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

Monthly Review, July, 2001 by Christian Parenti

Two years later, with another election on the way, Clinton gave us the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which massively expanded the use of the death penalty and eviscerated federal habeas corpus. If this law had been in effect years earlier, one of Clinton's favorite movies, Hurricane, would never have been made because Rubin "Hurricane" Carter would have been denied his exonerating retrial. And for the people "inside," that same election year delivered the Prison Litigation Reform Act. This little examined law barred many prisoners from access to the civil courts; helped eliminate prison law libraries; kept liberal judges from imposing meaningful penalties on abusive prison administrators; and stripped lawyers of their ability to receive legal fees when handling prison civil rights suits. The sad election year of 1996 also delivered the ideologically named "Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act," which eliminated the undocumented person's right to due process and helped bring Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) funding up to four billion annually. These were the Clinton administration's demolition devices, strategically placed to take out what little remained for prisoners in the Bill of Rights. The damage from this mid-nineties frenzy of hate is so massive that a full accounting is as yet impossible.

Coinciding with these federal laws came a tsunami of state laws. California made over a thousand changes to its criminal code during the eighties and nineties. Looking back we can see clearly the effects- intentional or otherwise-of this generalized project of repression: racialize the discussion of poverty via the code of crime and then hound the victims with police narc squads, SWAT teams, and "zero tolerance" enforcement; send the INS to raid their homes; and lock up as many as possible for as long as possible.

To recap, criminal justice regulates, absorbs, terrorizes, and disorganizes the poor. At the same time it promulgates racism; demonizing, disenfranchising, and marginalizing ever-larger numbers of brown working-class people; and in so doing it creates pseudo explanations and racialized scapegoats with which to delude downwardly mobile voters; this after all is the very lifeblood of American electoral politics! And most important, prison allows for the economically heuristic effects of mass unemployment without the political destabilization mass poverty can bring. Nor does the new model of control let loose dangerous Great Society style notions of "racial equality" and "social inclusion." These ideological side effects from controlling the poor via co-optation (welfare) were almost as bad as the economic support once offered by the insipient, inadequate, but real American welfare state to the restive working classes. As Reagan's first Attorney General, William French Smith, put it, "The justice department is n ot a domestic agency....It is the internal arm of national defense." [7]

Today, the poor are thoroughly locked-down. Law enforcement has moved to the center of domestic politics; state violence is perhaps more than ever a constant, regular and normal feature of poor people's lives. Police, private security, and closed circuit television secure revitalized city centers; while American ghettos are in political disarray, wracked by poverty, disease, addiction, and engineered illiteracy. When the best and the brightest in the 'hood do organize, the state comes down fast and furious. Take for example, the gang truce movements in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. In each case the political leaders were framed, busted, and replaced by apolitical thugs. This was true for the Vice Lords and the Latin Kings, as well as for the Crips and Bloods.