After the War on Crime

Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction

Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney Lopez, Jonathan Simon

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814727829
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Derecho penal

Since the 1970s, Americans have witnessed a pyrrhic war on crime, with sobering numbers at once chilling and cautionary. Our imprisoned population has increased five-fold, with a commensurate spike in fiscal costs that many now see as unsupportable into the future. As American society confronts a multitude of new challenges ranging from terrorism to the disappearance of middle-class jobs to global warming, the war on crime may be up for reconsideration for the first time in a generation or more. Relatively low crime rates indicate that the public mood may be swinging toward declaring victory and moving on.

However, to declare that the war is over is dangerous and inaccurate, and After the War on Crime reveals that the impact of this war reaches far beyond statistics; simply moving on is impossible. The war has been most devastating to those affected by increased rates and longer terms of incarceration, but its reach has also reshaped a sweeping range of social institutions, including law enforcement, politics, schooling, healthcare, and social welfare. The war has also profoundly altered conceptions of race and community.

It is time to consider the tasks reconstruction must tackle. To do so requires first a critical assessment of how this war has remade our society, and then creative thinking about how government, foundations, communities, and activists should respond. After the War on Crime accelerates this reassessment with original essays by a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars as well as policy professionals and community activists. The volume's immediate goal is to spark a fresh conversation about the war on crime and its consequences; its long-term aspiration is to develop a clear understanding of how we got here and of where we should go.

[Part I]

Crime, War, and Governance

[Chapter 1]

The Place of the Prison in the New Government of Poverty¹

Loïc Wacquant

Grasping the changing roles of the penal state in the post-Fordist and post-Keynesian age requires a double rupture. One must first break out of the dominant paradigm of “crime and punishment,” incarnated by criminology and criminal law, which keeps us confined within a narrow law-enforcement perspective that cannot account for the rising punitiveness of the authorities inasmuch as it steadfastly ignores the extra-penological missions of the prison. A simple statistic suffices here to spotlight the glaring and growing disconnect between crime and incarceration in the United States: in 1975 the country locked up twenty-one inmates for every 1,000 serious crimes (homicide, rape, assault, robbery, theft, and car theft counted together); by 1999 this ratio had reached 106 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2001, 528). Holding crime constant reveals that American society is five times more punitive now than it was a quarter of a century ago. But one must similarly sweep aside the oppositional tale of the “prison-industrial complex” elaborated by activists, journalists, and scholars mobilized against penal escalation, who variously misattribute America’s carceral boom to the global restructuring of capitalism, intensifying racism, and the frantic search for profit via prison building and the superexploitation of convict labor.

When we stop to think about it, we also realize that the label “War on Crime” is a misnomer on three grounds, rhetorical as well as substantive. First, wars are waged by the military against foreign enemies of the nation whereas confronting lawbreaking, however harshly, involves civilian agencies handling citizens and denizens who are protected by an array of rights and who, instead of being exiled or annihilated on capture, mingle back into society after their stint in penal custody. Second, the so-called war proclaimed by federal and local authorities was never waged on “crime” in general. It was targeted on certain categories of illegalities perpetrated in a definite sector of physical and social space: essentially street crime committed in the segregated lower-class districts of the American metropolis. Third, and most important, activating the fight against crime has been but the pretext and springboard for a broader remaking of the perimeter and functions of the state, which has entailed the concurrent and convergent “downsizing” of its welfare component and “upsizing” of its police, courts, and correctional wings.

