Our penal system

As we discussed in this blog post, the very high incarceration rates for African-Americans is a uniquely American failure.

There are fundamental problems with the US penal system in general, which locks up and puts under parole hundreds of thousands of young men (and women), mostly for non-violent offenses. But the comparison of the incarceration rates of whites and African-Americans, which is shown again in the next figure, is particularly jarring. Almost 5 out of every 100 male African-Americans are in jail, a rate more than five times that of white Americans.

Of course, this might all be because African-Americans commit more crime. But history suggests that there is more to it.

A recent book by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness suggests that the treatment of African-Americans in our penal system is a continuation of Jim Crow politics of the South. She starts the book with the following story:

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, he is being denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises — the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

Alexander’s book is polemical and not heavy on the history or evidence. So if you are the skeptical type, you may not be convinced that there is something necessarily wrong with our prisons or that there is a systematic Jim Crow-like discrimination against African-Americans in our penal system.

But, David M. Oshinsky’s powerful (and disturbing) history of Mississippi prisons and convict leasing program during the Jim Crow era, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice should probably convince even the skeptics that there is something quite suspicious in the history of US penal system that appears, at least on the surface, to have shaped our present.

Oshinsky tells the story of Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state penitentiary, which came to symbolize almost all of the injustices and brutality of Jim Crow rule.

Emancipation of blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War did not bring equality in the US South. As we also discuss in Chapter 12 of Why Nations Fail, especially after Union troops were withdrawn from the South and Reconstruction ended, Southern elites were able to re-create institutions of essentially the same degree of extractiveness as the antebellum ones — albeit under a different guise. Gone was slavery, but in came the Black Code of Alabama and vagrancy laws ensuring that black workers could still be coerced and could not leave their employers. Blacks were emancipated, but Ku Klux Klan intimidation and literacy requirements meant to disenfranchise them made sure that they couldn’t vote after the end of Reconstruction. Blacks were equal on paper, but this was “separate but equal,” where their schools and hospitals were far from equal. And in every sphere of life, they were repressed and made subservient to whites — at least until the Civil Rights movement started to change it all.

In Mississippi, the antebellum system started being re-created even before Union troops left. An important element of this was the subjugation of blacks by mob violence and by the local sheriff and the justice system. Part of this was beatings and lynchings of blacks (some Northern Senators claimed that during this period, “two or three black men” were being lynched in Mississippi every day). But an equally sinister and perhaps even more consequential part was the prison system that developed starting in 1868.

The impetus came from a practical problem: now that blacks were no longer slaves and could not be directly disciplined and punished by their masters, how should they be kept under control? Locking them up — when mob violence and lynchings didn’t do the job — seemed like a natural idea, but this would cost the state a lot of money, especially at a time when resources were scarce and the prison system was both underdeveloped and severely gutted by the Civil War.

An innovative solution to this problem came from a businessman named Edmund Richardson who made a deal with state authorities in 1868 to lease convicts to use as cheap labor on his Yazoo Delta plantation. He promised to feed them and guard them. In return, the state paid him money, transported them to his plantation, and allowed him to use the convicts in whichever way he wanted — for all practical purposes totally unmonitored.

What started with Richardson grew into a huge industry. The demand for cheap labor to work in cotton plantations was high and so was the pent-up anger in Mississippi against blacks who were freed by Northerners. So convict leasing programs multiplied and local authorities obliged by locking up scores of young black men on totally minor or trumped-up charges to provide the labor necessary for the program.

This part of Oshinsky’s book makes truly harrowing reading: children locked up for “illegal gambling” or “being a tramp” or for the most minor instances of theft, or sometimes children locked up just because of the deep racial prejudices of the local authorities and the good people of Mississippi. In all cases, they headed to the plantations as convict labor either directly or via the local court system which imposed on them costs and fines that they could not pay (and thus they would be sent to the state penitentiary because of these unpaid debts). The system only became worse with the arrival of railway companies and other industries hungry for cheap labor.

Oshinsky describes, for example, the arrangement between the local sheriff and a turpentine operator in need of men in the words of a journalist (p. 71):

“Together they made up a list of some eighty negroes known to both as good husky fellows, capable of a fair day’s work.” The sheriff was promised five dollars plus expenses for each negro he “landed”. Within three weeks, he had arrested all eighty of them “on various petty charges — gambling, disorderly conduct, assault, and the like.”

