The New Gaol: Seeing Incarceration Like a City

• In Event: Policy Panel: The Great Experiment: Realigning Criminal Justice in California and Beyond

Abstract

Since John Howard’s (1777) condemnation of local places of detention at the end of the eighteenth century, the goal of prison reform has been to replace local jails with their porous boundaries and mixes of troubled citizens, with austere and complete “total institutions.” The current crisis of mass imprisonment is an opportune moment to rethink this strategy. In particular, California’s Correctional Realignment law represents a provocative counter note to the historic link between progress in prison reform and state administration. This article proposes that we see crime, mental illness, and incarceration less like a state (Scott 1998) and more like a city (Valverde 2011). When we do, the jail emerges as a potentially equilibrium solution to the problems of mental illness, crime, and incarceration.

Author

• Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley