Cruel And Usual Pretrial Punishment In Jail
Murray, Charles
CRUEL AND USUAL PRETRIAPLU NISHMENT IN JAIL by Charles Murra ohn Irwin’s thesis is that American society uses jails to control and segregate the J “rabble,” a subset of the poor and...
...The Jail is not a quantitative study...
...Right...
...If one favors more jails, what else must one favor to make that position conscionable...
...He occasionally refers to his own experience when it is especially apropos, but the core of The Jail is based on extensive interviews with a randomly selected sample of 200 people in the San Francisco jail system...
...John Irwin does, and he lets us in on it in dispassionate and illuminating detail...
...The t pica1 penitentiary provides a muc L more humane environment than the typical jail...
...Its main defect is that it prevents Irwin from establishing a solid case for the jail inmate as a special type of person-part of the rabble-arrested more for being part of this group than for being a criminal...
...He was a prisoner in eight such jails for periods of up to 120 days and graduated from a five-year term in Soledad State Prison before getting his Ph.D...
...Indeed, The Jail inadvertently provides considerable evidence that the authorities should distinguish the rabble from reputable people and keep the rabble in jail while sending the reputable people home...
...Read, for example, his description of trying to get your car back when you leave jail, or what it means to get started when everything you own has disappeared while you were in jail...
...Charles Murray is a senior research fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and author of Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980...
...Irwin’s descriptive writing inspires confidence that the author knows what he is talking about and trust that he is trying hard to be fair...
...Irwin examines the corner of that world represented by the municipal and county jail, and he’s been there...
...That’s why the last seven pages do not really matter...
...The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society...
...But very few of us who talk about the crime problem have much first-hand knowledge of what it is like down in the bowels of the system...
...One answer is that the jail is a place to keep people who are awaiting trial and would be a danger to the community or unlikely to appear in court if they were released...
...I wasn’t converted to Irwin’s way of thinking...
...john Irwin...
...Members of the rabble are jailed not so much because of the seriousness of the crimes they commit as for the offensiveness of their behavior to middle-class sensibilities...
...This procedure is a blessing, yielding nuance and realism that can be gotten no other way...
...CRUEL AND USUAL PRETRIAPLU NISHMENT IN JAIL by Charles Murra ohn Irwin’s thesis is that American society uses jails to control and segregate the J “rabble,” a subset of the poor and disadvantaged...
...Besides being destitute, the rabble are detached from the conventional social networks and behave in ways that the middle class finds objectionable or threatening...
...help maintain a radically unequal distribution of wealth, opportunity and prestige, which, in turn, produces high rates of crime and many forms of repulsive public deviance...
...Knowing this and nothing else, what might you expect the conclusions to be...
...Excessive materialism and individualism...
...And, of course: “In the long run, we should work to alter our basic values...
...The most serious crimes (white-collar crimes, industrial pollution) are actually committed by “reputable” people, and the police should be concentrating on them...
...I note for the record that I have many quarrels with Irwin’s analysis, but they are no excuse for ignoring the book‘s strong points...
...His prose is workmanlike and all the more persuasive for his refusal to sensationalize naturally dramatic material...
...The good news is that the rhetoric begins only seven pages before the end of the book...
...But to treat The Jail as “proof” of anything is to miss its value...
...The genuinely troublesome behavior of the rabble should be controlled by informal, extralegal measures “that will foster a new sense of community among strangers...
...in sociology at BerkeIey...
...as it is to advocates o P fewer ones This sounds like a setup for a memoir masquerading as social science, but Irwin scrupulously avoids trading on his credentials...
...It is fundamentally wrong to punish people before they have been convicted (even though everyone in his sample was patently guilty-Irwin speaking, not Meese), and especially when the punishment takes as many perverse forms as it does...
...The rest of The Jail* is terrific...
...Nor does Irwin try to cast the police as villains...
...This should be unacce table to advocates of more jails, wrong to punish eople before they have been convicted, forms as it does...
...Citing the work of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, authors of Regulating the Poor, Irwin tells us that “the contemporary jail is a subsidiary to the welfare organizations” that control the poor and defuse their threat to the status quo...
...Irwin describes the ways in which the jail is intolerably punishing as well...
...Irwin is refreshingly unexcited about the notorious perversities (jail rape was a significant problem in the late 1960s, he writes, but not now), and at the same time manages to convey the pains of the homelier ones...
...University of California, $16.95...
...The typical penitentiary, he points out, provides a much more humane environment than the typical jail...
...Irwin apparently did not approach his subjects with multiple-choice questionnaire in hand but rather covered a predetermined set of topics in openended conversation...
...The value of Irwin’s background is that it makes him an extremely credible interpreter...
...This should be unacceptable to advocates of more jails, as it is to advocates of fewer ones...
...Many argue, I among them, that the system puts far too few offenders in jail and urge that more jails be built to protect the safety of poor people who now live under an intolerable threat of crime...
...Nor need one buy into Irwin’s politics to come away from The Jail with some bothersome questions...
...John Irwin adds to the debate over the underclass something it badly needs: good debate about what the world of the underclass looks like from ground level...
...For example, what purpose is a jail supposed to serve...
...The discussion has none of the geewhiz quality of accounts by observers newly encountering the underclass and not a scrap of condescension toward the people he describes...
...We should “learn to tolerate a large number of the rabble...
Vol. 17 • December 1985 • No. 11
