The Jail. John Irwin
2 shows who goes to jail and what they go there for. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 describe in detail what actually happens to people who are arrested and jailed and explores some of the frequent personal and social consequences of that experience. In Chapter 7, I discuss in broad sociological terms the problems related to reforming the jail.
Acknowledgments
Several persons attached to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department made it possible for me to study the San Francisco jails. Former Sheriff Richard Hongisto had created prisoner services, through which I was admitted into the jail. Guy Crouch, who was the director of prisoner services when I began my research, actually accepted me into prisoner services, which gained my clearance at the jail. Many other prisoner services staff—particularly Lou Valla, Ron Perez, Ann Walls, Mike Marcum, Andrea Elukovich, David Hoerl, Johnnie Drennon, Willy Gray, and Richard Baxter—assisted me in my work. Michael Hennessey was elected sheriff in the middle of the study and gave me full cooperation. Several people in the San Francisco OR project and the public defender’s office, particularly Ken Babb, Wendy Mengel, Peter Keane, Maria Zamora, and Mogel Christanson, also helped me considerably.
Nancy Strachan assisted me with some of the research and the analysis of data. Louise Doyle also assisted in this phase of the research.
In the spring of 1981 I received a grant from the National Institute of Corrections (NIC), which allowed me to complete the second half of a year’s leave from teaching, during which I began writing this book. I must thank Allen Breed, who was the director of NIC at that time and made this grant possible. Also, Bruce Bounds at NIC’s Jail Center was helpful during the period of the grant and especially during a visit I made to the center. Paul Katsampes and Mark Pogerebin, also at the center, read chapters, made suggestions, and arranged two forums at which I presented ideas from my work.
During 1983 I was attached to a study of the jail conducted by the National Council of Crime and Delinquency funded by the National Institute of Justice. James Austin and Pat Jackson, who conducted that study, provided me access to the Los Angeles and Yolo County jails, supplied me with data, and reviewed drafts of my study.
I experienced many difficulties in organizing and writing this book and am indebted to a very large number of people who assisted me along the way. My wife, Marsha Rosenbaum, read each draft and made thoughtful comments. Sheldon Messinger, Troy Duster, David Wellman, Barbara Owen, James Austin, and D. Alan Henry read whole or parts of drafts and made constructive comments. David Matza, David Minkus, and Hardy Frey discussed the study with me and made valuable suggestions. Carol Warren and Howard Becker read it more than once and assisted me tremendously. The comments of U.C. Press’s anonymous reviewers were very helpful; one person in particular gave the manuscript three thorough readings.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the in-depth contribution of Gene Tanke, who edited the final draft and is largely responsible for its readability.
1
Managing Rabble
IN A LEGAL SENSE, the jail is the point of entry into the criminal justice system. It is the place where arrested persons are booked and where they are held for their court appearances if they cannot arrange bail. It is also the city or county detention facility for persons serving misdemeanor sentences, which in most states cannot exceed one year. The prison, on the other hand, is a state or federal institution that holds persons serving felony sentences, which generally run to more than one year.
The public impression is that the jail holds a collection of dangerous criminals. But familiarity and close inspection reveal that the jail holds only a very few persons who fit the popular conception of a criminal—a predator who seriously threatens the lives and property of ordinary citizens. In fact, the great majority of the persons arrested and held in jail belong to a different social category. Some students of the jail have politely referred to them as the poor: “American jails operate primarily as catchall asylums for poor people.”1 Some have added other correlates of poverty: “With few exceptions, the prisoners are poor, undereducated, unemployed, and they belong to minority groups.”2 Some use more imaginative and sociologically suggestive labels, such as “social refuse” or “social junk.”3 Political radicals sometimes use “lumpen proletariat” and argue over whether its members are capable of participating in the class struggle.4 Some citizens refer to persons in this category as “street people,” implying an excessive and improper public presence. Others apply such labels as “riffraff,” “social trash,” or “dregs,” which suggest lack of social worth and moral depravity. And many police officers, deputies, and other persons who are familiar with the jail population use more crudely derogatory labels, such as “assholes” and “dirt balls.”
In my own research, I found that beyond poverty and its correlates—undereducation, unemployment, and minority status—jail prisoners share two essential characteristics: detachment and disrepute. They are detached because they are not well integrated into conventional society, they are not members of conventional social organizations, they have few ties to conventional social networks, and they are carriers of unconventional values and beliefs. They are disreputable because they are perceived as irksome, offensive, threatening, capable of arousal, even protorevolutionary. In this book I shall refer to them as the rabble, meaning the “disorganized” and “disorderly,” the “lowest class of people.”5
I found that it is these two features—detachment and disrepute—that lead the police to watch and arrest the rabble so frequently, regardless of whether or not they are engaged in crime, or at least in serious crime. (Most of the rabble commit petty crimes, such as drinking on the street, and are usually vulnerable to arrest.)
These findings suggest that the basic purpose of the jail differs radically from the purpose ascribed to it by government officials and academicians. It is this: the jail was invented, and continues to be operated, in order to manage society’s rabble. Society’s impulse to manage the rabble has many sources, but the subjectively perceived “offensiveness” of the rabble is at least as important as any real threat it poses to society.
The contemporary jail is a subsidiary to the welfare organizations that are intended to “regulate the poor.” Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have pointed out that when masses of occupationally dislocated people pose a threat, society applies social control devices, such as relief programs:
When large numbers of people are suddenly barred from their traditional occupations, the entire structure of social control is weakened and may even collapse. There is no harvest or paycheck to enforce work and the sentiments that uphold work; without work, people cannot conform to familial and communal roles; and if the dislocation is widespread, the legitimacy of the social order itself may come to be questioned. The result is usually civil disorder—crime, mass protests, riots—a disorder that may even threaten to overturn existing social and economic arrangements. It is then that relief programs are initiated or expanded.6
However, from among the poor there will also emerge a rabble who are perceived as a more serious and constant threat to the social order, a group in need of the more direct forms of social control delivered by the criminal justice system. Usually the more violent and rapacious rabble are arrested, convicted, and sent to prison; the merely offensive are held in jail. The jail was devised as, and continues to be, the special social device for controlling offensive rabble. To demonstrate this proposition, I will review briefly the history of the jail in England and its later development in America.
Historical Development of the English Jail
All ancient cities used some method of detaining persons in order to impose punishment. According to Hans Mattick: “Unscalable pits, dungeons, suspended cages, and sturdy trees to which prisoners were chained pending trial are some of the predecessors of the jail.”7 As early as the ninth century in England, Alfred the Great’s laws mentioned imprisonment: “If he, however, pledge what is right for him to fulfill, and belie that, let him give with lowly mindedness his weapon and his goods to his friends to hold, and be forty nights in prison in a king’s town, and suffer there as the Bishop assigns him; and let his kinsmen feed him if he himself have no meat.”8 Probably the persons sentenced were held in castles or