Why America Still Hates LeBron: The Natural, Horatio Alger & the Myth of Hard Work

Why America Still Hates LeBron: The Natural, Horatio Alger, & the Myth of  Hard Work

by John “JD” Roberts | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

As the dust settles on LeBron James winning his first NBA Championship, many Americans still dislike LeBron.  It is not even a debate-worthy topic anymore because many public opinion polls have overwhelmingly supported the idea that the general public dislikes James.  But why the hate?  By all accounts, LeBron is charitable, helps kids, loves his mama, does not appear disrespectful to his fiancée, and does not get in trouble with the law.  As a reformed LeBron hater myself, my dislike of LeBron has made me reassess America’s approach to sports and my own.  No matter how many wedding photos LeBron poses in, babies he burps, or little old ladies he helps cross the street, Americans outside of South Beach on the whole seem to not accept LeBron as their NBA superstar.  However, it is not simply because of “The Decision,” or as one guest pundit on NPR recently proposed, LeBron’s inappreciativeness, which in and of itself is (probably) a misperception.  Instead, LeBron is a victim of his own identity, an extraordinarily gifted black athlete that America has perceived as not having worked hard to get where he has gotten in the NBA.

At St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, LeBron exploded onto the scene as a freshman, averaging 21 points a game.  As he progressed through high school, he improved his game and stats steadily as he grew into his eventual 6’8”, 250 pound frame.  Tracked by Five Star and playing in the AAU circuit, early on he was well known, establishing himself as an athletic talent able to dominate his competition.  While comparisons of any athlete to Michael Jordan are often unfair, there is one comparison here to LeBron that is quite illustrative.  Even (and I would argue especially) when Jordan was at the height of his playing career, dominating his competition on the way to six NBA Championships, announcers obsessively brought up Jordan’s struggles and hard work to make his high school basketball team.  The level of adversity he experienced and the hard work Jordan put in to make his high school varsity team hides the fact that he had a growth spurt between his sophomore and junior year and regularly ran roughshod on his junior varsity competition in his sophomore year.  That part of the narrative does not complement the overall goals of the media’s message to its audience, one which the average American audience always wants to hear: stars like Michael Jordan got to the pinnacle of their professions through hard work, adversity, perseverance and dedication. 

While LeBron James’s early personal life presented him with plenty of adversity off the court, his “athletic life” was never a problem.  He was on the radar of college and NBA scouts since junior high school.  Some people like LeBron James are naturally gifted athletes.  Some people like Michael Jordan are naturally gifted athletes, but also have the historical narrative on their side of hard work and adversity.  Some people are the underdogs, and those are truly the most beloved athletes in America, almost wallowing and basking in the accidental glory of their hard work and adversity.  Why is America so hard on the naturally talented athlete though?

Obviously, the American public can identify with an underdog and cannot readily identify with a superiorly gifted athlete.[1]  Additionally, the naturally gifted athlete has often been historically derided as surly, having a bad attitude toward their chosen sport, or taking their athletic blessing for granted.  LeBron’s media image should not be compared to the “bad boy” of yesterday he mimicked, Charles Barkley, in his own Nike Role Model Campaign, but mirrors the likes of say, Wilt Chamberlain or Jim Brown.  All three were/are naturally gifted athletes that excelled in their sports in a seemingly effortless fashion.  These gifted athletes were standoffish at times and made their respective games seem easy for them.  When players like this fail, their failure is celebrated, much like Wilt Chamberlain’s celebrated failures against the serious and studious Bill Russell, or LeBron failing against the more “elegant” game of Dirk Nowitzki.  “The Natural” fails in the face of the more studious, elegant, and supposedly hard working cerebral opponent.  Raw natural talent is not earned, but is a gift, and when it fails, it is equivalent to man defeating a machine.  The machine does not have to work hard to excel or “know” what to do.[2]  Therefore, when the machine (or in this case, the naturally gifted athlete) is defeated, the defeat is always celebrated as a defeat in favor of humanity (which is imperfect) over perceived perfection (machine, or in this case, the naturally gifted athlete). 

