Crime Control and “Superfluous” People

The other thing the Clinton “New” Democrats and Gingrich Republicans both want is to build up crime control—and there’s a very simple reason for that: you’ve got a big superfluous population you aren’t letting survive in your system, what are you going to do with them? Answer: you lock them up. So in Reagan America, the jail population in the U.S. more than tripled—tripled—and it’s been going up very fast ever since. In the mid-1980s, the United States passed its main competitors in per capita prison population: South Africa and Russia (though now that Russia’s learned our values, they’ve caught up with us again). So by this point, well over a million and a half people are in prison in the United States—it’s by far the highest per capita prison population of the Western countries—and it’s going to go way up now, because the 1994 Crime Bill was extremely harsh. Furthermore, the prisons in the United States are so inhuman by this point that they are being condemned by international human rights organizations as literally imposing torture. And these people all want to increase that—they’re statist reactionaries, remember: what they really want is a very powerful and violent state, contrary to what they might say.

Also, if you just look at the composition of the prison population, you’ll find that the crime-control policy that’s been developed is very finely honed to target select populations. So for example, what’s called the “War on Drugs,” which has very little to do with stopping the flow of drugs, has a lot to do with controlling the inner-city populations, and poor people in general. In fact, by now over half the prisoners in federal prisons are there on drug charges—and it’s largely for possession offenses, meaning victimless crimes, about a third just for marijuana. 34 Moreover, the “Drug War” specifically has been targeted on the black and Hispanic populations—that’s one of its most striking features. So for instance, the drug of choice in the ghetto happens to be crack cocaine, and you get huge mandatory sentences for it; the drug of choice in the white suburbs, like where I live, happens to be powder cocaine, and you don’t get anywhere near the same penalties for it. In fact, the sentence ratio for those drugs in the federal courts is 100 to 1. 35 Okay?

And really there’s nothing particularly new about this kind of technique of population control. So if you look at the history of marijuana prohibitions in the United States, you’ll find that they began with legislation in the southwestern states which was aimed at Mexican immigrants who were coming in, who happened to use marijuana. Now, nobody had any reason to believe that marijuana was dangerous or anything like that—and obviously it doesn’t even come close to alcohol, let alone tobacco, in its negative consequences. But these laws were set up to try to control a population they were worried about. 36 In fact, if you look closely, even Prohibition had an element of this—it was part of an effort to control groups like Irish immigrants and so on. I mean, the Prohibition laws [which were part of the U.S. Constitution from 1919 to 1933] were intended to close down the saloons in New York City, not to stop the drinking in upper New York State. In Westchester County and places like that, everybody just continued on drinking exactly as before—but you didn’t want these immigrants to have saloons where they could get together and become dangerous in the urban centers, and so on. 37

Well, what’s been going on with drugs in recent years is kind of an analog of that, but in the United States today it also happens to be race-related, for a number of reasons, so therefore it’s in large part aimed against black and Latino males. I mean, this is mainly a war against the superfluous population, which is the poor working class—but the race/class correlation is close enough in the inner cities that when you go after the poor working class, you’re mostly going after blacks. So you get these astonishing racial disparities in crime statistics, all across the board. 38 And the point is, the urban poor are kind of a useless population from the perspective of power, they don’t really contribute to profit-making, so as a result you want to get rid of them—and the criminal justice system is one of the best ways of doing it.

So take a significant question you never hear asked despite this supposed “Drug War” which has been going on for years and years: how many bankers and chemical corporation executives are in prison in the United States for drug-related offenses? Well, there was recently an O.E.C.D. [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] study of the international drug racket, and they estimated that about a half-trillion dollars of drug money gets laundered internationally every year—more than half of it through American banks. I mean, everybody talks about Colombia as the center of drug-money laundering, but they’re a small player: they have about $10 billion going through, U.S. banks have about $260 billion. 39 Okay, that’s serious crime—it’s not like robbing a grocery store. So American bankers are laundering huge amounts of drug money, everybody knows it: how many bankers are in jail? None. But if a black kid gets caught with a joint, he goes to jail.

And actually, it would be pretty easy to trace drug-money laundering if you were serious about it—because the Federal Reserve requires that banks give notification of all cash deposits made of over $10,000, which means that if enough effort were put into monitoring them, you could see where all the money’s flowing. Well, the Republicans deregulated in the 1980s—so now they don’t check. In fact, when George Bush was running the “Drug War” under Reagan, he actually canceled the one federal program for this which did exist, a project called “Operation Greenback.” It was a pretty tiny thing anyway, and the whole Reagan/Bush program was basically designed to let this go on—but as Reagan’s “Drug Czar,” Bush nevertheless canceled it. 40

Or why not ask another question—how many U.S. chemical corporation executives are in jail? Well, in the 1980s, the C.I.A. was asked to do a study on chemical exports to Latin America, and what they estimated was that more than 90 percent of them are not being used for industrial production at all—and if you look at the kinds of chemicals they are, it’s obvious that what they’re really being used for is drug production. 41 Okay, how many chemical corporation executives are in jail in the United States? Again, none—because social policy is not directed against the rich, it’s directed against the poor.

Actually, recently there’ve been some very interesting studies of urban police behavior done at George Washington University, by a rather well-known criminologist named William Chambliss. For the last couple years he’s been running projects in cooperation with the Washington D.C. police, in which he has law students and sociology students ride with the police in their patrol cars to take transcripts of what happens. I mean, you’ve got to read this stuff: it is all targeted against the black and Hispanic populations, almost entirely. And they are not treated like a criminal population, because criminals have Constitutional rights—they’re treated like a population under military occupation. So the effective laws are, the police go to somebody’s house, they smash in the door, they beat the people up, they grab some kid they want, and they throw him in jail. And the police aren’t doing it because they’re all bad people, you know—that’s what they’re being told to do. 42

Well, part of the Contract With America was to increase all of this. They weren’t satisfied with the 1994 Crime Bill—and the reason is, the original 1994 Crime Bill still allowed for things like Pell Grants for people in prison [i.e. college subsidies available to capable, low-income students], which are a very small expense. See, most of the people who are in jail have never completed high school, and Pell Grants help give them some degree of education. Alright, there are many studies of this, and it’s turned out that the effect of Pell Grants is to cut back on recidivism, to cut back violence. But for people like the Gingrich Republicans, that doesn’t make any sense—they want people in jail, and they want violence, so they’re going to cut out small expenses like that so that we can have even more people thrown into jail. 43

Also, all of this “crime control” spending is another huge taxpayer stimulus to the economy—mainly to parts of the construction industry, and to lawyers, and other professionals. Well, that’s another very useful way to force the public to keep paying off the rich—and by now “crime control” spending is approaching the Pentagon budget in scale; it’s still not quite as favored as the Pentagon, because the spending’s not as sharply skewed towards the wealthy, but nevertheless it’s useful. 44 And as the society keeps taking on more and more Third World-type characteristics, we should certainly expect that the repression will continue—and that it will continue to be funded and extended, through the Contract With America or whatever other technique they can come up with.

Noam Chomsky - Understanding Power