WELCOME TO THE BIG HOUSE
If Alexis de Tocqueville were allowed to time travel to 21st Century America to get a sense of how things turned out, but was only allowed to observe us via the four major broadcast networks’ primetime offerings, his initial impression might be that the number of professions in America had shrunk to four. The blacksmiths, printers, innkeepers, farmers, canal operators, stay-at-home moms and slaves that dotted the 19th Century American landscape are nowhere to be seen on NBC, ABC, Fox, or CBS. de Tocqueville would be left to conclude that a significant minority of Americans are various and sundry medical professionals (which he would certainly see the irony of if allowed to tour actual America and discover 45 million Americans without access to health care), and that a privileged few hundred Americans earn their keep as reality TV contestants. But de Tocqueville would surely surmise that the vast bulk of Americans make a living on opposite sides of the same coin, either solving or committing crime.
de Tocqueville, however, is both dead and French, and even if Michael J. Fox pulled up in my driveway with a Flux Capaciter-equipped Delorean, I am honor bound as an American not to enable French time travel until either Lance Armstrong is elected President of France or a Pepe LePew documentary wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Merci beaucoup Alexis, but on with the discussion.
A quick scan of the primetime listings for said networks this week reveals that 21 different crime dramas filled 26 of the available primetime slots. This total does not even include the primetime news-magazine fare, which this week includes Dateline NBC’s investigation of a mother charged with the murder of her daughter, 60 Minutes’ take on American drug laws and (unrelated) possible terrorist attacks, another Dateline NBC episode dedicated to police pursuit of online predators, and 48 Hours Mystery’s look at a teenage baby-sitter charged with murder (the other newsmagazines, e.g. 20/20 {which should have closed shop when Barbara Walters stepped down; no Mr. Rogers means no Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and the same logic applies here}, did not have their topics listed on the Yahoo TV listings, but I would bet my wife’s dowry that they each bravely creep into hitherto unreported back alleys of American crime).
Here are the current crime dramas available to all Americans (not having a TV disqualifies one as an American), even those too poor to afford cable (although, if you believe what you see on TV, such folks are as likely to appear as subjects on the crown jewel of crime drama TV, Cops, as they are to watch it):
Ø On Sundays catch Cold Case on CBS at 8, about unsolved crimes which are no longer so by the time you tune in Law & Order: Criminal Intent on NBC at 9. L&O:CI establishes Rule One of hit crime dramas: franchise them. There is no such thing as overkill when it’s about killing people, be it by criminals or the state (you can say one thing about America’s death penalty-it sure adds to the suspense in a good crime drama).
Ø Monday kicks off with 24 on Fox, the whole appeal of which is that its star crime fighter is a former big-screen actor; Kiefer Sutherland puts everything into his role as agent Jack Bauer because he must in every scene prove that he is better than a TV actor. The suspense of this high wire act carries the show; if Sutherland blinks, the whole thing crumbles. The fact that Sutherland is on season 5 of this show and shows no sign of letting up on the Gary-Wiliams-during-a-Terps-game-intensity leads me to conclude that he is either on drugs or a robot sent back from the future. At 10, Tivo Medium, an obscure NBC offering whose central conceit is psychic crime fighting (and is, inevitably, billed as based on a real life psychic crime fighter- you could not have a serious crime drama based on psychic powers without linking it to reality- NBC should just turn it into the comedy it is aching to be and they might have a hit on their hands), while you watch CSI:Miami, another example of Rule One in which David Caruso, after a miserable go of it on the big screen, is like Rick Pitino comfortably returning to the college sidelines after flopping with the Celtics. Keifer Sutherland is USC’s Pete Carrol, somewhat successful in the big leagues, dominant after demotion to the minors, and obviously conflicted about the simultaneous urges to continue dominance and to bet the house on a triumphant return to the bigs.
Ø Tuesday opens with CBS’ NCIS at 8, which appears to exist solely to attract confused viewers who thought they were tuning in to CSI. CBS follows up with Criminal Minds at 9, featuring FBI agents who attempt to stop crime before it occurs, which (like the Tom Cruise vehicle Minority Report of 2002), exists to support the twin post 9/11 American practices of profiling and pre-emptive war to prevent terrorism before it occurs. Another version of NBC’s ubiquitous franchise, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, cashes in again for NBC at 10. And who can resist the holy trinity of James Spader, Candice Bergen, and William Shatner at 10 on ABC’s Boston Legal. Shatner alone, as ever, is worth the price of admission.