The Triadic Institutional Nexus of the Prison

Between 1975 and 2000, the carceral stock of the United States exploded from 380,000 to 2 million while the welfare rolls plummeted from 11 million to fewer than 5 million. To quadruple its inmate count between 1980 and 2000 and place some 6.5 million under criminal justice supervision (including parolees and probationers), the United States increased the combined budgets of federal, state, and local correctional administrations by 50 billion dollars and added half-a-million staff, making jails and prisons the country’s third largest employer in 1998, behind only Manpower Incorporated and Wal-Mart. Every year since 1985, the nation’s custodial expenditures have exceeded the monies allotted to both Food Stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC): in 1995, on the eve of “welfare reform,” the United States spent $46 billion to operate its houses of detention against less than $20 billion for AFDC (Gifford 2002, 8; Committee on Ways and Means 1997, 921). Yet, because public administrations could not expand fast enough to contain the ever-rising tide of convicts, the carceral boom led to the renaissance of private incarceration. In just a decade, for-profit operators captured 7 percent of the “market,” offering 120,000 extra beds in 1998, equal to the carceral populations of France, Italy, and Spain combined.

More than the specifics of statistical figures and trends, however, it is this deep-seated logic of this swing from the social to the penal that one must grasp here. Far from contradicting the neoliberal project of deregulation and decay of the public sector, the irresistible rise of the penal state in the United States constitutes, as it were, its negative — in the sense of obverse but also of revelator — since it manifests the implementation of a policy of the criminalization of poverty that is the indispensable complement to the imposition of precarious and underpaid wage labor as civic obligation for those trapped at the bottom of the class and caste structure, as well as the redeployment of social-welfare programs in a restrictive and punitive sense that is concomitant with it. At the time of its institutionalization in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century, “imprisonment was above all a method aiming at the control of deviant and dependent populations,” and inmates were mainly poor people and European immigrants recently arrived in the New World (Rothman 1971, 254 – 55). Nowadays, the carceral apparatus of the United States fills an analogous role with respect to those groups rendered superfluous or incongruous by the twofold restructuring of the wage labor relation and state charity: the declining fractions of the working class and poor blacks snared in the dilapidated core of formerly industrial cities. In so doing, the prison has regained a central place in the panoply of instruments for the government of poverty, at the crossroads of the deskilled labor market, the collapsing urban ghetto, and social-welfare services “reformed” with a view to buttressing the discipline of desocialized wage work.

1. Prison and the Deskilled Labor Market

In the first place, the penal system contributes directly to regulating the lower segments of the labor market — and it does so in a manner more coercive and consequential than labor legislation, social insurance schemes, and other administrative rules, many of which do not cover insecure work anyway. Its effect on this front is threefold. First, the stupendous prevalence and escalation of penal sanctions helps to discipline the reticent fractions of the working class by raising the cost of strategies of resistance to desocialized wage labor via “exit” into the informal economy. Faced with aggressive policing, severe courts, and the likelihood of brutally long prison sentences for drug offenses and recidivism, many shrink from getting or staying involved in the illegal commerce of the street and submit instead to the dictate of insecure employment. For some of those coming out of “the pen,” the tight mesh of post-correctional supervision increases pressure to opt for the “straight” life anchored in work, when it is available (Nelson, Dees, and Allen 1999). On both counts, the criminal justice system acts in concordance with workfare to push its clientele onto the peripheral segments of the deskilled job market.

Second, the carceral apparatus helps to “fluidify” the low-wage sector and artificially depresses the unemployment rate by forcibly subtracting millions of unskilled men from the labor force. It is estimated that penal confinement shaved two full percentage points off the U.S. jobless rate during the 1990s. Indeed, according to Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, when the differential between the incarceration level of the two zones is taken into account, the United States posted an unemployment rate higher than the average for the European Union during eighteen of the twenty years between 1974 and 1994, contrary to the view propagated by the adulators of neoliberalism and critics of “Eurosclerosis” (Western and Beckett 1999). While it is true that not all inmates would be in the labor force if free, that gap of 2 percent does not include the Keynesian stimulus provided by booming public expenditures and employment in corrections: the number of jail and prison jobs at the local, state, and federal level more than doubled over the past two decades, jumping from under 300,000 in 1982 to over 716,000 in 1999, when monthly payroll exceeded $2.1 billion (Gifford 2002, 7).² Penal growth has also boosted employment in the private sector of carceral goods and services, a sector with a high rate of precarious jobs and turnover and that is rising along with the privatization of punishment (since the source of the “competitiveness” of correctional firms is the exceedingly low wages and meager benefits they give their staff).

