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Tag Archives: University of California-Berkeley

Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016) by Dr. Martin Jay, Department of History, UC Berkeley

24 Tue Jan 2017

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Totalitarianism, Critical Theory, Philosophy

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Against the Grain, C.S. Soong, dialectic of enlightenment, Dr. Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz (1646–1716), Dr. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Dr. Karl Marx (1818-1883), Dr. Martin E. Jay (b. 1944), Dr. Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Dr. Max Weber (1864-1920), Frankfurt School, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), KPFA, Pacifica Radio Network, theodicy, transcript, Univerity of Wisconsin Press, University of California-Berkeley

jay-reasonafteritseclipse-cLUMPENPROLETARIAT—Of all the philosophical strands touching upon political economy, which we might encounter at the university level, apart from Marxian economics and Marxian philosophy, one of the most interesting with respect to sociopolitical (or socioeconomic) emancipation is the Frankfurt School of social theory. [1]  Back at the heterodox economics department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) a few years ago, at least one friend always championed the Frankfurt School and other neo-Marxists. [2]  As I studied undergrad economics at UMKC, with an emphasis on Marxian economics and modern monetary theory (MMT), and sought to find their intersectionality or synthesis, my radical friend was praising the virtues of Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer, and other theorists associated with the Frankfurt School.  Perhaps, we agreed that Dr. Karl Marx has contributed the most accurate description of the mechanics of capital, its nature, form, and dynamics, its circuital expansion.  But the Frankfurt School has presented compelling critiques of the various Marxian schools of thought, which have succeeded Marx.  Certainly, as Marxian scholar Dr. David Harvey reminds us:

I teach Marx.  And a question I always ask is:  What can we learn from Marx?  And what do we have to do for ourselves?  And I think that that’s a very important question to ask because very frequently, in the past, people have read their Marx and then sort of, I don’t know, plunked reality into it and, then, said:  Ah! Here’s the answer!  I don’t think you can do that.  I think there’s only a limited set of things we can learn from Marx.

Paradoxically, we can’t really learn that much about socialism or communism or the future from Marx.  We can learn a great deal about how capital works.

Marx will always be important for understanding capital, what it is and how it works.  But, as Dr. Harvey reminds us, and critical theory shows us, we must constantly grapple with the reality of capitalist relations in our own time and place.  So, it was a great joy to find today that free speech radio’s Against the Grain was featuring a discussion with Professor Martin Jay (Department of History, University of California-Berkeley) about his book, Reason after its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory.  The title evokes Max Horkheimer‘s important classic, The Eclipse of Reason (1947), a foundational text within critical theory.  Critical theory extends many of the important lines of theoretical inquiry elaborated by Dr. Marx and others since, who have sought to expand and build upon earlier work.  There is always so much for us to read.  But Professor Jay’s book On Late Critical Theory is an important read, which provides us with a philosophical study of reason and the foundations of intellectual inquiry.  And, of course, critical theory is required reading for all self-respecting intellectuals (assuming that’s not a contradiction in terms).

This is a fascinating discussion, which touches upon the ideas of Adorno and Habermas, of course, but also those of Marx, Weber, Hegel, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and others, including topics ranging from Horkheimer’s views on art and aesthetics to argumentation; Marcuse’s structural transformation of the public sphere, valuing evidence and its centrality to a responsible press; Habermas’ view of communicative rationality; and persuasion.  Listen (and/or download) here. [3]

Messina

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Against the Grain]

AGAINST THE GRAIN—[24 JAN 2017]  [SF Bay Area Flamenco Festival announcement]  [KPFA station identification] 

[Against the Grain theme music]

“Today on Against the Grain, reasoning may be something we do.  But reason is an idea, whose content and fate have been debated and discussed over the course of two millennia.  I’m C.S. Soong.  U.C. Berkeley historian Martin Jay joins me to discuss his new book, Reason after its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory, after these news headlines.”  (c. 1:15)

[KPFA News Headlines (read by Christina Aanestad) omitted by scribe]  (c. 5:35)

“From the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, California, this is Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.  My name is C.S. Soong.