Ø Wednesday plays fast and loose with the crime drama rules, opening with NBC’s E-Ring at 8, which styles itself as a military drama, but is actually a cop show in soldier’s clothing featuring those world police also known as the US military. Fox’s tired take on forensic science, Bones, airs at 9. Ten o’clock on Wednesday is crime drama’s witching hour, as three out of four networks bring the heat. The original, legendary Law&Order, which out of respect for its gravitas should only be watched in syndication after aging like a fine wine, airs on NBC (you just know there was a moment after Friends finally gave up the ghost that NBC considered filling its entire prime-time lineup with versions of Law&Order; perhaps an episode of Law&Order could be devoted to uncovering what stopped them, as the rest of NBC’s lineup is nothing short of criminal). Counterpunching with their own heavyweight franchise, CBS offers CSI:NY, whose psychological underpinning is investigating the crime scene that is New York after 9/11. Knowing they are toast, ABC throws Invasion to the lions at 10. Invasion features a park ranger fighting crime committed by aliens of the outer space variety. Like NBA coaches, Invasion was clearly hired to be fired. If only they had the park ranger busting aliens from Latin America….
Ø Thursday brings us to CSI on CBS at 9, which has the dual distinction of launching a franchise and, even more impressively, founding an entire sub-genre, the forensic crime drama. Set in Las Vegas, CSI, like its cousin CSI:NY, plays off of its home city’s status as crime scene; this time the crime is the emptying of American wallets into the coffers of the gambling industry. Without A Trace, at 10 on CBS, expands the forensic investigation theme to include FBI psychological profiling to track missing persons; its legitimacy as programming sanctions the government’s attempts to identify terrorists via profiling.
Ø Friday opens with inJustice on ABC at 9, which shall be discussed at length below. CBS counters with Close To Home at 9, a legal drama interested in suburban crime whose take-home message is surely that crime is everywhere. CBS follows up with Numb3rs at 10, another take on forensics, as police use mathematics to solve crime. Much like Medium, Numb3rs should have been a half-hour sitcom, perhaps starring John Larroquette and definitely set in Cleveland. Math, done right, could be funny. But it will never be sexy.
Ø As if all that was not enough, Saturday is generally a reprise of the week in crime. NBC offers reruns-cum-grand-finale, dishing out a two hour Law & Order: Criminal Intent as main course with an hour of Law & Order as dessert. At 9, CBS counters with a rerun from its own franchise, as CSI:NY clocks overtime. All the while Fox is busy stirring a potion of reality, crime, law enforcement, and sub-cultural lifestyles to bring you that sad documentary of America’s desperate underbelly known as Cops at 8 and 8:30. Finally, at 9 on Fox, we close the week with America’s Most Wanted: America Fights Back, which distills the logic of the crime drama to its forced choice essence: fight or commit crime. Join McGruff’s pack or he will take a bite out of you.
This guided tour of the major broadcast networks’ primetime offerings does not include syndicated programming, TV news, movies, newspapers, internet etc., each of which flood the information superhighway with equal measures of crime content. The manageable size of network primetime allows the suffocating sprawl of crime based programming, which covers primetime like kudzu on a Carolina pine, to act as microcosmic representative of a macrocosm obsessed with crime. The American obsession with crime, as displayed in all of our various media, might simply make for passable escapist entertainment if it was not paired with a compulsion (in clinical language compulsions = actions, obsessions = thoughts) of equal proportions. America has a collective Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when it comes to crime, and it is the compulsive component of American OCD that puts the bite in McGruff’s bark.
Americans have been compulsively locking one another behind bars for the last twenty-five years in a process some have termed the criminalization of America. But before cataloguing this process, a close reading of two new primetime network programs reveals that the criminalization of America, much like Francis Fukuyama’s history, has come to an end. History has ended for Fukuyama because history’s evolution has reached what he deems its end-point, liberal democracy (of course, Fukuyama forgot to tell the Muslims). The criminalization of America has reached its own end-point, America-as-prison. Fortunately, you don’t have to read Fukuyama to receive this wisdom, you just have to turn on your TV and tune in Prison Break or inJustice.