It does not matter that LeBron has dedicated himself to hone his skills through practice and hard work.  LeBron James could not excel in the NBA by only driving to the hoop for a dunk or a layup and bulldozing his opponents.  If that was LeBron’s only strategy, defensive schemes could be crafted by NBA tacticians to stop him.  He has had to craft a jumpshot, free throws, and moves in the lane through many years of practice, and he has conditioned his body through training and weightlifting.  His hard work is superseded by his body; an impossibly strong, agile and swift body that happens to be black.

If LeBron were white, he would be venerated as a freak of nature.  He would be an awesome dominant force that had inexplicably been born to dominate the NBA, and the NBA fans would love him for it.  It would not matter how much work he had put into his game, because he would be a white superman that dominated his opposition effortlessly.  His decision to take his talents to South Beach might be lauded as a shrewd decision in his search for a championship and better marketing opportunities.  Instead he (along with many other black athletes, particularly in the NBA and NFL) has been seen as an extraordinary talent in a long line of naturally gifted black athletes.  African Americans have attained the stereotypes in the second half of the 20^th century as (always) fast, (always) strong, and (always) able to jump high. 

These stereotypes on the surface seem favorable or benign, but they are not, because they make black Americans who cannot do these things less than the stereotypical “average,” and reduce blackness to physical attributes and athletic performance.  In this case, ideas of supposed black “natural gifts” are again deleterious and destructive, but in an opposite direction from the naturally gifted athlete, hemming black Americans into a box of athletic superiority, a role impossible to achieve for most.  Whiteness has been tied in sports to hard work and work ethic, while blackness has not.  Instead, blackness has been linked to natural ability, which is somehow (coincidentally?) inferior in the minds of American fans.

In many ways, LeBron’s life has mimicked Bernard Malamud’s book The Natural.  Roy Hobbs experiences a miraculous baseball season fifteen years after he was shot by Harriet Bird.  With his team the New York Knights, he performs superhuman feats on the baseball diamond after he takes over for the Knights’ former star Bump.  As Hobbs’s fame and profile grow, journalist Max Mercy seeks to discover what is really the story behind Roy Hobbs.  In the end of the book, corrupted by his desire for fame and wealth, and concerned about his own glory, Hobbs reneges on throwing the baseball game and tries to win, but strikes out anyway.  Throughout the book, Hobbs is infatuated by a beautiful woman named Memo who barely likes him over a woman named Iris who loves him dearly.  How does this book (notice the now famous Robert Redford movie adaptation is MUCH different than the book) compare to LeBron’s situation?  No matter how the public feels about the appropriateness of “The Decision,” LeBron spurned Cleveland to seek more fame and glory with another team (Memo vs Iris). 

In the 2011 NBA Finals against the Dallas Mavericks, he became so worried with the weight of failure that he disappeared in the 4^th quarter of those games and averaged well below his season average points per game (worried about his name and his own glory, Hobbs strikes out).  After The Decision, it is obvious that LeBron is consumed with how the American public sees him (Hobbs wants to be loved by Memo and she does not love him back).  His commercials for kids staying in school, the highlighted charity work (including The Decision money going to charity), the half-hearted Nike Role Model Campaign, and the impromptu posing with people in their wedding photos all smacks of a man who wants to be liked by a public that will not accept his overtures.  LeBron has been lauded all his life for his extraordinary natural talents, but he has recently come to the realization that despite those accolades, people seem to not like him.  Is it because of his talents he took to South Beach, or his personality?        

I would argue that the hard work and/or adversity narratives are what LeBron has lacked until recently.  The 2011 NBA Finals loss by LeBron and the Miami Heat provided the adversity needed for his 2012 NBA Finals win, leading to what I predict will be LeBron’s eventual “redemption” with the American public over time.  Americans require hard work and adversity to legitimate their love of superstar athletes, but where does this need originate?  

