Getting Tough

Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America

Julilly Kohler-Hausmann

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780691191546
  9780691174525
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400885183
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The politics and policies that led to America's expansion of the penal system and reduction of welfare programs

In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period.

When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. Kohler-Hausmann rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the "underclass" could be managed only through coercion and force.

Getting Tough illuminates this narrative through three legislative cases: New York's adoption of the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, Illinois's and California's attempts to reform welfare through criminalization and work mandates, and California's passing of a 1976 sentencing law that abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, Getting Tough offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.

PART I

Pushers

The addict, no matter what his psychological perceptions about himself, no matter what theorizing psychiatrists do, is a social type generated in response to changes in the social economy in a time of world crisis. A mistake frequently made is to view drug consumption merely as an indulgence, a gratification, an escape rather than a market response to economic and social dislocation.

—Sol Yurick, author of The Warriors, in “The Political Economy of Junk”

Drugs make people feel good, not bad. They give people pleasures available in no other way. And they provide a near perfect escape from reality. The truth is that we are a drug taking society, with nine million alcoholics, hundreds of thousands of respectable pill takers who can afford prescriptions, thousands who drink to excess on occasion, including before driving, untold millions who continue to shorten their lives with tobacco, and five hundred seventy thousand heroin addicts. The truth is we are all in the same boat.

—Harvard Hollenberd, chief counsel of Narcotic Addiction Control Commission, to Harriet Michel, director of Mayor’s Narcotic Control Counsel, 19721

Alarm about illicit drugs crescendoed in the 1960s and 1970s. Drugs seemed to threaten the nation at every turn. “Junkies,” “pushers,” and “addicts” loomed large in public consciousness. Newspapers warned that hunger for drugs drove people to steal, mug, and even kill to sustain their habits. Commentators attributed the era’s crime rates to surging heroin use and claimed that addicts transformed once welcoming neighborhoods into dangerous, forbidding spaces. Simultaneously, many were alarmed that heroin no longer seemed confined to poor communities of color. Media broadcasts reported that soldiers were using the high-quality, affordable heroin in Southeast Asia to manage the boredom and terror of the Vietnam War.2 Reports of white middle-class substance abuse and experimentation led parents to worry that drugs—like so many problems at the time—had breached the carefully guarded borders of suburban America.3 These specific crises were all the more ominous because of the general upheaval throughout society. Drugs joined with the mass movements, the rebellions of youth, and the war in Vietnam to threaten traditional authority structures. And the more attention and resources state and federal governments devoted to drug treatment and law enforcement, the worse the situation seemed to get. For many, drugs appeared to be the final straw, pushing the country into mayhem and chaos.

Nowhere was the issue more salient than New York. New York City, a main entry point for heroin into the country, was supposedly home to half of the nation’s heroin addicts.4 The perception of a drug epidemic was both crisis and opportunity for lawmakers in New York State, and few politicians more persistently leveraged the issue than Nelson Rockefeller, who governed the state during the crisis. Drugs, he explained in 1970, imperiled the nation’s fundamental stability: “The fiber of the American character has traditionally been strong. That is why the nation grew great. Drugs threaten to destroy that very fiber and to destroy the American future along with it.”5

As the son of the powerful philanthropist and financier John D. Rockefeller Jr., Nelson Rockefeller was born into the spotlight as an heir to one of the country’s great fortunes. Before entering electoral politics, he worked for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to advance U.S. interests abroad, particularly in Latin America.6 He served as New York’s governor from 1959 to 1973, but his ambition was always to hold the nation’s highest office. Rockefeller ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, 1964, and 1968. He was the quintessential moderate Republican during a period when a revived conservative movement mobilized within the party, pulling it to the right and frustrating his presidential ambitions.

In the last decade of Rockefeller’s tenure as governor, he dedicated unprecedented physical, institutional, and monetary resources to a series of rehabilitative programs that approached drug addiction as a medical disease. Then, in January 1973, Rockefeller shocked the political establishment by declaring that these drug-treatment efforts—programs he had championed for over a decade—were abject failures. He proposed instead that the state make the penalty for selling hard drugs, regardless of quantity, a lifetime in prison without any option of plea bargaining, probation, or parole. A few months later, the New York legislature answered Rockefeller’s call and passed a mildly diluted version of his proposal, enacting the harshest narcotics laws in the nation.