Fox is in the final year of an eight year contract for the right to broadcast National Football League games of the NFC variety. For this right Fox paid the NFL $4.4 billion (a figure roughly equivalent to the 2004 gross domestic product of Madagascar). The NFL’s rates continue to rise, as Fox will shell out $4.2 billion to broadcast games for the next 6 years (it doesn’t take the math experts at Numb3rs to realize that the NFL is accumulating Serious Money, putting the NFL, after you include the fees from 3 other networks, on par with Harvard, whose endowment topped $25 billion in September ’05, slotting Harvard between the GDP for Bulgaria and Guatemala; if Harvard doesn’t cure cancer or land on Venus by 2050 they should have to give the money to Yale). There is no way that Fox can make a profit from the advertising money they receive for running commercials during NFL games. $4.4 billion is just too big a number to match with the limited amount of NFL programming that Fox can air (6 hours per Sunday, 16 weeks per year, plus 3 more weeks for playoffs, and, every 3 years, the Super Bowl- that’s the sum total). But Fox is in the business of making money. Fox, unlike the US government, does not specialize in corporate welfare (which Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) estimates at $125 billion annually), so you can bet the bean counters at Fox have calculated down to the cent what they can expect to profit from broadcasting the NFL.
All of which brings us, at last, to Prison Break (whose absence from the list above is due to a current brief hiatus-it is due back on 3-20-06). Fox pays the NFL its pound of flesh because the NFL delivers the demographic Fox desires most, young affluent males. Chevy and Budweiser buy ad time on NFL games to access this demographic, which is nice for Fox, but Fox’s real agenda is the promotion of its own primetime lineup. I spent Sunday afternoons this fall as I have since the second grade. After a brief, ultimately unsatisfying early flirtation with the Minnesota Vikings, autumn Sundays have been devoted to watching my Washington Redskins (and I know the mascot is racist, but like a gay Catholic who refuses to leave the church he loves in the hopes of reforming it from within, I stick with the Redskins in the hope that someday they will proudly sport a redskin potato on the side of their helmet; which idea I swear my college roommate had years before I heard it voiced by Tony Kornheiser). As an NFC squad, the Skins are almost always on Fox, which is how I first became aware of Prison Break. From the promo’s on Fox alone I learned that Prison Break was about a young man choosing to be sent to prison (via a crime, which I learned from the show’s web site was robbing a bank-which was a great choice for audience sympathy because we all aspire to bank robbing in a way that we don’t aspire to, say, carjacking) in order to break out his unjustly imprisoned brother.
While I am usually foaming at the mouth and throwing things at the television during Skins games (my wife has rightly banished me to the basement during games to keep me away from our daughter, lest I frighten her. During the 2004 season when our daughter was a newborn we could never figure out why she was up crying every Sunday night, until the Skins bye week when she was her usual, delightful self. It has been the basement ever since.), Prison Break was such an anomaly that it penetrated my ninja-like focus on the product of Joe Gibbs’ genius (which competitive genius puts Gibbs on my all-time genius Mt. Rushmore with Einstein, Freud, and Lao Tzu). Prison Break pierced my consciousness during a Skins game like nothing has since Joe Theissman’s compound fracture pierced his leg, courtesy of a possibly high Lawrence Taylor, in 1985.
Prison Break shocked me out of my immediate concerns, i.e. the Skins’ lack of a reliable second wide receiver and their inability to generate a pass rush with their defensive front four, by flouting the logic of American crime drama. According to this immutable logic, justice is upheld by putting people in prison. By pursuing justice through the act of breaking people out of prison, Prison Break flips the crime drama script. Prison Break is as radical as the idea of Joe Gibbs allowing all of his opponents to score at will, and winning his fourth Super Bowl as a result (although Joe Gibbs is a born-again Christian, I doubt his faith extends to a belief that the last shall ever be first to hoist the Lombardy Trophy).
As provocative as Prison Break’s emergence onto the primetime scene was, it appeared to be the exception that proves the crime drama rule. Then, it must have been during Monday Night Football, I saw a promo for the new ABC crime drama inJustice, which is about lawyers springing the unjustly imprisoned by overturning their wrongful convictions. inJustice throws traditional crime drama a bone by tacking on a conviction of the real criminals (it certainly could not air on network TV without this addendum), but it is just window dressing. inJustice works not because it locks up criminals, which would make it like every other crime drama and therefore irrelevant, but because its logic of restoring justice by liberating the unjustly imprisoned rests on a fundamental shift in the American experience.
