The
Criminalization of Everyday Life
by
Chase Madar and Tom Engelhardt
Warren County Undersheriff Shawn Lamouree poses in front the department's mine resistant ambush protected vehicle, or MRAP, on November 13, 2013, in Queensbury, NY. The hulking vehicles, built for about $500,000 each at the height of the war, are among the biggest pieces of equipment that the Defense Department is giving to law enforcement agencies under a national military surplus program. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)
9
December, 2013
Sometimes
a single story has a way of standing in for everything you need to
know. In the case of the up-arming, up-armoring and
militarization of police forces across the country, there is such a
story. Not the police, mind you, but the campus cops at Ohio
State University now possess an MRAP; that is, a $500,000,
18-ton, mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle of a sort
used in the war in Afghanistan and, as Hunter Stuart of the
Huffington Post reported,
built to withstand “ballistic arms fire, mine fields, IEDs and
nuclear, biological and chemical environments.” Sounds like
just the thing for bouts of binge drinking and post-football-game
shenanigans.
That
MRAP came, like so much other equipment police departments are
stocking up on — from tactical
military vests,
assault rifles and grenade
launchers to actual
tanks and helicopters –
as a freebie via a Pentagon-organized surplus military equipment
program. As it happens, police departments across the country
are getting MRAPs like OSU’s, including the Dakota
County Sheriff’s Office in
Minnesota. It’s received one of 18 such decommissioned
military vehicles already being distributed around that state.
So has Warren County which, like a number of counties in New York
state, some quite rural, is now deploying Afghan War-grade vehicles.
(Nationwide, rural counties have received a disproportionate
percentage of
the billions of dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment that
has gone to the police in these years.)
When
questioned on the utility of its new MRAP, Warren County Sheriff Bud
York suggested,
according to the Post-Star,
the local newspaper, that “in an era of terrorist attacks on US
soil and mass killings in schools, police agencies need to be ready
for whatever comes their way… The vehicle will also serve as a
deterrent to drug dealers or others who might be contemplating a show
of force.” So, breathe a sigh of relief, Warren County is
ready for the next Al Qaeda-style show of force and, for those
fretting about how to deal with such things, there are now 165 18-ton
“deterrents” in the hands of local law enforcement around the
country, with hundreds of requests still pending.
You
can imagine just how useful an MRAP is likely to be if the next Adam
Lanza busts into a school in Warren County, assault rifle in hand, or
takes over a building at Ohio State University. But keep in mind
that we all love bargains and that Warren County’s vehicle cost the
department less than $10. (Yes, you read that right!) A
cornucopia of such Pentagon “bargains” has, in the post-9/11
years, played its part in transforming the way the police imagine
their jobs and in militarizing the very idea of policing in this
country.
Just
thinking about that MRAP at OSU makes me feel like I grew up in
Neolithic America. After all, when I went to college in the
early 1960s, campus cops were mooks in suits. Gun-less, they
were there to enforce such crucial matters as “parietal hours.”
(If you’re too young to know what they were, look it up.) At
their worst, they faced what in those still civilianized (and sexist)
days were called “panty raids,” but today would undoubtedly be
seen as potential manifestations of a terrorist mentality. Now,
if there is a sit-in or sit-down on campus, as infamously at the
University of California, Davis, during the Occupy movement, expect
that the demonstrators will be treated like enemies of the state
and pepper-sprayed or
perhaps immobilized with a stun gun. And if there’s a bona
fide student riot in town, the cops will now roll out an armored
vehicle (as they did recently in
Seattle).
By
the way, don’t think it’s just the weaponry that’s militarizing
the police. It’s a mentality as well that, like those
weapons, is migrating home from our distant wars. It’s a
sense that the US, too, is a “battlefield” and that, for
instance, those highly militarized SWAT teams spreading to just about
any community you want to mention are made up of “operators” (a
“term
of art”
from the special operations community) ready to deal with
threats to American life.
Embedding
itself chillingly in our civilian world, that battlefield is proving
mobile indeed. As Chase Madar wrote for
TomDispatch
the last time around, it leads now to the repeated handcuffing of
six- and seven-year-olds in our schools as mini-criminals for
offenses that once would have been dealt with by a teacher or
principal, not a cop, and at school, not in jail or court.