From the get go, there was no room for confusion. The convict leasing program was designed for blacks, not for whites. Fittingly, the conditions for convict laborers were awful. Physical abuse, malnourishment and death from overwork were commonplace.

When convict leasing programs spread to other parts of the South, the outcomes were similar — even if few could match the brutality of the Mississippi system. In other parts of the South too, the convict leasing was associated with trumped-up charges against blacks, and inhumane work conditions. For example, the Greenville and Augusta Railroad Company started demanding convicts faster than South Carolina authorities could supply them, despite their efforts to lock up as many people as possible as potential convicts. Between 1877 and 1879, out of the 285 convicts working for the company, 128 died from gunshots, accidents and disease. And this huge death rate was not a surprise given their living conditions, described by the captain of the convict camp as (p. 60):

The English language does not possess words sufficiently strong to express the stench that rose from [this] place.

The situation was similar in other parts of the South. Many argued that 10 years was the “utmost length of a time that a convict can be expected to remain alive in a Georgia penitentiary”.

What the convict leasing program came to mean is well summarized by a list of quotations that Oshinsky provides at the beginning of the book:

The abuses of [our criminal justice] system have often been dwelt upon. It had the worst aspects of slavery without any of its redeeming features. The innocent, the guilty, and the depraved were herded together, children and adults, men and women, given into complete control of practically irresponsible men, whose sole object was to make the most money possible (Frank Sonborn, keynote address, in Ninth Atlanta Conference on Negro Crime, 1904).

And:

The convict’s condition [following the Civil War] was much worse than slavery. The life of a slave was valuable to his master, but there was no financial loss… if a convict died. (L. G. Shivers A History of the Mississippi Penitentiary, 1930).

In Mississippi, the system reached its end in one sense and its apogee in another with the opening of the Mississippi State penitentiary at Parchman Farm. Starting in 1894, there were restrictions on the leasing of convicts. Now instead, they would work as coerced laborers, under no better circumstances, at the cotton plantations of the state at Parchment Farm

Oshinsky describes this in the words of Hastings Hart:

I have visited Parchman repeatedly and I have found that their cotton was very profitable but that profit was secured by reducing the men to a condition of abject slavery.

And Parchman Farm is described in the 1919 Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the American Prison Association as:

The most profitable prison farming on record thus far in the State of Mississippi.

Brutality and exploitation at Parchman Farm continued well into the 1960s, and was only stopped by the Civil Rights movement. In 1970, a New York attorney, Roy Haber, started collecting information about abuses at Parchment Farm (which was not easy given the intimidation from the authorities against him and violence against inmates who cooperated with him). Finally he was able to compile a list of murders, rapes, beatings and tortures at Parchman Farm between 1969 and 71, which ran into 50 single spaced pages, and the snippets that Oshinsky recounts are truly disturbing (pp. 241-245).

Convict leasing and hard labor at Parchman plantation are gone. But with this history of a penal system designed to lock up and repress blacks, it is natural to wonder — or even hypothesize — that what we are seeing today is a nationwide continuation of both that system and its long-run consequences. After all, as journalist Ray Stannard Baker noted, the distinctive logic of the Jim Crow penal system required a particular type of justice (p. 63):

One thing impressed me especially… A [black man] brought in… was punished much more severely than a white man arrested for the same offense.

Against this background, Michelle Alexander’s claims about the origins of mass incarceration do not seem as incredulous, for example when she writes (p.225):

Mass incarceration as we know it would not exist today but for the racialization of crime in the media and political discourse. The War on Drugs was declared as part of a political ploy to capitalize on white racial resentment against African Americans…

Could this be the basis of the new Jim Crow? Could the incarceration of so many black men be a continuation under a different guise of the penal system that developed in the South after Reconstruction? Could this be, paraphrasing Robert Michels and our own use of his Iron Law of Oligarchy, “the Iron Law of Discrimination”?

American Lessons (for Europe)

Thomas J. Sargent’s Nobel Prize lecture, “United States Then, Europe Now,” draws an important parallel between the United States - the Articles of Confederation of 1781 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 - and Europe today. In both cases, polities were joined in a currency union under the tutelage of a weak central government, without the power to tax and conduct fiscal policy, and with all the free-rider problems that this creates. Sargent takes the reader through a tour of some basic dynamic general (macro-) equilibrium modeling, emphasizing the importance of the government’s budget constraint — even the government’s debt has to be paid and that determines the value of its bonds.