The American experience has heretofore been the game of cops and robbers. To live in America is to play one of the two roles. The game’s twist is that, regardless of what it says in the Declaration of Independence, all robbers are not born equal. The cops actually work for one set of “fortunate” robbers, who employ them to arrest and generally intimidate the “less fortunate” robbers. This game went on for decades, and could have gone on indefinitely if the game’s equilibrium had not been disturbed. For decades the fortunate robbers had the cops imprison just enough of the less fortunate robbers to keep things under control (i.e. to the fortunate robbers’ liking), as reflected by the relatively stable number of imprisoned Americans. In 1980, this all began to change, as the fortunate robbers began to have their cops imprison more and more of the less fortunate robbers. As more and more of us have been imprisoned, we have become obsessed with crime and the legal machinations that pump out prisoners with all of the efficiency of Henry Ford’s assembly line.
This obsession with the new high stakes version of cops and robbers is written all over our primetime lineup. But Prison Break and inJustice announce that America has passed a tipping point, beyond which our roles as cops and robbers are null and void. Prepare to hand over your black hat in exchange for prison stripes, as we are now all prisoners and prison guards. (My cops and robbers metaphor is obviously cribbed from Marxist theory. I am certainly not a proponent of the miserable results born from the attempt to actualize Marxist theory in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. But in a world where the only alternative to extreme global capitalism is extreme Islamic fundamentalism, and in which the confrontation between the two threatens to engulf us in flames, a Marxist critique suddenly feels like a fresh breeze. Certainly, when Jihad and McWorld {to borrow Benjamin Barber’s delightful turn of phrase} are about to blow each other up, and with Stalin now 50+ years in his grave, a Marxist critique is not only less threatening, it has the clear ring of sanity to it amidst our deepening madness. Marx’s greatest gift to society was not his vision of a classless society, as clearly we are centuries, at least, from that dream. Instead, it was his critique of capitalism, which remains the gold standard, and should be applied liberally and rigorously to our current mess.)
A brief look at the numbers tells the story of what some have called the Criminalization of America. But if we are all already robbers, some of us just better connected, then America, much as the sausage biscuits in my fridge come pre-cooked, comes pre-criminalized. In recognition of this along with the fundamental shift from cops and robbers to prisoners and prison guards, I prefer to call it the Incarceration of America. While reviewing the data that tell this tale, keep in mind the Benjamin Disraeli line made famous by Mark Twain, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” The use of statistics is akin to connecting the dots, which offers infinite possibilities if you forget that there is a pattern to be rigidly followed. This is both liberating, because you may discover something lurking in those dots that you were not supposed to see, and dangerous, as you may be reading into those dots like a Rorschach test. But this danger is preferable to the danger of following the dots as prescribed, which is to effectively put your life on autopilot. With these caveats in mind, it is time to connect the dots freestyle. Just don’t be surprised if the picture that emerges is of you or your neighbor behind bars.
According to the US Bureau of Justice statistics, the number of incarcerated felons (essentially those sentenced to a year or more) remained relatively stable from 1920 to 1980. In 1925 there were approximately 100,000 sentenced felons in the United States. By 1980 this number had only grown to 315,974, a fairly reasonable increase over fifty-five years given the growth in the American population during this period. By the end of 2003, less than twenty-five years later, the number of sentenced felons had increased to 1,470,045. This over four-fold increase in imprisoned Americans since 1980 is even more striking in graphic form, when you can see the prison rate spike like Bush I’s approval rating after Operation Desert Storm. When you include the number of Americans locked up in local jails the number jumps again, to 2,212,475. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does the math and finds that “as of 12/31/03, one in every 140 US residents was confined in a state or federal prison or a local jail.”
To put the Incarceration of America into perspective, consider that the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but now has 25% of the world’s prisoners. In raw numbers, the US now has 2.2 million out of the world’s 9 million prisoners, putting us a comfortable 700,000 prisoners ahead of second place China at 1.5 million, and a solid 1.4 million prisoners ahead of third place Russia’s 820,000. Even more impressively, if this were a World’s Strongest Man competition the US would not only win the honor of lifting more total prisoners than any other nation, the US would also out-lift China and Russia pound-per-pound. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, the United States incarcerates 724 per every 100,000 citizens. Russia lags well behind at 577 per 100,000, and China looks like a 98 pound weakling at 118 per 100,000. With every American incarceration we kick sand in China’s face.