Today, Madar returns to explain just how this particular nightmare is
spreading into every crevice of American life. Tom
The Over-Policing of America Police Overkill Has Entered the DNA of Social Policy
By Chase
Madar
If
all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a
nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or
later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is
increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves “solving”
social problems (and even some non-problems) by throwing cops at
them, with generally disastrous
results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday
life as police power is applied in ways that would have been
unthinkable just a generation ago.
By
now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where
“the war on crime” and “the war on drugs” are no longer
metaphors but bland understatements. There is
the proliferation of
heavily-armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use
of shock-and-awe tactics
to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace
amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if
not family members; and in communities where drug treatment programs
once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency
war. (All of this is ably reported on journalist Radley
Balko’s blog and
in his book, The
Rise of the Warrior Cop.)
But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported
up-armoring of your local precinct. It’s also the way police
power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every
sphere of American life into a police matter.
The
School-to-Prison Pipeline
It
starts in our schools, where discipline is increasingly outsourced to
police personnel. What not long ago would have been seen as normal
childhood misbehavior – doodling on
a desk, farting in
class, a kindergartener’s tantrum –
can leave a kid in handcuffs, removed from school or even booked at
the local precinct. Such “criminals” can be as young as
seven-year-old Wilson Reyes, a New Yorker who was handcuffed and
interrogated under suspicion of stealing five dollars from a
classmate. (Turned out he didn’t do it.)
Though
it’s a national phenomenon, Mississippi currently leads the way in
turning school behavior into a police issue. The Hospitality
State has imposed
felony charges on schoolchildren for “crimes” like throwing
peanuts on a bus. Wearing the wrong color belt to school got
one child handcuffed to a railing for several hours. All of
this goes under the rubric of “zero-tolerance”
discipline, which turns out to be just another form of violence
legally imported into schools.
Despite
a long-term drop in youth crime, the carceral style of education
remains in style. Metal detectors — a horrible way for any
child to start the day — are installed in
ever more schools, even those with sterling disciplinary
records, despite the demonstrable fact that such scanners provide no
guarantee against shootings and stabbings.
Every
school shooting, whether in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, or Littleton,
Colorado, only leads to more police in schools and more arms as
well. It’s the one thing the National Rifle Association and
Democratic senators can agree on.
There are plenty of successful ways to
run an orderly school without criminalizing the classroom, but
politicians and much of the media don’t seem to want to know about
them. The “school-to-prison pipeline,” a jargon term coined by
activists, is entering the
vernacular.
Go
to Jail, Do Not Pass Go
Even
as simple a matter as getting yourself from point A to point B can
quickly become a law enforcement matter as travel and public space
are ever more aggressively policed. Waiting for a bus?
Such loitering just got three Rochester youths arrested.
Driving without a seat belt can easily escalate into an arrest,
even if the driver is a state judge. (Notably, all four of
these men were black.) If the police think you might be carrying
drugs, warrantless body cavity searches at the nearest hospital may
be in the offing — you will be sent
the bill later.
Air
travel entails increasingly intimate pat-downs and arbitrary rules
that many experts see as nothing more than “security
theater.”
As for staying at home, it carries its own risks as Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates found out when a Cambridge police officer mistook
him for a burglar and hauled him away — a case that
is hardly unique.
Overcriminalization
at Work
Office
and retail work might seem like an unpromising growth area for police
and prosecutors, but criminal law has found its way into the
white-collar workplace, too. Just ask Georgia Thompson, a
Wisconsin state employee
targeted by
a federal prosecutor for the “crime” of incorrectly processing a
travel agency’s bid for state business. She spent four months
in a federal prison before being sprung by a federal court. Or
Judy Wilkinson, hauled
away in
handcuffs by an undercover cop for serving mimosas without a license
to the customers in her bridal shop. Or George
Norris, sentenced to
17 months in prison for selling orchids without the proper paperwork
to an undercover federal agent.
Increasingly,
basic economic transactions are being policed under the purview of
criminal law. In Arkansas, for instance, Human Rights Watch
reports that a new law funnels delinquent
(or allegedly delinquent) rental tenants directly to the criminal
courts, where failure to pay up can result in quick arrest and
incarceration, even though debtor’s prison as an institution was
supposed to have ended in the 19th century.
