remains a mystery how the country that wants the champion of freedom in the world has changed in society over the prison planet. In the early 70s the United States had a percentage of prisoners than the entire population, comparable to that of Western Europe, but today there is practiced the largest ever recorded in internment a parliamentary democracy. In 2004 about one hundred thousand people there were seven hundred and sixty prisoners, against the forty-Japan, eighty of France, Italy ninety-four. In the U.S., that is, there are sixteen times more prisoners than in Japan and eight times more than in Italy. Only the post-Cold War Russia has comparable numbers: seven hundred and thirty prisoners every hundred thousand inhabitants. If you add to them who is on parole for good behavior or, in the U.S. monitored the total exceeded 4.3 million people in 1990 and seven million in 2004. That is, at any time in the United States more than three hundred adults are caught in the net of justice.
not surprising that the subject arouses the curiosity of journalists and researchers. Almost always prevails a sociological look like in the book by a disciple of Pierre Bourdieu, Loïc Wacquant (Punishing the poor). This contrasts with the perspective of Elizabeth the Great who, while reviewing all aspects of American carcerizzazione, look at the phenomenon from an angle less traveled and asks what are the mechanisms for investigation, litigation and legal proceedings that have sent so many people behind the bars. The title of his book The third strike. The prison in America (with a note of Adriano Sofri; Sellerio, pp. 168, € 15) points out that provision, approved by an overwhelming majority for the first referendum in California and then in other states, so that the third sentence, even for minor offenses, automatically results in life sentence: three strikes and you are out. At the third "hit" they close the cell and 'throw away the key. "
Elizabeth Large reports horrific cases: for example, a man sentenced to life imprisonment (with the proviso that can not get out on parole after serving fifty years before) for stealing nine videotapes worth from one hundred and fifty dollars, just because he had previous theft and transportation of marijuana, or another recidivist punished with life imprisonment for stealing a piece of meat valued at $ 5 and 62 cents (4.19 euro) plus that was used to feed the handicapped brother and mother Both hungry because the board of the latter was lost in the mail.
What has been lost on the street is the idea that punishment should be proportionate to the seriousness of the offense. In this regard, the book uses a legal term often evocative: it speaks of bagatellari crimes, follies of life imprisonment. It is distraught that the very notion of judicial punishment and is not even the hypocrisy of bourgeois penalty as a means of orthopedic, through the redemption that punish that Michel Foucault has dissected in a masterly way. If they could, the judges would like their U.S. colleagues of the colonial powers of yesteryear, will ship held in Cayenne or Siberia.
Elisabetta Grande follows the meanders court the accumulation of small devices that combined crowd the prisons. Two examples. One is based on the idea that the truth of the case should be decided by battle between defense and prosecution during the trial. But good lawyers because they charge by the three hundred thousand dollars for each hour of work, deprived the defendants can receive only a defense motion that is performed by inexperienced lawyers or in decline, overwhelmed by a huge amount of work and paid a poverty: "In Georgia, in 2002, three lawyers from the same family are represented in court for 776 poor people accused in an average cost of $ 49.86 (€ 37.21) ... Also in Georgia, a lawyer appointed to defend the court found 94 defendants in the same day. " The weakness of the defense motion makes it easier for prosecutors to condemn the poor, and then fill out the list of winners of their convictions, necessary to launch his political career. For the same reason, defenders tend to abuse the office of plea bargaining, plea bargain before trial, with admission of guilt in case of innocence: a better reduction of sentences that the lottery process. Hence the increase in the number of repeat offenders, and then of those who fall into the nightmare of the third strike. The number of prisoners becomes an independent variable that has nothing to do with the number and seriousness of the crimes actually committed, but rather is related to the rate of anxiety "Securitarian" that the media and politicians are able to instill in the public opinion.
The "great internment" American (to borrow another key term in Foucault) as follows by a perverse mix between the media system and representative democracy, and the specificity of the racist connotation of all U.S. detention.
The fact and law and order is first of all white law to bring order among blacks that although only 12.5 percent (one out of eight) of the population but account for almost half (one in two) of American prisoners, so that the detention is an almost inevitable rite of passage for a young black man raised in an urban ghetto. The effects on American society are outlandish and inconceivable: for example, this rate of imprisonment has reintroduced polygamy in urban ghettos, because black women have to share the few males out of the bars.
What an excellent book by Elizabeth Large can not do is predict the long-term incarceration as a huge produce the fabric of American society. Of course it is a strange society in which the correction (as they call themselves the companies involved) is one of the leading sectors of the economy: the judicial system employs 2.3 million people in 2001 and fight crime has cost the U.S. one hundred sixty-seven billion dollars, three times and a half times more than nineteen years earlier. Elisabetta Grande notes worried that other countries (especially those of the Commonwealth) are following the U.S. on the same street. I do not know if postmodern theorists had in mind also that involution concentration camp.
PS. Publishers and editors should Adriano Sofri to defend himself, even when it exposes the thesis, it shall then make a surplus of hatred that does a disservice to his intelligence. Here in the initial note rightly argues that the law ex-Cirielli shows that Italy is being Americanized. But why to say it must do before a shot sull'antiamericanismo any discourse on prisons and then joined the U.S. anti-Semitism? Maybe that analyze the rise of Silvio Berlusconi is a symptom of anti-Italian? Here too we observe a perverse effect: the legal persecution suffered by Sofri and supported by the right, has paradoxically led to a hatred towards the left, perhaps it should take longer to brake.
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