Annual Report Of The New York State Commission Of Correction

Tables.

Tables.

Despite the intensity of the national debate concerning control and correctional policies, neither the costs of existing agencies nor of alternative approaches are adequately understood. Accurate figures are not reported to private citizens or public officials, and spending is fragmented among different agencies and governing units. This study presents a comprehensive description and analysis of how much money was actually spent in New York in 1977–1978, at all levels of government, for each of the control systems that incarcerate or supervise criminal offenders/defendants. After a broad overview of criminal justice spending, it details spending for prisons, jails, probation, and parole; evaluates the services provided by these public expenditures; and discusses proposals for alternative penal policies and their fiscal implications. The book concludes with recommendations for improved government cost accounting, as well as suggestions for broader penal reforms. Although restricted to an analysis of New York, the findings and recommendations are broadly relevant to other regions of the country.

But Creating Born Criminals is much more than a look at the past. It is an exploration of the role of biological explanation as a form of discourse and of its impact upon society. While The Bell Curve and other recent books have stopped short of making eugenic recommendations, their contentions point toward eugenic conclusions, and people familiar with the history of eugenics can hear in them its echoes. Rafter demonstrates that we need to know how eugenic reasoning worked in the past and that we must recognize the dangers posed by the dominance of a theory that interprets social problems in biological terms and difference as biological inferiority.

How progressive good intentions failed at Coxsackie, once a model New York State prison for youth offenders. Should prisons attempt reform and uplift inmates or, by means of principled punishment, deter them from further wrongdoing? This debate has raged in Western Europe and in the United States at least since the late eighteenth century. Joseph F. Spillane examines the failure of progressive reform in New York State by focusing on Coxsackie, a New Deal reformatory built for young male offenders. Opened in 1935 to serve “adolescents adrift,” Coxsackie instead became an unstable and brutalizing prison. From the start, the liberal impulse underpinning the prison’s mission was overwhelmed by challenges it was unequipped or unwilling to face—drugs, gangs, and racial conflict. Spillane draws on detailed prison records to reconstruct a life behind bars in which “ungovernable” young men posed constant challenges to racial and cultural order. The New Deal order of the prison was unstable from the start; the politics of punishment quickly became the politics of race and social exclusion, and efforts to save liberal reform in postwar New York only deepened its failures. In 1977, inmates took hostages to focus attention on their grievances. The result was stricter discipline and an end to any pretense that Coxsackie was a reform institution. Why did the prison fail? For answers, Spillane immerses readers in the changing culture and racial makeup of the U.S. prison system and borrows from studies of colonial prisons, which emblematized efforts by an exploitative regime to impose cultural and racial restraint on others. In today’s era of mass incarceration, prisons have become conflict-ridden warehouses and powerful symbols of racism and inequality. This account challenges the conventional wisdom that America’s prison crisis is of comparatively recent vintage, showing instead how a racial and punitive system of control emerged from the ashes of a progressive ideal.