The "New" Criminal Justice System: State Repression from 1968 to 2001

Monthly Review, July, 2001 by Christian Parenti

This was accompanied by a right-wing assault on the disadvantaged and dispossessed. Labor unions, which had maintained some power in the 1970s and whose members had been extremely troublesome (wildcat strikes, absenteeism, and the like), were subjected to a vicious frontal assault. In 1982 alone the Reagan administration cut the real value of welfare by 24 percent; slashed the budget for child nutrition by 35 percent; reduced funding for school milk programs by 78 percent and urban development action grants by 35 percent; shrank educational block grants by 38 percent; and simply abolished the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act which had employed four-hundred thousand.

This multifaceted society-wide class assault from above had a single unifying aim: discipline for the laboring classes. Neo-conservative "theorist" George Gilder summed it up nicely. "The poor must work hard, and they must work harder than the classes above them."[6] The policy package known as "Reaganomics" was an effort to boost profit margins by increasing the rate of exploitation. And by the mid-late eighties profitability was recovering, but with enormous social costs. Chicago saw its number of ghetto census tracts increase by 61.5 percent between 1980 and 1990; cities like Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Boston saw similar changes. Overall, the number of African Americans who found themselves living in "ghetto" census tracts, due to middle class flight, job loss etc., grew by one third. So, too, did homelessness make a dramatic comeback.

Enlarging the industrial reserve army of labor-the unemployed- brought with it serious political problems. Simply stated, capitalism always 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. This simple fact punctuating every moment in history is systematically expunged from official texts. Yet the past is full of poor and working peoples' rebellions, from the United Mine Workers dropping dynamite on the West Virginia state militia, to the National Welfare Rights Organization flipping desk s in welfare offices across the county, to the Teamsters bringing the United Parce Service to its knees. Thus the poor and working classes must always be physically controlled.

The mechanism of the second phase of the criminal justice escalation was, of course, Reagan's vicious and hyperbolic War on Drugs. The reengaged build up began quietly, at first FBI funding was doubled; wiretap laws were loosened; and more money was doled out for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Meanwhile, Reagan's Chief of Staff, Ed Meese, and his Attorney General, William French Smith, started demanding changes in the criminal code that would "increase the power of the prosecutors.