The need to overcome something through hard work and adversity is seemingly encoded in America’s DNA.  It does not matter how authentic the narrative really is for America’s historical trajectory.  From Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” to Hollywood, to the more formative influences of Horatio Alger’s youth books, America has hungered to believe that hard work, adversity, “rugged individualism,” and a little bit of luck have made America great.[3]  One could argue that Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick series has done as much harm as it has good to American political and social thought.  Alger’s late 19^th century books for young adults followed a set formula of young boys gaining wealth and status in society through hard work and overcoming adversity, rising out of their unfortunate circumstances, sometimes with the help of some good fortune or fortuitous coincidences (think pulling oneself up by the bootstraps).  While it demonstrates the infinite optimism of what can happen through hard work and determination in America, it also deludes some, often associates hard work primarily with those who have not, and negatively affects those who have not achieved success in their working lives. 

Does the coal miner work as hard as the successful entrepreneur?  The most important point in the case of LeBron though is the association of the have nots with hard work.  The consequence of this idea is questioning those naturally gifted individuals’ (intelligence, athleticism, appearance) work ethic.  If one’s work ethic is questioned, one’s status as “deserving it” is questioned.  America rejects those viewed as not “deserving it.”  Therefore, America up until this point has rejected LeBron James as their NBA superstar. 

Having come to the end of this article and realizing I might have written what could be perceived as Atlas Shrugged: The Athlete’s Edition, I would like to instead reiterate my main point, which are the fallacies America has created when it comes to pro sports.  Extraordinary athletes like LeBron James have been groomed early in their high school careers based on their natural abilities, and then are faulted for their status as venerated athletes when they eventually turn pro. 

The very system of sports, which has created an unfathomable amount of wealth for owners and athletes, is fed by the dollars of the average working stiff/fan, who believes NBA players like Brian Scalabrine work harder than LeBron James because one player is more like them than the other.  Narratives are constructed to demonstrate how each athlete deserves to be where they are, regardless of the truth behind that narrative or the narrative’s motivations.  These narratives are historically constructed by American circumstance, which includes a heavy dose of racism, classism, Social Darwinism, and Horatio Alger tales along the way.  The construction of these narratives often does not favor black athletes, and definitely does not favor a superiorly gifted black athlete like LeBron James. 

Players get built up by the media and the fans to be summarily torn down for not working hard enough, not having enough heart, or not having enough natural ability as they get older.  If I had anything to tell LeBron James, it would be to keep working hard, stay out of trouble, and let the haters (like myself, before I reformed) hate.  No matter what LeBron does, it will be the media and the American public that constructs his historical narrative for him.                                                  

              

***

John (J.D.) Roberts is a PhD student in the History Dept at UMass-Amherst. He focuses on drug trafficking history in Latin America, but has researched and written on a wide array of issues globally, particularly globalization and illegality.

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[1] Perhaps the 13 Colonies’ underdog status against Mother England in the American Revolution kickstarted America’s affinity to the underdog, even though we are now (and still) the world’s hegemon.

[2] The Legend of John Henry for instance would actually equate LeBron James to the steam powered hammer instead of John Henry.

[3] For FJT’s “Frontier Thesis,” see: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/

Saturday Edition | Keeping Up Appearances: The Myth of the “Inner City”

Saturday Edition

Keeping Up Appearances: The Myth of the “Inner City”

by John (J.D.) Roberts  | special to NewBlackMan

On a recent trip back from a Hampton Roads vacation, I saw a black family setting up a barbeque on their rural front lawn in Snow Hill, Maryland.  They seemed to have it all; a nice pleasant house, a green front lawn, an open porch, and a (seemingly) happy tight-knit family.  I had not really given this scene much thought until a few weeks after I had gotten home from this vacation.  I saw a few news stories discussing the plight of an “inner city” school somewhere in the U.S., which then made me question what the term “inner city” really meant.  The term “inner city” is a relic of American history, transformed/remixed to denote two things: dysfunction and a place where people of color live.  It is a loaded term, filled with bullsh*t, and we as thinking acting caring Americans should reject it every time we hear it. 

