Blockchain Papers

Jess Fournier

Resurgent interest in prison abolition from academics, activists, and popular culture is a response to mass movements: some of the largest protests in US history.1 The George Floyd rebellions during the summer of 2020 responded to the latest series of US police murders of Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and others, by attacking the “carceral institutions [that] have become enmeshed in the daily life of the racialized US working class.”2Françoise Vergès’s Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective and Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie’s Abolition. Feminism. Now. can be seen as interventions into this moment, conditioned as it is by a longer crisis that necessitates prison abolition. The authors—long-time feminist activists and theorists—characterize sexual violence as a social problem that cannot be ameliorated through criminal legal sanctions for individual perpetrators. While prison abolitionists have long debated the appropriate responses to sexual violence,3AFN and FTV go farther by offering a unified theory of sexual violence’s causation.Asserting that “the state does not offer the solution to interpersonal violence,” the authors argue that sexual violence is in fact structurally produced by the state itself (AFN, 75). However, contradictory definitions of structure and state limit their theorization, which relies on analogizing the dynamics of interpersonal sexual violence to the function of states. The abstract state-as-rapist does not ultimately offer a structural theory of sexual violence and risks foreclosing possibilities for political mobilization that could actualize prison abolitionist demands.First published in 2020 and translated into English in 2022 by Melissa Thackway, Vergès’s text is a feminist meditation on violence: historical and contemporary, colonial and neoliberal, systemic and deeply personal. Her examples of violence are far-ranging: Haitian slave rebellions; her own upbringing in the French department of Réunion and her education in the United States; sex workers’ mobilizations in Lyon, France, in 1975; and the elections of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Matteo Salvini. What unites these phenomena is an argument about the nature of violence itself. Vergès’s position is that all violence is “a structural element” of patriarchy, colonialism, and racial capitalism (FTV, 4). The “State and neoliberal politics of protection” promise legal protections for white bourgeois women to obscure the state’s continued violence against women, racialized people, migrants, and the poor (FTV, 8). Instead of appealing to the state, Vergès exhorts feminists to develop a decolonial politics of protection that would “remai[n] autonomous . . . show solidarity with all liberation struggles, [and] nurture revolutionary friendship and love” (FTV, 101).In Abolition. Feminism. Now., Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie construct a “critical genealogy” of abolition-feminist activism that illustrates how this decolonial politics of protection might be enacted (AFN, 14). The first two sections, simply titled “Abolition” and “Feminism,” identify a range of primarily US-based historical antecedents for prison abolitionist and feminist thought. These include the founding of Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color against Violence in the late 1990s San Francisco Bay Area; the 1970s campaign to Free Joan Little; the 1960s anti-rape activism of Rosa Parks, Esther Cooper Jackson, and Anne Braden; anti-lynching movements in the 1850s; and African American Women in Defense of Ourselves’ protests in 1991 against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The authors argue that “abolitionist traditions have relied on feminist analysis and organizing from their inception and that the version of feminism we embrace is also not possible without an abolitionist imagination” (AFN, 13). The final section, “Now,” presents a series of “snapshots” of Chicago activism that showcase the “everyday practices, collective experiments driven by necessity, practice, and reflection, and in sinewy networks that crisscross time and space” (AFN, 33). Both texts situate sexual violence not only as a key issue for abolition-feminist activism but as a crucial subject for analysis of the state.Both AFN and FTV define sexual violence as a structural rather than an individual or interpersonal problem. Vergès calls sexual violence “a structural element of patriarchy and capitalism” (FTV, 8). Davis et al. argue that abolition feminism must address the “structural character of gender violence alongside its intersections with violences generated by racism and capitalism” (AFN, 91). Neither text offers a precise definition of structural sexual violence or indeed of structure. At times the authors appear to use the term structural interchangeably with systemic, as when, later in the same paragraph, Vergès characterizes patriarchy and capitalism as “the crucible of systemic violence against women” (FTV, 8).While AFN and FTV do not offer a rigorous definition of structure, their analysis of sexual violence within state institutions echoes public health theories of structural violence. Public health analyses of structural violence focus on the role of inequality in social hierarchies, political institutions, and economic systems that creates conditions that lead to violence or injury.4 Concepts like coercive violence highlight how individuals can weaponize systems to abuse their partners, such as by making reports to child protective services or immigration.5 Finally, theories of structural violence emphasize that structural violence “functions more or less independently of individual behaviors.”6AFN’s and FTV’s analyses of the sexual violence perpetrated by state agents—prison guards, police, soldiers, and border patrol agents—reflect these elements of structural theories of violence. Both texts attend to the way that sexual violence sometimes occurs within the official mandates of carceral institutions, as in the