“Many have been tempted to think, in times of relative peace and prosperity, that the world is moving toward ever greater rationality, that Reason, with a capital ‘R’, is in the process of becoming realised.  Notions like that take a hit when times turn dark, when, for example, fascism rears its ugly head.  And, then, people wonder:  What’s happened to reason?  What’s happened to rational thinking?  And:  How did this—you might call it—crisis of reason, how did it arise?  And what can we do about it?

“A collection of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, which was established in Germany in the 1920s and, then, relocated to the U.S. because of Nazism, a number of Frankfurt School thinkers grappled with what they saw as a kind of crisis of reason, with different thinkers taking different approaches to the question and coming up with different ways to address it.  (c. 6:53)

“The ideas of two Frankfurt philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, are among the many ideas investigated in a new book by Martin Jay, a book called Reason after its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory.  In the book, Martin Jay, a history professor at UC Berkeley, described how Adorno looked to aesthetics for answers.  (c. 7:17)

“For Adorno, writes Jay, art was not the betrayer of reason, but rather its salvation.

“Jay also examines the very different approach taken by Habermas, a second-generation theorist of the Frankfurt School.  Jürgen Habermas, in his effort to restore a robust notion of reason, pointed to a rationality rooted in the give and take of communication, of giving reasons and persuading through logical arguments and listening to the arguments of others.

“When Martin Jay joined me in-studio to discuss Reason after its Eclipse, I began by asking what concept of reason he was claiming, or observing, had been eclipsed.”  (c. 8:00)

DR. MARTIN JAY:  “This an impossible question to answer.  And, in fact, I address precisely the impossibility in the introduction [to my book] to the extent that the defining of a concept, the limitational concept, the belief that you can create a single unilocal meaning of a concept is precisely what intellectual history, um, tries to avoid.  What intellectual history is most interested, I think, in doing is tracing the sometimes adventitious, sometimes meaningful—let’s call it—pilgrimage of a word or a term or a constellation of terms over a long period of time.

“So, reason—not only in English, but in all the various other languages going all the way back to the Greek logos, and Italian [ratio], and a lot in between, reason‘s had many, many different meanings over time.

“So, what the book tried to do is to be fair to the variety of meanings and not privilege one as the essential meaning.  Having said that, the Frankfurt School, itself—the people about whom I’m writing about in this book—did have an implicit normative notion of reason, which was, in their eyes, eclipsed in the modern world in favour of a debased version, which they saw as, essentially, instrumental.  (c. 9:26)

“So, even though I’m being a little reluctant to give you a definition, they, I think, implicitly, held on to a normative notion.

“Now, one of the arguments of the book is that they never fully, at least not in the first generation of critical theorists, never fully defended a viable notion of what that alternative to instrumental reason was.  They derived somewhat from Hegel, some from Kant, some from other metaphysical sources, maybe even theological sources, sometimes psychoanalytic sources, but there was never an absolutely coherent version.  (c. 9:29)

“So, the second generation of critical theorists, most notably Jürgen Habermas, had to provide a kind of paradigm shift, in which a different version of rationality became his normative standard against which instrumental reason was measured.  And, so, the book tries to tell the story, precisely, of that shift from the first to the second generation, with Habermas’ alternative—communicative rationality—being the new norm.”  (c. 10:27)

C.S. SOONG:  “And, by instrumental reason, you mean reason used as a means to some end?”

DR. MARTIN JAY:  “Uh, Max Weber was the first, really, to point this out, that there was a substantive notion of reason, one which emphasised values, one which emphasised ultimate, we might say, concerns, ethical as well as cognitive.  That, on one hand, and other types of reason, formal, and, most importantly for our purposes, instrumental, which emphasised the rationality of finding means, finding instruments to achieve ends, which are themselves arbitrarily and contingently given.  (c. 11:05)

“So, instrumental rationality was, basically, the rationality of a kind of efficiency, a kind of willingness to suspend a deeper question of why you’re doing something.  So, for example, you might have, during wartime, a situation, a goal of winning a battle, of winning a war, and you might use the most efficacious way of doing that, which would, perhaps, be to, uh, wipe out the population, civilian as well as military, against whom you were fighting.  But this doesn’t, of course, raise the difficult, ethical question of:  Who should, in fact, be seen as the enemy?  Who should not?  For what reason is the war being fought?  Is it possible to minimise collateral damage?  And all the other things, that are ethical questions.