When you add the 4,073,987 Americans on probation and the 774,588 Americans on parole to the 2.2 million Americans incarcerated, you get the staggering sum of 6,934,200 Americans under the control of the US judicial system, which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Switzerland (and that’s as of 2003; the numbers only keep rising). And just to get a taste of how the incarceration of America weighs even heavier on people of color (which would take another whole essay to tackle in depth), consider that 12% of all Black males in their 20’s were incarcerated in 2003, and one out of every three (32%) Black males in this age group were under control of the judicial system by 1995.
The origin of the incarceration of America is no great mystery. It is not as if the Soviets managed to contaminate our water supply in 1980, turning us all into lawless thugs. The moral fabric of America did not somehow spontaneously combust in 1980, sending us all out into the streets to commit 400% more crime. But Ronald Reagan did enter office in 1981. There has long been a so-called War-On-Drugs in America, but it went nuclear under President Reagan. Reagan promised morning in America, but here are the cold, hard facts of nuclear winter in America:
Ø According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ), American drug arrests tripled from 1980 to 1997.
Ø CJCJ reports that “fully 76% of the increase in admissions to America’s prisons from 1978 to 1996 was attributable to non-violent offenders, much of that to persons incarcerated for drug offenses.”
Ø Continuing with the theme of non-violent prisoners, CJCJ found that “in 1997, 4 out of 5 drug arrests (79.5%) were for possession, with 44% of those arrests for marijuana offenses.”
Ø “While the number of persons imprisoned in state institutions for violent offenders nearly doubled from 1980 to 1997, the number of non-violent offenders has tripled, and the number of persons imprisoned for drug offenses has INCREASED ELEVEN-FOLD.” (CJCJ, but with my italics and caps for emphasis)
Ø “Nearly one in four persons imprisoned in the US is imprisoned for a drug offense. The number of persons behind bars for drug offenses is roughly the same as the entire prison and jail population in 1980.” (CJCJ, but again my emphasis)
No reasonable thinker could deny the correlation between the War-On-Drugs and incarceration rates in the United States. Asserting this correlation is powerful in and of itself, but stopping at such an assertion leaves even more fertile ground untilled. The War-On-Drugs is actually a War-On-Us, making incarcerated non-violent drug offenders prisoners of war. To end this war and liberate incarcerated America requires an understanding of the origins of this war on Americans, why it has flourished for twenty-five years, and how it is allowed to continue today. To get the whole sordid picture there yet remain a few dots to connect.
The incarceration of America and the War-On-Drugs triangulate with a simultaneous, third phenomena, an upsurge in the Concentration of American Wealth. Together they form a Bermuda Triangle into which American sanity has vanished. But before setting a direct course into the middle of this triangle, with the hope of locating our collective sanity and hauling it back to the mainland (I would sooner cheer for the Dallas Cowboys than utter the slightly creepy “Homeland”), here are the facts on the concentration of American wealth:
Ø “In the twenty-two years between 1976 and 1998, the share of the nation’s private wealth held by the top 1% nearly doubled, going from 22% to 38%.” (Office of Social Justice, Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minnesota {OSJASPM})
Ø “In 1982 the wealthiest 400 individuals in the Forbes 400 owned $92 billion. By 2000 their wealth increased to over $4.2 trillion.” (OSJASPM)
Ø According to United For a Fair Economy, the change in average household net worth for the top 1% of Americans was +42.2%, while the change for the bottom 40% was -76.3%.