case of prison guards’ use of strip and cavity searches or rectal force-feeding techniques in interrogation. Even when sexual violence is technically extralegal or illegal, state agents perpetrate sexual violence with “complete impunity” (FTV, 15). In the case of police officer Daniel Holtzclaw—whom the Oklahoma City Police Department assisted in covering up the rapes of thirteen Black women7—Davis et al. demonstrate that state agents can perpetrate sexual violence without reprisal because of their institutional power.Vergès’s account of military torture is a similarly compelling example of how rape can be legitimated by institutions. Torture is by definition purposeful and deliberate—a tactic to punish, control, or extract information. In addition to analyzing torture as an individual violation, Vergès defines wartime rape as a “weapon of colonial war” (FTV, 14). Drawing on US Senate hearings and survivors’ testimony, Vergès identifies commonalities between multiple historical contexts—including the Central Intelligence Agency’s rape of Iraqi and Afghani detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as a “means of behavior control” and rape to foster familial humiliation in the Congolese civil war (FTV, 17–18). Rape functions as a tool of social control, owing to the exploitation and reinforcement of gender roles and the legal impunity afforded police officers, soldiers, and even UN peacekeeping forces.These instances of sexual violence perpetrated by military, police, and prison guards form the basis for AFN’s and FTV’s broader theories of sexual violence. For Vergès, sexual violence reflects the purpose of carceral institutions, stating that “we must stop turning to a system—one that claims to save us—that is organized to exclude, lock up, kill” (FTV, 84). The premise that these institutions cannot solve sexual violence because of their own perpetration of violence, however, does not offer insight into what Davis et al. describe as the “structural and institutional underpinnings” of sexual violence perpetrated by nonstate actors (AFN, 90). For these authors, what connects the violence of state agents and institutions to the broader abolition-feminist framework of sexual violence is the concept of the state-as-rapist.Rather than focus on individual perpetrators of sexual violence, the argument goes, abolition-feminists must “point the finger at those truly responsible for femicide and rape: the police and the State” (FTV, 2; emphasis mine). The opening lines of FTV illustrate Vergès’s understanding of the state-as-rapist. Quoting from the song “A Rapist in Your Path” by the Chilean feminist performance collective LASTESIS, Vergès argues, “The oppressive State is a macho rapist” (FTV, 2). While neither AFN nor FTV offers a clear definition of the state, both books use the term to refer to a super institution that connects all forms of sexual violence. Vergès characterizes the state as the institution that “condenses all forms of imperialist, patriarchal, and capitalist oppression and exploitation” (FTV, 3). Vergès’s description of the state as “consubstantial” with sexual violence and capitalism suggests that sexual violence, capitalism, and the state share a singular essence that, ostensibly, is responsible for the employment of sexual violence by states in service of capital (FTV, 104).However, Vergès’s own analysis of colonial slavery in Haiti and Martinique calls into question the usefulness of a concept like the “male, rapist State” to describe the functions of sexual violence in a capitalist system (FTV, 25). After the legal abolition of the slave trade in Martinique, the plantation class sexually exploited enslaved African women and men to increase their profits and resisted the state’s attempts to institute paid leave for pregnant women as an infringement of private property rights. To suggest that the state has a consistent function across all time and space neglects the historical specificity of legal regimes, racialization and gendering schema, and forced labor. In addition, Vergès’s account of British and French racialized immigration exclusion highlights distinctions between the two countries: distinctions that the transhistorical concept of a singular state falls well short of addressing.Like Vergès, Davis et al. understand sexual violence in state institutions as merely the most visible manifestation of the state’s sexually violent nature. Citing Monica Cosby’s Intimate Partner Violence and State Violence Power and Control Wheel, Davis et al. assert that “prison is quite literally a form of gender violence,” because “in both instances, harm results from the arbitrary use of authority, the abuse of power with impunity, [and] the absolute control of bodies, minds, and spirits of survivors” (AFN, 93). In other words, the violence of prisons and sexual violence are connected because of shared tactics of control. The concept of the state that AFN develops is also based on a perceived tactical similarity between the nature of abusive relationships and the nature of governance. Davis et al. argue: The pretext of ending gender violence allows the state to determine the nature of the problem, to decide on “reasonable” solutions, and to categorize people as either deserving to be free from injury or not. These are the same tactics that people who cause harm in intimate relationships use: arbitrary authority, attribution of blame to justify punishment, and expulsion of those who are objectionable, threatening, or obsolete. (AFN, 93; emphasis mine)Davis et al. suggest that the common tactics of abusive relationships can provide insight into the purpose or behavior of the state. However, the claim-by-analogy that interpersonal sexual violence is like prison violence does not substantiate the claim that interpersonal domestic or sexual violence is state violence, or that all interpersonal sexual violence originates with the state. The frameworks on which AFN bases its analysis of domestic violence reveal the limitations of this method of analyzing the actions of states or the purpose of governance. Cosby’s