And
the mood is spreading. Take the asset bubble collapse of 2008
and the rising cries of progressives for the criminal prosecution of
Wall Street perpetrators, as if a fundamentally sound financial
system had been abused by a small number of criminals who were
running free after the debacle. Instead of pushing a debate
about how to restructure our predatory financial system, liberals in
their focus on individual prosecution are aping the punitive zeal of
the authoritarians. A few high-profile prosecutions for insider
trading (which had nothing to do with the last crash) have, of
course, not changed Wall Street one bit.
Criminalizing
Immigration
The
past decade has also seen immigration policy ingested by criminal
law. According to another Human Rights Watch report — their US
division is increasingly busy — federal criminal prosecutions of
immigrants for illegal entry have surged from
3,000 in 2002 to 48,000 last year. This novel application of
police and prosecutors has broken up families and fueled the
expansion of for-profit detention centers, even as it has failed to
show any stronger deterrent effect on immigration than the civil law
system that preceded it. Thanks to Arizona’s SB
1070 bill,
police in that state are now licensed to stop and check the papers of
anyone suspected of being undocumented — that is, who looks Latino.
Meanwhile,
significant parts of the US-Mexico border are now militarized (as
increasingly is the Canadian
border),
including what seem to resemble free-fire
zones.
And if anyone were to leave bottled water for migrants illegally
crossing the desert and in danger of death from dehydration, that
good Samaritan should expect to
face criminal charges, too. Intensified policing with aggressive
targets for arrests and deportations are guaranteed to be a part of
any future bipartisan deal on immigration reform.
Digital
Over-Policing
As
for the Internet, for a time it was terra
nova and
so relatively free of a steroidal law enforcement presence. Not
anymore. The late Aaron Swartz, a young Internet genius and
activist affiliated with Harvard University, was caught downloading
masses of scholarly articles (all publicly subsidized) from an open
network on the MIT campus. Swartz was federally prosecuted
under the capacious Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act for
violating a “terms and services agreement” — a transgression
that anyone who has ever disabled a cookie on his or her laptop has
also, technically, committed. Swartz committed suicide earlier
this year while facing a possible 50-year sentence and up to a
million dollars in fines.
Since
the summer, thanks to whistleblowing contractor Edward Snowden, we
have learned a great deal about the way the NSA stops and frisks our
(and apparently everyone
else’s)
digital communications, both email and telephonic. The security
benefits of such indiscriminate policing are far
from clear,
despite the government’s emphatic but inconsistent assurances
otherwise. What comes into sharper focus with every volley of new
revelations is the emerging digital infrastructure of what can only
be called a police state.
Sex Police
Sex
is another zone of police overkill in our post-Puritan land. Getting
put on a sex offender registry is alarmingly easy — as has
been done to
children as young as 11 for “playing doctor” with a relative,
again according to Human Rights Watch. But getting taken off
the registry later is extraordinarily difficult. Across the
nation, sex offender registries have expanded massively, especially
in California,
where one in every 380 adults is now a registered sex offender,
creating a new pariah class with severe obstacles to employment,
housing or any kind of community life. The proper penalty for,
say, an 18-year-old who has sex with a 14-year-old can be debated,
but should that 18-year-old’s life really be ruined forever?
Equality
Before the Cops?
It
will surprise no one that Americans are not all treated equally by
the police. Law enforcement picks on kids more than adults, the
queer more than straight, Muslims more than Methodists – Muslims a
lot more than Methodists
— antiwar activists more than the apolitical. Above all, our
punitive state targets the poor more than the wealthy and blacks and
Latinos more than white people.
A
case in point: after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, a
police presence, including surveillance cameras and metal detectors,
was ratcheted
up at
schools around the country, particularly in urban areas with largely
working-class black and Latino student bodies. It was all to
“protect” the kids, of course. At Columbine itself,
however, no metal detector was installed and no heavy police presence
intruded. The reason was simple. At that school in the
Colorado suburb of Littleton, the mostly well-heeled white families
did not want their kids treated like potential felons and they had
the status and political power to get their way. But communities
without such clout are less able to push back against the
encroachments of police power.