Ø “The richest 1% of Americans now own more than the bottom 90% of Americans.” (OSJASPM)
Ø Against the canard that the great number of Americans invested in the stock market insures a fair distribution of wealth, “over 86% of the value of all stocks and mutual funds, including pensions, was held by the top 10% of households. In 1998, the top 1% of Americans owned 47.7% of all stock.” (OSJASPM)
Ø “Among the industrialized nations, the US has the highest concentration of individual wealth- roughly three times that of the number two nation, Germany.” (UN Human Development Report-1998)
Ø “The top 5% own more than half of all wealth….The top 20% own over 80% of all wealth.” (Edward Wolff- New York University professor of economics)
Ø And, to add a dose of perspective, “Bill Gates alone has as much wealth as the bottom 40% of US households.” (OSJASPM)
You might argue that the Concentration of Wealth is just the American Way, where to the victor goes the spoils. The acceleration of the Concentration of Wealth might seem but a more efficient distribution of the rewards of meritocracy. By this line of reasoning the Concentration of Wealth is the equivalent of infusing the carrot that has spurred American ingenuity and entrepreneurship with healthy growth hormone. Concentration of Wealth thereby ensures a steadily growing economy for all. But the United States economy grew at a fantastic rate for much of the twentieth century, with no correlating rise in the Concentration of Wealth until the late 70’s. History, as told here by Edward Wolff, puts the lie to trickle-down economics:
“We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976. Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970’s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970’s…. Up until the early 1970’s, the US actually had lower wealth inequality than Great Britain, and even than a country like Sweden. But things have really turned around over the last 25 or 30 years. In fact, a lot of countries have experienced lessening wealth inequality over time. The US is atypical in that inequality has risen so sharply over the last 25 or 30 years.”
The Concentration of Wealth in the hands of the few has nothing to do with extending benefits to all Americans via a healthy economy, and everything to do with concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. It is what it is, you might say. But the Concentration of Wealth’s being is not the result of Zen not doing. The concentrator’s of wealth have been ever so active, building foundation and walls out of the Incarceration of America and the War-On-Drugs, atop which rests their inestimable wealth like a roof. (But if you must have some Zen imagery: The Incarceration of America is the Concentration of Wealth’s meditative breath, and the War-On-Drugs is the very air it breathes.)
But I am getting ahead of myself, so first to connect those dots. Going back to the Cops and Robbers metaphor for America, I have a deeply cynical view of the relatively stable rate of incarceration and the downward trend in the Concentration of Wealth that obtained from the 1920’s through the 1970’s. While it is tempting to believe that certain crimes, like rape or murder, inherently equal incarceration (or, in America, the death penalty) the truth is that you could have a society in which there was no incarceration, even for rapists and murderers. Not that rapists and murderers would go unpunished, or that society would not protect itself from them, but that incarceration is but one answer among many to these problems. (I remember an episode of The Twilight Zone, I think it was the more recent version of the show, in which a man found guilty of a crime was punished with a brand on his forehead which directed all others to completely ignore his existence; the punishment was nothing less than soul crushing.)
Incarceration is not a given. However, once you institute incarceration as the default punishment for crime, you can incarcerate either all, some, or none of your citizenry according to how you define crime. For example, you could incarcerate everyone who speeds in their car, as speed does indeed kill; since everyone speeds, everyone would be in jail. Of course this would not work, because someone has to guard the prisoners, but you get the idea. There is no Platonic Form of incarceration floating out in the ether to which we should be aspiring.
The fundamental question in play here is whether incarceration is primarily an instrument of social control, or an instrument of justice. The understanding that incarceration is not a given, that its default status as punishment for crime is, at its core, strictly arbitrary, informs my stance. But the nefarious possibilities that open, like Pandora’s Box, the moment you give one set of homo sapiens the keys to lock up the others, is, for me, the deciding factor. These possibilities, e.g. the mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, or e.g. the legal bridling of one in three young Black males, are exactly what makes incarceration, and its cousins probation and parole, such an effective tool for social control. If justice is blind, then a hypothetically just system of incarceration would necessarily be blind to differences of class and race. Here in the real world, incarceration makes an extravagant living as a growth industry by exploiting class and race. I have no doubts: Incarceration is first and foremost, or as our friends down under (who were originally a penal colony) would say, well and truly an instrument of social control.
With incarceration unmasked as an instrument of social control, the remaining task is to apply this understanding to the period of American history here under scrutiny. Acknowledging incarceration’s true function Re. social control underscores my earlier argument that the relatively flat rate of incarceration from 1920 to 1980 reflected a delicate balancing point. The rate at which the powers-that-be in America incarcerated their fellow citizenry was just enough to secure their grasp on the levers of power. Incarcerating significantly fewer Americans would have been to lift the foot off of the neck of the man pinned to the ground, in which case he might fight back. Incarcerating significantly more Americans would be to crush your foot into the man’s neck and cut off his air. With his life in the balance the man on the ground might find the strength of the truly desperate and go berzerker. The delicate point of balance was incarcerating just enough Americans to keep them on the ground underfoot, but not so many that they would revolt out of desperation. From 1920 until1980 the balance point held, and the powers-that-be kept their hands firmly on the levers of control.
