Hip-Hop and Philosophy

The payback attitude heard in gangsta rap sounds like a call for retribution. As 50 cent puts it, “Nigga you play around, I lay you down / That’s how it’s goin’ down.”²²² Justice as retribution echoes the feeling that vengeance is sweet, redeeming those who’ve suffered the humiliation of being wronged. This appeals to many people. It fact, it seems to express the attitude many law-abiding citizens would direct at gangstas themselves. Yet the desire for retribution that some rappers express isn’t proposed as a legitimate basis for a system of punishment. To begin with, the situations they portray are sometimes way outside of the law, as Nas depicts in “Every Ghetto”: “Circle the block where the beef’s at / And park in front of my enemy’s eyes / They see that it’s war we life-stealers, hollow-tip lead busters.”²²³

Behind rappers’ desire to settle the score often lies a firm belief that the law does not, and doesn’t aim to, protect them. If the law doesn’t protect you and won’t deliver justice, you may have to protect your own honor and reputation by seeking vengeance against your enemies. In Dr. Dre’s words, “And if motherfuckers come at me wrong / I straight put my .44 Desert Eagle to his motherfuckin’ dome / and show him why they call me the notorious one.”²²⁴

Many rappers are skeptical about justice in America and alarmed by our system of punishment. They suggest that racial bias in our criminal justice institutions—police, courts, and prisons—undermines the notion that criminals are getting their “just deserts.” Rappers also call into question whether the massive effort to incarcerate black men serves the purpose of public safety. The rhetoric of both retribution and the public good seem to them to be a front for unjust forms of social control that help to maintain a system of racial privilege for whites. I will discuss “retributivist” and “consequentialist” philosophies of punishment and how rap music aims to snatch the disguise from the ugly face of the system.

In lawless circumstances, by contrast, the line between retribution and self-defense gets blurred. Retaliation and even preemptive action might seem necessary to defend person and property. “Ready to rhyme / Standin’ my ground / Never back down,” says OutKast, “Willin’ to rob, steal, and kill any thang that threatens mine.”²²⁵ But advocates of retribution (a.k.a. retribu-tivists) are not interested in retaliation as a means to personal safety or as a reaction to a threat. They advocate retaliation for wrongdoing as a matter of justice. This has led famous retribu-tivists, the philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and, in our time, Robert Nozick (1938–2002), to stress differences between vengeance and retribution. Vengeance is emotional, personal, reckless, and often disproportionate to the wrong. Retribution is impartially applied by a dispassionate and legitimate authority, and carefully calculated to fit the crime. In a civilized society, these philosophers claim, retribution should replace vengeance. This does not mean that retribution will be less violent or brutal. The death penalty and maximum-security prisons are hardly gentler alternatives to vigilante vengeance—as the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) emphasizes in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).

Yet the ideal of retribution carries with it more than a trace of vengeance. Indeed, some recent books, such as Peter French’s The Virtues of Vengeance and Jeffrie Murphy’s Getting Even, urge us to embrace the emotional, personal, and expressive value of punishment as retribution. These philosophers accept continuity between vengeance and the justification of punishment. French offers four conditions that vengeance must meet if it’s to count as justice:

1. Communication. The penalty must effectively communicate that what the offender did was wrong.

2. Desert. The penalty must be deserved.

3. Proportionality. The penalty must fit the crime.

4. Authority. Someone with legitimate authority must administer the penalty.

PE’s Chuck D implies that the authority of a government that doesn’t care about some of its people can’t be legitimate. A legitimate government serves the interests of all of its people, including minority groups. A government that fails to do this exercises only power, not legitimate authority—might, not right.

The most basic rights associated with our criminal justice system, guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, are these: people should not be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment); people are innocent until proven guilty through due process of the law (Fifth Amendment); people should not be subjected to cruel or unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment); people should be equally protected by the law (Fourteenth Amendment). Many rap artists point to violations of these basic constitutional rights—police and prosecutorial misconduct, lack of access to legal counsel, unfair sentencing policy, and inhumane prison conditions. These are well-documented problems that disproportionately affect African Americans and Latinos.

Consider, for example, racial profiling. As Mos Def describes it, “The po-po stop him and show no respect / ‘Is there a problem officer?’ / Damn straight, it’s called race.”²²⁷ Racial profiling is a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with the excessive use of force and with disproportionate incarceration of minorities.²²⁸ Problems such as these threaten not only U.S. Constitutional rights but also internationally recognized human rights. They give us reason to doubt whether many punishments have been justly imposed.

But grounds for doubt about punishment as retribution may extend beyond worries about racial bias in its application. How could we know whether the desert condition or the proportionality condition for justice as retribution has been satisfied? Consider this discussion about fitting the punishment to the crime:

Tailoring the fit appears to depend on the moral sensitivity or intuitions of the punisher(s). When is the fit ‘just right’? When does a suit of clothes fit? When it feels right? Yes, but also when it looks right to the wearer and to others.... Morality is an art, not a science.²²⁹

Statements such as this should worry if not alarm us. The lack of a cohesive moral community and a shared basis for moral judgment in multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious America dooms this justification of punishment. We simply don’t agree about who deserves what. The haphazard nature of desert judgments cannot justify the high-stakes social policy of criminal punishment. Our system of punishment costs us almost 60 billion dollars per year; ²³⁰ it disrupts families and communities; and it deprives offenders of their most basic liberty, sometimes for a very long time. Metaphorical and biblical references to cosmic balance, the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or the art of morality are inadequate as rational and public justifications for a system of punishment. We must look elsewhere for a more plausible rationale.

