Professor Bernard Harcourt has recently released a compelling book "The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Social Order." Harcourt, a professor of law and chair of the political science department at the University of Chicago, painstakingly traces the parallel historical trend of increasing punishment during eras of strong free market advocacy. Harcourt's Illusion presents crucial historical evidence that when nations' focus on freeing their trading and capital markets, there is always a concomitant rise in that nation's imprisonment and incarceration rates. Of course, the rise in incarceration is always of the nation's poor and disempowered.Harcourt's thesis perfectly situates the failed American War on Drugs. The explosive rise in mass incarceration in the United States over the past 25 years (imprisonment increase of 335% as a result of the War on Drugs) occurred when the presidential administrations of Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. simultaneously worked tirelessly to deregulate the U.S. capital markets. Free market advocacy and deregulation have been occurring at exactly the same time that prison rates and populations have been skyrocketing. Harcourt describes how this is not just an American anomaly, but is a global historical reality.
The question that this historical reality begs is why? Why during eras of powerful free market advocacy do governments' radically imprison their own citizens?
From the front flap of The Illusion of Free Markets: "It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in 'free markets' has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices.
Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of 'liberty' emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as 'police.' This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere.
This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of 'freedom' or 'discipline' on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today."
