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

Monthly Review, July, 2001 by Christian Parenti

Thus the new criminal justice system does an excellent job of destroying the social fabric upon which any future political rebellion would rely for coherence at the same time as it has created a system of surveillance and repression that is already being used against a new protest movement. The courts--retooled by a generation of conservative judicial appointments and crazed case law--now function as social abettors, in which the poor and the dark skinned are shunted off to a concrete hell with industrial efficiency. Left behind are broken families, more addiction, more disease, more illiteracy, and thus a more docile society. All this for the political security of capital. This is how class struggle is waged from above.

Christian Parenti teaches sociology at the New College of California in San Francisco and is the author of Lockulown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (Verso, 2000).

Notes

(1.) For a full version of this argument see the last chapter in, Christian Parenti, Lockdown America:(Verso, 2000).

(2.) "Goldwater's Acceptance Speech to GOP Convention," New York Times, July 17 1964.

(3.) Richard Nixon, "If Mob Rule Takes Hold in the US: A Warning from Richard Nixon," U.S. New and World Report, August 15, 1966. 5

(4.) Quoted in Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 28.

(5.) H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside The Nixon White House (New York: P. G. Putman's Sons, 1994), 53; quoted in Baum, op citain.

(6.) George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 82.

(7.) Quoted in Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996). 137-138

The last decade has...seen the highest rates and fastest increase in mass incarceration in the history of the Country. These glaring facts, in conjunction with the current trends of the increasing concentration of national minority people in the prisons and the every increasing sensitivity of the prison system to the demands of monopoly capitalism, insure that the prison problem in America can only get worse....Reactionary politicians play on the fears and worries of the people about street and other crimes. Their proposals for still more repression, however, provide no solution. Longer prison sentences and harsher treatment of prisoners clearly have no bearing on the root cause of the growth of crime: unemployment and racism....Short of a major social transformation, militant struggle against racism and for a new WPA (or its equivalent) is the only meaningful approach to the reduction of crime and the prison population.

Richard D. Vogel, "Capitalism and Incarceration," Monthly Review, March 1983.