Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America

by Jonathan Simon

Overview

In this “impassioned plea for human dignity” (Kirkus Reviews) Jonathan Simon—called “one of the outstanding criminologists of his generation” by Nikolas Rose of the London School of Economics—charts a surprising path to end mass incarceration in America. Using the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Plata on overcrowding in California prisons as his starting point, Simon suggests that incarcerating people on a “mass” scale simply cannot be accomplished in comportment with the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

In an argument that the Los Angeles Review of Books calls “unique,” Simon contends that because we cannot offer meaningful health care, mental health care, or safe and reasonable prison conditions when prisons are run at many times their maximum capacity, “mass incarceration is fundamentally incompatible with humane treatment.”

Todd Clear, former dean of Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, calls Mass Incarceration on Trial “highly readable, stunning,” Slate says the book “could mark the beginning of a new era in American jurisprudence,” and David Cole in the New York Review of Books calls Simon's work a “sign of the new optimism about criminal justice reform.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620972540
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	11/01/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,143,818
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Simon is the Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His book Governing Through Crime won the American Sociology Association's 2008 Sociology of Law Distinguished Book Award. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Inhuman Punishment 1

1 Total Incapacitation: The 1970s and the Birth of an Extreme Penology 17

2 The House of Fear: Dignity and Risk in Madrid v. Gomez 47

3 Engines of Madness: Coleman v. Wilson 73

4 Torture on the Installment Plan: Prisons Without Medicine in Plata v. Davis 87

5 Places of Extreme Peril: Coleman-Plata v. Schwarzenegger and California's Prisons in the Era of Chronic Hyper-Overcrowding 109

6 Dignity Cascade: Brown v. Plata and Mass Incarceration as a Human Rights Problem 133

7 The New Common Sense of High-Crime Societies 155

Notes 173

Index 199

Editorial Reviews

Finalist for the Media for a Just Society Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency

“Simon's arguments are unique…it's hard not to agree with Simon that the policies of mass incarceration…are one of the greatest human rights abuses in this century.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“An impassioned plea for prison reform grounded in human dignity…a sound, sobering report.”
—Kirkus

"An eloquent critique of the American prison system…Simon's accessible and powerful book deserves widespread attention."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Yet another sign of the new optimism about criminal justice reform."
—David Cole, New York Review of Books

"Remarkable…In mapping a way forward, Simon introduces innovative legal devices to ensure that mass incarceration joins the nation's past aberrations from our democracy."
—New York Law Journal

"Simon fits the numbers into a frame that renders them disturbingly intelligible."
—Inside Higher Ed

"Anyone who believes that the United States does not torture prisoners in domestic lock-up need only read Jonathan Simon's book…to be disabused of this delusion."
—Truthout

"Both a useful guide to Plata and an effective polemic against the United States' excessive reliance on prisons."
—Reason

“A masterful job of assessing the qualitative shift in the court's analysis on human rights concerns as they apply to our notorious prison system, the book points the way to a legal strategy premised on human dignity as a means of challenging mass incarceration.”
—Marc Mauer, executive director, The Sentencing Project, and author of Race to Incarcerate

“A powerful critique of California's use of mass incarceration combined with an inspiring vision of a hopeful future created by landmark court decisions.”
—Jules Lobel, president, Center for Constitutional Rights

“Highly readable, stunning stuff. California is at the epicenter of a new American debate about prison policy and Simon's remarkable book places the state's travails in national and historical context. I recommend it to anyone interested in the problem of prisons in America.”
—Todd Clear, author of The Punishment Imperative

“[Jonathan Simon is] one of the outstanding criminologists of his generation.”
—Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics

From the Publisher

★ 06/16/2014
UC Berkeley criminologist Simon (Governing Through Crime) offers an eloquent critique of the American prison system and uses several Supreme Court cases to examine the development of new jurisprudence that might end mass incarceration. His sketch of the history of mass incarceration attends to interlocking issues, such as racial politics, the upheavals of the 1960s, and media influence on public opinion. In his case studies, he focuses on the way decisions have addressed human rights violations arising from the prison system, from overcrowding, to the failure to reduce crime, to the torture of being incarcerated with a terminal illness. Simon’s most striking contribution comes in the discussion of “dignity” as a concept in human rights law. He argues that making prisons more humane and effective requires a “dignity cascade,” which will enshrine a basic notion of bodily integrity and decency in the edifice of law. Though the Eighth Amendment is often narrowly interpreted to prohibit only the most intentional torture, interpreting it to protect dignity would allow us to understand mass incarceration as inherently “cruel and unusual” because of the conditions it fosters. Simon’s accessible and powerful book deserves widespread attention. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

07/01/2016
After examining several key court cases arising out of the appalling conditions in California's prisons, Simon (law, Univ. of California, Berkeley) theorizes that prison overcrowding creates cruel and unusual punishment. He shows how these cases that challenged that environment can result in a system that recognizes human rights.

Library Journal

2014-06-17
A scholarly treatise on the case for American penal reform.Simon (Law/Univ. of California;Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, 2008) offers an update on the American prison industry and applauds its more recent progression from the inhumanely overpopulated confinement of past decades to what he terms as an “ebbing” evolution toward more dignified treatment of incarcerated individuals. He chronicles prison history back to the 1970s and ’80s—decades of “extreme penology”—and looks at how California, amassing over 150 victims of serial killings throughout that era, became the epicenter of monstrous criminal activity with the only foreseeable solution being extreme incarceration. Simon astutely documents the sea change in prison reform simmering throughout the mid-1990s once community activists and prison specialists began rallying against the “unhinged and unchecked” “supermax” prisons fraught with overcrowding and largely dismissed chronic disease and mental illness issues. Significant litigation then sprung up, citing prisoners’ human rights violations against the state of California, supported with disturbing photographs of barbaric conditions. These cases all culminated in the pivotal 2009 case ofColeman-Plata v. Schwarzeneggerand the Supreme Court decision inBrown v. Plata, which set population limits on prisons to preserve inmates’ Eighth Amendment rights. With mass incarceration’s attempt at “twentieth-century correctional modernism” and crime deterrence deemed a failure with marked human rights infringements, California was ordered to drastically reduce prison populations with reframed parole programs and, optimally, improved crime-prevention strategies. Simon makes an impassioned plea for prison reform grounded in human dignity, and he leans toward more broad-brush restructuring into smaller and more specialized correctional facilities.A sound, sobering report that’s more educative than eye-opening.

Kirkus Reviews