Is America heaven on Earth?
John Winthrop commenced the nation’s early history with his dream that “we shall be as a city upon a hill,” and American exceptionalists have long thought that the nation has been destined by God for an empyrean superiority. Others sway toward “maybe,” questioning whether heaven on Earth is even attainable or categorically denying that God’s perfect goodness can, or should, be replicated by humans. The question is quite divisive — is heaven on Earth something even worth pursuing? As some have alternatively asked, is America actually Earth’s hell? These queries all beg deliberation, but you need not waste your breath or energy on the latter question. hell on Earth certainly exists, at the likes of San Quentin, ADX Florence, and Pelican Bay — in America’s jails and prisons.
The Kangaroo Court of Public Opinion
Violent, filthy, and overcrowded, America’s carceral institutions are the antithesis of the human condition, the place where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness all go to unceremoniously die; they are that place which any rational American seeks to avoid at all costs. All of this is facilitated by the phenomenon of mass incarceration. Nearly half a million Americans are pumped into carceral gates a year, and America’s jails and prisons are where almost 4,000 people lose their lives annually.
If mass incarceration is a rhetorical boogeyman in America, then retributivism — the belief that wrongdoers should be proportionately punished merely for their wrongdoing — is the darkness from which the boogeyman slowly makes his way to your bedside. It is what scholars and pundits alike have pointed to as the crux of the American justice and carceral system, the ideology that justifies incarceration for incarceration’s sake without the seemingly sensible priorities of rehabilitation and reducing recidivism.
With the problem of mass incarceration so neatly and nicely wrapped up, it seems easily intelligible to quite a general audience. The distant prisons you’ve never had the misfortune of visiting are the places of perdition, the chaotic cacotopias created by a rancid retributivism perpetuating mass incarceration. But forgive me for muddying these placid waters, as I arraign the true culprit for mass incarceration, and charge them with the complicity and neglect that have truly enabled the funneling of hundreds of thousands into prison. It is not retributivism, nor the justice system, nor Uncle Sam. The person I must accuse is… you!
The Reality of Retributivism
To prove your guilt — as well as that of every other average American — I must first acquit retributivism of the farcical charges brought against it. It seems to me that retributivism has rather hastily been identified as the underlying logic of the American justice and carceral system. It has been deemed the root of the disparate discrimination and malpractice that has left the United States with the largest prison population in the history of the world, but I’d implore you to consider that this hurried understanding is the real injustice.
“Retributivism is the application of the principle of desert to the special case of criminal punishment: it is the view that people who commit crimes such as murder and rape deserve to be punished and that this alone is sufficient to justify punishing them. It is not merely that punishing them satisfies certain sorts of vengeful feelings. On the contrary, it is a violation of justice if murderers and rapists are allowed to walk away as if they had done nothing wrong. It is a matter of justice.”
The American philosopher James Rachels here provides the crucial distinction, the alea iacta est, that will allow you to cross the Rubicon of understanding retributivism. Take the phrase “an eye for an eye,” which many see as a succinct summary of retributivist reasoning — to the retributivist, this is not an expression of some vengeful, vindictive barbarism that would eventually see the whole world go blind. It is a recognition that the taking of an eye, or any commitment of a vice in general, alone necessitates a punishment of equal proportion. This acknowledgment is made based on what Rachels calls the “principle of desert.” However, you need not use this term: you derive the same concept from the smiles you exchange with passers-by, the grade you expect for doing well on an assignment, and the everyday understanding that the things you do to and for others deserve a coinciding reaction. The principle of desert takes the causality governing the physical world and elevates it to the realm of human behavior, explaining our self-evident understanding that what we do to others has an effect on others, and that there is a sensible reaction to what we do.
Ponder, then, on how one can attribute the vicious mass incarceration in America to retributivist logic, while simultaneously and habitually adhering to the very principle of desert that serves as retributivism’s foundation. This session of contemplation should be a short one, for the rational conclusion here is that retributivism has been framed, improperly handed the guilt for a development it is not responsible for. The principle of desert is explicitly proportional, and contingent on the understanding that you’re entitled to both the negative and positive repercussions of your actions — mass incarceration deprives prisoners of the dignity they deserve, and undeservingly presses them with cruel and unusual punishment.
