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Ed Webb

The Making of the American Gulag | Boston Review - 0 views

bostonreview.net/...schrader-making-american-gulag

US USA ColdWar policing prison police authoritarianism democracy

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Mar 20 - Cached
  • Imagine an empire with a massive security sector, one barely accountable to the democratic will. This coercive system, though appearing self-perpetuating, represents an elite echelon’s efforts to protect and consolidate power. It employs so many people that its maintenance and funding is necessary, not because of the dictates of national security, but simply to keep all its workers from becoming “superfluous.” With a repressive apparatus notorious for its abuses, this security sector fosters the very domestic opposition it is designed to combat.
  • this description actually comes from George Kennan’s foundational article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, under the byline X, in 1947. Kennan, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the rhetoric of the Cold War in a way that made it seem preordained, inevitable. He is most often remembered for calling out the supposedly innate qualities of Russian culture—spiritual deprivation, cynicism, and conformity—upon which communist ideology had been grafted. This combination, he argued, was destined to conflict with the innate qualities of Americanism—its freedom of worship, its emphasis on individuality, and its support of business. But the dominance of the security sector was another persistent motif in Kennan’s work; he dedicated five paragraphs of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to the “organs of suppression.” Secret police lurked everywhere, the narrative went, and prisons were the Soviet Union’s primary feature. By 1953, under Joseph Stalin, 2.6 million people were locked up in the gulag and over 3 million more were forcibly resettled— a total of around 3 percent of the population kept under state control. Kennan’s point, like those of other foundational Cold War tracts, was clear: unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was brutally repressive.
  • The pathway toward the permanent war economy of NSC 68’s vision was not direct. It was contested in Congress and in public opinion. Critics rightly feared the emergence of a “garrison state,” a term that has been largely lost today.
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  • Today 2.3 million people are locked up in the United States, and an additional 4.5 million are on parole or probation, for a total of around 2 percent of the population under state control. While much has been written about how legal changes and racial politics led to the carceral state, it is also helpful to see how Cold War confrontation further contributed to the United States’ own gulag
  • to find a way for fiscal conservatives to accede to the new appropriations that capital-intensive war-making would require in the atomic age, it was necessary for New Dealers to give up hope for continuously robust social-welfare appropriations
  • New tax increases would cover the costs of coercion abroad but not of health, education, and welfare at home.
  • The result was the military-industrial complex, as Dwight Eisenhower called it in his 1961 farewell speech. He wanted to highlight the entanglement of the military, arms manufacturers, and members of Congress, which he felt was imperiling democratic decision-making over the size of the military, its deployments, and its ever-increasing budget. Eisenhower also worried that a tradition of individual liberty would be difficult to reconcile with a national security state. But while his critique and terminology were indeed useful, Eisenhower was concerned only with the threat from abroad, failing entirely to see what the security state was already accomplishing at home.
  • Emily Rosenberg has called it the “central dilemma” of NSC 68: “how to advocate ‘freedom’ by greatly enlarging the state’s capacity for coercion.”
  • Eisenhower adversary General Maxwell Taylor urged Kennedy to adopt this New Frontier policy, which, in practice, meant a focus on “counterinsurgency,” with police forces as the “first line of defense” against mob-ridden anarchies around the world, particularly those ginned up by subversives.
  • The goal was to make police in dozens of countries the preeminent tool in the fight against communist subversion. The Office of Public Safety’s advisors were experienced law enforcement experts, many of whom spent the immediate aftermath of World War II in the occupations in Germany, Italy, Korea, and Japan. After observing authoritarian police and prison systems firsthand, these experts developed a contrasting commitment to political independence of police and aimed to achieve it through more decentralized organizational reform, technical upgrading, and internal discipline. Their goal was to bolster and educate security forces in “developing countries,” and thanks to the constant stream of funding NSC 68 inaugurated, police trainees from other countries quickly learned about “police service under autocratic rule.”
  • The purpose of public safety assistance, advisors insisted, was to enhance democracy. And they aimed to foster respect for constituted authority among the citizenry by making the police efficient and technically adept.
  • with no trace of irony, these lessons detailed how Soviet secret police sent advisors to “vassal” countries to “pull the strings” of the local security apparatus.
  • Many of these aid-recipient countries—from Uruguay to the Philippines—went on to practice harsh forms of policing while paramilitary death squads emerged in others, such as Guatemala. The U.S. image of Soviet repression was mirrored in U.S. client states.
  • At the very moment the National Security Act took effect, another crucial document in the history of U.S. law enforcement emerged. The President’s Committee on Civil Rights had been investigating how law enforcement could safeguard civil rights, especially black civil rights, in the United States. The committee’s report to President Harry Truman, To Secure These Rights, advocated for what Mary Dudziak has labeled “cold war civil rights.” It was necessary to ameliorate racial inequality, this argument went, because the Soviet Union frequently invoked lynching and racial abuses to highlight U.S. hypocrisy
  • by framing the problem as arbitrary and as growing out of lawlessness, the committee effectively ruled out the systematic and legally enshrined character of racial abuse. What made it predictable, rather than arbitrary, was its consistent object: racially subjugated peoples. By diminishing the structural aspects of the abuse of minorities, liberal law enforcement reformers opened the door to a wider misunderstanding of what needed to be reformed. The response the committee endorsed—to enact procedural reforms and modernize law enforcement in the United States—rode the high tide of police professionalization initiatives that would crest in the following decades, and which called for a well-endowed, federally sanctioned anticrime apparatus. As historian Elizabeth Hinton and Murakawa have argued, this effort to reform law enforcement and codify its procedures actually made it more institutionally robust and less forgiving, contributing to the country’s march toward mass incarceration.
  • For liberal reformers, injustice looked like a lynch mob. For many police experts, steeped in Cold War ideology and trained in counterintelligence, it looked like the Soviet secret police.
  • the negative model of the authoritarian state was misleading: it may have prevented centralized dictatorial rule, but it left police power largely insulated
  • The 1968 anticrime bill thus followed a familiar Cold War model: it funded new federally coordinated riot-control training programs—training that mimicked what the Office of Public Safety urged overseas—and it authorized the purchase of huge supplies of tear gas as well as other technical instruments, from radios to helicopters to tanks.
  • the “prison-industrial complex” was born out of its zeal for spending on the penal sector. Strategic planning of the best way to utilize those resources fell second. Moreover, by leaning so heavily on Cold War rationales, elected officials and law enforcement leaders started treating criminals as interchangeable with political subversives, thus eschewing rehabilitation efforts
  • The War on Crime was a creature of federalism. Federal appropriations for upgrading police, courts, and prisons came embroidered with a commitment that no usurpation of local authority or discretion would result. Policing remained decentralized. Even when police killed unarmed people during unrest, causing public complaint, police were protected; outrage could be an orchestrated communist plot, the thinking went, intended to take control over law enforcement by undermining its autonomy
  • By insulating police from federal oversight or control, while also affording them increased resources, particularly for capital-intensive repressive technologies, the War on Crime allowed the underlying structure of Jim Crow policing to persist.
  • The prison-industrial complex of the present is marked by aggressive and technologically advanced policing, brutal conditions of incarceration, civic exclusion, and fiscal penalties that extends far beyond time served. It has metastasized despite crime declining in the same period.
  • as crime continues to decline and appropriations for police continue to grow, the question of democratic control over the instruments of public safety becomes urgent, for public safety appears now to be the instrument for the control of democracy. Law enforcement leaders have become, as Kennan claimed they were in Russia, “masters of those whom they were designed to serve.”
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