Health and Safety

Here in England, ‘health and safety’ is a catch-phrase–it encapsulates the fears, anxieties, and preoccupations of organizations, public and private, about consumers without actually really caring about them. The analogous phenomenon in America is the preoccupation with litigation–I remember being told when I signed up for renter’s insurance in California that I should be concerned about a drunken friend leaving my party and slipping on the sidewalk in front of my house. I shouldn’t really be concerned about my friend; I should be concerned about what my friend could do to me.

I’m interested in the way that the language about ‘health and safety’ — and the attendant concerns about protecting organizational assets–may enter juvenile institutions. I read an article yesterday about a New Jersey case in which the mother of a young man who committed suicide in a Union County jail was given $780,000 by the county and several private corporations that worked within the juvenile correctional system in a wrongful death claim. Her son committed suicide by tying a sheet to an exposed and broken fire sprinkler. This line from the article struck me: “Settlements also were brokered with Trinitas Hospital and Correctional Health Services Inc. which treated Sinclair, and Siemens Building Technology Inc. and Firemasters, companies involved in the installation of the fire sprinkler head.” Here is the ‘health and safety’ phenomenon operating in its fullest sense (and also the trend of the privatization of services within institutions, which I spoke about in my previous post). Though I certainly don’t blame the young man’s mother for pursuing a wrongful death claim, it is shocking to me that the focus of the claim would (have to) be directed at the ‘building technologies’ — as if the availability of the broken fire sprinkler caused his death! What this logic precludes, even by including the county as a respondent in the wrongful death claim, is that the design and management of the juvenile institution itself can be improved in order to prevent suicide, rather than broader systemic questions being tackled.

Barry Goldson, a criminologist from the University of Liverpool, writes: “The primary logic of “safer custody” reform implies that corrosive penal regimes can be “humanized”; the conditions that give rise to damage, harm, and even death can be “designed out.” But the system is, in effect, at war with itself and penal reform can never “succeed” within an overarching context of rampant punitiveness” (‘Fatal Injustice: Rampant Punitiveness, Child Prisoner Deaths, and Institutionalized Denial—A Case for Comprehensive Independent Inquiry in England and Wales’ Social Justice, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2006)). Not only does the criminalization of young people inevitably create harms to them and their families, there is also an extent to which the experience of institutions themselves is traumatic. Lawsuits become the only way for families to cope with that trauma, because there is no systemic way for them to address–or prevent–the pains of imprisonment and institutionalization within a culture of the criminalization of young people.

Does the market drive youth punishment?

Yesterday I was reading an article about the organizational structure of the school because I am interested in some of the similarities between the school and the juvenile justice system as bureaucratic structures keen on the order and control of young people. The article suggested that schools are autonomous from the pressures of the market, and I wrote in the margin: is the juvenile justice system autonomous from these same pressures? My initial answer was no: unlike adult corrections, I don’t think that juvenile corrections systems have been fully privatized (though I may be wrong); the systems’ growth seems to be driven more by public fear than by the economic bottom line, and though I think that there is a relationship between class oppression and incarceration rates, I can’t think of a clear link between the market and the functioning of the juvenile justice system.

I was proven wrong today when I read an article in the New York Times called Law on Young Offenders Causes Rhode Island Furor. This article is about the State’s decision to transfer all seventeen year olds to the adult criminal justice system in order to save money! The State Department of Children and Families said that it cost $98,000 a year to incarcerate a juvenile offender as opposed to $39,000 for inmates in the adult system. This simple equation of cost-effectiveness reduces the young lives trapped in these systems to a matter of a bottom line, and ignores all of the collateral consequences of incarcerating young people in the adult system. I’m really outraged by this example of treating young people as financial commodities that can be ‘traded’ up or down a system and understood in such a discrete manner.

This article has perhaps made me re-think my belief that the juvenile justice system is relatively autonomous from the market, not just in this obvious sense, but in a deeper, more insidious sense. Perhaps more of our juvenile justice policies are driven by this bottom line than we think they are. Things to consider: ‘minor’ offenders who aren’t yet considered adults under the eyes of the law for employment purposes are in a sense wasted producers–they cannot stamp license plates or do any of the other kind of meaningless but revenue-generating activities that are present in American prisons. Young people in general — particularly I think young people from our urban centers — drive much of the consumer goods market that aids the economy. To a certain extent, young people who sell drugs on city streets are helpful to the economy in the sense that their ability to thrive in the underground economy helps the licit economy stay afloat. Perhaps there is more of a push and pull of punishment than we think–how do we understand the paradox of states’ concerns about the costs of incarceration yet their persistent and consistent reliance on mass incarceration? Perhaps these things are more related to the push and pull of the markets than we think.