Criminal Justice as Social Control

[This article appeared in a RAIL pamphlet against the prison system. --ed.]

Amerika is under a repressive dictatorship. A dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and this rule is defended by its criminal justice system. More than one million human beings languish in Amerika's gulags. For one-in-three young Black men, Amerikan freedom and democracy means prison, parole or probation.(1) That's seven-times the rate for white men.(2) Five years ago, only 1 in 4 Black men were under judicial supervision.(1) Combining prisons and jails, there are 1.3 million people behind bars in the U.S.(3)

Prisons are a tool of social control for the ruling class. In an imperialist society, prisons implement the reality of national oppression.

Prisoners whose letters appear in MIM Notes each month describe conditions in state and federal prisons as growing ever-more intense and brutal. The creation of prisons as places designed to break people's will to resist, to think, and to live, is the most compelling testament to the role of prison as a means of extermination.

Prisons have two main purposes. First they take dissenting groups or individual dissenters out of circulation. Secondly, prisons serve to break up existing structures, be they communities, families, or organizations. As a matter of policy, the bourgeois dictatorship uses it's tools, including prisons, to further expand power differences between groups.

Critics of MIM are quick to say "but it's not 'dissenters' that are punished, it's 'criminals'." What these critics don't realize is that criminality itself is a political term defined by the bourgeoisie to control oppressed groups. As a bourgeois system, the courts cloak this role by claiming to only defend the law, as if this was a neutral process without class- and nation-based biases. The very definition of crime has been defined by this bourgeois society to ensure that their genocidal crimes against humanity are rewarded and that the oppressed are punished for existing, let alone resisting.
There are no laws which say Blacks and Latinos should be executed more often or that execution is necessary for the murder or rape of a white person. but that's what makes bourgeois society so sinister; it defines "crime" and "justice" in a way which ensures that the desired effect of bolstering white nationalism is achieved.

Prisons Don't Stop Crime.

The common conception is that the increase in the number of prisons is related to an increase in crime and that more prisons will stop crime. However, the statistics of the U.S. government tell a different story. Crime, as it is conceived of by the U.S. (in)justice system has two measures: the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the National Crime Survey (NCS). The UCR can be thought of as the compiled log of all crimes hat get reported to the police while the NCS is best understood as the statistical representation of the crime rate that includes unreported crimes.

It is important to understand two things about these statistical measures of crime. First, both surveys indicate criminal activity as it is defined by the U.S. government and the states: murder is a definitive crime, while domestic violence is more nebulous. second, both statistics are skewed upwards by the legal system as a whole in order to legitimate their activities. Nevertheless, these indicators show violent crimes as decreasing in frequency since 1972 or staying relatively the same.(2) While socially defined criminal activity has remained relatively the same since the 1970s, the rate at which the "justice system" has been funded has not, it has gone up 600% in the past 20 years.(2)

Big Changes Since 1972

The prison system of the United States of Amerika has well over 1,300,000 people locked up and approximately 3,000,000 additional people under its control through probation and other forms of non-prison incarceration. The rate of incarceration for black men in Amerika is seven-times that of white men, and men and wimmin of Latino an dFirst nations are incarcerated at similarly high rates. U.S. incarceration has gone from being a "normal" tool of social control in a capitalist country to the bloated cancer of national oppression that it is today.

In 1972 the rate of imprisonment was around 100 per 10,000. Pretty much the same as it had been since 1925 when these sorts of statistics began to be compiled. Since 1972, however, the incarceration rate has climbed to 455 per 100,000 in 1990. Compare that with 46 in the Netherlands and 79 in Australia.

Tool of Social Control, Tool of Terror

The prison system and the police as a whole began to receive a marked increase in their funding in the early 1970s. These increases occurred in the immediate wake of massive urban rioting and the FBI sponsored terror campaigns against oppressed nation revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party.

For example, Frank Rizzo, the notorious Mayor of Philadelphia who presided over the 1978 assault on the MOVE house, was police commissioner of Philadelphia during the early 1970s. His work creating SWAT-like teams in the police force, and the successful integration of automatic weapons, personal transport and anti-urban insurrection tactics won him the praise of President Nixon as a "model commissioner". This qualitative change in the nature of urban police marked the beginning of an upward spiral of urban cops into a military occupying force in Amerikan cities.

