breath, and paralyzed with fear.

"Hey ASSHOLE! Why were you running?" He punches me in the chest. I start stammering about not wanting to get caught for breaking curfew. I start pissing myself while I'm standing there. I'm totally humiliated and scared. Why would a police officer punch a kid, I'm thinking.

They put me in the back of the squad car. We drive around to the 7-11 next door to the grocery store. They go in and come back out with one of my friends who has gone in and bought himself a Slurpy. They start questioning him. A couple minutes later, my other two friends walk up on their own and start talking to the cops. One of the cops gets me out of the car and brings me over with the others. We all tell our various stories. Where do we live, ages, parents, et cetera. They tell us to go home.

So we start walking home. I'm soaked from the waist down. And you know what I'm thinking? God, I hope my friends don't tell anyone I pissed my pants.

pstuart2• 13 years ago

And a keystone of this madness is the War on Drugs. End it, and the police will have a lot less to do...

trimbo• 13 years ago

I'm almost scared of what happens when we have so many bored police and unclear laws in this country.

nyrina• 13 years ago

Doesn't matter much, it will only take about a year before everyone is arrested and put into jail. The jails will become the new America

Amadou2• 13 years ago

Even if the War on Drugs was cancelled today, we'd still be dealing with the criminal effects for decades. When prohibition was repealed, all the criminals who had been bootlegging didn't decide to start living straight lives, they switched to other criminal enterprises. Prohibition was a big part of how the mafia got a foothold in the US.

Its even plausible that massive decriminalization would lead to more work for the police. I'd like to think it would be more productive work though, instead of just hassling easy targets like so many do now.

pstuart2• 13 years ago

Yeah, the criminals will become bankers.

mortyseinfeld• 13 years ago

Yeah, this is what happens when people defer to government authority as a consequence of looking to government to solve all their problems. This leftist shift will only make the situation worse.

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

Hilarious.

Would you rather leave this to capitalist corporations or the free market? I mean, maybe we should just have lots of Blackwaters running around performing "protection" services for the highest bidder.

aric3• 13 years ago

"capitalist corporations"

"Capitalist corporations" are the direct result of corporate states serving corporate law. The irony in your comment is strong. Blackwater and its derivations became powerful specifically because of [the many] having their labor (e.g. taxation) and choice (e.g. systemic control) forcefully deferred to [the few] of the state (in its singular, arbitrary version of existence). The rest of the US military is already nearly wholly dependent on so-called private interests. Realistically, there is no difference between private and public entities on this same platform. Either an entity is accountable to such oligarchical 'control' or it is not.

Free market

Like most terms that become distorted and perverted through political propaganda, a "free market" can have wildly different meanings. You may find that you support a freer market.

A free market as some people define it is one in which groups of trade (businesses) are less powerful because "corporations" would not exist in law. People would exist. Business would exist. Legal buffers from responsibility of actions would not exist. Those buffers currently afford the largest corporations of today the luxury of exploiting people and land through the use of government -- not only protecting directors from their violent actions but also increasing the platform where police/military force serves their corporate law. In a free market where abstract entities are not state-protected, all actions fall under the same domain of scrutiny. Frameworks of law as far as business is concerned would be relegated to protecting people from direct contractual fraud or abuse, only to the extent financial or physical damage is actually taking place. Therefore, egregious economic fines and prison sentences for non-violent actions that disobey corporate law would be a token of more brutal eras. Systems of this sort are often paired with models that give people, the public, more direct control over the flow of their own labor/money, thereby making it harder for abusive or surreptitious entities (e.g. every war/surveillance company) to gain vast power through the current top-heavy, centralized money pools of a government's taxation. A transition to more human freedom such as this isn't possible overnight; but it is worth aspiring to in the evolution of governmental systems. That's humanist.

Other people define a "free market" as a system in which corporations are still greatly protected yet even less susceptible to recourse by people. That's problematic.

grecy2• 13 years ago

By that logic almost all Developed nations in the world should be a lot worse of than America (they're almost all more left leaning that America).

