The Prison as Defining Criminality

One idea that came up during my discussion with my independent advisor was how crime comes to characterize imprisonment. We were talking about white-collar crime, and my professor noted the way that people generally cannot understand how to respond to crime or any wrongdoing without reverting to the prison as the only site of addressing crime. So even when other alternatives might exist, it’s hard for most individuals to think beyond the carceral logic. I added to that by saying that imprisonment also comes to characterize crime, not just in people’s inability to respond to crime without invoking the prison but people’s inability to recognize crime in situations where the prison isn’t involved. That’s why white collar and Wall Street crime, while way more severe than the vast majority of crimes that people are currently incarcerated for, goes all but unnoticed in our social order.

While most people can recognize that these are examples of clear wrongdoing, it is not regarded with the same degree of severity as nonviolent “crimes” against property or drug offences. The latter category of crime also does not cause direct physical damage to any person but still counts as somehow damaging enough to society that they are processed through the criminal justice system as serious offenses warranting imprisonment for perpetrators. Usually because in cases of white-collar crime, it is hard to place blame on any individuals (although definitely not impossible), the logic of imprisonment doesn’t seem to make as much sense in those situations and because crime is characterized by imprisonment (and vise-versa), it must not really be a crime if we can’t find someone to go to jail for it (or we just don’t want to).

This also brings into play the racialized and class nature of all notions of “crime” and “criminality,” since the majority of people in prison for non-violent offenses are people of color and those most likely to commit white collar crime are, well, white. The characterization of people of color, specifically blacks, as more prone to criminality translates to harsher and more punitive responses to “black crime” by the criminal justices system (most “black crime” actually being a consequence of lower economic and educational opportunities) than to stereotypically “white crime” even when the damage to individuals and society is greater in the latter case.

Constructions of criminality also require an attention to the individual and not to the systems that produced the individual. By focusing on black criminality as a trait of individual blacks, society can ignore myriad systems of racial discrimination and disenfranchisement that result in black criminality and, instead, use locking individuals up as a way of “handling” crime. The way the public responds to white-collar crime also displays an inability to understand criminal behavior in the context of social systems that produce criminality. By looking (and failing) to find individuals to lock up, we as a public can ignore entire capitalist systems that are “criminal” or corrupt that produce criminal and corrupt capitalist behavior as the norm. 

Understanding how to address wrongdoings at a systemic level, not just at the level of the individual, is essential to ridding ourselves of the carceral logic because prison as a system depends on an individualized understanding of crime. Part of that is transferring attention away from the individual behavior of perpetrators and onto the individuals and communities that the wrongdoing affects. By defining our response to crime as reducing harm, righting wrongs, and building back broken communities instead of putting some “bad guy” in jail, we can move from an individualized, racialized, and punitive understanding of crime to one that acknowledges systemic factors and aims to restore instead of punish.