I chose the term bullsh*t purposefully here to illustrate a point.  In Harry G. Frankfurt’s philosophy text On Bullsh*t, the meaning of the word bullsh*t gets explored to its fullest extent.  When Frankfurt discusses bullsh*t’s relation to humbug, he uses a scenario of the orator discussing the Founding Fathers at a July 4^thcelebration.  In Frankfurt’s case study, the orator’s glowing prose about the Founding Fathers did not have basis in knowledge or factual accuracy, but rooted itself in what the orator wanted the crowd to think about him and his patriotism.[1]  The essence of the word “bullsh*t” boils down to using language and statements that “keep up appearances,” much like the term “inner city” does. 

The “inner city” allows the listener/reader to imagine whatever/wherever they like, no matter how loaded and nebulous the term actually is.  “Inner city” describes a place in seemingly precise geographic terms, but is also used to describe groups of people, certain aspects of culture, or activities as well.  It means everything and nothing; it allows the purveyor and audience’s perceptions of the word to be vague, but it is never used to describe one place: poor and working class white urban spaces.      

The “inner city’s” identity as “not white” is not the only concern.  Barring stories of miraculous salvation and escape, when was the last time a newspaper printed a positive story about the “inner city” (“Inner city Philadelphia: What a Great Place To Raise a Family”)?  They have not because there are supposedly no good stories coming out of the “inner city” without intervention from outside.  When was the last time a poor white urban space was called the “inner city” (Bostonians who are familiar with Charlestown can hopefully give me an amen here)?  The term “inner city” almost begs for a ridiculous Seinfeldian comedy routine asking something like, “Where does the inner city end and the outer city begin?” 

This line of thinking eventually leads to the second reason why the term “inner city” should be considered bullsh*t: the term is incredibly concerned with sincerity.  As Frankfurt states in his text, in our postmodern world, feigning sincerity has replaced the quest for correctness.[2]  Truth has been superseded by the intent or appearance of being sincere, polite, caring, and compassionate.  Therefore, the term “inner city,” a catch all term for the alleged dysfunction of people of color living in a decaying urban setting functions both as a weapon for those in a position of power and authority and as a prison of sincerity and compassion for those living in these urban areas deemed “inner city.”   Where do these ideas of urban spaces originate though?

White flight out of urban spaces after World War II is a well known phenomenon, (and I will not cover it too deeply here) but this flight is important to note as a product of older historical undercurrents and social thought.  Automobility and America’s Interstate Highway System allowed (primarily) white Americans to flee America’s cities to live in newly created suburbs with their families and drive to work in the increasingly abandoned cities.  The urge to flee these urban settings has always been a part of America’s history though.  Early in its history, New York City symbolized the filth, depravity, decay, crime and sickening conditions early cities generally had to offer. 

By the 1830s, New York City was a city that could not offer its citizens adequate water resources, sanitation, or health care, and did not believe it had a duty to as a city.  By the 1850s and 1860s, people such as Charles Loring Brace started promoting the health benefits of rural living, sometimes nefariously/forcibly moving children out of cities and into the country through his Children’s Aid Society.  These relocated children worked on the farms of rural (white) foster families in an effort to promote clean living, work, and a healthy lifestyle.  According to Brace and the majority of his contemporaries, the city was a corrupting element, particularly to children. 