This is not the case, your logic is flawed.

aric3• 13 years ago

I agree with your underlying sentiment.

However, it's narrow to use a term like leftist. An arbitrary left vs. right political spectrum is completely fallacious and antiquated. There are only cosmetic differences for beliefs built upon the same underlying ideology of an allegiance to a current state system. People with philosophical backbones strong enough to have independent thoughts do not fall into rigid scales. They have varying thoughts and tolerances. Such political terms continue to become undefined, propaganda, and contradictory depending on the person using them.

bayesianhorse2• 13 years ago

Who else is supposed to "solve" this mess? Yelling at the government to change its behavior isn't very effective overall, but extraordinarily more effective than yelling at society as a whole.

On the other hand, for some people there only seem to be two options: Government has no power or the government has all power. No middle ground. No trying to design more effective policies.

tsotha3• 13 years ago

I can't help wondering what the black women in the neighborhood thought of Miss Goffman.

squozzer2• 13 years ago

It's quite possible the purpose of the criminal justice system is to remove the young male (and dare I say black?) population from the breeding cycle.

Is that a falsifiable hypothesis?

anoncowherd• 13 years ago

Well, they do breed just fine even in the current system.

rurounijones• 13 years ago

Kind of ironic that the article talks about how she is annoyed that the story is focusing on her.

At which point the article basically starts focusing on her.

austinl• 13 years ago

On a similar topic, I would highly recommend the book The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault. http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-The-Birth-Prison/dp/...

sologoub3• 13 years ago

"In modern history," Goffman writes, "only the forced labor camps of the former U.S.S.R. under Stalin approached these levels of penal confinement."

That's actually a pretty offensive comparison. Stalin's regime resulted in an untold number of completely innocent people being worked to death. There was no due process, no hope of any humane treatment. Just terror and dumb luck that kept people from being picked out of a crowd.

Maybe my views are biased by growing up in Russia, but such rhetoric seems to use horrors of the past to advance a particular agenda, that has little to do with the horrors themselves. It also denies the respect and dignity to those innocents that died.

The very introduction admits that there were drugs and guns in the apartment, so crimes happened and unfortunately, people are being prosecuted with somewhat questionable methods. But how is this the same as NKVD coming for you in the middle of the night and you are never heard of again?

declan4• 13 years ago

"There was no due process"

If you have an unjust law on the books, you can have all the due process you want while being arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced, and jailed, and that doesn't help you one whit.

loxs• 13 years ago

Actually, that was exactly the case in the Eastern Block. All those laws for "crimes against the state" were on the book. Most of the GULAG prisoners were in fact jailed after a "due process". And I think it's the same now with the US. Tons of laws that you can never be sure you are not breaking. Tons of laws that everyone is breaking (copyright law, anyone?) etc. Every empire will collapse eventually. Under its own weight.

twoodfin• 13 years ago

So there's no added justice in the due process we offer in the U.S. over Stalin's caprice? C'mon.

sologoub3• 13 years ago

Ok... so what is unjust about a drug dealing prosecution?

Decriminalizing drug use is smart, but everywhere it is decriminalized, but the sale is considered illegal, prosecution for dealing is quite harsh.

Again, comparing an outlet to an economic problem with ideological repression or downright made up charges is very strange to me. No one is denying that there is an economic problem that is driving people to commit crimes. That needs to be addressed, and brutality is not the answer. But please, don't make this into a Stalin comparison.

Dirlewanger• 13 years ago

I'm from the US but I thought similarly when I read that. Absolutely disgusting that she'd compare arguably the worst human rights violator in history's regime with the US's rather humane prisoner treatment. Inexcusable alarmism from an academic. And most people here already have an imaginary chip on their shoulder concerning the US (most of them actually American) so of course they'd passively agree.

groupthinker• 13 years ago

This submission is not "Hacker News".

bananacurve• 13 years ago

It is how HN is now. It is not up voted because because they want America to improve, it is upvoted because they want to pretend America is failing. I can sort of understand the attitude as Europe should really have more power in the world but don't for reasons that are unclear.

