Baltimore City Paper
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
By Christian Parenti Unlocks the "Prison-Industrial Complex"

Review by Michael Anft

We Americans like our fellow countrypersons to behave. Or else. Our severity finds its voice through laws designed to curtail any deviancy, including drug use, political dissent, and minority or resident-alien status. With urban crime a rallying point for politicians looking to win votes, tough policing tactics and mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenses have become the late-90s norm. And if you're poor or of non-European descent in this new gilded age, your chances of avoiding the slammer are decidedly slimmer than those of your white brothers, who are rarely the targets of "zero-tolerance" or "quality-of-life" policing or Draconian drug laws. All of which has led to an explosion in prison-building and a scuttling of the penal system's erstwhile goal of rehabilitation. America's gone incarceration-crazy. More than 1.7 million people live in jails nationwide—way up from 500,000 in 1985—and another 3 million are tied to the justice system through parole and pbroation. In California, more state funds—about $4 billion—go to what author Christian Parenti calls "the prison-industrial complex" than to schools. Americans tired of crime—or at least the fear of it—have gotten their wish: More people are serving longer sentences, with the majority of prisoners doing hard time for nonviolent property crimes or drug charges. And the color of our prisons is increasingly dark; while African-Americans make up about 12 percent of the national population, about half of our inmates are black. By next year, some criminologists predict, one in every 10 African-American men will be in prison.
What to make of it all? Is the proliferation of prisons a further sign of racial intolerance? Or is our society simply creating more criminals, who require more prisons to house them?

Parenti, author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, believes he has the answer: It's the economy, stupid. After two decades of pro-business, anti-poor government and the loss of millions of blue-collar jobs, many in the working classes are having trouble finding their way in our allegedly flush economy. With the help of a new kind of class intolerance, they've found their way to prison. Borrowing a far-ranging polemic style from his father, noted leftist academic and writer Michael Parenti (Democracy for the Few), Christian Parenti posits that a de-industrialized economic landscape's "surplus population" is under attack from those who scapegoat the poor as a threat to otherwise burgeoning capitalism. Under these conditions, Parenti writes, "incarceration is [on] one level a rational strategy for managing the contradictions of a restructured American capitalism." Beyond Parenti's leftist dogma (and an unfortunate slew of typographical errors and a mischosen "fact" or two) is a history of this country's law-and-order fetish, dating back to the days of Republican demagogue and one-time presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and continuing through the years of heightened police response to riots and revolutionaries under Richard Nixon and into the era of Ronald Reagan and former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, whose policies Parenti says ushered in the days of rapidly increasing incarceration rates and anti-urban, anti-crime hysteria.

While the book is predictable in its solutions—more collective action, more help for those on the bottom through a rebound of labor unions—Parenti convincingly pieces together disparate crime-fighting strategies and shows how they have been combined to create a well-funded "police state," one replete with prisons that ironically become the economic linchpins of so many once-failing small towns.Reached at his home in San Francisco, Parenti says that we've been down this road before. "During the post-Reconstruction period—from the 1870s when slaves were liberated and the Union Army pulled out of the South, to World War I—there were repressive "black codes' and a criminal-justice expansion similar to the one we're now seeing," says the author, a 30-year-old doctoral candidate in sociology at the London School of Economics. "The targets then were not just blacks, but poor whites as well, although the buildup isn't anywhere near the scale we're seeing now."

The reason we're seeing more prisons, more cops (courtesy of Bill Clinton), and more rhetoric has to do with the decline of the left in mainsteam political discourse, Parenti says. "It's a lot easier now for people to be racist and to hate the poor because there's no counterbalancing force to remind people that poverty is a part of the class structure, that capitalism demands there be some who remain poor," he says. With the demise of labor, and with the recasting of "liberal" as a dirty word, the left has retreated, leaving the poor and displaced without a voice in politics. Because of that, he says, it's much easier to view the poor and immigrants as outsiders. The irony of "theme-park cities" such as Baltimore, where glitzy entertainment zones exist side by side with neighborhoods wracked by poverty, points up how the poor are perceived by others as impediments to urban renaissances. "They're seen as a threat to continued development" in downtown regions, as well as in neighborhoods coveted by gentrifiers, Parenti says. Such perceptions make the poor—particularly those who are African-American—more susceptible to publicly backed crackdown campaigns. Although such tactics trouble Parenti and others, he concedes that policing aimed at poor neighborhoods enjoys a wellspring of citizen support. "The crime and violence aren't all imagination," he says. "We are more violent here than Western European countries, which is who we should be comparing ourselves with. That's something that the left hasn't dealt with, that police repression is popular among people of all classes."
Hence the emphasis on get-tough policing techniques in cities such as Baltimore, where Democratic mayoral candidate Martin O'Malley ran an almost single-issue primary campaign around the concept of zero tolerance, which Parenti sees as a dangerous affront to the civil liberties of many of the law-abiding poor. He notes in the book that since 1994, complaints of police brutality jumped by 62 percent in New York—zero tolerance's most-cited positive example—while the city paid out more than $100 million in damages in cases involving police violence. High-profile cases involving a sodomized detainee and the shooting of an unarmed immigrant merely scratch the surface of zero-tolerance-related brutality, Parenti says.

For all that, the author acknowledges that zero tolerance—along with a decline in the population of young males, an improved economy, and the dwindling of the crack culture—has lowered the crime rate. "To some extent, zero tolerance has worked," he says. "You can't ignore that. Repression and terror do work. I'm sure that if shoplifters were executed, we'd go a long way toward ending shoplifting. But I don't want to live in a society that does that."

Nor does he care to watch a second generation of young men be carted off to serve mandatory five-year sentences for drug use or first-time offenses. "There are too many lives that have been irrevocably lost because of this overemphasis on nonviolent offenders," Parenti says. "What we need to do is to see prisons as a really, really brutal last resort. Small-time drug dealers and young screw-ups don't need to go to prisons to be raped or forced into gangs. We have to think about whether those kinds of punishments [inside jail] that come from a prison sentence really fit the crime."