Sociological Forum, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1995

Review Essay

The Imprisoned Society: Time Turns a Classic on Its Head

John Hagan I

In spite of extraordinary changes in the American experience with imprisonment, more than a third of a century after its publication, Gresham Sykes' (1958) The Society of Captives remains a landmark study of prisons. When this book was written in the 1950s, its author could not have imag- ined that the per capita use of imprisonment in the United States would more than triple by the turn of the century. This book, which for decades so dominated the sociological understanding of prisons, deserves reconsid- eration in the vastly changed 1990s. Nils Christie (1993) recent volume on Crime Control as lndustry vividly documents the changed context in which Sykes study should be reread.

Sykes' analysis is built around the dysfunctional elements that make maximum security prisons unstable institutional settings. Sykes reasons that these prisons are unstable in part because they have so few rewards to offer their inmates. In place of rewards, guards and prison administrators must reach implicit compromises that involve ignoring illicit inmate activi- ties. The result is a relaxation of rules and an opening of institutional op- portunities to distribute and consume contraband and other illicit pleasures of prison life. In exchange, involved inmates help to establish an interim order in day-to-day institutional affairs. In the popular axiom, the inmates come to run the asylum. However, Sykes points out that many of the in- mates who help maintain the inner order of the prison are actually among the more stable role models in the institution. This is why guards and ad- ministrators seek their assistance. They are the best of a bad lot.

The costs of the above compromises come when citizens outside prison learn of the arrangements within and demand a restoration of rules. An effect of restoring the rules is to remove relatively more stable inmate

1Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. North Carolina, 27599.

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leaders from their claims to privileged positions, leaving a leadership vac- uum into which less stable and often more violent inmates move. The latter inmates in turn often provoke rebellions and outbreaks of violence, includ- ing prison riots. When "order" is restored, the cycle begins anew.

If there is a lesson to Sykes' persuasive portrait of prison societies, it is that it is best to have as few of these inherently unstable institutions and inmates as possible. This lesson follows from an analysis of the internal dynamics of prisons as self-contained institutions or societies. Ironically, parts of this analysis may now apply to the surrounding American society that is today institutionalizing offenders at unprecedented rates. Most of this essay will consider how and why this growth of prison populations has occurred. I draw selectively from Christie's recent account in documenting how this happened. In explaining why this happened, I argue that demo- graphic forces of change have interacted with America's growing under- g r o u n d drug economy to p roduce an unsus ta inab le re l i ance on imprisonment. These developments are then linked to a reconsideration of the meaning of Sykes' classic analysis for the American experience with imprisonment in the 1990s.

Contemporary politicians lack sufficient monetary resources to gain the support of many groups in society. Electable politicians therefore find themselves invoking a logic oddly similar to the guards and administrators of Sykes' prisons as they seek to satisfy nonmonetary wishes of the voting public. For example, support is sought by indulging voter's demands for the increased use of imprisonment in response to pervasive concerns about crime. Almost all of our mainstream politicians now not only accommodate but encourage these demands. Few candidates stray from this position. Mi- chael Dukakis was the last presidential candidate who seemed to do so, when he awkwardly explained his lack of enthusiasm for the death penalty in response to a question about the hypothetical rape of his wife. It is no- table that Dukakis was not in this context advocating reductions in reliance on imprisonment. He was nonetheless interpreted as being "soft on crime."

In part because of the enthusiasm of politicians and the public for imprisonment, we are today approaching a crisis in prison capacity and funding. Citizens will eventually become aware that there are substantial opportunity costs that accompany an expensive reliance on imprisonment, and that some restoration of fiscal restraint is required. Meanwhile, the policies of the day continue to herd too many prisoners into too few and too small prison cells, under sentences that too often allow them to leave only on the condition of death.

Rare is the politician who dares to discourage or divert legislation that would increase imprisonment through mandatory minimum sentences or "three strikes and you're out" kinds of measures. Instead we have the

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specter of a federal crime bill in which ten billion more tax dollars will be invested in building new state prisons, with no new money to continue run- ning them once they are filled. While it costs an estimated $75,000 to build each new prison cell in America, it costs a further $20,000 a year to keep an inmate in prison. The latter costs quickly swamp the former.

Meanwhile, in a further parallel with Sykes' scenario, more desperate "political inmates" seek to take over the "societal asylum." They propose schemes ranging from what Christie calls "the private push," including the privatization of prisons, to an increased use of the death penalty. As this essay is being written, a son of former President Bush is running for gov- ernor of Texas on a platform that includes the suggestion that inmates be housed in tents. It is important to try to understand why we have come to this juncture and what the future might hold.