Amadou2• 13 years ago

Yet Alex vehemently resisted being taken to the hospital. Police crowd the emergency room, running the names of young black men through their database

Seems to me that the hospitals that let this happen in their ERs have forgotten their mission -- to heal people. They may have come up with some rationalization that says it is not a technical violation of doctor-patient confidentiality, but it sure as shit is a violation of the intent of that precept which is if you can't trust your doctor you won't get medical treatment.

As a comparison, after the PATRIOT Act was passed librarian associations stood up to the surveillance state by starting to redesign their computerized lending systems to be resistant to national-security-letter searches. Instead of keeping a lending history, as soon as a book is returned all records of it being borrowed are purged. That privacy is important for exactly the same reason, a borrowing history can be very revealing - medical books, law books, financial books, they can reveal quite a bit of personal information and if people feel like they are being watched, they simply won't borrow the books they need. You'd think doctors would stand up for their patients at least as much as librarians.

http://www.ila.org/advocacy-files/pdf/Confidentiality_Best_P...

Grue3• 13 years ago

Did I accidentally stumble onto /r/politics on reddit or what? A bunch of first worlders complaining about "police state" in their first world country. Give me a break.

st0neage• 13 years ago

"What her research shows is that these institutions may be self-defeating and may carry very significant social costs," Western says. "And so the whole effort to improve public safety through criminal-justice supervision and through incarceration may have significantly backfired, and may in many ways have contributed to the ongoing poverty and shortage of opportunities that we see there. That's a fairly new story."

Everybody with half a brain has known this forever.

FedRegister• 13 years ago

So what do we do? It's all good and well that we've made this observation, but what do we do about it?

tootie2• 13 years ago

Not to make light of this serious subject, but this isn't what a Police State is. A Police State refers to use of the police for political ends. Like arresting dissidents or placing armed guards next to voting booths. It does not refer to overly aggressive enforcement and certainly not to the enforcement of laws some people don't like. Drug prohibition was a response to public outcry and we live in a democracy.

tehwalrus2• 13 years ago

It is argued in one of the comments (on the link) that this is a response to the civil rights movement of the '60s - if you can't legally exclude the Minority Ethnic community from voting, lock them all up instead.

I'm not saying that's a true analysis, but it's certainly one way to make this story seriously political. Even if you just make it about stopping poor people voting, instead of some other subdivision, it's still leaks out of the "law and order" debate.

tootie2• 13 years ago

That's a roundabout argument and I don't think you can prove any criminal intent about that. Unless you can prove that the political process encourages the targeting of minorities, then it's just an enforcement issue. And not every state will ban you from voting for a non-violent offense.

john103141• 13 years ago

I hold a degree in Sociology but I lack the teary eyed outlook on life which seems a requirement if one if going to make a name for themselves in the field of Sociology in this era. For that reason I also earned a degree in engineering and opted for a steady income instead. But, like so many other sociology majors, I read nearly everything Erving Goffman ever published. For a time I was a nearly complete fanatic of his work and style. Unfortunately, Alice Goffman's writing lacks the depth of her father's studies; indeed American Police State is just another Martinique Hotel handwringer complete with all the hopelessnes and despair as the subtext. Why can't sociology majors ever concentrate on the individuals who grow up in ghettos and get on with life? Surely they must represent the majority.

I believe that as long as sociologists continue to write in the Martinique Hotel manner an undue number of tears will be shed without any real work being done. In physics such a machine would be one-hundred percent entropic, i.e. fuel in, nothing out. Or, in the case of Alice Goffman's piece, tears in, nothing out. It is time for a new generation of sociology majors to concentrate on the winners and do research on them to see what makes them different, i.e. such as making the right decisions before acting.

Pitiless in Seattle

The American Police State

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