State Violence Power and Control Wheel is an adaptation of a ubiquitous model of domestic violence: the Power and Control Wheel (fig. 1).Also called the Duluth Model of domestic violence, the Power and Control Wheel was developed in 1984 as an educational tool to explain heterosexual men’s physical and sexual violence against their female partners. At the center of the wheel are the words power and control to represent the notion that domestic violence tactics—restricting a partner’s finances, destroying property, or threatening children—are deployed to “intentionally control or dominate” an intimate partner.8 Physical and sexual violence, in the Duluth Model, instill fear and exacerbate existing power differences between men and women. The Duluth Model does not suggest that domestic violence is structurally produced. Describing common behavioral tactics in abusive relationships does not explain the reasons that people may perpetrate domestic or sexual violence in the first place, which remain poorly understood.9 The framework’s numerous adaptations—for LGBTQ domestic violence and immigrant and refugee women, to name a few10—further suggest that the Duluth Model does not offer a comprehensive theory of interpersonal sexual violence, either.Central to the Duluth Model is the idea that abusive tactics are perpetrated intentionally—in other words, the model promotes an understanding of abuse that is at odds with the aforementioned definitions of structural violence. Vergès and Davis et al. similarly attribute interpersonal sexual violence to individual sadism. Vergès develops Sayak Valencia’s concept of gore capitalism—an extension of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics—to analyze femicide and intimate partner violence not committed by state agents. Without providing evidence for her claim, Vergès states that these forms of violence have intensified under neoliberalism because “violence gives meaning to an existence programmed for premature death; it allows people to exist for an ephemeral moment, having access to what has become proof of existence” (FTV, 19). Vergès’s description of neoliberalism as a period when “brute, cruel violence is a form of government, a regime of existence” suggests that neoliberalism creates or perhaps licenses a preexisting desire for sexual violence (FTV, 19). If interpersonal sexual violence is a meaning-making tool for working-class people to exercise to feel powerful in the face of economic and social dislocation, sexual violence appears to be a by-product of structures that produce said economic and social dislocation rather than itself a structuring force. Elsewhere Vergès’s reference to the causes of sexual violence as “greed, cupidity, and power” emphasizes the emotional states of perpetrators rather than any systems or structures that are responsible (FTV, 106). Davis et al. suggest that “police are trained to use force rather than to prevent or address root causes of violence, which is perhaps why police officers are more likely to engage in violent behavior with their partners than other groups” (AFN, 97–98). The implication that police officers are more likely to abuse their partners than other groups because of their training still does not identify the root causes that the authors say are in fact truly responsible for sexual violence. What, precisely, are these root causes?The question about the underlying causes of interpersonal sexual violence—be they structural or otherwise—is a significant one. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey suggests that nearly 80 percent of rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows personally: an acquaintance, friend, current or former romantic partner, or family member.11 This does not discount the widespread prevalence and institutional suppression of sexual violence within prisons, jails, and detention centers.12 But the premise of AFN and FTV is that a theory of structural sexual violence can explain sexual violence on a societal level, even outside these specific institutions. Instead, as I have argued, their own theorization affirms the of interpersonal sexual violence as the of While AFN and FTV argue for the to individual their analysis simply the rapist for the individual without the root causes of sexual violence, on what basis can a for political to address it be the authors, the state-as-rapist is to in popular of how sexual violence to be If the state is a as Vergès appealing to it for because it is the first that social (FTV, 2). The of AFN’s authors suggest that their is to US feminist political from criminal Davis and are founding of the Bay prison abolition Critical the the on Violence and the which the US violence on the criminal system in the and a founding of INCITE! and of the has the of on Black of sexual violence through her In Black and Richie characterizes violence for the Violence against Women as of the as having the but the Vergès, of political at of and the only the of US-based prison on her own Critical Resistance and Davis as For these abolition-feminists more to sexual violence is a of political organizing rather than individual service Davis et al. abolition-feminists against as a political organizing The authors argue that and analyses not by up or through forms of on and up can (AFN, 75). Davis et al. for their theory of from concept by on systems and than a that to in or their for abolition-feminist organizing is a series of and that can the we to (AFN, Vergès calls for abolition-feminists to “a politics and of and (FTV, While AFN and FTV sexual violence as a structural problem a political to address they from for the of that could about such a Davis et al. abolition-feminists to “the both of or a and of the carceral state, and the of a the and with and a shared (AFN, While AFN does not on what this or might the authors Critical to by the the concept of has up by Critical which its prison abolitionist organizing as that the power of an oppressive system the to solve the it the state’s violence may be through forms of However, the or tactics that AFN are not a