Books such as Herbert Asbury’s retrospective book The Gangs of New York surveyed not only the crime-ridden streets of New York City in the 19^th century, but also the disgusting, unhealthy and putrid conditions people lived in.  Designers such as Frederick Law Olmsted not only designed Central Park, but planned suburbs as well to provide spaces for people to leave the unhealthy living of urban communities.  They hoped that trees, greenscapes and rural air would revive the spirit and lives of (white) Americans. 

Moving forward to the beginning of the post World War II flights out of cities by whites, authors like Mickey Spillane created characters such as Mike Hammer, a hard boiled private investigator that cleaned the urban streets of scum and vice with his Colt 45.  American culture has continually inculcated in its citizenry from the very beginning that urban living is unhealthy, unnatural and creates pathology.

So with this historical background in place, we now return to the term “inner city.”  People of color in America, particularly Black Americans, have become inextricably linked to the term, which also inherently links blackness in general to the so-called “inner city.”  Since the city has also traditionally symbolized dysfunction and unhealthy living, blackness, by its connection with the term “inner city” has become intertwined with dysfunction in America.    This subtle intertwining of racial identity with geography and living space can obviously be carried even further to examine the much used (often hated) term “ghetto,” which has and still could fill many tomes with its interrogation, investigation, and inquiry.  Additionally, by extension, terms like “urban radio” have replaced the term “black radio” that prevailed in the 1960s through the 1980s, further essentializing blackness with urbanity.    

This is not to say blackness or Latino identity are never connected to rural living, but often, those connections to rurality are also portrayed negatively, spelling rural poverty in the Deep South for Black Americans, or in the case of Latinos, agricultural work on the West Coast.  Media depictions of rural blackness in America often follow these tropes, rarely straying to depict a well-rounded rural blackness (Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins), or the impressive ranch holdings of some Latinos in the Western U.S. 

I am not saying that Black Americans should listen to Arrested Development and head down to Tennessee.  I am not saying people of color should eschew their urban environs.  What I am saying though is all Americans should recognize the power of terms like “inner city” because these terms are incredibly powerful forms of bullsh*t.  They essentialize groups of people.  They help create dominant narratives.  They influence economic, political, social and security decisions regarding groups of people.  At the “speed of stereotype,” groups of people are generalized, rationalized and have decisions made for them based on false assumptions derived from loaded words and terms.  These terms help institute phony social contracts based on feigned sincerity and false compassion, which then lulls people into a sense of cooperation and participation in their own oppression and subjugation.  This is why words matter. 

We must reject bullsh*t at every turn because it breeds complacency and subtly encourages cooperation with oppressive state agendas and the status quo.  I would argue there is no “inner city,” and we should allow no bullsh*t term to replace its role as a placeholder for geographically-oriented racism and oppression.  Furthermore, the rural black family I saw in Snow Hill, Maryland deserves to represent the rich complex tapestry of blackness just as much as the black family from Brooklyn, Houston, Atlanta, or Chicago does in the minds, media, and cultural representations of America.

***

           

John (J.D.) Roberts is a PhD student in the History Dept at UMass-Amherst. He focuses on drug trafficking history in Latin America, but has researched and written on a wide array of issues globally, particularly globalization and illegality.

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[1] Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullsh*t (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 17-19.

[2] Ibid., pg. 65.

Ain’t Nothing Gettin’ Corrected: Correctional Facilities, Lockup Raw and the Breivik Controversy

Ain’t Nothing Gettin’ Corrected:

Correctional Facilities, Lockup Raw and the Breivik Controversy

by John (J.D.) Roberts | special to NewBlackMan

Recently, I received an order on Amazon for a book. This purchase was for an inmate in a correctional institution and the purchase address was to the inmate, with his prison number after his name (proper protocol and required for inmates to receive incoming mail). Having experienced problems with this type of order in the past-I had a package rejected for “excessive tape” (apparently packaging tape can be used to make or fortify a shiv/shank)-I called the correctional facility to see what I had to do to successfully complete this transaction. The prison guard I spoke with on the phone, who was almost flippantly (or comically) candid, told me not to send the book because it would get rejected by the facility. My father, who is a minister, had a similar experience trying to send a Bible to a suicidal congregation member in prison. This experience made me think how sad it is that I (a seller on Amazon and a complete stranger to the prisoner) cannot send a book about the biology of bats to an incarcerated person. Despite thorough searches of all items sent via mail into prisons, these shipments would still be denied by the facilities for whatever reason.

