The Making of the American Police State

Wednesday, July 29, 2015
By Paul Martin

By Christian Parenti
Global Research
July 29, 2015

How did we end up with millions behind bars and police armed like soldiers?

How did we get here? The numbers are chilling: 2.2 million people behind bars, another 4.7 million on parole or probation. Even small-town cops are armed like soldiers, with a thoroughly militarized southern border.

The common leftist explanation for this is “the prison-industrial complex,” suggesting that the buildup is largely privatized and has been driven by parasitic corporate lobbying. But the facts don’t support an economistic explanation. Private prisons only control 8 percent of prison beds. Nor do for-profit corporations use much prison labor. Nor even are guards’ unions, though strong in a few important states, driving the buildup.

The vast majority of the American police state remains firmly within the public sector. But this does not mean the criminal justice buildup has nothing to do with capitalism. At its heart, the new American repression is very much about the restoration and maintenance of ruling class power.

American society and economy have from the start evolved through forms of racialized violence, but criminal justice was not always so politically central. For the better part of a century after the end ofReconstruction in the 1870s, the national incarceration rate hovered at around 100 to 110 per 100,000. But then, in the early 1970s, the incarceration rate began a precipitous and continual climb upward.

The great criminal justice expansion began as a federal government reaction to the society-wide rebellion of the late 1960s. It was a crucible in which white supremacy, corporate power, capitalism, and the legitimacy of the US government, at home and abroad, all faced profound crisis. The Civil Rights Movement had transmogrified into the Black Power movement.

“Third World” Marxist and nationalist groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords began arming. During riots in Newark, Watts, and Chicago, black people shot back at cops and the National Guard; in Detroit, urban “hillbillies” — poor white Southerners who had also been displaced by the mechanization of agriculture — fought alongside their black neighbors. Transwomen, drag queens, and gay men fought the cops who came to raid the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Women organized, filed successful lawsuits, and staged large protests against discrimination.

Even the US Army was in rebellion. In Vietnam draftee insubordination took the form of increasing drug use, combat refusals, and even “fragging” — the murder of overly gung-ho officers.

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