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

Monthly Review, July, 2001 by Christian Parenti

Aiding that effort came a battery of new right-wing federal judges. And from the U.S. Supreme Court came several crucial decisions, notably Gates v. Illinois, which made it easier for police to obtain search warrants based on anonymous tips, and United States v. Leon, which allowed police to use defective and partially false warrants in obtaining evidence.

But the buildup really took off with the Federal Crime Bill of 1984. This created the assets forfeiture laws enabling police to keep as much as 90 percent of all the "drug tainted" property they could seize. Nationwide, the total amount of all seizures grew from about $100 million in 1981 to over $1 billion by fiscal year 1987. Thus did the feds entice local police into their plans for total war at home. The next congressional election brought another massive crime bill. Only eighteen lawmakers voted against the catch-all Anti-Drug-Abuse Act of 1986, which imposed twenty-nine new mandatory minimum sentences, among them the notoriously racist disparity in the penalties for crack and for powder cocaine. This bill also shifted official rhetoric from hunting "king pins" to rounding up "users."

The escalating repression hit people of color hardest, and black people hardest of all. In 1980, African Americans made up 12 percent of the nation's population and over 23 percent of all those arrested on drug charges. Ten years later, African Americans were still 12 percent of the total population, but made up more than 40 percent of all people busted for narcotics. Still more remarkable, over 60 percent of all narcotics convictions were (and are) for African Americans. Overall, drug arrests almost doubled in the late eighties: 1985 saw roughly eight hundred thousand people taken down on drug charges; by 1989 that number had shot up to almost 1.4 million.

By the late eighties, lawmakers and the media were locked in a symbiotic hysteria--a political perpetual motion machine--and the drug war juggernaut was steaming ahead at full throttle. The racist PR of this onslaught reached it zenith with the Hill & Knowlton produced TV ads featuring convicted rapist-murderer Willie Horton who escaped prison while Michael Dukakis was governor. (As Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair remind us, it was Al Gore who first deployed the Willie Horton story during the Democratic primaries.) The 1988 crime bill emerging from this most grotesque of planned panics created, among other things, the cabinet level "drug czar" and pumped millions more in federal funds to police and prison construction. The bill also created a "one strike" policy for public housing. Any tenant caught with even a tiny amount of drugs or paraphernalia is now subject to automatic eviction. One recent victim of this policy was seventy-five-year-old Herman Walker of Oakland, California. A home-care attendant was caught with drug paraphernalia in Walker's apartment so the old man was "kicked to the curb."

The Clinton presidency brought new heights of viciousness. The specter of the Los Angeles riots-which were for the ruling class a frightening psychedelic blast from the past-spurred the New Democrats on in their design and implementation of the most racist and merciless policies yet. Their magnum opus was the 1994 Violent Crime Control And Law Enforcement Act, which offered up a cop's cornucopia of $30.2 billion in federal cash from which we got Clinton's one hundred thousand new police officers, scores of new prisons, and SWAT teams in even small New England towns.