Controlling surplus populations

In ​The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America​, Mark Lewis Taylor (in the

chapter ​Theatrics and Sacrifice in the US led Imperium) ​points out that the terrors of Gulag America

function theatrically, producing a negative impact on the poor and racially “other”. Most of the time, these

theatrical spectacles involve the sacrifice of these disadvantaged groups who “also constitute an

intimidating display for exercising control throughout the wider society” ( Taylor, 2001, 48). Employing

evidence from ​The Executed God​, this paper will focus on controlling surplus populations in the United

States through the mass imprisonment of the poor and the disadvantaged.

This paper is divided into three sections: Section I is a summary of Mark Taylor’s discussion of

controlling surplus populations supported by textual evidence from ​The Executed God​. Section II explains

the moral visions of punishment present in Taylor’s discussion of controlling surplus populations. In

section III, I mention my personal reflections on controlling surplus populations and provide evidence for

the moral visions of punishment discussed in the previous section by using evidence from Mark Taylor’s

The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America​ and James Logan’s ​Good Punishment?:

Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment.

Section I: Mark Taylor’s discussion of controlling surplus populations

Taylor (2001) discusses the notion of social wreckage consisting of surplus populations which

“the United States controls today to a growing extent by systems of punishment and confinement” (57).

Terms like debris and wreckage are names through which the elites and the power holders in the system

view those that “do not find a comfortable place in the economic and political order” (57). Christian

Parenti, drawing from the work of criminologist Steven Spitzer, divided this wreckage into two

categories: “Social Junk” and “Social Dynamite” (57). According to Spitzer, “social junk” refers to those
“whose lives are worn down and nearly destroyed, barely holding together which includes mentally ill,

drug addicts, lonely and frayed drifters, alcoholics and cast-off, impoverished elders” (57). Although

these people rarely pose a threat to the society, they, according to Parenti are “a kind of ontological threat

to the system” (57). Therefore, in order to have safer neighborhoods and escape from the thought that

something is wrong with the functioning of the economic order, the elites believe in confining these

people through mechanisms to get them out of sight. “Social Dynamite” on the other hand, “names that

section of the population left behind by economic production who do pose the threat of social explosion”

(57). These include those “who are impoverished low-wage, working class and unemployed youth who

are often omitted from statistical summaries” (57). They fight to be included in the social order posing a

major threat to the functioning of the economic order. Therefore, in order to maintain economic and social

stability, those in power think it is best to keep these people in confinement and under surveillance, and

often use mass imprisonment as a way to punish them. Groups of young people such as those who

organized the Black Panthers, Young lords and the Indian American movement posed a threat to order

and power, “from the perspectives of officials who live atop a political order marked by disparity” (58).

Therefore, groups like these were and still are marked by class and race, and repressed often through

confinement. Along with the idea of maintaining social stability and security of the elites, there were

institutional frameworks that also contributed to increasing imprisonment. There were several acts of

legislation that were designed to support and create the new building of prisons, the longer sentencing,

paramilitary police force, all of which came into being during the rising economic disparity created by

mainly conservative politicians “that put rich and poor into greater conflicts with one another” (59).

Section II: Moral visions of punishment present in Taylor’s discussion of surplus populations

There are two moral visions of punishment that are present in Taylor’s discussion of surplus

populations in my opinion: Incapacitation and deterrence. Incapacitation refers to “mere restraining

effects of the prison: while incarcerated, an individual cannot be out on the street committing crime(s)”

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(Logan, 2008, 21). There are two kinds of deterrence, general and individual. “General deterrence refers

to the effects of punishment on those who are contemplating criminal acts, causing them to think again”

(logan, 2008, 22). “Individual deterrence has to do with the preventative effect that punishment has on an

individual who is punished” (Logan, 2008, 22). Since the elites perceive social junk and social dynamites

to pose a threat to society, the elites believe in incapacitating them through imprisonment. The aim is to

deter (both general and individual) via incapacitation in order to maintain social stability. This in my

opinion is futile “given today’s rapidly increasing prison population, it seems apparent that neither

individual nor general deterrence is very effective” (Logan, 2008, 22). Therefore, by incapacitating a few,

does not really reduce their numbers as new disadvantaged members of the society take their place easily.

The alternative step would be to have appropriate services for these people who are considered as “social

junk” so that they have the tools to be useful to the society. By imprisoning those that act against the elites

and those in power, the law enforcement wants to reinforce the deterrence effect for those that plan to

carry out similar action in future. They believe that by mass imprisonment, they will be able to create fear

among those who decide to obstruct social order and therefore deter future behavior against those in

power. Deterrence can be carried out in different ways both inside and out prison. One of the ways in

which deterrence is carried out is through degradation of the offenders as Logan (2008) contends, “that

offenders feel punished in part because they feel degraded” (23). Degradation is forbidden in international

law. However, the language of criminal justice “has given rise to vocabulary of disgust when describing

offenders like filth, dirt, scum, pieces of shit, diseased, wreckage, debris, monsters etc” (25). One of the

reasons for this is due to the fact that social scientists and philosophers have argued that degradation is

essential to punishment as, “punishment only works if it succeeds in making the punished person feel like

an inferior” (Logan, 2008, 25). However, since majority of the population in prison are the poor, peoples

of color who already had an inferior social status even before imprisonment, degradative practices in

prisons just reinforces similar feeling of inferiority that they are familiar with from outside of prison.

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Therefore, this creates more anger among this population and instead of deterring, more are inclined to

react against the government and the elites in order to change their lower status in the society, thereby

undermining the process of deterrence.