America’s correctional facilities have been on my mind a lot lately. Following Anders Breivik’s recent homicidal rampage in Norway, many news agencies began to report on the “cushy” conditions Breivik would likely experience in prison in facilities such as Halden Fengsel, and compared them to the punishment doled out in American correctional facilities.[1]Many media outlets expressed outrage that Breivik could—but  incidentally will not—be released twenty one years from his conviction.[2]Norway takes great pains to humanize the incarceration experience, constructing correctional facilities that allow prisoners relative freedom of movement, contact with family on the outside, excellent amenities and facilities, accessibility to the outside via internet, stimulating work and recreational environments inside the facility walls, and personal privacy.

What are the results of this approach? Norway has a recidivism rate of approximately 20% two to three years from an inmate’s release, while the United States has a recidivism rate above 60%.[3]Yes, Norway has a smaller population than the United States. Yes, Norway has a lower crime rate, more restrictive gun laws and fewer problems with gangs compared to the United States (only in the past 20 years has Norway had problems with biker gangs such as the Hells Angels and the Outlaws). However, this does not discredit Norway’s successfully low recidivism rate among its former inmates. So, why do developed countries such as the United States espouse a failing strategy of imprisonment and punishment?

The beginnings of an answer to this question and the inspiration for this piece are found on a TV show called Lockup Raw shown late night on MSNBC. Since I often find myself staying up late with insomnia, I generally end up watching this show when late night TV options run out. The program travels around the United States, filming the ins and outs of living as inmates and working as correctional officers in American correctional facilities across the country. One especially telling scene from the show had a correctional officer in Boston’s Suffolk County Jail saying goodbye to an inmate, then asking the inmate when he would see him next and laughing about it. The correctional officer then expressed his belief that the former inmate would either violate his parole or commit a crime and be re-incarcerated in the same facility. This scene subtly captures one of the biggest problems with correctional facilities in America: nothing is being corrected or rehabilitated, and no one (guard or inmate) believes in that mission statement.

While Norway attempts to humanize their prisons and mainstream/rehabilitate inmates for their future success back in society, the United States clings to punishment theory for its so-called “correctional” facilities. Inmates must submit to all commands of the correctional officer, no matter how arbitrary or capricious (as long as the command is legal and not violating an inmate’s human rights, and even then, who knows). Officers shown on Lockup Raw often make bad situations worse by heightening the tension between themselves and inmates with seemingly unnecessary directives.

Corrections officers create, maintain and sustain a system of restriction, privation and subjugation to further punish their inmates (beyond their mere incarceration). Austere cells and facilities further aggravate the psyches of inmates who frequently come from dysfunctional families, impoverished socioeconomic backgrounds and quite often are mentally ill to varying extents.  Correctional facilities can even have water and electricity restrictions, forcing inmates to, for example, commingle toilet and sink bathroom water or restrict their reading. Correctional facilities are places of extreme danger for everyone involved, inmate and officer alike, due to the incarcerated persons, the restrictive punishment systems in place, and the continuous heightened state of alert in the facilities (due to both inmate AND officer behavior). Inmates are at no time treated as human equals by corrections officers, but are instead further confined inside correctional facilities in a parent/child relationship (I think back to the words my parents would say that made me the most angry as a kid: “because I said so”).