But by the mid-1970’s the steadily decreasing concentration of American wealth, certainly the result of federal social programs such as FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, must have had the powers-that-be gripping their levers ever tighter in fear that they might be about to lose their grasp. Something had to be done, something to stem the flow of wealth to the other 90% of America, and, if possible, redirect the flow of wealth back to its accustomed home. Most importantly, something had to be done to keep the levers in the right hands. Enter, stage right, the War-On-Drugs and the Incarceration of America.
I want to be very explicit about what I am not saying as I complete the picture. There are those who argue that in the 1980’s the US Government, courtesy of the CIA, allowed crack cocaine to be brought to the streets of urban America by Nicaragua’s Contras, in order to raise money for the Contras’ war in Nicaragua. This basic story, which is not all that surprising if you recall what Ollie North was up to in the Middle East to fund the very same Contras (in an age when we are so sensitive to terrorism it is important to note that the US-funded Contras were basically a terrorist operation, but that is a subject for another day), has been spun into a conspiracy theory which holds that the US Government proactively introduced and distributed crack cocaine onto the streets of urban America.
The problem with such grand conspiracy theories is not only that they are inaccurate (although, again, the original story of a limited CIA-Contra-Crack connection appears to be true), but that they serve to distract attention from the far subtler but equally effective methods used by those in power to bend circumstances to their will. Those who hope to uncover a smoking gun which proves that the US Government actively spread crack in urban America are chasing a pie in the sky. Efforts to understand the abuse of power in America are not as simple as going from point A to point B, for example believing that since in one case the CIA allowed crack into America than the US government must therefore be a drug dealer. The tactics used by the powers-that-be to secure their privileges are slightly more complex. Their basic logic, as we shall see, is to mask the protection of their privileges in the sheep’s clothing of protecting everyone else’s best interests. These tactics are in the best hiding place ever conceived, right in front of our noses. Decoding the logic of these tactics is the Lasik eye surgery necessary to see what is staring you right in the face.
Having established that the US Government does not peddle street drugs, it is time to unpack the insidious methods it does use to promote the interests of the few over the many. When crack cocaine hit the streets of urban America in the early 1980’s the US Government had many choices in confronting the crisis; the War-On Drugs, like incarceration, is not a given. The primary decision to be made was whether to approach the problem from a public health or a criminal justice paradigm. There are no magic bullets, but the appropriate choice to mitigate the effects of substance abuse was obvious then, and even more obvious now after twenty-five years of the War-On-Drugs with nary a dent in the problem. So, if the obvious choice to confront America’s drug problem was ignored, then the obvious question is who benefits from the choice that was made?
Let’s go back to the metaphor of the Man with his foot on our necks. Recall the Man’s quandary, he can not press his foot any harder on our neck without risking our revolt. In the late 1970’s the powers-that-be were not in a position to press harder, to take the risk of reversing the slow decline in wealth concentration. In fact, it looked like they might finally be slipping off of the foothold of our necks. The powers-that-be, like ticket-less Deadheads, were in need of a miracle. The choice to frame drugs as an enemy rather than illness, and the ensuing declaration of War-On-Drugs, was like pulling Excalibur from its stone for the powers-that-be. They have had a sword to our neck ever since.
The War-On-Drugs is, like a light saber, an elegant weapon. This light saber resembles Darth Maul’s double-bladed piece (which light saber was the only cool element in the entire disastrous prequel trilogy). One blade of the saber cuts passively. The War-On-Drugs does nothing to heal the societal wounds of drug addiction, so all the symptoms of the plague of drug abuse remain untreated. Great swaths of urban America lie in virtual ruins from the ravages of drugs and the drug trade. These are the very communities which, if they had been helped rather than criminalized, would have remained whole. But in their wholeness this “bottom 40%” would never have stood by while their share of the American pie shrunk 76% while the “top 1%”’s share ballooned another 42%. After drugs, and especially after the War-On-Drugs, a once vital urban America is now too shattered and broken to put up a substantial fight, even as the blade now punctures its windpipe. The social safety net that directly benefited the “bottom 40%” has been largely dismantled in their greatest hour of need. (If you doubt that much of urban America resembles a bombed out war zone, you are welcome to drive with me through west Baltimore; I assure you it will end such doubts.)