Western and Beckett argue that carceral hypertrophy is a two-pronged, delayed mechanism with contradictory effects: while it embellishes the employment picture in the short run by amputating labor supply at the bottom of the occupational ladder, in the longer term it can only aggravate it by making millions more or less unemployable. In their view, “incarceration has lowered the U.S. unemployment rate, but … sustained low unemployment in the future will depend on continuing expansion of the penal system” (Western and Beckett 1999, 1031). But this overlooks a third impact of hyperincarceration on the labor market, which is to facilitate the development of sub-poverty jobs and the informal economy by continually (re)generating a large volume of marginal laborers who can be superexploited at will. Former inmates can hardly lay claim to better than degraded and degrading work because of their interrupted trajectories, distended social ties, ignominious judicial status, and the manifold legal restrictions and civil liabilities it carries. The half-million convicts streaming out of American prisons every year provide the vulnerable labor power suited to fuel the temporary employment sector, the fastest growing segment of the U.S. labor market over the past two decades (it accounts for one-fifth of all new jobs created since 1984) (Peck and Theodore 1998; Barker and Kristensen 1998). Extreme imprisonment thus feeds contingent employment, which is the spearhead for the flexibilization of wage labor in the lower tier of the jobs distribution. In addition, the proliferation of detention facilities across the country — their number has tripled in thirty years to surpass 4,800 — contributes directly to the national growth and diffusion of illicit trafficking (of drugs, prostitution, stolen goods) that are the driving engine of the booty capitalism of the street. Countless small towns in rural areas have lobbied hard to build prisons or bring in inmates from overcrowded urban jails in the hope of stemming economic decline. But, along with convicts, they have unwittingly imported the cultural and economic influences of their visitors and associates, including gangs and the gamut of illegal activities they routinely engage in, for which the carceral population provides a stable consumer base.³

2. Prison and the Imploding Ghetto

The massive and growing overrepresentation of lower-class African Americans at every level of the penal apparatus shines a harsh light on the second function assumed by the carceral system in the new government of poverty in America: to complement and compensate for the collapsing ghetto as device for the confinement of a population considered deviant, devious, and dangerous as well as superfluous, on an economic plane — Mexican and Asian immigrants make more docile laborers (Waldinger and Lichter 2003)— as well as on a political plane— poor African Americans hardly vote and, in any case, the country’s center of electoral gravity has shifted away from declining central cities to well-off white suburbs.⁴

From this angle, incarceration is only the paroxystic manifestation of the logic of ethnoracial exclusion of which the ghetto has been the instrument and product since its historical inception. During the half century (1915 – 1965) dominated by the Fordist industrial economy to which African Americans contributed an indispensable pool of unskilled labor, i.e., from World War I, which triggered the “Great Migration” from the segregationist states of the South to the worker metropolises of the North, to the civil rights revolution, which finally gave African Americans access to the ballot box a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, the ghetto served as a “social prison” in that it ensured the systematic social ostracization of African Americans while enabling the exploitation of their labor power in the city. Since the debilitating crisis of the ghetto, symbolized by the great wave of urban revolts that swept the country during the mid-1960s, it is the prison that is in turn serving as surrogate “ghetto” by warehousing the fractions of the African American (sub)proletariat that have been marginalized by the transition to the dual-service economy and by state policies of welfare retrenchment and urban withdrawal (Kerner Commission 1969/1989; Harris and Curtis 1998; Wacquant 2007).