Section III: My personal reflection on controlling surplus populations and evidence for the moral

visions of punishment ​(Based on Good Punishment and Executed God)

I think Taylor (2001) makes very persuasive arguments about the creation of surplus populations

due to a dominant elite class created as a result of economic disparity. Logan (2008) also agrees with

Taylor’s discussion concerning surplus populations and believes that “employing punishment and

confinement as strategies to control should be of concern in any case, especially when it is tied together

with the exploitation of prison labor by private corporations” (39). This phenomenon is dangerous, as

these big companies are bringing profit only to the rich and prosperous in the U.S at the cost of

imprisoning the poor and the disadvantaged. Elected officials, most of whom favor the economic growth

brought by these big companies, are passing tough on crime legislations and building more prisons which

are extremely costly on the federal budget. This diverts funds from other important places like healthcare

and education which are necessary to help those at the bottom of the economic ladder to come up in the

society and prevent creation of this social wreckage. Logan (2008) states “that about 50 to 75 percent of

released inmates will be returned to prison within a few years”(62). Therefore, the purpose of deterrence

via incapacitation clearly fails. In ​The Executed God,​ one of the justifications that the law enforcement

and the elites use for incarcerating surplus populations, is the lockdown of the social junk (mentally ill,

disabled, drug addicts, alcoholics), because “their very being discloses that something is wrong with the

functioning of the economic order” (Taylor, 2001, 57). Just like Taylor and Logan, I disagree with this

argument of confining the “social junk” and believe that instead of isolating, restricting and confining the

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poor and the disadvantaged, these people need rehabilitation and support from the society to reform their

lives.

The practice of confining the “social junk” and the “social dynamite” is not coincidental as Parenti

points out the “processes that link economic disparity with the punitive buildup” (61) which enables us to

see how they are causally connected. According to Parenti, the theatrics of terror expressed through mass

imprisonment of the surplus population and rapidly increasing prisons serves as two major contributions

towards the security of elites who are at the top of the disparate economic order: The first factor involves

massive punitive forces that help to remove the social junk from the neighborhoods of the elites thus

making it clean and safe to live as well as controlling the social dynamites from disrupting social and

economic order (Taylor, 2001, 61). Although systems of force are always justified when used for

everyone’s protection, when in reality their basic role is “to protect the present disbursement of wealth.”

“The more disbursement is unequal, more force will be necessary” (Taylor, 2001, 61). “This explains the

mass of new legislation and huge number of prison construction of the 1980s and 1990s as there was a

need to protect the disproportionate wealth of new elite” (Taylor, 2001, 61). The second factor is the

creation of a “predator population” as a result of the system of punitive terror funneled through its prison

culture (Taylor, 2001, 61). This predator population further reinforces economic disparity by congregating

in poor neighborhoods where the surveillance of the police forces are high. Therefore, upon release they

go back to their poor neighborhoods and continue committing crimes which provides further justification

towards the criminalization and imprisonment of the poor neighborhoods and shows how deterrence via

incapacitation discussed in the previous section fails (Taylor, 2001, 61) . However, some authors still

believe that incapacitation helps in reducing the crime rate.

Logan (2008) quotes David Muhlhausen from Heritage foundation, “If you put somebody in

prison, you can be sure they’re not going to rob you.” He also states that based on research there is a

correlation between increasing incarceration and decreasing crime (60). Many other scholars and analysts

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have also asserted similar conclusion of having safer streets by increasing incarceration as crime rates

have fallen by one-third over the past decade while the prison population has risen to 2 million (Logan,

2008, 61). I agree that this is true to an extent only when those who are committing violent crimes and

jeopardizing the social stability are imprisoned . However, in reality only few violent criminals are

arrested as Logan (2008) quotes Reynolds who states “that despite the nation’s high rate of incarceration,

violent crimes rates remain high” (Logan, 2008, 61). Therefore, it is quite evident that those that are

incarcerated are rarely violent criminals and rather low level offenders who do not pose major threat to

the society. As a result, the purpose of imprisonment here is not reduction of crime, but rather “getting rid

off” a population that is considered unprofitable for the society (Taylor, 2001, 61). Logan (2008) quotes

John Irwin and James Austin who argue that, “ when hundreds of thousand of prisoners are crowded into

human (or inhuman) warehouses, where they are increasingly deprived, restricted, isolated, and

consequently embittered and alienated from the conventional world,” little is done to prepare these people

within the prison walls that make them capable ‘enough’ to have a conventional life after prison (63).As a

result, “With regard to those who commit the most serious of crimes, it has been estimated that about 40

percent of all felony probationers are rearrested for new felonies within three years of being placed under

community supervision” (Logan, 2008, 62). Therefore, to reinstate my opinion, I disagree with the notion

of controlling surplus populations and believe that people should not be segregated based on their

economic status on the whims of the powerful elites and government, but rather should be helped by the

elites and the government to reintegrate them into the society.

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Bibliography

Mauer, Marc. Introduction. Race to Incarcerate. New York: New, 2006. 1-15. Print.

Logan, James Samuel. "Re/producing Criminality and the Prison-Industrial Complex." Good

Punishment?: Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment. Grand Rapids, MI:

William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2008. 17-63. Print.

Parenti, Christian. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. New Edition.

New York: Verso, 2008.

Taylor, Mark L. "Theatrics and Sacrifice in the U.Sled Imperium." The Executed God: The Way

of the Cross in Lockdown America. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001. 48-67. Print.