Social Exclusion

The significance of contemporary spaces of social exclusion to the face of modern de-territorialized Muslims in their many contemporary cultural expressions and locales, as outlined in Olivier Roy's book Globalized Islam, got me thinking recently. My thoughts were further focused by Mike Davis' recent book Planet Slums, wherein he outlines with his signature starkness how spaces of social exclusion—from Baghdad to Los Angeles—have become one of the most formative elelments in the political, social and cultural landscape of the contemporary world.

Spaces of social exclusion are not new phenomena. The powerless, the have-nots, the marginalized, the Third World, the urban underclass, and the modern inmate all provide testimony to the multiple forms of social exclusion zones. Their histories, in fact, run deep and wide.

Michel Foucault's seminal work Discipline and Punish on the origins of the modern prison and its representation of the carceral nature of modern social structures, is an excellent example of an historical-philosophical excavation of modern forms of social exclusion, and in particular, of the way in which power/knowledge operates in the complex process of exclusion built into the institutions of the modern world.

I, of course, live in one of the most recognizable of these social exclusion sites—the modern prison.

As a lover of most things moderate, I have had a very hard time coming to terms with this very radical, though disturbingly accurate, representation of the social ecology of the modern world. I find it problematic to approach the subject along the lines of a Foucault or a Davis—Apocalypticism and nihilistic pessimism have never really appealed to my sunny humanistic tendencies. But I have come to learn to listen to jeremiads when their prophesies amount to real depictions of social phenomena.

The incomprehensible nature of the criminal is one of those perennial mysteries that seem to have plagued humanity from time immemorial. And yet, I have a hard time believing that any of the great sociologists and criminologists of the past and present have ever really taken a hard look at durance vile, the last of the great colonies, the subaltern within, the final resting place of the convicted.

Sure, they've identified its ecological profile and primary fauna—the poor urban-underclass minority. But they don't seem to really understand what they are looking at.

This profile should be a deeply disturbing fact. Crime has become a function of poverty and ethnicity (primarily Latino and African-American). The deep contradiction between the idea of criminality as antisocial conduct, and the reality of the criminal as a poor ethnic minority, ought to outrage us. Poor ethnic minorities are not congenitally predisposed to criminality—even the thought is abhorrent. But if crime is primarily a function of socioeconomic status, then is not the fact that the U.S. has the largest criminal class in the world an indictment of the most advanced, prosperous society on earth?

And how can a nation so concerned with the health of its economy, especially with respect to job-growth, continue to bear such an extremely wasteful, ineffective, economically unprofitable system for administering justice and controlling antisocial behavior?

With the nation focused domestically on the health of the economy vis-a-vis Mexican and Latin American immigration—the link between immigration, the socio-economic profile of the California inmate, and the health of the California economy is not being understood. The hidden costs of bad immigration policy is wrapped up in the cost of incarcerating poor ethnic minorities from overwhelmingly immigrant communities, especially in California. Disenfranchising immigrants from American society creates the conditions for urban-underclass criminality...not in first generation immigrants to be sure, but in their children.

Closing the border, building a wall and criminalizing and evicting illegal immigrants is definitely the wrong answer to this problem. Seeing the link between bad immigration policy and criminality focuses attention on the real issue, and points to a potentially viable solution—increased enfranchisement and economic assimilation can mean socio-economic opportunity for immigrant children—which is the surest way to prevent poverty related crime, and provide real incentives to buy into society and play by the rules.

The same solution can be applied to the oldest unassimilated immigrant group in America—the African American community. Indeed, the history of African American's in America since reconstruction is a case study in the wrong way to deal with immigrants (in this case, forcibly appropriated immigrants), and the consequences of a deeply flawed socio-economic assimilation strategy of exclusion and control.

The key to controlling criminality in America is a good immigration policy focused on socio-economic integration. A well adjusted immigrant family, whether first generation or fifth, addresses urban-underclass crime at its root, where socio-economic disenfranchisement breeds an antisocial response.