The Making of the American Police State

[TBF]

How did we end up with millions behind bars and police armed like soldiers?
by Christian Parenti ~ 7/28/15

In other words, among the important things criminal justice does is regulate, absorb, terrorize, and disorganize the poor. At the same time it promulgates politically useful racism. Criminal justice discourse is the racism circus; from courts to reality TV it is the primary ideological site for producing the false consciousness that is American racism.

How did we get here? The numbers are chilling: 2.2 million people behind bars, another 4.7 million on parole or probation. Even small-town cops are armed like soldiers, with a thoroughly militarized southern border.

The common leftist explanation for this is “the prison-industrial complex,” suggesting that the buildup is largely privatized and has been driven by parasitic corporate lobbying. But the facts don’t support an economistic explanation. Private prisons only control 8 percent of prison beds. Nor do for-profit corporations use much prison labor. Nor even are guards’ unions, though strong in a few important states, driving the buildup.

The vast majority of the American police state remains firmly within the public sector. But this does not mean the criminal justice buildup has nothing to do with capitalism. At its heart, the new American repression is very much about the restoration and maintenance of ruling class power.

American society and economy have from the start evolved through forms of racialized violence, but criminal justice was not always so politically central. For the better part of a century after the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the national incarceration rate hovered at around 100 to 110 per 100,000. But then, in the early 1970s, the incarceration rate began a precipitous and continual climb upward ...

Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/incarceration-capitalism-black-lives-matter/

[AllFieldsRequired]

1. I like this part, note the comment attributed to that sweetheart Nixon...

Here were the old demonizing tropes of white racism. Black people were cast as dangerous, ignorant, unworthy of full citizenship, and thus in need of state repression. As Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, put it in his diary: “[The President] emphasized that you have to face that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” A federal war on heroin followed and with it came new laws like the RICO Act that empowered prosecutors. At the same time Nixon began his appeal to “the silent majority,” a group not named as white but understood as such.

[yallerdawg]

2. Good analysis.

Capitalism's role and the number of Republican presidents complicit in the creation of the police state.

It wasn't just the Clintons? Remarkable!

[TBF]

3. Interesting that it has been largely a bi-partisan effort though

when all is said and done. The more authoritarian types on either side of the aisle will use nearly any excuse to scale back freedom in the interest of "security". Patriot Act, etc ...

[yallerdawg]

4. Would a more homogeneous society result in lower incarceration numbers?

Looking at just white incarceration rates would put us in line with the best of the rest of the world!

Add on non-white rates, and we go over the top!

Our justice system from the police on the street to the sentencing and societal emphasis on punishment is drenched with institutional racism.

Racism is a bi-partisan tool. We need to look at ourselves.

[TBF]

5. Yes - I think you just summed up

what they were trying to say with these comments: "Racism is a bi-partisan tool. We need to look at ourselves."

[yallerdawg]

6. The old "Which came first" question?

I think Karl Marx answered:

"In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded."

http://www.isreview.org/issues/01/cp_blacks_1930s.shtml

[Doctor_J]

7. Christian parenti does his father proud.

Glad there is a place where he can be read. Good find

[TBF]

8. ...

[Cheese Sandwich]

9. A very smart piece.

Simply stated, capitalism needs poverty and creates poverty, but is simultaneously always threatened by poverty. The poor keep wages down, but they also create trouble in three ways.

First, their presence calls into question capitalism’s moral claims (the system can’t work for “everyone” when beggars are in the street). Second, the poor threaten and menace the moneyed classes aesthetically and personally simply by being in the wrong spaces. Gourmet dining isn’t quite the same when done in the presence of mendicant paupers. And finally, the poor threaten to rebel in organized and unorganized ways as they did in the sixties and seventies.

Capitalism will never escape these contradictions. The best it can do is manage them with criminal justice, the ideological racialization of poverty, and the geographic segregation of the poor.

One more point. When viewing this history and the present, it is important to think in terms of concomitant and overlapping agendas. Police on the street are not usually consciously pursuing the violent reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. More often local cops in Staten Island; Albuquerque; Ferguson; Waller, Texas; etc. are pursuing their own personal power trips, which very often take on racist angles.

But regardless of what cops think they are doing, their work usually also fits into local political agendas of segregation and real-estate development. And both of those smaller projects fit into the larger national project of social control in an increasingly unequal class society. In other words, the macro, mezzo, and micro levels all line up but also all remain somewhat autonomous.
...