This book’s first part traces the genesis and enactment of these punitive proposals, which came in time to be known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Chapter 1 explores the governing problems that set the stage for the 1973 drug laws and the ways different groups struggled to interpret and respond to them. It chronicles New York’s efforts to manage heroin through drug rehabilitation and explores how the varied therapeutic approaches coexisted with criminalization. Chapter 2 explores the ways Rockefeller’s 1973 tough proposal attempted to resolve the governing problems that arose from the therapeutic regime. It analyzes the ideological and political work accomplished by the tough proposal and the response by policymakers, opponents, drug users, and the diverse members of the general public.

Political and media narratives tethered the “drug problem” to political upheaval, economic change, and rising crime rates, which inflamed public anxiety. There was no consensus about how to respond: politicians and their constituents rushed into the fray offering a host of diverse interpretations of the problem and appropriate reactions. Far from purely elite, rarified policy debates, people from all quarters shaped and engaged these questions. From prisons to the state capital to neighborhood meetings to newspapers’ editorial pages to new drug-treatment groups, people wrestled over what caused drug use and what authority and strategies were best employed to manage it. Did drug abuse result from individual pathology, either criminality or illness? Did it originate in certain suspect spaces or cultures? Were drug abuse and drug markets a function of larger social and economic structures or perhaps a permanent feature of American culture? How should society respond to widespread drug use and illicit drug markets: punitive sanction, coerced medical treatment, rehabilitation directed and controlled by ex–drug users, legalization, or, perhaps, revolution? Hashing out these questions through drug-policy debates not only helped produce popular knowledge about the state’s capacity to manage drug users and sellers. It ultimately also amplified some narratives about the causes of addiction, crime, urban disorder, and social inequality and drowned out others.

CHAPTER ONE

Addicts into Citizens

THE TRIBULATIONS OF NEW YORK’S TREATMENT REGIME

When Nelson Rockefeller proposed his draconian drug penalties in 1973, he presented them as a rupture with the recent past—a sharp repudiation of the drug-treatment programs he had championed for almost a decade. Many scholars and commentators have largely echoed this assessment, positioning the Rockefeller Drug Laws as the origins of the modern, punitive War on Drugs. There is no doubt that the political theater of enacting these policies reverberated nationally and dramatically escalated the prescribed penalties for selling illicit drugs. But emphasizing only the radical departure the laws entailed risks obscuring the continuities with the earlier period and impeding our ability to understand the transformation. Carefully locating Rockefeller’s dramatic proposal in the longer history of the state’s efforts to manage drug use and street crime reveals that the 1973 policy both repudiated and built upon the treatment regime that came before them.

Contemporary political rhetoric also obscured the complexities and continuities. A newspaper at the time captured the tidy narrative in the simple title: “Drug Addiction in NY: Once an Illness, Now a Crime.”1 Though Rockefeller emphasized drug rehabilitation before 1973 and penal sanction afterward, it is imperative analytically to recognize that criminalization and medicalization are concurrent, intertwined, and at times mutually dependent strategies. Rockefeller—and most other participants in these debates—never categorically rejected a role for treatment or law enforcement. They more typically debated the appropriate balance between them. Policymakers endeavored to establish which strategy was appropriate for which groups: what enticements, services, and deterrents were needed to manage different consumers and sellers of illicit drugs. In other words, the architects of New York’s drug policy were engaged in a (largely futile) effort to sort the various participants in the drug economy into distinct categories: between victims and perpetrators, addicts and pushers, or the redeemable and incorrigible. As has often been the case throughout the state’s frustrated efforts to regulate intoxicating substances, a person’s social location—race, ethnicity, neighborhood, gender, and class—had a profound influence over where in the state’s taxonomy he or she landed.

While rhetoric in the 1970s presented “addicts” and “pushers” as stable, essential identities, these terms are best understood as artifacts of the ongoing historical struggles over narcotics. Instead of objective divisions within the social body, the distinct categories of drug users were actually constituted through debates over policy. The term “addict” sugges...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Politics and Society in Modern America
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Pushers
• Part II: Welfare Queens
• Part III: Criminals
• Conclusion: Forging an “Underclass”
• Index