The Punisher(s): America's Love Affair with Incarceration

Hello and happy “Let’s circle back in the New Year” season to all of you!

Next up in our essay series on why cycles of fear and punishment in America repeat themselves — Hannah’s thoughts on the stubborn hold punitiveness has on our politics and imaginations, and how the stories we amplify keep pulling us back toward “solutions” that don’t work.

Punitiveness has deep roots in the United States. The concept of an eye for an eye runs through all the Abrahamic traditions, and even little kids understand retribution. I know at least one of you has a daycare aged child who has bitten a friend who wronged them, and look, I get it — there’s a seductive emotional gravity to the idea that harm demands punishment. It pulls at us before we’ve even absorbed what happened; that tug is understandable, and harder to resist than most of us like to admit.

But the primary way we deal with harm as a country isn’t exactly something we’ve arrived at through careful, studious thought. Our punitive responses are shaped by our own (often misguided) instincts as well as the stories we hear (and, more importantly, how those stories are framed). The most popular framing teaches people to see wrongdoing almost entirely as a personal failure that must be punished, rather than as something deeply influenced by the society we’ve built and the systems people move through. When harm is presented purely as an individual story, divorced from the daily structural failures of our legal system, punitive responses will continue to seem like the most natural and obvious answer.

For example: if you spend any time online, especially in the slop bucket that now passes for Twitter, you’ve probably seen some version of the story about the killing of a young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, on a Charlotte light rail train this summer. The man who killed Zarutska, Decarlos Brown, was in the midst of a serious and untreated mental health crisis. Police body cam footage from January of this year shows him requesting a welfare check and telling officers, in clear distress, that “man-made material” had been implanted in his body and was controlling his movements. When Brown called his sister from jail after the murder, he expressed relief that, finally, the authorities would have to address the “foreign material” in his body that compelled him to attack Zarutska.

So the underlying cause of this tragedy is…not exactly mysterious. Yet Brown’s psychosis was treated as almost irrelevant, and a wide swath of elected officials and commentators saw the potential for spin. The end result was pretty predictable: a punitive new policy penned by the North Carolina legislature. As of December 1st, “Iryna’s Law” is in effect.

The new law overhauls how North Carolina judges decide who stays in jail before trial. It changed a lot (you can read about it here) but the quick summary is that it makes it much harder for people to be released pretrial without paying cash bail. The results won’t be surprising: more people stuck in increasingly overcrowded jails before they’ve even been convicted of anything (if they are ever convicted at all). That’s no small thing – jail, might I remind you, is a profoundly destabilizing place, leading to the loss of jobs, stable housing, or even custody of kids, and leaving behind all manner of lingering trauma.

A few grim ironies hang over this whole thing. Chief among them is that Brown had already served a full six year prison sentence in his twenties for armed robbery, the maximum sentence he could’ve received. He wasn’t the beneficiary of some judicial soft-heartedness, and he wasn’t free because the system somehow failed to detain him long enough. He served the entirety of the punishment that the state had imposed, and that punishment did not make anything better. In the years that followed, he cycled in and out of jail, just like thousands of other people struggling through poverty and mental illness. Commentators and politicians berated judges for continuing to free him, as if they somehow had the authority to keep someone imprisoned beyond their lawful sentence, and, more ludicrously, as if more incarceration would somehow have resolved a worsening mental illness that had gone untreated inside that very system. (According to his family, Brown left prison haunted by the intrusive delusions that ultimately contributed to Zarutska’s death.)

The churn in and out of incarceration doesn’t reveal a propensity for leniency on anyone’s part. It’s just evidence of a system that has no meaningful treatment to offer and relies instead on expensive and destabilizing periods of confinement. If the takeaway from this tragedy is that “incapacitation” would have saved Zarutska – meaning Brown should simply have been kept in a cage indefinitely just in case he might harm someone in the future, then the logical extension of that view is pretty bleak. It would require giving people life sentences for offenses like robbery, not because of what they actually did, but because of what we fear they might do someday.

It’s also true that failures are simply easier to spot, and they tend to loom larger in our minds than successes. We fixate on the people who cause harm and almost never talk about the people who don’t. There’s no MSNBC segment titled “Area Man Minds His Business for 12 Straight Years” (although I’d watch that.) But even the failures we do choose to highlight are oddly selective. Media coverage often focuses on the kinds of incidents that fit neatly into our preconceived ideas about how our systems work and who is most dangerous. Meanwhile, the equally abundant reporting on horrific prison conditions, persistent abuse inside jails, and the fact that incarceration so often makes people less stable rarely gets connected back into our narratives about crime. The violence inside jails and prisons doesn’t exist in a separate universe from the violence outside. They are deeply intertwined.

This lopsided media narrative, coupled with our natural instinct for punishment, really distorts how people think about incarceration. Sorry to be a broken record, but for years, researchers have shown that jails and prisons do little to nothing to improve public safety; serving time in prison just makes people more likely to break the law in the future, and, of course, prisons themselves are not safe places for the people who live or work there. This isn’t some niche problem. Half of American adults have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated, so the dangers posed by jails and prisons will impact most (if not all of us) at some point. Despite all this evidence, most media coverage encourages the idea that prisons are places where people go to be (at best) rehabilitated or at (at worst) kept out of the way until they return to the rest of us. When someone is released and commits another crime, we return immediately to the familiar script: blame the person, blame the judge who released them, blame the politician who changed a sentencing law. The institution that failed at its own stated purpose isn’t a part of the story.

Politics, of course, thrives on these blind spots. A ton of elected officials come out of careers in prosecution or the courts, so they instinctively speak the language of punishment. Plus, punitive tools give governments a blunt form of power that is tempting whenever the public appears anxious (which is, unfortunately, most of the time). When politicians reach for these tools, it resonates with voters in large part because the narrative soil has already been tilled. People have been taught to see harm as an individual failure and punishment as the obvious fix, so proposals that double down on caging or surveillance are seen as common sense even when there’s zero evidence they work. And, because these stories cycle endlessly through our media and political systems, we rarely get the space to imagine anything else. So no, the media did not invent the concept of punishment, and they didn’t build our prisons, but they have played a role in paving the emotional pathway that makes these things feel like the appropriate or inevitable response to wrongdoing.

With all this said, let’s end on a note that keeps us from total despair: narratives can (and do) change! The media has enormous power to carve out new pathways in public imagination. If we tell different stories, people will start to expect different outcomes. And if people start to expect different outcomes, they will start asking for different solutions. That’s the hopeful part of all this: the same narrative machinery that has bolstered our most garbage instincts can just as easily help us build something better.