Nowhere is this situation clearer than the cell extraction. If an inmate refuses to comply with instruction while in his or her cell, or s/he is destroying their cell or creating a hazard to the prison while in their cell, this situation can lead to a cell extraction, where a team of trained correctional officers go into the cell, subdue the inmate, and extract the inmate. The process of cell extraction is highly formalized, with a clear coda of verbal instructions, precise videotaping of the incident for legal reasons, clothing and equipment to protect the officers during the cell extraction, and regimented teams following procedure to the letter during the extraction. What is incredibly striking and not discussed on Lockup Raw is the fact that this cell extraction is often a test of wills between officers and inmates. Perhaps half of the cell extractions displayed on Lockup Raw are truly due to such hazards as facility tampering, fecal/urine cell contamination, or violent/hostile behavior by the inmate. The other cell extractions involve inmates trying to “prove a point” or demonstrating an unwillingness to submit to officer commands.

Cell extractions are not only a power play between inmate and officer, but are also a gargantuan waste of resources, manpower, training, and equipment. Officers are frequently called in or off from other duties to participate in the cell extraction. Someone has to film the incident from beginning to end. The state or federal government has to pay for the equipment, clothing, and extensive training programs involved in training officers to properly extract inmates from their cells.[4]Instead of humanizing the prison experience, American correctional facilities dehumanize inmates, leading to situations like these where inmates act out in a futile “test of wills” against officers. By infantilizing inmates, correctional facilities encourage the exact type of inmate behavior they are supposed to be correcting: reliance on criminality and gang networks to solve problems, desperate acts based in impulsivity, inmate fatalism toward his or her life and the future, and an intransigence/unwillingness to work within a set of agreed upon rules and laws. None of this is corrected in correctional facilities. Instead, American corrections systems create angry individuals that pick up additional criminal tricks and affiliations within its walls, and develop a depressed despondency towards life and society.

Detailed indictments of the American correctional system have filled numerous academic volumes. Lately though, I have been pondering some points regarding the correctional system I have not seen or heard discussed. I have spent the initial part of this discussion covering what correctional facilities do to inmates, but what do they do to the officers? In psychology experiment conducted in 1971, Philip Zimbardo, a student of Stanley Milgram, (see the Milgram Obedience Experiment)[5]studied the effects a prison environment had on the mental state of guards and prisoners as a variable. In Zimbardo’s highly provocative and non-replicated study, (ethical concerns swiftly arose and the initial experiment itself was ended early) so-called “normal” people became “aggressive and abusive” in their roles as prison guards, while the inmates in the study became “passive and depressed.”[6]

In such a highly demanding job, what psychological counseling and training is offered to corrections officers to help them cope with the stresses of their job, as well as stay ethical, fair and level-headed in their conduct? How could corrections officers NOT become aggressive in such an environment, structured by its very nature to expect and elicit dangerous actions and create tense surroundings? How could corrections officers humanize the correctional facility experience at all without a complete overhaul of the system? Why do we still call them “correctional facilities?” Who is to say that the correctional system does not also dehumanize the officer?

Despite these concerns, corrections officer is an attractive job to many. In a landscape of high unemployment and a tough job market, the job of corrections officer is still a burgeoning one. From 2008 to 2018, the corrections system has a predicted growth rate of 9%. As of 2009, there were over a half-million corrections officers, bailiffs, wardens, supervisors, managers, and jailors working in American correctional facilities.[7]These statistics do not account for all the other jobs created by correctional facilities, such as maintenance, construction, food service and delivery, laundry, groundskeeping, surrounding businesses to accommodate visitors needing hotels, motels, and food, etc., many of which depend upon the amount of inmate labor used (or not used) by the facility.

These inmates and ex-inmates account for a surprisingly large portion of American society. As of 2009, 2.3 million people were either in jail or in prison. When including those individuals either on probation or parole, 2.3 million climbs to 7.2 million people.[8]In 2009, U.S. population estimates put total population at 305 million. So, essentially 2.4% of the total American population had some sort of correctional supervision governing their lives. This does not account for all those individuals who successfully made it through correctional supervision, yet still have a felony on their record. In an era of fewer unskilled/low-skill/blue collar/middle class white collar jobs in America and slow to no-growth job sectors, it should be no surprise that the American correctional system is run more like a warehouse system than a system that corrects criminal behavior.