Christie estimates that over the last century the rate of imprisonment per hundred thousand population in the United States has more than quad- rupled. The exact scale of growth is uncertain because the United States has never kept accurate counts of municipal jail populations. Nevertheless, we do know that most of the change in imprisonment has occurred in the last 20 years. No other advanced Western society comes close to the United States in its use of imprisonment, and Christie suggests that only China may now rival this reliance on institutionalization.

Consider a comparison with Germany, a country not known to be "soft on crime." In the late 1960s the United States and Germany were not so different in their use of imprisonment. The United States then im- prisoned about 100 persons per 100,000 population compared to about 75 in Germany. However, the German use of imprisonment stayed fairly sta- ble, while the American use of imprisonment by conservative estimates more than tripled by 1992.

To get a better sense of how different the United States is from other Western nations, it is useful to consider recent figures Christie assembles from other European jurisdictions. The most punitive of these is Ireland, which has a rate of imprisonment less than one third that of the United States. Other parts of the British Isles have rates close to Ireland. For rea- sons that will become apparent below, it is relevant to note that Spain has an imprisonment rate less than one fourth of the United States. Rates in most other European countries are significantly lower.

It is well known that the American use of imprisonment falls particu- larly heavily on African Americans, who are incarcerated at a rate more than ten times that of whites. However, Christie's data suggests a more startling fact: the U.S. rate of black imprisonment is at least four times higher than it was in South Africa before the end of apartheid. I return to this point below.

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What makes the United States so different? A predictable answer is the amount of criminal violence that we experience. The United States is indeed one of the most homicidal countries in the world. The only other Western nation that is even half as homicidal is Spain. However, recall that Spain imprisons its citizens at about one fourth the rate of the United States. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that none of the other countries we rank with in terms of violence (e.g., the Bahamas and Ecuador) are Western or industrialized, and the countries we otherwise seem most like (e.g., Can- ada and the countries of Western Europe) have far lower levels of homi- cide.

It is well known that much of America's violence has been concen- trated, through most of the last half century and especially since the early 1980s, among young African American males, who have rates of homicide on the order of six times those of young white males. However, homicide is a relatively rare crime and African Americans are a relatively small part of the general population. High black rates of homicide alone cannot ac- count for the escalation of American imprisonment, nor can overall in- creases in rates of homicide or other kinds of violent crime in the United States.

Although U.S. rates of homicide jumped in the 1960s and early 1970s, overall they have remained fairly stable for the last 20 years. In the United States the rate has hovered between 9 and 10 homicides per 100,000 popu- lation from 1972 to 1992. So homicide worsened in the 1960s and early 70s, and then leveled off. This is also true of other kinds of violent crime, such as robbery. Why, then, the increasing use of imprisonment in the United States?

An answer begins to emerge when we consider the proportion of per- sons who are sent to prison for drug crimes (Blumstein, 1995). Beginning in the early 1980s, drug offenders started to dominate prison statistics. Drug offenders went from less than ten percent to more than one third of all persons imprisoned during this period. More violent offenders, such as armed robbers, became a shrinking part of the picture. Because African American youth are so heavily involved with drugs, an effect of this is to greatly increase the numbers of nonwhite prison inmates.

Why might young African American males have increased so much as a part of America's drug problems? We can argue endlessly about this. The most plausible sociological explanation is that the root cause of in- creased involvement with drugs is the worsened economic picture for the poor in America. There is incontrovertible evidence of an increase in in- come inequality of the richest and poorest Americans in the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Sampson and William Julius Wilson Jr. (1995) persuasively argue that poverty has become highly concentrated in densely populated

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inner city African American neighborhoods, and that this has torn the social fabric of these communities to such a great extent that previous social con- trois on crime have been greatly weakened. In the absence of such controls, involvement in the drug economy is a readily available adaptation to a la- bour market in which there are few secure or well-paying jobs.

Apart from the causes of growth in the drug economy in America, I will argue that imprisonment is not a useful way of reducing its size. This argument is built around the concept of vacancy chains. The simple premise is that job opportunities occurs in chains (White, 1970). For example, in conventional lines of work, a retirement creates a vacancy to be filled by a new recruit. In turn, the new recruit creates a vacancy in his or her pre- vious job, which pulls in a new person, and so on. In the underground drug economy, imprisonment is a major source of vacancies (i.e., in addition to death and related occupational hazards). This industry, like most, is hier- archically organized from wholesale importers, through distributors and dealers, to runners on the street. Each time an importer, dealer, or runner is imprisoned, a vacancy in the hierarchy is created. The higher the position in the drug hierarchy, the longer the chain of vacancies.