“So, instrumental reason, essentially, brackets the ends, sees them as arbitrary and irrational, and reduces reason to merely its means-ends possibility.  (c. 12:01)

C.S. SOONG:  “Now, in the eyes of the Frankfurt School, the first generation, is there a way to generalise about what they saw instrumental reasoning coming out of, in other words, what they saw instrumental reason replacing?  What was the prior version of reason, that maybe they approved of, or maybe they felt was more benign than instrumental reason?”

DR. MARTIN JAY:  “The first generation, basically, held on to a notion of what might be called an emphatic or a metaphysical notion of reason, which was a notion prior to the reduction of philosophy to science and the triumph of modern technology, one which emphasised the role, that reason played in creating a nexus, we might say, of means and ends, in which the ends were themselves rationally chosen.

“Now, what makes it particularly difficult to figure out exactly where this notion of objective and non-instrumental reason can be located is that there was a metaphysical residue, which said that somehow it existed in history, it existed out there, it existed in social relations, rather than, uh, human interaction, understood as the process of giving reasons, or the process of reasoning.  So that, there was what might be called an inherent reason in the world, which was a residue of a sort of metaphysical idea that the world, itself, was the creation of a rational god, could—even though we may not fully understand it—could be, at the deepest level, inherently rational.  (c. 13:37)

“Now, there are two versions of this, we might say.  One is what’s called a conservative version:  The world is, with all its apparent, let’s say, surface or, let’s say, contingent irrationalities, on the deepest level, is reasonable, is rational, is somehow meaningful.  And, one might argue, this was best expressed in the work of the 17th-century philosopher Leibniz, who contended that there was a principle of sufficient reason underlying all the happenings, that occurred, even those, that seemed most basically irrational or unethical.  So, he came up with theodicy, which said that partial evils were part of a general good.  This is one version.

“The second version, we might call it, more or less Hegelian and, certainly, Marxist, was that reason exists, but not yet in a rational form, that the world is potentially rational.  The world has the tendency to become rational.  The world is, in complicated ways, moving through an historical process, which has as its goal the realisation in the institutions and practices of humankind a version of reason.  (c. 14:43)

“But, here, too, it happens, if not automatically, at least on a level, that is almost like providence, in the religious sense, that happens behind the backs and even against the wills of individuals.  And this was a version, that Marxism emphasised as an automatic process of, you know, basically, social revolution-producing outcomes, that would be beneficial to humankind.

“So, the Frankfurt School, to some extent depended on this latter version, but, basically, became disillusioned with the Marxist notion that this was inherently happening in a meta-narrative of historical progress, which left them with a dilemma because, if reason was not already in the world and reason was not, in a way, the talus of the world inevitably happening in a future, then it left it, in a way, hanging in the air.  There was no, what you might call, human agent or a social agent bringing about reason.  It had to be done by will.  It had to be done by practice.  It was not yet in place.  And there was a kind of, we might say, loss of faith in the possibility of rationality finally being achieved.

“So, to some extent, the Frankfurt School fell back on a rather desperate utopianism, in which, although the present was growing increasingly problematic—and remember they were writing, many of them, during the period of fascism—and the enlightenment, instead of being a progressive, upwardly mobile, we might say, phenomenon, was dialectically going also in a negative direction.  This is the idea of dialectic of enlightenment.

“They were left with, really, no hope beyond a kind of—we might call it—faith and prefigurative ciphers of utopian, maybe, art, maybe in other aspects of human imagination, but certainly not sufficient to create much confidence that reason would be achieved in the near or even in the far future.” (c. 16:39)

C.S. SOONG:  “So, you focus part of the book on what Max Horkheimer, a prominent, a leading member of the Frankfurt School, thought about reason and what had happened to it, what the future might bring.  What did Horkheimer contend is the disease of reason?”

DR. MARTIN JAY:  “Well, this is a very troubling question because, if you have a notion that there was once a robust positive—let’s call it—objective or emphatic notion of reason, which is then replaced by a diminished instrumental version, then, it’s a fairly simple narrative of decline.  If your replace that with the notion that, from the very beginning, from the origins of human logos, of human use of reason, to survive in a hostile world there’s always already a kind of negative fatality, in which reason is used for self-preservation.  And self-preservation involves, basically, dominating a hostile environment, which creates a kind of technological instrumentality, which becomes inherently anti-human and certainly hostile to nature in its more benign forms.  (c. 17:49)  [snip]  “

[additional notes/transcription pending]

[snip] (c. 59:59)

Learn more at AGAINST THE GRAIN.