As if that was not enough, the saber’s other blade cuts actively. If anyone appears threatening to the powers-that-be, it is angry young Black males. Filled with righteous anger, these Black males might rise up with their conscience-plagued White allies, just as they did in the Jim Crow south, and thwart the re-concentration of American wealth. (Martin Luther King Jr. may have been allowed to end Jim Crow, but is it any coincidence he was assassinated on the eve of his Poor People’s Campaign? I am not immune to all conspiracy theories.) With one in three young Black males under the control of the criminal justice system, courtesy of the War-On-Drugs, it is safe to say that this threat has been sufficiently blunted.
A versatile weapon, the War-On-Drugs also resembles Captain America’s shield, offering, amidst the carnage, the cover that the US Government is doing something about the drug problem. But blood from said carnage drips from the patriotically engraved shield; the blade-edged shield can be flung (like James Bond’s enemy Odd Job’s bowler hat) to maim all in its path before returning to Captain America like a boomerang.
The dots connect to form a triangle, one suspiciously like the pyramid depicted on our one dollar bill. The War-On-Drugs and the resulting Incarceration of America form the base angles of this pyramid. At the peak, separated by a never-to-be breached gap, rests the Top 1% and their concentration of wealth. A gigantic, disembodied eye looks ever outward in all directions, as the Top 1% has been entirely consumed by the hyper-vigilant guarding of their wealth.
Think all of this is impossible in a democracy? It now takes on average in excess of $800,000 to run a race for the US House of Representatives. The cost of a 2006 US Senate campaign will run about $10 million, and if you hope to unseat an incumbent you will have to outspend your opponent by double (both facts courtesy of the University of Washington’s communications department; the House number was drawn from MSN Encarta). And, according to The Washington Post, over 34,785 registered lobbyists now haunt Washington, DC, spending $2.1 billion in lobbying money to influence the votes of our elected decision-makers. To whose interests are these decision-makers responding? Chances are the 0.2% of American wealth that the “bottom 40%” controls does not buy them very much access on Capitol Hill.
I can not but also note that the Incarceration of America has only deepened with our response to the tragedy of September 11, 2001. President Bush famously stated that we were attacked because the enemy hates our freedoms. If this is so, then one devastating terrorist attack has already won the day for the enemy. It must be satisfying for the enemy to sit back and watch us dismantle the very freedoms which President Bush asserts they so passionately despise. To wit, there can be no more fundamental right in a democracy than the right to a fair trial. Post 9/11 America has witnessed the indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” without trial, some of them US citizens. And nothing is more anathema to a free and open society than a Secret Police. With the recent revelation that the National Security Agency, per President Bush directive, has begun spying directly on US citizens on US soil, this slippery slope has now been greased. That these developments do not shock the population (I have heard no mention of them outside of the news media, i.e. from my fellow citizens- I have heard plenty about Dancing With the Stars; it appears they allow TV in prison), is testimony to how quickly we have grown accustomed to life behind bars.
Just so I am clear, I do not pretend that the defense of our country from those who would strike us is a matter to be taken lightly. But if we believe that freedom is at risk, we should do everything we can to preserve and strengthen the civil liberties and constitutional rights that make up the bulk of these freedoms. Sacrificing our civil liberties and constitutional rights to save our freedom is like cutting off our foot to save our toe. Perhaps we will be safer from terrorist attack if we do so, but in securing our safety from the enemy by these methods, the terrorists’ very goal of crushing freedom will become what deTocqueville would call a fait accompli. By the bye, it is very safe in solitary confinement. Perhaps that is where we are all headed.
This has been a lot to glean from the primetime lineup. Perhaps Prison Break and inJustice are just television shows, and nothing else. But my hope is that these two TV shows are the first glimmer of light on the horizon after a twenty-five year nightmare. These otherwise forgettable crime dramas may signal that America is at last waking up to the fact that we are all behind bars, together. In that case, the Incarceration of America could be the long dark night of the soul necessary prior to a collective spiritual awakening that will see not just a reversal of the concentration of wealth, but the birth of a deep seated Democratic Spirit that could shine forth to the world as a genuine example of democracy in action. At such a time I could embrace the goal of “spreading democracy”, as presumably it would not involve dropping bombs on the people to whom democracy was being spread.
I hope I am not reading too much into these TV shows. But just in case I am, I think I will learn to play the harmonica.