But the bottom line comes down to how the U.S. Constitution sorted out the quagmire by giving the central government the power to tax and transferring the debt obligations of states to the central government (i.e., “bailing out” the states). This arrangement was not only more stable (because it avoided the free-rider problems) but also enabled the U.S. government to establish a reputation as a credit-worthy borrower, thus reducing its future borrowing costs. Sargent also notes the importance of the federal government not bailing out the states once more when, after 1829, many states started running large government deficits, which they were not able to sustain — Sargent suggests that this decision led to fiscal discipline at the state level.

Sargent draws the conclusion that the current situation in Europe is also likely untenable in the same way that the United States was in an unstable arrangement before 1788.

Though there is much to agree with Sargent’s conclusions, one thing in his discussion is notable in its absence: political economy.

Was the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the U.S. Constitution just a process of better (albeit slow) understanding and learning by clever and well intentioned leaders? Sargent implies that the answer is yes.

But one could have developed a political economy perspective where this transition was shaped by its economic and political implications for different groups.

In fact, one such perspective was developed in 1913 by Charles A. Beard in his imminently original and seminal An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.

Beard started by dismissing explanations for the unique sequence of events leading to the U.S. Constitution based on some distinctive cultural characteristics of the American people. He also dismissed accounts that only emphasized the genius of the founding fathers. Instead, he wrote (p. 16):

class and group divisions based on property lie at the basis of modern government; and politics and constitutional law are inevitably a reflex of these contending interests.

So Beard argued that a defining set of factors leading to the U.S. Constitution were the political powerful groups who stood to benefit from it. Or in his words (p. 63):

Large and important groups of economic interests were adversely affected by the system of government under the Articles of Confederation, namely, those of public securities, shipping and manufacturing, money at interest; in short capital as opposed to land.

Importantly, Beard doesn’t deny that other factors were at play, or that the economic system that the U.S. Constitution created was more “efficient” — meaning that it created fewer instabilities. But the point is that this wasn’t the only or even perhaps the most important reason why the U.S. Constitution was adopted and ratified. It was ratified because those who stood to gain — the creditors, the manufacturers, the merchants and the politicians — were sufficiently powerful. (Some of the details of Beard’s account are hotly debated, see, for example, this paper, though the general political economy approach to constitutional design he advocated seems to have withstood the test of time).

The lessons for Europe are little more complex than a story like Sargent’s where institutional changes took place because they were finally understood to be more efficiency-enhancing. First, the coalitions in favor of a stronger fiscal union may be different today (for example, banks rather than capital owners in general may be the main beneficiaries of bailing out indebted countries). Second, the same economic interests may not be sufficiently politically powerful or may be facing a more determined opposition in Europe than in the United States 230 years ago. Third, the redistribution that a move towards a fiscal union will entail and the accompanying further bailouts of constituent polities may be more extensive and thus more difficult to pull off. Fourth, the institutional heterogeneity and the institutional weaknesses in some of the European countries such as Greece may be more dramatic today, making a fiscal union less attractive or less feasible.

One implication of all this is that what was a political equilibrium in the founding of the U.S. Constitution may not be a political equilibrium today in Europe, at least not in a form that includes all members of the European Union — even if such an arrangement would be efficiency-enhancing and growth-promoting.

This can be seen from the fact that what was a political equilibrium in the United States turned out not to be one in Latin America. After independence, Latin American countries also faced similar problems, including decisions on how to pay off the debts that had built up during their independence wars and how to build nations from smaller and sometimes competing polities. Some places like Argentina did manage to create a federal state, though Buenos Aires opted out for some time. Even in this case, as we point out in Chapter 13 of Why Nations Fail, they did it with a centralizing constitution that created many perverse incentives, shaping the future problems that Argentina would face. In other places, such as the putative Federal Republic of Central America, which lasted between 1823 and 1838, and Gran Colombia, which lasted only a decade between 1821 and 1831, no such agreement turned out to be stable.

So the sort of union that emerged in the U.S. Constitution and helped solve the free-rider problems and built government reputation in financial markets is not the only possible endpoint. Where Europe will end up will ultimately be determined not so much by what is the best arrangement for Europe as a whole but the political equilibrium between and within countries.