***

Reason After Its Eclipse: A Conversation With Martin Jay, posted to Vimeo

***

“The Dictator Decides” (2016), posted on YouTube by Pet Shop Boys on 1 APR 2016.

“Pazzo!” (2016), posted on YouTube by Pet Shop Boys on 1 APR 2016.

***

[1]  About the Frankfurt School of social theory:

The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) is a school of social theory and philosophy associated in part with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Founded during the interwar period, the School consisted of dissidents who felt at home neither in the existent capitalist, fascist, nor communist systems that had formed at the time. Many of these theorists believed that traditional theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.[1]

Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind; they shared the Marxist Hegelian premises and were preoccupied with similar questions.[2] To fill in the perceived omissions of classical Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines.[3] The school’s main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber, and Lukács.[4]

Following Marx, they were concerned with the conditions that allow for social change and the establishment of rational institutions.[5] Their emphasis on the “critical” component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism, and determinism by returning to Kant’s critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel’s philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of human reality.

Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jürgen Habermas‘s work on communicative reason, linguistic intersubjectivity and what Habermas calls “the philosophical discourse of modernity“.[6] Critical theorists such as Raymond Geuss and Nikolas Kompridis have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he has undermined the aspirations for social change that originally gave purpose to critical theory’s various projects—for example the problem of what reason should mean, the analysis and enlargement of “conditions of possibility” for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism.[7]

[2]  About neo-Marxism:

Neo-Marxism is a loose term for various twentieth-century approaches that amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, usually by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions, such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism (in the case of Sartre).

Erik Olin Wright‘s theory of contradictory class locations, which incorporates Weberian sociology, critical criminology, and anarchism, is an example of the syncretism in neo-Marxist theory.[1] As with many uses of the prefix neo-, many theorists and groups designated as neo-Marxist have attempted to supplement the perceived deficiencies of orthodox Marxism or dialectical materialism. Many prominent neo-Marxists, such as Herbert Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School, were sociologists and psychologists.

Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber‘s broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy. Strains of neo-Marxism include: critical theory, analytical Marxism and French structural Marxism.

The concept arose as a way to explain questions which were not explained in Karl Marx’s works. There are many different “branches” of Neo-Marxism often not in agreement with each other and their theories.

[3]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Against the Grain, this one-hour broadcast hosted by C.S. Soong, Tuesday, 24 JAN 2017, 12:00 PST.

Broadcast summary at kfpa.org (accessed 24 JAN 2017):

What happens when “reason” is in decline, when the world appears to be moving in the direction of irrationality and political pathology?  Martin Jay discusses how two Frankfurt School thinkers, Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, tried to salvage a critical version of reason.  Whereas Adorno looked to art and aesthetics, Habermas appealed to practices of interpersonal communication and argumentation.

Martin Jay, Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory University of Wisconsin Press, 2016

A note on Reason after its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory by University of Wisconsin Press:

George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History
Steven E. Aschheim, Stanley G. Payne, Mary Louise Roberts, and David J. Sorkin, Series Editors

“Martin Jay is one of the most respected intellectual historians now working, and any book by him is an important event.  His subject here could hardly be bigger: the idea of reason in Western thought over two millennia.”
—Michael Rosen, Harvard University

Martin Jay tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor?  Applying the tools of intellectual history, he examines the overlapping, but not fully compatible, meanings that have accrued to the term “reason” over two millennia, homing in on moments of crisis, critique, and defense of reason.

After surveying Western ideas of reason from the ancient Greeks through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Jay engages at length with the ways leading theorists of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and most extensively Habermas—sought to salvage a viable concept of reason after its apparent eclipse.  They despaired, in particular, over the decay in the modern world of reason into mere instrumental rationality.  When reason becomes a technical tool of calculation separated from the values and norms central to daily life, then choices become grounded not in careful thought but in emotion and will—a mode of thinking embraced by fascist movements in the twentieth century.