No, retributivism cannot possibly be the malefactor here, your honor. That would be the individualist American standing before me, slothfully neglecting the discursive reality highlighted by retributivism in our social, economic, and political interactions.
A Cross-Examination
Mass incarceration in America was born out of a society that exalts individualism above all else. These hellscapes of torture, abuse, and discrimination did not appear suddenly out of a vacuum – they arose from the individualist logic that Americans so often employ. If America’s carceral institutions are hell on Earth, Americans are the makers.
From the dawn of the American nation, the “frontier spirit” of individualism has flowed through it, filling it with an egoist precedent that tells you not to ask for mutual aid, but pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Whether it be capitalism or the Protestant ethic, American social interactions, economics, and ethical philosophies alike have been underlined with the preeminence of personal responsibility. At first glance, this may seem like the influence of retributivism, but this would amount to the same misconception the disparagers of retributivism make so very often.
Rather, I introduce to the court Exhibit A: the neglect that produces would-be (or soon-to-be) criminals.
Direct your eyes to this fiend, a violent offender who — after being found with 40 tablets of Xanax, 10 past the legal limit — broke into a grocery store, and removed all 23 chili cans from the premises. Only this is not the criminal after his conviction, but 22 years earlier, not long after his birth.
In the philosophy of John Locke, this boy is a tabula rasa – he is a blank slate, substanceless in terms of his mental content, which will be accumulated from the experiences he goes through throughout his life. The boy, at this time in his life, is obviously undeserving of any type of prosecution or punishment by the justice system, meaning that by the standards of retributivism, he is innocent. What, then, transpired between this moment and his conviction on drug offenses that makes him deserving of destitution in prison? Statistically, the boy likely grew up in a low-income household, which was additionally either dysfunctional or lacking one parent. The boy was plausibly exposed to drugs, hooked on a substance that would then unduly influence his rational decision-making. If the boy was so unfortunate as to become unhoused, then he was 514 times more likely than the average American to be arrested and charged with a felony.
These engravings on the boy’s rugged soul were not made in a vacuum. Further, retributivist logic does not rationalize punishing the boy after 22 years of accumulating all the likely risk factors for committing a crime. Only individualism, the priority of one’s own self, family, and belongings over everyone else’s, can allow for this neglect to occur, where, for 22 years, the boy was allowed to be exposed to malfactors without intervention or regard for his well-being. The American individualist doesn’t care about what the boy deserves; the retributivist does.
For Exhibit B, I present to you, your honor, the structure of both our social and carceral systems, the panopticon.
The panopticon as a disciplinary concept emerged from the thought of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the man who also founded the moral theory of utilitarianism. In line with his moral thought, which sought to maximize overall utility, the panopticon was Bentham’s design for a prison, one in which a central guard tower is surrounded by a circular structure of prison cells. The inmates of the panopticon are unable to see the observer residing in the guard tower, meaning that in their minds, each and every one of them is always being watched.
The panopticon saw implementation in many prisons across the world, including in U.S. prisons such as the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles. But more than that, the panopticon saw implementation in the American social structure.
The inmates within a panopticon are obsessively concerned with the regulatory eyes of the unseen guard, who is at all times privy to the actions of those behind bars. Americans, too, have come to adopt this attitude. Legal developments, such as the criminalization of drug use that emerged during Nixon and Reagan’s “war on drugs,” are the result of individualist thinking that seeks to minimize the offenses of others, producing an “orderly society” wherein not only is the aim to be unintrusive to the lives of others, but to obsessively concern oneself only with one’s own life and belongings. This, together with the neglect showcased in Exhibit A, has resulted in a society in which the principle of desert goes unapplied, and where the dignity, empathy, and camaraderie one is intrinsically deserving of is overshadowed by individualism. You are either rarely or never nurtured and cultivated for being a person with potential, but incessantly regulated and reprimanded for violating social standards and the law.
A Closing
The principle of desert holds that people deserve particular treatment — both the punishments and the rewards — based on their actions, character, or contributions. This principle, in being the bedrock of retributivism, has been derided as the root of mass incarceration and of a carceral logic that funnels offenders into the worst spaces in the nation. Yet, what the American justice and carceral system has truly ignored is that aspect of retributivism that holds that you are deserving of entitlements as a human. Retributivism, it should be seen, is what the justice system deserves.
Featured Image Source: The Simple Heart