When liberal values and safety fears collide

The New Yorker is a notably liberal magazine, for decades a cultural influence in America. As its publisher recently remarked, the magazine is “for people who are switched on. It’s for people who are culturally aware, who go out to live music, the theater and films, and read voraciously. It is a publication for people who are educated, who congregate in urban centers, and who are citizens of the world.”

A good part of the magazine’s brief is to provide the intellectual foundation for progressive causes and things. A recent article attempts to do that for the prison abolition movement. “Overcorrection,” as its title implies, agrees with Pamela Price that a “carceral” approach to crime is misguided, and that we should consider alternatives to prisons and jails for those convicted of crime. The author, Adam Gopnik, makes clear from the get-go which side he’s on.

Our penal system, he writes in the first line, is “regrettable.” It is nothing more than “power and class hierarchy enforced.” Thievery, and other forms of criminal behavior, are “rational” behaviors of “those born poor.” (If you can’t afford something, steal it.) The rate of incarceration in America—the world’s highest—“boggles the mind and shivers the heart.” The current movement for “the outright elimination of incarceration” is simply “a question of right and wrong”; prisons must be wrong because we continue to have so much crime in this country. “Mass incarceration as a strategy to address violence is failing,” Gopnik quotes an anti-prison activist, “[and] when we admit to that failure, we become responsible for trying something different.”

This is exactly what Price, her colleague Cat Brooks, and the Black Panther Angela Davis argue. Theft itself can be seen as a legitimate form of that “something different” we should try. When a gang of shoplifters invades an Apple Store to smash and grab, it’s not really theft, it’s the repossession of items that have previously been stolen from the community due to inequality and racism. Retail theft is thus merely the redistribution of wealth by other means. In fact, Gopnik suggests, the real culprit behind theft is “late capitalism...”.

This blitzkrieg on capitalism is typical of the progressive thinking of Price, Brooks, Davis and Carroll Fife, who would have us believe that the reason for the economic desperation of so many people of color is the failure of the American system, and not individual behavior. It is capitalism itself they indict, and nowhere is their anger towards it more evident than in their denunciation of prison labor, which “serves the sinister ends of capital” when inmates are forced to, say, make license plates. This is why Gopnik calls our carceral system “the American Gulag,” as though our jails and prisons constitute a vast Siberian forced labor camp.

Read again The New Yorker publisher’s description of the magazine’s readers: “people who are switched on. It’s for people who are culturally aware, who go out to live music, the theater and films, and read voraciously. It is a publication for people who are educated, who congregate in urban centers, and who are citizens of the world.” Do you know whom that makes me think of? Our white, affluent Hill dwellers, upon whose coffee tables you will frequently find a New Yorker. It was those very people I wrote about last week, when I described their meeting with Sheng Thao at which they vented their distress at the invasion of crime into their hilly, leafy enclave. I bet that most of them consider themselves liberal and progressive and probably voted for Pamela Price and Sheng Thao. Many of them have, or had, Black Lives Matter signs in their yards, and have intellectually toyed with the idea of abolishing prisons and defunding the police. Yet here they were, assembled in force on a warm Wednesday evening, telling their mayor that they’re fed up with a crime wave they perceive as being caused, at least in part, by her.

There’s enough cognitive dissonance here to drive a Tesla through: how to reconcile their liberal, switched-on ideals with their personal safety worries, and whether there’s any connection between the two. Can one be a “citizen of the world” and at the same time want to protect one’s hearth and home against invasion? The switched on residents of the Oakland Hills will have the opportunity to answer that question on November 5 when they vote.

Steve Heimoff