Putting Foucault’s conceptualization of the state creating “docility” in inmates in his Discipline & Punish aside, I must build upon Angela Davis’s mental construction of the Prison-Industrial Complex to get an accurate picture of the American correctional system. Building on the foundations of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s historic farewell address warning of the dangers of a Military-Industrial Complex, (newsflash America: we are already there and have been there for awhile) Davis posited that the American penal system had become a big business just like military manufacturing and production. This accounts for corrections officers, facilities, etc, but it does not account for the failure of the correctional facilities themselves. Perhaps the rate of recidivism in America can be overlooked by the state, because the state needs bodies to fill these “big business” facilities.

Less obvious though is the amount of labor the corrections system removes from the free labor pool. Instead of correcting and normalizing inmates to go back into society as productive citizens, the state prefers to relegate these former denizens of correctional facilities to recidivism, joblessness, underemployment or holding menial jobs. By dehumanizing the correctional facility experience, the inmates’ recidivism rates are considered an acceptable side effect to the incarceration of American citizens. In a country with fewer and fewer jobs, taking these individuals out of the labor pool creates space for other taxpaying “regular” citizens while not “wasting” resources on correcting criminal behavior. Convicted criminals’ expendability creates space in the labor market, much like capitalism’s need to produce spaces to expand and grow infinitely and forever (think legitimate spaces as well as bubbles: the housing boom, the dotcom boom, the derivatives market, or the swampland boom before the Great Depression).[9]

The lack of correcting criminal behavior in correctional facilities creates these types of faux spaces. In this case, the deletion and delegitimization of theoretically productive workers from the American free labor market and their subsequent warehousing in the correctional system creates jobs to both supervise and aid in their warehousing AND creates labor space by taking these individuals out of the labor pool, sometimes indefinitely. Even if inmates beat the odds and do not repeat offend, their job prospects are often incredibly grim, particularly as a convicted felon in a hypercompetitive job market. This once again aids the weak American job market by creating one less viable job competitor.

While America can afford and might downright relish less viable job candidates, a country such as Norway, with 4.8 million people (as of 2009) cannot afford to warehouse thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of its citizens in correctional facilities. In a modern and robust Western economy, people are needed to run a functioning democratic society, particularly one as hi-tech oriented as Norway’s. Additionally, Norway cannot afford to warehouse thousands of its citizens monetarily. Therefore, Norway corrects the behavior of its wayward citizenry in its correctional facilities. Simply put, Norway cannot afford in any capacity to dehumanize and warehouse its citizens convicted of crimes, save for a select few like Anders Breivik. Meanwhile, the United States, reeling from a bad economy, credit crunches, and slow/no growth can afford to dehumanize their incarcerated population and allow 2.3% of the population to go “uncorrected,” including incarcerated persons wanting to read about the biology of bats.     

**Disclaimer: I appreciate the hard work corrections officers have to do on a daily basis. I am finding extreme fault with the system itself.**

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John (J.D.) Roberts is a PhD student in the History Dept at UMass-Amherst. He focuses on drug trafficking history in Latin America, but has researched and written on a wide array of issues globally, particularly globalization and illegality.

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[1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html#ixzz0n9t8l6FT

[2] Norwegian law has an incarceration term of 21 years, which can be extended/renewed for more years on a case-by-case basis. One of those cases will be Anders Breivik.

[3] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html#ixzz0n9t8l6FT; http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm

[4] http://www.doc.state.nc.us/osdt/in-service/Class_Cell_Extraction.htm

[5] http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm

[6] http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/stanford-prison-experiment.htm

[7] http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos156.htm

[8] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/corr2.cfm

[9] See David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)