Is there a more robust idea of reason that can be defended as at once a philosophical concept, a ground of critique, and a norm for human emancipation?  Jay explores at length the communicative rationality advocated by Habermas and considers the range of arguments, both pro and con, that have greeted his work.

A brief bio of Dr. Martin Jay by University of Wisconsin Press:

Author. Photo credit, NameMartin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is the author of fourteen previous books, including The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50, which has been translated into thirteen languages; Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas; Adorno; Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America; Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French Thought; Songs of Experience: Modern European and American Variations on a Universal Theme; and The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics.

***

[25 JAN 2017]

[Last modified at 15:24 PST on 26 JAN 2017]

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Urban Policing, Mass Imprisonment, & Second-Class Citizenship in the USA

03 Wed Jun 2015

Posted by ztnh in Democracy Deferred, Police State, Prison Abolition

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Amy E. Lerman, civic engagement, free speech, Goldman School of Public Policy, Prison Litigation Reform Act, Scholars Strategy Network, state theory, UC Berkeley, University of California-Berkeley, Vesla M. Weaver

CopWatchCoverflickrA_SynLUMPENPROLETARIAT—In the context of the current national upheavals against police terrorism, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley are featuring interesting and relevant research, particularly one study published in 2014.  In an article, entitled “How Urban Policing and Mass Imprisonment Create a Second-Class Citizenship in America“, Amy E. Lerman (Assistant Professor of Public Policy) and Vesla M. Weaver (Yale University) summarise the key findings presented in their book, entitled Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control (University of Chicago Press, 2014).  The article was originally published as “How Harsh Policing and Mass Imprisonment Create Second-Class American Citizens” by the Scholars Strategy Network.  (See below.)

—Messina

***

GOLDMAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY

“How Urban Policing and Mass Imprisonment Create a Second-Class Citizenship in America“, Amy E. Lerman (Assistant Professor of Public Policy) and Vesla M. Weaver (Yale University)

In many urban areas across the United States, police departments, criminal courts, probation and parole offices are the agencies of government most familiar to residents. A recent study of New York City, for example, showed that three-quarters of 18 to 19 year-old black men are stopped by the police each year. On any given day, eleven percent of young black men are in jail or prison, and one third are living under some form of correctional supervision. The prevalence of prison terms, police encounters, and other contacts with criminal justice have grown at a breakneck pace. The incarceration rate in America more than quadrupled over the last four decades. Imprisonment went up when crime grew – but also went up when crime declined.

Importantly, though, policies that changed how we police and how much we confine resulted not just in larger proportions of the population being exposed to criminal justice. It has also led to a shift in the types of people who experience some form of contact with criminal justice. In fact, most of those who encounter police and courts have never been found guilty of any crime. In New York City alone, police stops increased more than 600 percent over the past decade. Just one in ten of these stops resulted in the individual being arrested or charged with a crime. In a nationally representative sample of young Americans, fully 20 percent report having been stopped and questioned at least once by police but never arrested, and about half that number have been arrested but never convicted of a crime.

So what? Setting aside debates about the causes of these remarkable trends, we still know surprisingly little about their many effects on American life. Democratic citizenship is one of the most crucial areas to investigate. Do encounters with criminal justice institutions affect Americans’ attitudes toward government and democratic values – and alter their likelihood of voting or engaging in other important forms of citizen participation? For blacks and Latinos who are disproportionately affected, do contacts with police, courts and other agents of surveillance and punishment shape perceptions of racial equality and the social standing of minorities in America? In our new book, we tackle these important questions. Our findings document worrisome trends and suggest new ways of thinking about the issues and what is at stake.

Encounters with Authoritarian Institutions Heighten Citizen Distrust

Numerous studies attest to the growth of criminal justice over time. But these institutions have not only become more pervasive; they have become less democratic, embodying practices at odds with the core commitments of citizen voice and equality and institutional accountability and responsiveness. Over recent decades, prosecutors and police have gained new immunities, and it has become harder for citizens to express grievances and pursue legitimate claims of misconduct.

At the same time, U.S. prisons have adopted tighter limits on free speech and limited the ability of prisoners to form unions and other groups. Prison unions and newspapers once flourished, but are now discouraged or prohibited; and the Prison Litigation Reform Act has placed new limits on inmates’ access to the courts. Overall, criminal justice has become more authoritarian during the same era that millions more U.S. citizens, especially minorities, are exposed to the system.