Even
Our Prisons Are Over-Policed
The
over-criminalization of American life empties out into our vast,
overcrowded prison system, which is itself over-policed. The
ultimate form of punitive control (and torture) is long-term solitary
confinement, in which 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners are encased at any
given moment. Is this really necessary? Solitary is no
longer reserved for the worst or the worst or most dangerous
prisoners but can be inflicted on
ones who wear Rastafari dreadlocks, have a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art
of War in
their cell or are in any way suspected, no matter how tenuous the
grounds, of gang affiliations.
Not
every developed nation does things this way. Some 30 years
ago, Great Britain shifted from
isolating prisoners to, whenever possible, giving them greater
responsibility and autonomy — with less violent results. But
don’t even bring the subject up here. It will fall on deaf
ears.
Extreme
policing is exacerbated by extreme sentencing. For instance,
more than 3,000 Americans have been sentenced to
life terms without chance of parole for nonviolent offenses.
These are mostly but not exclusively drug offenses, including life
for a pound of cocaine that a boyfriend stashed in the attic; selling
LSD at a Grateful Dead concert; and shoplifting three belts from a
department store.
Our
incarceration rate is the highest in the world — triple that of the
now-defunct East
Germany.
The incarceration rate for African-American
men is
about five times higher than that of
the Soviet Union at the peak of the gulag.
The
Destruction of Families
Prison
may seem the logical finale for this litany of over-criminalization,
but the story doesn’t actually end with those inmates. As
prisons warehouse ever more Americans, often hundreds of miles from
their local communities, family bonds weaken and disintegrate. In
addition, once a parent goes into the criminal justice system, his or
her family tends to end up on the radar screens of state agencies.
“Being under surveillance by law enforcement makes a family much
more vulnerable to Child Protective Services,” says Professor
Dorothy Roberts of
the University of Pennsylvania Law school. An incarcerated
parent, especially an incarcerated mother, means a much stronger
likelihood that children will be sent into foster care, where,
according to one recent study, they will be twice as likely as war
veterans to suffer from
PTSD.
In
New York State, the Administration for Child Services and the
juvenile justice system recently merged, effectively putting
thousands of children in a heavily policed, penalty-based environment
until they age out. “Being in foster care makes you much more
vulnerable to being picked up by the juvenile justice system,” says
Roberts. “If
you’re in a group home and you get in a fight, that could easily
become a police matter.” In every respect, the creeping
over-criminalization of everyday life exerts a corrosive effect on
American families.
Do
We Live in a Police State?
The
term “police state” was once brushed off by mainstream
intellectuals as the hyperbole of paranoids. Not so much
anymore. Even in the tweediest precincts of the legal system,
the over-criminalization of American life is remarked upon with
greater frequency and intensity. “You’re probably a (federal)
criminal” is the accusatory title of a widely
read essay co-authored
by Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit of the US Court of
Appeals. A Republican appointee, Kozinski surveys the morass of
criminal laws that make virtually every American an easy target for
law enforcement. Veteran defense lawyer Harvey Silverglate has
written an entire book about how an average American professional
could easily commit three
felonies in a single day without knowing it.
The
daily overkill of police power in the US goes a long way toward
explaining why more Americans aren’t outraged by the “excesses”
of the war on terror, which, as one law professor has argued,
are just our everyday domestic penal habits exported to more exotic
venues. It is no less true that the growth of domestic police
power is, in this positive feedback loop, the partial result of our
distant foreign wars seeping
back into
the homeland (the “imperial boomerang” that Hannah Arendt warned
against).
Many
who have long railed against our country’s everyday police overkill
have reacted to the revelations of NSA surveillance with
detectable exasperation:
of course we are over-policed! Some have even responded with
peevish resentment:
Why so much sympathy for this Snowden kid when the daily grind of our
justice system destroys so many lives without comment or scandal?
After all, in New York, the police department’s “stop and frisk”
tactic, which targets African-American and Latino working-class youth
for routinized street searches, was until recently uncontroversial
among the political and opinion-making class. If “the gloves came
off” after September 11, 2001, many Americans were surprised
to learn they
had ever been on to begin with.
A
hammer is necessary to any toolkit. But you don’t use a
hammer to turn a screw, chop a tomato or brush your teeth. And yet
the hammer remains our instrument of choice, both in the conduct of
our foreign policy and in our domestic order. The result is not
peace, justice or prosperity but rather a state that harasses and
imprisons its own people while shouting ever less intelligibly about
freedom.
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