Race Proportions in American Prisons
This was a paper I wrote about a year and a half ago. I have more recently cut out all of the discussion on Athens and turned it into its own piece on economic history. I plan to return to the topic of contemporary race disparity soon.
Abstract:
Minority races make up majority populations of prison inmates compared to their general proportions in the American public. The predominate theories of crime fail at offering a cogent explanation of these conditions. In such a failing they seem to be less of an explanation and more of a product of the gut political reactions such empirics evoke. Traditional crime theories take a constructivist approach, finding a single planned phenomenon to explain these aggregative results. This paper presents a brief summary of the major proposed explanations, and offers refutation by presenting a bottom up approach of emergent theorizing to explain disproportionate race populations in America’s prisons. The notion of isonomia or equality before the law is presented as an ideal of justice, as it has been since the times of ancient Athens. By combining the emergent process of security provision with the role of isonomia, this paper hopes to redirect the typical explanations of crime away from interventionist policy suggestions and towards more spontaneous free market solutions. Isonomia is concluded not to be determined from conditions resultant from emergent processes but a characteristic of the processes themselves. The current American justice system is exposed as lacking isonomia for such structural reasons of authority being held hierarchically rather than networked thus lacking competitive mechanisms.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
