Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society

by John Irwin, Jonathan Simon (Foreword)

Combining extensive interviews with his own experience as an inmate, John Irwin constructs a powerful and graphic description of the big-city jail. Unlike prisons, which incarcerate convicted felons, jails primarily confine arrested persons not yet charged or convicted of any serious crime. Irwin argues that rather than controlling the disreputable, jail disorients and degrades these people, indoctrinating new recruits to the rabble class. In a forceful conclusion, Irwin addresses the issue of jail reform and the matter of social control demanded by society. Reissued more than twenty years after its initial publication with a new foreword by Jonathon Simon, The Jail remains an extraordinary account of the role jails play in America’s crisis of mass incarceration.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[Max Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long before Michelle Alexander wrote her critical and groundbreaking analysis of mass incarceration in The New Jim Crow, Irwin wrote about jail and the people it houses and fails. He is one of the few "jail scholars" in the field of mass incarceration, and deserves much-needed attention.

Irwin's central claim is this: jail is the spatial solution and a political choice to warehouse (or "manage") America's underclass, who he refers to as "The Rabble." Irwin describes the crimes that "The Rabble" commit, crimes that are petty on paper but are visible and disruptive, exacerbating the middle class' desires to sweep such problems away into jail.

But Irwin also discusses what happens in jail, and how it destabilizes people's lives, and reinforces criminal behavior. In short, jails are effective at two things: disappearing people and increasing crime.

Perhaps the most poignant observation Irwin makes is that the choice to jail America's underclass is just that, a choice. As Irwin states "the public does not want the rabble confiend in a hotel; it wants them to suffer in jail." This desire to punish others, especially those who consciously or unconsciously reject conventional bourgeois society, is as American as apple pie. But rather than simply air the problems out and leaving the reader to wallow in despair, Irwin offers manageable solutions: focus on "serious crimes" like wage theft and businesses who pollute our air and water, establish "informal extralegal systems for controlling repulsive public deviance," and consciously unlearn what materialism and individualism have done to warp our perspectives.

[Corey Colyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a truly excellent piece of grounded sociological theory. Irwin's analysis situates the jail in its cultural and political moment. The jail (described by Hans Mattick as the "asshole of the justice system") exists for Rabble. People... that is, people who vote... middle class people, want to see the Rabble kept miserable (all for reasons that Irwin makes understandable).

I'll be assigning this book to my Punishment and Social Control class next term.

[Eileen Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

not badddd

[Kevin Karpiak · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually hate these kinds of remarks, but I'll do it anyway: how someone could write a social scientific book, in 1992, on prisons (well, jails, actually) without passing through Discipline and Punish is beyond me