The two institutions of ghetto and prison have thus become coupled and they complement each other in that each operates in its own manner to enforce the setting apart (the etymological meaning of segregare) of an undesirable category perceived as threatening the metropolis with a twofold menace, inseparably physical and moral. And this structural and functional symbiosis between ghetto and prison finds a striking cultural expression in the lyrics and the lifestyle flouted by “gangsta rap” musicians, as attested by the tragic destiny of the singer-composer Tupac Shakur. Born in prison from an absentee father (his mother, Afeni Shakur, was a member of the Black Panthers), the apostle of “thug life,” hero to a multitude of ghetto youths (and hordes of white suburban teens), died in 1996 in Las Vegas, riddled with bullets in a car ambush set up by members of a rival gang, after having himself been accused of shooting at police officers and serving eight months for sexual assault (White 1997/2002).

3. Prison and Welfare-Turned-Workfare

As it was at its birth, the carceral institution is now directly connected to the gamut of organizations and programs entrusted with “assisting” dispossessed populations, in step with the increasing organizational and ideological interpenetration between the social and penal sectors of the post-Keynesian state. On the one side, the panoptic and punitive logic proper to the penal field tends to contaminate and then redefine the objectives and mechanisms of delivery of public aid (Katz 1996, 300 – 34; Handler and Hasenfeld 1997). Thus, in addition to replacing the right of indigent children to state assistance with the obligation for their parents to work after two years, the “welfare reform” endorsed by President Clinton in 1996 subjects public aid recipients to intrusive practices of lifelong record-keeping and close supervision, and it establishes a strict monitoring of their behaviors — in matters of education, employment, drug consumption, and sexuality — liable to trigger sanctions both administrative and criminal. For example, since October 1998, in central Michigan welfare recipients must submit to periodic drug testing, as do convicts on probation or parole, and their testing is carried out by the state’s department of corrections in offices where they mingle with parolees. On the other side, correctional facilities must nolens volens face up, under conditions of permanent penury and emergency, to the social and medical hardship that their “clientele” did not manage to resolve on the outside: in the country’s major cities, the biggest homeless shelter and the largest mental health facility readily accessible to subproletarians is the county jail (Fuller 1995). And the same population cycles through from one pole of this institutional continuum to the other in a near-closed orbit that entrenches their socioeconomic marginality and intensifies their sense of indignity.

Finally, budgetary constraints and the political fashion for “less government” have converged to push toward the commodification of welfare no less than that of incarceration. Several jurisdictions, such as Texas and Tennessee, already consign a sizable portion of their convicts to private establishments and subcontract the administrative handling of public aid recipients to specialized firms because the state does not possess the administrative capacity to implement its new poverty policy. This is a way of making poor people and prisoners (the vast majority of whom were poor on the outside and will be poor again when they get out) “profitable,” on the ideological if not on the economic level. What we are witnessing here is the genesis, not of a “prison-industrial complex,” as suggested by some criminologists following after journalists and justice activists mobilized against the growth of the penal state (Lilly and Knepper 1993; Schlosser 1998; Goldberg and Evans 1998),⁵ but of a truly novel organizational figure, a partially commercialized, carceral-assistential continuum that is the spearhead of the nascent liberal-paternalist state. Its mission is to surveil and subjugate, and, if need be, chastise and neutralize, the populations refractory to the new economic order according to a gendered division of labor, with its carceral component handling mainly the men while its assistential component exercises its tutelage over (their) women and children. In keeping with the American political tradition established during the colonial era, this composite institutional ensemble in statu nascendi is characterized, on the one hand, by the deep interpenetration of the public and private sectors and, on the other, by the fusion of the functions of branding, moral redress, and repression of the state.

The Demonic Myth of the “Prison-Industrial Complex”

Scholars, activists and ordinary citizens concerned with, or dismayed by, the runaway growth of America’s penal system have failed to detect this new triadic institutional nexus of the prison because they have been obsessed by the apparent linkage between incarceration and profit. For the past decade, the refrain of the rise of a “prison-industrial complex” that would have succeeded (or supplemented) the “military-industrial complex” of the cold war era with defense industry giants retooling from supplying arms to the Pentagon to providing surveillance and punishment for the poor, the fear of the “red enemy” of the exterior being replaced by dread for the “black enemy” of the interior, and private operators acting in cahoots with corrections offi...