A chain of vacancies will end only if a job in which the vacancy chain appears is left unfilled. However, this seldom happens in the drug economy because the demand for drugs is so persistent. A result is that government driven rates of imprisonment can play a significant role in the recruitment of new offenders. And as the pool of new recruits shrinks, the pool itself expands. Younger men and women begin to enter the underground drug economy. Instead of deterring drug crime, imprisonment can increase its spread.

Why, then, in a time when government resources for almost all public goods and services are decreasing, is American investment in imprisonment increasing? Why, as Christie puts it, is "the crime control industry" in a "most privileged position?" My answer is that the same set of factors that produced the increase in homicide in the 1960s and early 1970s is now pushing the public demand for investment in prisons. The primary factor that increased homicide rates in the United States and other countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s was that the baby boom generation was com- ing into the age range (i.e., late adolescence and early adulthood) when violent behavior is most common. What is surprising is not that this hap- pened, but that the increased rates did not decline in the 1980s and 1990s, as this age group grew older. Sociologists will argue that these rates re- mained high because of the growing economic disparities that were alluded to earlier. However, leaving aside why this happened, the fact remains that homicide rates in the United States remained high, but that they did not increase.

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Why, then, did imprisonment rates increase so dramatically so long after this surge in homicide rates and during a period when these rates were leveling off.9 An answer is that as the baby boomers grew older and began to enter middle age, they took on a new significance with regard to crime policy. This significance results from the fact that as the population ages it becomes more apprehensive of life in general, and in contemporary America, of crime in particular. Middle aging baby boomers finally have joined older Americans in becoming more conscious of their mortality, and more specifically of their vulnerability to crime.

This new sense of age-related vulnerability has led to several trends in the United States: a tremendous boom in the home security industry, an increase in the purchase of guns for self-protection, and a great growth in the use of imprisonment. The surge in the demand for imprisonment has proven so strong that, as noted earlier, every candidate for president since Michael Dukakis, and countless candidates for lower offices, have sim- ply agreed that we need tougher prison sentences to deal with crime. The politics of punishment have become a constant. Yet there is no credible evidence that the resulting investment in imprisonment is working.

So policies such as "three strikes and you're out" gain public support and more often result in the imprisonment of drug offenders than violent offenders. Drug offenders are simply the most recidivist "revolving door" offenders who are liable to this treatment. Meanwhile, associated expendi- tures in the federal "war on drugs" have continued to grow, from less than 3 billion dollars in the early 1980s, to over 13 billion dollars today. The cost of imprisoning drug offenders is especially steep. There is no clear benefit to this investment by any significant measure, for example, as re- flected in the reduction of drug arrests, drug-related hospital emergencies, or the contraction of aids by drug users.

Imprisonment is like many other public expenditures in its tendency, if left unchecked, to grow. We increasingly confront a world in which we must ration public goods and services, for example, in the form of health care, public education, and public transportation. Imprisonment is one more public resource that must be used more sparingly if we are to afford it. We need to ask ourselves the extent to which it makes sense to respond to drug and related problems by locking people up.

Sykes' answer to this question in Society of Captives is that increased imprisonment will lead to more disruptions and riots in prisons. As prisons become more crowded, staff morale declines, turnover increases, and as Sykes explains, inmates become more involved in the illicit internal man- agement of daily institutional life. Sykes' warns that the public periodically becomes outraged by such arrangements and demands a restoration of

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rules, which in turn destabilizes the internal order of the prison and results in outbreaks of violence.

Interestingly, the public has not taken great interest in what goes on in prisons in recent years. Outbreaks of prison violence also have received little notice in the last decade. It may be that the public simply no longer cares what goes on in prisons, and it may also be that techniques of riot control have become sufficiently effective to make the prospect of prison violence less threatening than it was in the past. However, increasing levels of prison overcrowding, leading to such measures as housing inmates in tents, will severely test these possibilities in years to come. If Sykes' classic analysis remains applicable in America in the 1990s, we will experience extraordinary problems in association with our expanding prison popula- tions. We may ourselves yet become the captives of our society's short- sighted policies of imprisonment.

REFERENCES

Blumstein, Alfred 1995 "Prisons." In James Q. Wilson and

Joan Petersilia (eds.), Crime. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies.

Christie, Nils 1993 Crime Control as Industry: Towards

GULAGS, Western Style? London and New York: Routledge.

Sampson, Robert, and William Julius Wilson 1995 "Toward a theory of race, crime and

urban inequality." In John Hagan and

Ruth Peterson (eds.), Crime and In- equality: 37-54. Stanford, CA: Stan- ford University Press.

Sykes, Gresham 1958 Society of Captives. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press. White, Harrison 1970 Chains of Opportunity: System Mod-

els of Mobility in Organizations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.