When people are poor, unemployed, without hope, and subject to street violence and police abuse, prison may seem a lot less like something to fear, as Dead Prez makes clear in “Behind Enemy Lines”:

You ain’t gotta be locked up to be in prison
Look how we livin’
30,000 niggas a day, up in the bing, standin’ routine
They put us in a box, just like our life on the block.²³²

Of course, prison is in many ways worse than “life on the block.” The point is that people in difficult social circumstances are more willing to take risks, especially when they’re angry or desperate. This fact, which might be called “the ghetto factor,” substantially weakens the effectiveness of punishment as a deterrent.

We’re left with incapacitation, and herein lies a deeper story. It begins with an agonizing recognition of the prospects facing many people who get caught up in the system: “They’re scared of us, rather beware than dare to trust / Always in jail, million dollar bail, left there to rust.”²³³ Incapacitation could be a legitimate rationale for punishment only if the aim is public safety. But rappers charge that the long sentences that many African Americans face often serve interests that reach beyond the safety of the public.

For instance, federal sentences for cocaine possession and distribution are much harsher for the drug in crack form as compared to powder form. Possession of five grams of crack triggers a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, whereas it takes five hundred grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence. Although evidence indicates there are far more white crack users and dealers than black ones, 84 percent of crack defendants are African American.²³⁴ By contrast, only 31 percent of powder cocaine defendants are African American. The racial disparity may be explained by a concentration of drug law enforcement in urban, minority communities in which crack, the cheaper form of cocaine, is more prevalent than powder cocaine. The media also hyped the “evils” of crack as the government launched its “war on drugs” in the 1980s. The result is what Human Rights Watch has described as “an indefensible sentencing differential [that] becomes unconscionable in light of its racial impact.”²³⁵

The idea that our criminal justice system punishes not only crime but also race comes up time and again in rap tracks. In the words of Ice Cube: “I think back to when I was robbin’ my own kind / The police didn’t pay it no mind / But when I start robbin’ the white folks / Now I’m in the pen wit’ the soap-on-a-rope.” ²³⁶

Similarities between prison and ghetto have caught the attention of sociologists. The ghetto is a physical space that segregates, stigmatizes, coerces, and makes people vulnerable to economic exploitation.²³⁸ Ghettos have worked this way, in apartheid South Africa, the Jim Crow American South, Chicago, and New York City. The racial profile of the U.S. prison population—65 percent of the prison population is non-white—suggests that prison too contributes to racial segregation. No doubt it also stigmatizes. And further, private companies are making big money marketing products and services. Telephone companies, for instance, are reaping hundreds of millions of dollars on unregulated phone rates for calls from prisons, some as high as $2.20 per minute.²³⁹

Greater racial integration in American society achieved by the civil rights movement of the 1960s has been followed by a massive increase in the incarceration rate. The total U.S. prison population has shot up, incredibly, from less than 200,000 to almost 1.4 million today—about seven times. In addition, close to 700,000 people are held in local jails. This brings us to a grand total of 2.1 million people behind bars in America today. At the current rate, about 1 in 3 black men will do time at some point in their lives. Sociologist Loïc Wacquant remarks on the post-civil rights era: “As the walls of the ghetto shook and threatened to crumble, the walls of the prison were correspondingly extended, enlarged and fortified, and ‘confinement of differentiation,’ aimed at keeping a group apart . . . gained primacy over ‘confinement of safety’.”²⁴⁰ Wacquant draws a contrast here between incarceration as a way to make society safer and incarceration as a way to stigmatize and ostracize a despised group. His point is that our prison system has increasingly functioned to stigmatize and to ostracize African Americans; the advancement of public safety cannot plausibly be characterized as its primary aim. Some rappers, like Nas, seem to be making the same point:

My country shitted on me (My country)
She wants to get rid of me (Naw, never)
’Cause the things I seen (We know too much)
’Cause the things I seen (We seen too much).²⁴¹

Rappers challenge us to be more aware and critical of the systematic abuse, exclusion, and marginalization of the black urban poor. They protest the endless cycling of black men between ghetto and prison. Their strategy is aggressively provocative—by being provocatively aggressive. Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” is an early example that prompted a censorship debate in the 1990s. The lines I quoted from OutKast are more subtle. We don’t know whether “standin’ my ground, never back down” is a matter of rhyming or something more threatening. We often find rappers playing on words, or signifying, in order to drive home a deeper message. Think of KRS-One’s play on the similarity between the words “officer” and “overseer” to draw a parallel between the control and violence that people in each role have exercised over the lives of African Americans.²⁴² An aim in the music here, as elsewhere, is to destabilize our perceptions of state legitimacy and criminal justice.

Criminal “justice” in an unjust society is suspect. The burden on those who shoulder it is heavy. Despite the materialistic, consumerist values frequently found in rap tracks, sometimes a simpler, deeper, and more soulful plea can be heard, as in Dead Prez’s cry for freedom:

Yo, this world is oh so cold, I think about my ancestors

Being sold, and it make me wanna break the mold . . .

I don’t wanna be no movie star
I don’t wanna drive no fancy car
I just wanna be free, to live my life, to live my own life.²⁴³

Punishment as Retribution

Doubts about the Justice of Retribution

Punishment as Social Control

Prison/Ghetto