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

by Jonathan Simon

Overview

For nearly forty years the United States has been gripped by policies that have placed more than 2.5 million Americans in jails and prisons designed to hold a fraction of that number of inmates. Our prisons are not only vast and overcrowded, they are degrading—relying on racist gangs, lockdowns, and Supermax-style segregation units to maintain a tenuous order.

Mass Incarceration on Trial examines a series of landmark decisions about prison conditions—culminating in Brown v. Plata, decided in May 2011 by the U.S. Supreme Court—that has opened an unexpected escape route from this trap of “tough on crime” politics. This set of rulings points toward values that could restore legitimate order to American prisons and, ultimately, lead to the demise of mass incarceration. Simon argues that much like the school segregation cases of the last century, these new cases represent a major breakthrough in jurisprudence—moving us from a hollowed-out vision of civil rights to the threshold of human rights and giving court backing for the argument that, because the conditions it creates are fundamentally cruel and unusual, mass incarceration is inherently unconstitutional.

Since the publication of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, states around the country have begun to question the fundamental fairness of our criminal justice system. This book offers a provocative and brilliant reading to the end of mass incarceration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595587923
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	08/05/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	878 KB

About the Author

Jonathan Simon is the Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Governing through Crime, won the American Sociology Association's 2008 Sociology of Law Distinguished Book Award and the 2010 Hindelang Prize of the American Society of Criminology. 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

★ 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

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

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