Our research reveals that institutions of criminal justice teach citizens lessons about democratic life, their government, and themselves as members of the body politic. Specifically, we find that adversarial, involuntary contacts with criminal justice institutions alter what people believe about government and their own standing as citizens. From encounters with police, prosecutors, courts, and prisons, people learn it is best to remain quiet, make no demands, and be generally wary and distrustful of anyone in authority. This civic learning stands directly at odds with the ideals of democracy itself.

Impacts on Citizen Trust, Participation, and Racial Outlooks

From detailed analyses of large, nationally representative surveys, supplemented with over one hundred in-person interviews, we find sizeable effects of experiences with police, prisons, and other criminal justice institutions on a range of citizen attitudes and behavior.

  • Compared to those who have never had contact with criminal justice, those who have been arrested but never convicted are 16 percent less likely to “feel like a full and equal citizen” in America. These individuals are 20 percent less likely to believe that “everyone in the US has an equal chance to succeed.”
  • People who have been stopped and questioned by police or arrested for a crime—but have never been convicted in a court of law—are roughly 10 percent more likely to express distrust of government.
  • When asked how much government leaders “care about people like me,” fully three-quarters of people who had experienced punitive contact with the criminal justice system said “very little,” compared with just 36 percent of otherwise similar people with no criminal justice contact.
  • Citizens with prison experience are much less likely to be registered to vote or to report having voted in the past presidential election. Even encounters that do not result in a criminal conviction are associated with a reduced likelihood of turning out in an election.And the effects are sizeable: encounters with criminal justice agents and institutions discourage citizen participation just as much as traditional predictors of lower participation, such as poverty.
  • Compared to other socioeconomically similar blacks, African Americans who have had experiences with police, courts, or prisons perceive more racism and feel less equal.

Correlations are not the same as causation, of course. To fully explore the causal processes at work, we went beyond the numbers to talk directly with people about their experiences. From these interviews, we learned that people who had experienced police stops or other forms of punitive encounters in the criminal justice system were not only less likely to vote, but had also actively withdrawn from political engagement of other kinds, in part because they learned to fear any interactions with the state. As a middle-aged black man in Charlottesville put it, discussing why he would never contact a public official for assistance, “I feel like they’re not interested in what I have to say. I feel like if I contact a senator or governor, they’ll probably want to put me in jail and leave me as a troublemaker. I’m serious. That’s how I actually feel: ‘I better stay below the radar….’”

The Reforms America Needs

In a nation that aspires to political inclusion and responsive government, our results should elicit concern. The modern criminal justice system not only does social and economic harm to the many individuals who encounter it, as well as their children, partners, and communities. It also transforms citizens’ relationship to the polity. Intentionally or not, get-tough-on-crime activities have deepened the divide between those Americans whose voice is heard and those whose views are silenced. That these ill effects fall especially hard on blacks and other traditionally disenfranchised minorities should give us particular pause.

What should we do? Bringing the scope of criminal justice activity back into line with the scale of actual crime rates gains new urgency given our findings. For instance, finding alternatives to imprisonment, especially for non-violent violations, is an important step. In addition, though, real reform must take seriously the culture of our democratic institutions, giving citizens voice in the issues that concern them and being responsive to citizens’ complaints and concerns—even those institutions tasked with surveillance, adjudication, and punishment. Our country needs to instill democratic values into police, courts and prisons, assuring basic democratic rights even in these necessarily regimented settings. These steps can be taken without undermining public safety – and all of them are important to help revitalize the democracy in which all Americans have a strong stake.

Amy E. Lerman is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and co-author with Vesla M. Weaver of Yale University of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control from the University of Chicago Press (June 2014). This article was first published by the Scholars Strategy Network. [See below.]

*

“How Harsh Policing And Mass Imprisonment Create Second-Class American Citizens“, Amy E. Lerman (University of California-Berkeley) and Vesla M. Weaver (Yale University).

In many urban areas across the United States, police departments, criminal courts, and probation and parole offices are the agencies of government most familiar to residents. Young black men in many cities are regularly stopped and questioned by police. On any given day, more than one in ten are behind bars. Experiences of imprisonment, police encounters, probationary supervision and other dealings with the criminal justice system have proliferated at breakneck pace. Over the past four decades, incarceration rates more than quadrupled – going up even after crime declined.

