In the wake of the 1965 Watts uprising, Daryl Gates, who would later become Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, called for a great leap forward in policing, for a new “military-corporate” model with the technological edge of the Defense Department and the managerial expertise of the large corporation.

Just as the Watts uprising was an early harbinger of the emerging social revolution of this era, the paramilitary style of policing introduced by Gates’ mentor, William Parker, Chief of the LAPD during the rebellion, was a harbinger of the wide spread military style of policing increasingly applied today as American society is undergoing profound change.

Beginning in the 1970’s, revolutionary changes in technology produced revolutionary changes in the workplace. Computer-driven, digital, robotic, automated production, designed to increase productivity and maximize profits, resulted in the expulsion of human labor from the productive process. As jobs are eliminated, workers find themselves homeless by the millions because they cannot afford housing. More millions are denied access to health care because they cannot afford private insurance. Their children are crammed into the bottom of a two-tiered education system that denies them access to an equal, quality education. From the workers replaced by robotic production, who are cast aside and made valueless to the capitalist class, a new class of dispossessed is emerging.

The state is responding by reorganizing itself as an unrestrained apparatus of force to contain and control the social revolution set in motion by these revolutionary changes in society. The military style of policing imposed on Black and Latino communities is used more and more against other sectors of American society. While most sharply and unjustly targeting Black and Latino communities, police state tactics are becoming common wherever the new class of dispossessed is found, particularly against homeless populations of all colors and nationalities.

The capitalist ruling class has come to view this growing class of dispossessed with open antagonism. The interests of the corporations take precedence over the interests of society as a whole. Anything that interferes with the making of maximum profit is eliminated. The state is being reorganized to annul the social contract, sacrifice democracy, and move toward a fascist solution. Fundamental human rights, denied first to those on the bottom, are being sacrificed for the whole of society in order to secure the economic and political interests of the capitalist class.

Repressive Laws

Managing and controlling the new class of dispossessed is the new paradigm of policing and incarceration. The impoverished low-wage and no-wage class is seen as potentially explosive and must be held in check. As the crisis in society has developed, and poverty has spread to broader and broader sections of society, there has been a steady and consistent process to put in place a system of laws to effect that containment.

The 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act created federal preventive detention to deny bail to defendants, eliminated federal parole, and established asset forfeiture procedures to allow for the seizure of property of accused defendants. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act declared open season on petty dealers and addicts, and disproportionately targeted the youth and African Americans, who in 1990 were only 12 percent of the U.S. population, but comprised 60 percent of all narcotics convictions. In 1985, about 500,000 people were in state and federal prisons; by 1998 that number had swelled to 1.7 million.

President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act put 100,000 more police on the streets, increased penalties for a variety of crimes, and accelerated the war on immigrant workers by doubling the size of the Border Patrol.

As the new system of laws has been put in place, the militarization of the police and the rise of more aggressive policing tactics have proceeded in lockstep. The 1970s marked the first systematic transfers of military technology and materiel to domestic policing; Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) Teams became the vanguard of police militarization. Soldier cops, armed and trained as a paramilitary counter-insurgency force, have become standard practice for everyday policing in America.

Now, even the routine serving of warrants is conducted by these paramilitary units designed to “shock and awe.” Police violence and the use of deadly force is on the increase. Dressed in camouflage, helmets, and bulletproof vests, with attack dogs, grenades, and automatic weapons, and backed up by tanks, armored personnel carriers and helicopters, and often armed with dubious “no-knock” warrants, the police raid homes in the dead of night. A 92 –year old woman was shot to death in such a raid of a home in Vine City, the poorest neighborhood in Atlanta, when it was suspected that drugs were in the house. In addition to the so-called “war on drugs,” the “war on gangs” especially targets African-American and Latino youth.

Prison Industrial Complex

One, two and three-strike laws with long mandatory sentences, laws to try children as adults, the advent of zero-tolerance laws, the rise of “quality-of-life” policing, and the aggressive enforcement of even the most petty of municipal codes, have served to both terrorize the poor and to make Americans the most incarcerated population on the globe.

California alone holds more inmates than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined. The Bureau of Justice reported that in December 2006 over 2.25 million people were incarcerated in America’s jails and prisons. Most of them are poor and disproportionate numbers are African-American and growing numbers of Latin-American immigrants. Another three million people are on parole. The poor are arrested for asking for food, for sitting on a park bench, for jaywalking, or sleeping on the sidewalk. Parole requirements are so repressive that joblessness itself can be grounds to be returned to prison.

As factories close their doors forever, prisons have become a crucial source of jobs. Over 700,000 people are currently employed by U.S. jails and prisons. Prisons and jails have become indispensable to many small towns and rural areas as the sole source of employment and the mainstay of local businesses.

Profit making from Prisons

The commodification, militarization and privatization of prisons and policing have opened up a vital market for capitalist exploitation. The number of private prisons around the country has mushroomed from five to 150 in the last two decades. Texas, the world capital of the private prison industry, now contains 42 private prisons. Specific laws have been passed to create a ready supply of prisoners for private prisons. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), both passed in 1996, created a special population of immigrant prisoners who were effectively segregated from the rest of the prison population because they were turned over by the federal government primarily to the private prisons. By 2002 over 36,000 undocumented workers were so imprisoned, and that process has accelerated since September 11, 2001. Homeland Security swells the ranks of the prison industrial complex, as its budget now exceeds $41 billion, much of which is parceled out in private contracts, often exempted from the bidding process.

Exploiting prison labor by private firms is another aspect of the prison industrial complex. The Federal Prison Industries Enhancement Act of 1979 provided for “joint ventures” with state prisons. UNICOR, for example, employs 18,000 prisoners making over 150 products. Over 72,000 now work in prison industries; in Texas, all prisoners must work, and none are paid. Prisoners derive no benefits from this work experience once released. Unemployment rates for those who have records exceed 50 percent.

Undermining Democracy

As the conditions in the jails and prisons become harsher hellholes of terror, and indigent prisoners are routinely denied due process, conditions are in place for the sacrifice of democracy itself. The Patriot Act has expanded the attack on the poor to all of society, eliminating fundamental rights such as habeas corpus, establishing the legal basis for secret searches and surveillance, and establishing massive databases based upon that surveillance of the whole of society. Torture is now routinely conducted against those accused of terrorism, and secret rendition prisons located throughout the world shield the torturers from view. The military itself increasingly intervenes domestically. The National Guard appeared in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina and has never left. The border with Mexico is being militarized as all undocumented workers are criminalized, and draconian laws on the local level are used to literally hunt down immigrant workers.

American society, founded upon the battle cry for freedom, has now gone full circle. For untold millions, poverty is itself a prison whose inmates are unjustly incarcerated. A society that cannot house, clothe, feed, educate or otherwise provide for the basic needs of its people can no longer call itself free. And when the response of government is to lock up those whom it has already locked out, the battle cry of freedom today can only be for a new society.

 

March.2008.Vol18.Ed2
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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