With an end to official segregation and rampant Klan terror, the police had to step in to keep the oppressed nations down. Civil rights underwent legal transformation, ending legal segregation. While lunch counters might be legally integrated, many city areas don't have any whites to eat at them, and many suburbs don't have any oppressed nationals.

The "end" of Amerika's segregation apartheid and the rise of the civil-rights discourse meant that the notions of racial purity/superiority which had legitimated these systems of oppression had to be de-emphasized. In the same way, the Klan, which also functioned as an ever present threat to keep rural Blacks and other oppressed nationals "in their place," could not be employed in urban areas where the oppressed nationals were concentrated. The inner-cities have been transformed into minimum security prisons, warehousing a readily accessible reserve army of labor.

Amerika needed to come up with a new form of social control as well as a new theory for legitimizing its exercise. The legal prison system was Amerikkka's answer. The bourgeoisie in the media and the government helped to define oppressed nationals as the criminal element. Using the legal system, as opposed to the extra-lega/Klan, as the principle vehicle of social control is the perfect response to te growth in civil liberties consciousness because within this paradigm the "criminal" forfeits those rights through his or her activity. Consequently, the charge of racism in the "objective criminal justice system" is far murkier than charging the Klan with racism.

While the Klan could kill and terrorize, the police have the additional option of entering their victims into the criminal justice system in order to maintain white-nation hegemony. Copes can and do use extra-judicial force, but they also have other means not available to the Klan: long term incarceration with the endorsement of the legal system.

The part of the white nation that is uncomfortable with an ideology of racial supremacy has readily accepted prisons as a way of controlling oppressed nations. This has been going on since slavery with the myths of the super-macho black man that rapes white wimmin. Half a million Blacks are in prison, but the effects of this incarceration run much deeper than 500,000. With one-third of young Black men under some form of judicial supervision (prison, parole or probation) at any one time, it's important to recognize that even more may be shuffled through this system before they reach the age of 29.

This cycling of a significant portion of the oppressed national population through the prison system has many deleterious effect on the development of these nations' community and national economies. Thus while civil liberties may be seen as having succeeded in changing the nature of white nation oppression over its internal colonies (desegregation), it did not change the fact that these nations are still "kept in their place."

Oppose the Anti-Crime Hysteria

The prison system is not designed to counter crime or drugs; rather it concerns itself with maintaining the oppressive capitalist system. This is done through selective application of arbitrarily defined notions of criminality. For example, the bourgeoisie defines possessing a small amount of crack to be a crime, but it's business as usual for the CIA to bring in coke by the ton. Oppressed national areas are the ones who come under the more frequent surveillance for drugs, so it's no surprise that many more oppressed nationals are arrested than whites, proportionally.

And when whites are arrested for small amounts of crack possession the "just-us" system is quick to give them shorter sentences. This clearly exposes that the cops and the laws have nothing to do with stopping crime and everything to do with stopping the oppressed.

However, in order to support greater and greater repression, the cops and politicians occasionally need to fan the flames of settler anti-crimes hysteria. We must always resist the attacks of the state, and when the politicians take the largest leaps from reality, such as arguing that more prisons are needed to stop crime, we must intervene and attempt to split chunks of settlers from the lynch mob. (Welfare and immigration are common places to find white national delusions, too.)

For example, it's a proven fact that building more prisons and arresting more people doesn't affect the crime rate. Since the settlers think that what they want to stop is "crime" even though it's actually deporting the oppressed from the locality, we can sometimes take some of the steam out of white national hysteria with an interjection of reality. Simply put, parts of the labor aristocracy can be split from the pro-cop, pro-prison movement for reasons other than proletarian ones, such as the fact that more cops and prisons could mean higher taxes. If wings of the labor aristocracy and bourgeoisie are too cheap to subsidize half of North America to lock the other half up, then that group can be a tactical ally in the struggle against national oppression. Similar arguments can be made about immigrants, where we can have a tactical alliance against Proposition 187-type measures with the internationalist minded bourgeoisie that hires illegal immigrants.

Notes:
1. 1995 Sentencing Project Report via Associated Press in Massachusetts Daily Collegian 10/5/95, p.2.
2. Walkin' Steel, Spring 1994, p.1. Committee to End the marion Lockdown. PO Box 578172, Chicago, IL 60657-8172.
3. The Sentencing Project, "Americans Behind Bars: The International Use of Incarceration, 1992-1993." 918 F St. NW, Suite 501, Washington DC 20004.