Changes in U.S. criminal justice have had a broad impact – because most people who encounter police and courts have never been found guilty of any crime. In New York City alone, police stops increased more than sixfold in the past decade, even though just one in ten stops led to an arrest or criminal charges. In a nationally representative sample of young Americans, fully one fifth reported having been stopped and questioned at least once by police but never arrested.

What difference do so many encounters with criminal justice make? Do encounters with criminal justice agents affect Americans’ attitudes toward government and democratic values – and alter their likelihood of voting or engaging in other forms of citizen participation? For blacks and Latinos who are disproportionately affected, do these encounters affect perceptions of racial equality? Our new book crosses a new research frontier to tackle these important issues.

Encounters with Authoritarian Institutions Heighten Citizen Distrust

Numerous studies show that U.S. criminal justice institutions have expanded, but they have also become more authoritarian. Prosecutors and police have gained new immunities, and new laws make it harder for citizens to formally express grievances and pursue claims of misconduct. At the same time, U.S. prisons have adopted tighter limits on inmate speech and rights to associate. Prison unions and newspapers once flourished, but are now discouraged or prohibited.

These shifts have a larger importance because, as our research shows, involuntary dealings with criminal justice institutions teach people lessons about government and their place in U.S. democracy. From encounters with police, prosecutors, courts, and prisons, people learn it is best to remain quiet, make no demands, and be generally wary and distrustful of anyone in authority – lessons that are very much at odds with democratic ideals.

Adverse Impacts on Citizen Trust, Participation, and Racial Outlooks

From detailed analyses of large, nationally representative surveys, supplemented with over one hundred in-person interviews, we discovered sizeable effects on citizens’ attitudes and behavior traceable to people’s experiences with police, prisons, and other criminal justice institutions.

• Compared to people who have never had contact with the criminal justice system, those who have been arrested but never convicted are 16 percent less likely to “feel like a full and equal citizen” of the United States. These individuals are also 20 percent less likely to believe that “everyone in the U.S. has an equal chance to succeed.”
• People who have been stopped and questioned by police, or arrested for a crime but never convicted, are about ten percent more likely than otherwise comparable others to express distrust of government.
• When asked how much government leaders “care about people like me,” fully three-quarters of people who had experienced punitive contact with the criminal justice system said “very little,” compared with just 36 percent of similar people with no such contact.
• Citizens who have been imprisoned are much less likely to be registered to vote or report having voted in the past presidential election, and reduced likelihood of voting also happens for people with criminal justice encounters not resulting in convictions. Such contacts with criminal justice have a sizeable adverse impact – comparable to the well-known dampening effect poverty has on citizen participation.
• Even compared to other blacks, African Americans who have had encounters with police, courts, prisons are more likely to perceive they are subject to racism and unequal treatment.

To understand these effects, we turned to our interviews. From the many individuals with whom we spoke, we learned that those who had experienced police stops or other forms of punitive encounters were not only less likely to vote but had generally withdrawn from active citizenship.
“I better stay below the radar,” said a middle-aged black man in Charlottesville, explaining why he would never ask a public official for assistance. “I feel like they’re not interested in what I have to say. I feel like if I contact a senator or governor, they’ll probably want to put me in jail
and leave me as a troublemaker. I’m serious! That’s how I actually feel.”

The Criminal Justice Reforms America Needs

In a nation that aspires to political inclusion and responsive government, our findings should elicit deep concern. Intentionally or not, get-tough-on-crime activities have deepened the divide between those Americans whose voice is heard and a growing group of second-class citizens whose voices are silenced. That these ill effects fall especially hard on African Americans and other traditionally disenfranchised minorities should give us particular pause.

What should Americans do? Devising alternatives to imprisonment, especially for non-violent violations, is an important first step. In addition, real reforms must be made in the inner workings of institutions tasked with surveillance, adjudication, and punishment. Even in these necessarily regimented settings, basic democratic rights and values need to be maintained. These types of reforms in U.S. criminal justice can be accomplished without undermining public safety – and such reforms are much needed to restore the vitality of democracy and the equal citizen rights in which all Americans have a strong stake.

Learn more in Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver, Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

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