political in and of activists must develop to such tactics the power of people to a of that sexual violence is in of it would a political that can on the same its the theory that AFN and FTV is a theory of social that does not does not claim offer a to social to and and and and more on as the form for social movements reflects what calls the of which defines as from capitalist and and autonomous from While AFN the system for social the model is itself a of to class analysis of the US of Black liberation movements highlights the to rather than simply that violence can be as an of as when Chilean feminists at the police, Vergès similarly of how an abolition-feminist politics might and the systems and institutions that sexual to the state as a rapist may be power and social structure through to an individual rapist or domestic the of an abolition-feminist political The state-as-rapist is the that cannot be or through any form of political While text can be to offer comprehensive Davis et that an abolition-feminist is at appears more as an exercise than a of (AFN, of political power and cannot be on the reflects that of is its of institutional power through as a series of interpersonal than the basis for political such a is itself the of an an autonomous framework to the social of of At a when other of the US are the question of and FTV offer the interpersonal as an to the to their Without a prison abolition risks to a to be to a mass be and to understand the nature of violence from a structural the Abolition. Feminism. Now. and Davis et al. conditions to be in to gender While to be to this structural theories of sexual violence analysis of capitalism as the of the social of rape and In her to State on titled against Women and the to Davis identifies rape as a political tactic by and like the and as from and of a social crisis that connects social or and existing power exhorts the to relationships with working-class women of in the the of this and as as as possible that even as individual are the of violence on to a and revolutionary in which form of oppression and violence against is The Abolition. Feminism. Now. and A Feminist Theory of Violence identify the that not only how to a political powerful to the system of exploitation in which we but also how to to and for their on an version of this

Christopher Alan Lewis, Adaner Usmani

Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States.2 Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.3 And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.4 It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor, Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.5The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong about much of what we argue here.In the first part of this essay, we outline five comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts and make the case for the First World Balance.In one sense, prisons and police are complements. It would be impossible to have many people in prison without the police, since, to put people in prison, the police usually have to apprehend and arrest them first. It would also be difficult to have police without prisons, since the threat of imprisonment is one of the typical sanctions wielded by police around the world. Given this, and given the exceptionally high incarceration rate in the United States, many people assume that the United States must also have an exceptionally high number of police officers.But that is not in fact the case. Figure 1 plots the police and incarceration rates of a sample of developed countries.6 The graph illustrates the chief fact that has animated the iterature on mass incarceration: America is a developed-world outlier in its use of incarceration. Yet it also illustrates the much less-well-known fact that America is not at all an outlier in its rate of policing. The United States has around 212 police officers for every 100,000 total residents, which ranks it in the forty-first percentile of today’s developed world.Yet this way of putting things in fact understates the magnitude of what has been misunderstood. Figure 1 denominates the scope of incarceration and policing by population. By that metric, the United States has an exceptionally high incarceration rate but a relatively normal number of police officers given the total size of its population. But we think it is more informative to denominate punishment and policing by the level of serious crime in a country. By doing so, it is possible to make inferences about cross-national differences in how countries manage serious crime.Here one runs into some difficulties. For several reasons, it is challenging to compare levels of serious crime across countries. Some countries criminalize acts that are perfectly legal in others. Countries define many criminal acts, such as “assault,” differently from one another.7 And countries vary widely in their ability to measure the incidence of criminal acts. The result is that many international patterns in reported data are obviously misleading. Data collected by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, for instance, suggest that the rate of violent crime is higher in Belgium, France, and Canada than in El Salvador, Russia, or Rwanda.8 Our solution to this problem is to measure the rate of serious crime by the rate of homicides.For the comparisons that anchor this piece—the United States to the developed world—this immediately raises a problem. Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins have argued that “[r]ates of crime are not greatly different in the United States from those in other developed nations. … [O]ur extremely high rates of lethal violence are a … a distinct social problem.”9 If America has more lethal violence than Europe, but not more crime, the relatively high homicide rate in the United States would be a biased estimate of the rate of serious crime.We have two kinds of reasons for thinking that this is wrong and that the homicide rate is the right (or best) measure. First, given the reliability issues that bedevil the police or victim survey data on which Zimring and Hawkins and others rely, this is an area in which one has to take some cues from theory and other data. Consider, then, the following trilemma.Concentrated disadvantage is the root cause of most serious crime in developed societies.America has significantly more concentrated disadvantage than European countries.America has the same amount of serious crime as other developed countries.One of these three statements must be false. Criminological theory and existing social science evidence strongly support (1).10 And we think there is good evidence to support (2).11 The main theoretical reason to believe (3) is that the United States has far more guns per capita than European countries. But while firearm availability no doubt has some impact on the level of violence, we think the is to be would be difficult to with other patterns across and Consider, for that while the United States has times as many guns as El Salvador, the homicide rate there is roughly times higher than it is And that in the United States are much more to a than Given this and given the reasons to believe and we think (3) is most to be the of this second not on the that homicide for a of the total by as of the crime rate to by the state, they are with a petty and one murder has much serious crime than a with a and one petty the crime rate would be the same in measure has to for the or of is difficult to measure how different kinds of crime are with but the a first estimate the social of different kinds of crime by people how much they would be to to their of being a victim of this and that the of a murder is around the of an than the of a around and the of around homicide is much than other it is much more that it for about of the total of This that it is a much estimate of the rate of serious than of the rate of Figure the same but this by homicide rather than by immediately level of incarceration relatively is a higher than the developed-world but not by is the fact that its if by the level of serious crime, America is not but rather America has about the number of police per than the developed of the of police has been that American police are inefficient. people argue that American Black been and they by this that the of American police are focus too much on petty and too on serious This is the of for on the fact that of a typical police is to violent it is that in comparative the police in the United States do not solve many serious rate is the of all as Figure The developed around one arrest per homicide that In the United States, the is this not to as because police in the United States are exceptionally on one measure of police the number of homicide per police The rate is the of police focus and the police The of policing in the United States that the problem with rate is that is but focus is In fact, as Figure the is is but focus is way of much of what we have far is to that the United States to the of punishment the of The high and the level of police per homicide suggest that the United States on long rather than the of arrest to One way to estimate and more is to the into the of to homicide and the of to Figure plots these two across the developed world. The result our the United States has relatively levels of but relatively high levels of of and to measure these two is that we can about how and are the United Figure also while all from an exceptional balance of and it is Black people in the United States are especially to police killed around people in In the rest of the developed the number of police is around per the is It that to the level of police violence, we must the of the Yet comparisons suggest the opposite Figure there is a and cross-national between the rate at which police and the number of police officers per with of police per homicide are countries in which police are much to as compared to countries with police per The countries of the developed world on the right of this graph levels of police while the countries of the world the The is the United be a is not that levels of cause the police to be more possible might the of high levels of police and homicide It is that the in the levels of police cause public demand for police is and our data are poor, is there are some theoretical reasons to believe that this is in fact violence police police make with a of those these the treatment of a of have a the American combination of police and is of the the of and the of the is but of can be the most way to with the in police to with rates of violence and are more to police officers are more to out of for their such as this since, such a there are for to take to and on and rather than to crime make the of policing more And this might in make with the police more these inferences are empirical research is to But we think the cross-national between police and the number of police officers per with the theoretical reasons to believe those might be as a It is not at all that the number of police officers on the would the of police violence and And it to that the to police argue that police officers be as rather than But the that and the be of United States is with much more serious crime than other It to this exceptionally high level of serious crime with an exceptional combination of relatively police and long this its in the way it most people. is to be comparative we have suggest an the United States, like the rest of the developed to policing and penal rather than incarceration and penal the United States to from incarceration to policing the balance between the two more like the balance in the rest of the developed world. 