christian parenti on capitalism and prisons (2001):
...there is a debate going on, which is not always acknowledged as such, as to what is the enemy? Is the enemy nasty corporate practice or is the enemy a whole society that is a specific stage of historical economic development that has, as a system, a logic. And that's you know, what I think. And I think that, I'll give you the punch line first, I think that if we limit our critique to bad corporations we will end up in a cul-de-sac where we will eventually be patting Nike on the head for changing their nasty habits, which they will never do anyway.
(...) So, more specifically, why does America with 5% of the world's population have 25% of the world's prisoners.
(...) [why?] When this criminal justice crackdown that we're living in now began was really in the late sixties and what was going on in the late sixties? Basically the U.S. system faced a dual crisis, political and economic. the political crisis, you're all familiar with, I'm sure: the civil rights movement, the black power movement, then the anti-war movement adding into that. Also a little known wildcat labor movement that was making things difficult for the captains of industry, massive strikes also making things difficult for the corrupt leadership of the AFL-CIO forcing them to actually act like actual unionists, and of course rioting: massive rioting from 64 on. (...) There's also the war in Vietnam that is the background for all of this. You have to remember that the U.S. is bogged down in this hugely expensive, incredibly technically complicated war that by the late-sixties was threatening the power of the U.S. dollar and undermining the whole world financial system and also, after the Tet offensive of '68, it was a war that was falling apart from the U.S. side. (...) And in response to all of this on the domestic side, the police were not up to the task of basically crushing and containing the rebellion. We often forget that because ultimately they prevail, right? They crush the panthers, they put so many activists in prisons, they shut things down, they were tremendously brutal, broke the law, got away with it, et cetera.
(...) [the effect of all this:] And it didn't scare people away; it radicalized the movement. It made the U.S. look really really bad. It made it harder for the U.S. to get on the world stage and say "Capitalism and liberal democracy deliver the goods. Not any of these other options people are fighting for. This is The system."
(...) [the concrete result: the underpinnings of today's justice system] So in response to the police crisis, Lyndon Johnson, in 1967 proposes legislation, that in '68 passes the house of representatives as D.C. is literally burning for the second time. Martin Luther King has just been assassinated, there is massive riots, there is like smoke billowing over the congress and these guys are designing this piece of legislation which creates the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the LEAA, this huge federal bureaucracy, which over the next ten years redistributes about a billion dollars a year to local police to retool and retrain american law enforcement and the judicial system and prisons, to some extent, to deal with the crisis of an incipient revolution which is what they had on their hands at the time.
(...) [world-economic situation at the time] The second part of the crisis that was going on parallel to this was economic. The U.S. ended world war 2 as the industrial power on the planet. Europe and Japan, the two main capitalist rivals had been destroyed economically and so the U.S. was, by the end of the war, producing half, or some people say more than half of the world's output and it was in the position to make incredible profits. (...) So you had, like, fifteen years of deprivation and pent up economic demand coupled with generous aid from the U.S. and U.S. corporations there to provide the machines, tools, and the commodities at first. And you get this incredible boom throughout the nineteen fifties and the early sixties: the golden era of capitalism.
(...) [the crisis...] So finally you have the fundamental crisis that capitalism always returns to: you have a crisis of overproduction. This is one of the central irrationalities of this system. That when things work out the way they're supposed to, you run into trouble. When the economy is going well, you inevitably produce too much stuff and therefore you can't keep producing at the same rate of profitablity, which is the logic, which is the reason that investors invest, that's what keep capitalism going, is profitability.
(...) [the solution?] Well, the solution in the real, you know, true organic solution to this problem is war. That is one of the functions of war under capitalism. Not that it's thought of as such, but structurally this is how it works: one of the heuristic positive things about war for the capitalist class is that it destroys, not just people, but stuff. You clear away the commodities of capital and then restart a period of growth. It's like burning a field and we are their weeds, unfortunately. So they couldn't just write off capital, destroy Europe's economic base, destroy the U.S. economic base, so where are they going to make up the difference?
(...) [the other solution?] Well, from labor. That's the easiest place to go, is to take back the gains that the working class had made over the last thirty years since the depression. Both directly through higher wages and indirectly through what's called the social wage, funding for welfare, increased funding for education, increased funding for the environment. You have to remember that it's under Nixon in the early seventies that you have the creation of the EPA, the creation of OSHA, all of these huge agencies. (...) So capital tries to attack labor in the Seventies. They try to drive down wages, but it doesn't work, and the ruling class is trying to figure out "well, why is this?"
(...) [on this engineered crisis] At one point, congress asked Volcker, the crisis was getting very very bad, Mexico was threatening to bail out on its ninety billion dollar debt and Volcker goes before congress and they say you have to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy and he says "Well, I can't do that," because basically, this is his quote, "the standard of living of the average american worker has to decline, I don't think you can get around that," until economic health returns. His colleague in England, where the same policy was being pursued, because this is a world system, Alan Budd, later described the policy this way: "Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes. What was engineered in Marxist terms," this guy is a Thatcherite conservative, "was a crisis in capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor and has allowed the capitalist's to make high profits ever since."
(...) [and the 80s] In 1980, not a single union contract included a wage freeze or wage giveback and none of them really had since the early sixties. By 1982, forty-four percent of all union contracts included wage freezes or outright wage givebacks. So you have, in the eighties, you have the return of mass poverty.
(...) [on why capitalism needs poverty] If the poor, you want the poor to intimidate your workers, right? Say you own a hotel, you want the poor. You want homeless people to scare the shit out of your waitstaff, but you don't actually want those homeless people in front of your hotel, cause then they scare away the tourists. And, of course, poor people organize and rebel. So how do you manage this contradiction? You have to have poverty under capitalism, capitalism produces poverty through policy and organically through crisis, but it's always threatened by poverty. --> [and the repression/prison-complex] Well, one way was welfare, right? Absorb the poor, co-opt the poor, placate the poor, but that was seen to be aiding workers in general, so that's not an option. Well, what do you do? You switch back to the old-fashioned method of repression, increased demonization. So you get, in the early eighties, a re-engagement with that earlier part of the story of the criminal justice crackdown. and it's very much about containing and controlling the poor. You get the War on Drugs, ramps up in '82, first by changing the rules to favor the prosecution. In '84, there's the first really big federal crime bill that does a whole bunch of stuff. It creates a lot of grants for local law enforcement, local incarceration, but one of the key things it does is create the Asset Forfeiture laws which is a way of recruiting local police into the drug war, because this is really coming down from the top in certain levels.
(...) [and more militarization...] Eighty-six, you get another major crime bill that creates new, twenty nine new mandatory minimums, billions of dollars for grants to the locals. Eighty-eight through ninety-two, more of these crime bills. Ninety-two riots, Clinton comes in. More of the same policies culminating in the '94 crime bill where there's thirty billion dollars doled out to the states. Of course, always with strings attached that they must repress poor people more, essentially, right? So you can get the money to build your prison if you have a three-strikes law or truth-in-sentencing law. Which means that in many cases nonviolent offenders on a third or second offense are put away for twenty-five to life. Then you can get extra money from the Feds, etc etc. Ninety-six, effective terrorism anti-death penalty act. Numerous immigration restrictions to militarize the border. And on and on and on, and we're still in that moment of buildup though it is beginning to plateau to some extent and there is this response to it.