Religion and Hierarchy at Göbekli Tepe

Last week, we wrote about how what has become the conventional wisdom on the Neolithic Revolution, partly based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, may be underestimating the importance of institutional innovations underpinning transition to agriculture (see our previous two posts on geography and the Neolithic Revolution).

We discussed how the evidence from Göbekli Tepe is particularly telling.

A National Geographic article on Göbekli Tepe by Charles C. Mann, the author of the excellent 1491 and its even more engaging sequel, 1493, is definitely worth reading in this context.

Mann tells the story of German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, whose research on Göbekli Tepe challenged the established wisdom at the time and pinpointed the role of religion and religious hierarchy before the transition to agriculture. But it also tells the story of how the conventional wisdom on the Neolithic Revolution, which goes back to the Australian archaeologist Gordon Childe, has been changing.

Mann writes of the Neolithic Revolution:

The new research suggests that the “revolution” was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.

He also explains based on Schmidt’s work why Göbekli Tepe symbolizes the sort of religion and religious hierarchy that emerged before the transition to agriculture. He quotes from Schmidt:

“These people were foragers,” Schmidt says, people who gathered plants and hunted wild animals. “Our picture of foragers was always just small, mobile groups, a few dozen people. They cannot make big permanent structures, we thought, because they must move around to follow their resources. They can’t maintain a separate class of priests and craft workers, because they can’t carry around all the extra supplies to feed them. Then there is Göbekli Tepe, and they obviously did that.”

Mann continues:

Discovering that hunter-gatherer had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife.

He also explains why Göbekli Tepe reverses the conventional wisdom:

The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization…. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm — a fixed huddle of homes with hundreds of inhabitants — and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.

He sums it up again quoting from Schmidt:

“Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces. I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind.”

We would add that it’s probably a product of the human mind in a very specific sense: a product of human institutions.

How Marx Got it Wrong

In our last two blog posts (here and here) we discussed Jared Diamond’s thesis about world inequality and the Neolithic Revolution. In emphasizing the primacy of technology and its defining impact on institutions, Diamond is in fact following a great line of thinkers.

Perhaps the most famous version of the argument that technology shapes institutions is advanced by Karl Marx, who stated:

The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

Alas, Marx was largely wrong about feudalism. 

As the French historian of the feudal world Marc Bloch pointed out in his book Land and Work in Medieval Europe, milling by hand went back a long way. Nobody quite knows exactly when the handmill started being used, but it was certainly many centuries before feudalism. (We know that the first dated watermill was in 18 BC at Cabrira in an old palace of Kind Mithridates of Pontus, in modern Turkey).

Bloch writes on the handmill (page 143):

It was in fact the first machine whose use seemed capable of ameliorating the lives of countless numbers of human beings. The astonishing thing is that, having it at their disposal, they were so slow at bringing it into general use. 

The handmill did not cause feudalism, quite the contrary. Bloch noted (pages 152-153):

From the 10th century onwards, however, a profound change took place in the economic and legal framework of rural life. Using their power of command – which was called the `ban’ — and fortified by the right to deal out justice … the lords … succeeded in setting up certain monopolies very much to their own advantage, monopolies concerning the use of the baking oven, the wine press, the breeding boar or bull, the sale of wine and beer … monopolies in the supply of horses for treading of corn … and lastly … a monopoly over the mill… From this point onwards the lord’s mill was the only one where tenants of land on which it was erected were allowed to grind their corn.

With lords in charge of the watermills, they then systematically suppressed and broke up handmills.

So contrary to Marx’s claim, it wasn’t technology driving the political organization of society, but the political organization and institutions of society determining what technology could be used.

Sounds familiar?

In the last two blog posts [hyperlink to the previous two posts] we discussed Jared Diamond’s thesis about world inequality and the Neolithic Revolution. In emphasizing the primacy of technology and its defining impact on institutions, Diamond is in fact following a great line of thinkers.

Perhaps the most famous version of the argument that technology shapes institutions is advanced by Karl Marx, who stated:

The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

Alas, Marx was largely wrong about feudalism. 

As the French historian of the feudal world, Marc Bloch pointed out in his book Land and Work in Medieval Europe [hyperlink to Amazon], milling by hand went back a long way. Nobody quite knows exactly when the handmill started being used, but it was certainly many centuries before feudalism. (We know that the first dated watermill was in 18BC at Cabrira in an old palace of King Mithridates of Pontus, in modern Turkey).