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possible to to the of a prison on the in the it is to be that the of arrest and would do more to crime than in the United States, a on policing is times more at crime than a on Our is that the First World would be a world of a more than (and crime more the to by mass incarceration would be its prison is extremely to the of It is difficult to put a number on this But one that a in prison is as good as a this a of two in the prison would be the of one of a of about The the rate if for a in prison of the of for a prison, rather than the the of the of policing. the one a world of more policing be a world of more on by our is that the First World would be a world of more the other for the reasons we we that a world of more policing would be one of police violence people killed by the have to some way to these against This is not but one to do the against the For the to be reason to against our on the of these to must the of the of crime and incarceration (and police We think this is on fact, the of arrest are than one of the of the First World in for instance, that the arrest is about as as three in do not this this the argumentative against our this in a is the of roughly This is not five of the of if we to at the rate given these would be the of about five than the we estimate would be by the in might that the and social of these would the of the in serious crime we think the First World would Yet those make this would have to reasons to think that these the and social of we have argued it to out the of one of these to the of the others. crime, and concentrated incarceration to all have the same kinds of from a we think that the First World is In What’s Wrong with Mass we the of our to a of alternative The that a different an about the of police on crime that is out of with the empirical argue that public not to it must also be to how the and of in and the criminal legal system in are Consider, for what the people more the these people of the (or is that people the those people of how to strike the balance between policing and how they to do be by the of crime, of police and and those all to be from the ranks of the are Black and are most to be of the kinds of the same people are most to be or killed by the And they are also those are at the of in these are not Figure Black people are more murder the and those for serious than they are in the ranks of those have been for petty or killed by the police in given In fact, Black people to be those been in their are far more in the incarcerated than they are those have been in their make of the but of the (and of the total support to the case for the First World The of the which the United States on long prison to more on Black people and the poor, and especially the Black poor, than do the to the First World would not to the with the penal system but also to the it would the number of of crime and those for serious offenses, and those killed by the police, it would also the from a more to the can the for the First World as people the those people of incarceration and homicide are more by the than the of arrest and police we the of incarceration and homicide more than the of arrest and police First World the of incarceration and homicide (and police while the of The the case for the First World what we have argued in this We have that the United States, developed especially on penal to the of penal This is in the fact that it has roughly three for every police while every other developed has about police officers for every The United States would have to the incarcerated by around people and half a more police officers to its officer in with the rest of the we called the First World first the First World on We that it would be a more way to use the of America to penal The and of incarceration would be homicide and other serious crime would and police violence might also The main of our would be the with a significantly number of But these in to the that a more of people than crime or incarceration. of police violence to be than the is but more than those are incarcerated or of a according to which we have reasons to on people the they this the case for the First World Balance.In What’s Wrong with Mass we a more normative case for the First World than we can in this We think that the First World is on a of But we do think that some of out our might without or some in police on the that violence or is different violence by of this would that no amount of violence the use of by the But a in would be to law and and to not public or a social this of is a kind of political And we doubt many are in fact to this of if there is no moral between that the and it to do to one one might think that the is than the as a of We think there are reasons to be of this between the and of But we defend a about these moral questions In What’s Wrong with Mass we that one would have to much more than to different In our this fact the same in the more that we in the we argued serious crime runs in it has number of on and in to the one like the think that the to be from violence or is more than the of or political of this to those on the especially in of the fact by international the United States the First World be a police Figure the in this United States would be roughly to the in today’s and in with the rest of the developed world. the in policing and the in there would be about police officers per homicide in the United This would be the in the developed world the this of from incarceration to one make the case that it would be relatively also that the First World the United States would be a of about three and roughly This would make it the in the developed the in this world would be about as Figure would be the countries. if the First World is one might it is and of the kind of normative and we have given that there are to the balance that and strike between the arms of law reasons that the United States has its penal But our is that the First World is more than the kinds of things that to demand In the America in which we at to a of with than to the is we assume it is to the United States to a in the of the social to use social to the root of crime are we have to be a social must the of those most to Yet an that the of those in this the of the and political readers not think of the First World as an alternative to social Justice and efficiency demand that and in the United States balance the of between the two arms of law enforcement differently from the way they do at would be if this more we think it is that more do what we have in this