Bloch writes on the handmill (page 143):

It was in fact the first machine whose use seemed capable of ameliorating the lives of countless numbers of human beings. The astonishing thing is that, having it at their disposal, they were so slow at bringing it into general use. For … although the invention of the watermill took place in ancient times, its real expansion did not come about until the Middle Ages.

Bloch attributes this to different things, one being the use of slaves. Nevertheless, hand horse driven mills were common throughout the centuries before feudalism.

In fact, the handmill did not cause feudalism, quite the contrary. Bloch noted (pages 152-153)

From the 10^th century onwards, however, a profound change took place in the economic and legal framework of rural life. Using their power of command – which was called the `ban’ — and fortified by the right to deal out justice … the lords … succeeded in setting up certain monopolies very much to their own advantage, monopolies concerning the use of the baking oven, the wine press, the breeding boar or bull, the sale of wine and beer … monopolies in the supply of horses for treading of corn … and lastly … a monopoly over the mill… From this point onwards the lord’s mill was the only one where tenants of land on which it was erected were allowed to grind their corn.

With lords in charge of the watermills, they then systematically suppressed and broke up handmills.

So contrary to Marx’s claim, it wasn’t technology driving the political organization of society, but the political organization and institutions of society determining what technology could be used.

Sounds familiar?

What Really Happened During the Neolithic Revolution?

In our last blog post, we examined the explanatory power of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel. A viable position is that while the argument in his book cannot explain modern inequality amongst nations, it can explain where the Neolithic Revolution took place and thus, at least in part, account for inter-continental inequality before 1500.

But we also saw that the distribution of domesticable plants and animals doesn’t show a distinct pattern singling out southeastern Turkey and the banks of River Jordan as the places where the Neolithic Revolution should have taken place.

This should not be surprising. Economic success is all about innovation and technology. But technology itself depends on institutions — and on institutional innovations.

The Neolithic Revolution was not only a set of technological innovations associated with farming and herding. It was also an institutional revolution — people became sedentary and social and political life changed.

Diamond’s argument, which has essentially become the conventional wisdom on this topic, is that the introduction of farming was a direct result of the greater benefits from farming in terms of greater domesticable crop and animal species, and this major technological change then caused institutional change.

Though popular, this argument is at odds with the archaeological evidence, which instead shows extensive social and institutional change prior to the transition to farming in the Middle East.

Consider the hill of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Soon after 9600 BCE people came and carved massive T-shaped pillars out of limestone, an example of which is shown in the next picture.

Many pillars were 8 feet high and weighed 7 tons and had been brought from as far as 100 meters away. They were sunk into circular structures cut into the hill, and many of the pillars were carved with wild animals, snakes, wild cattle, gazelles, wild boars.

Here is the important thing: There is no evidence of domesticated plants or animals in the area from this period. The site shows a level of social organization previously unknown before the Neolithic Revolution.

Another important site is Çatalhöyük also in Turkey, shown below.

Archaeological evidence suggests that this was a sedentary town of perhaps 500 people dependent on hunting and gathering. The town appears to have had a very rich religious and symbolic life. People were buried under houses, which embedded the skulls of bulls in their walls, and included clay figurines and wall paintings.

But this is the sort of stuff that is supposed to happen after the Neolithic Revolution, not before.

The archaeologist Bruce Smith in his book The Emergence of Agriculture describes the transition which took place in the Middle East in the following way (page 79):

their inhabitants had clearly shifted to permanent year-round settlements as early as 12,500 years ago and invested considerable labor in constructing houses and storage facilities.

When people established sedentary settlements, their concepts of who owned resources likely became more restrictive as they strengthened their claim on the surrounding countryside, which they viewed more and more as being for their exclusive use. By 12,5000 BP, then, hunting and gathering societies began to adopt a way of life that set the logistic, economic, and organizational groundwork for the emergence of village farming communities…many of the basic elements of social organization essential to village life were already in place before the first experiments with cultivation…

In other words, the existing evidence, in contrast to what is presumed in Diamond’s argument and the conventional wisdom, is that institutional innovation did not follow transition to agriculture, but preceded it. In fact, it was this institutional innovation which allowed the technological changes at the heart of the Neolithic Revolution.

So most likely, the Neolithic Revolution is also not about geography but all about institutions.

James A. Robinson (Harva