The Police State

by MC5 & MC11

The United States ranks number one in the world in highest per capita imprisonment, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. government.

A private research organization called the Sentencing Project reported in January that the United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than does any other country. Using statistics provided by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the organization reported that more than one million people are currently incarcerated in the United States. That means 426 incarcerations per 100,000 residents as of June 30, 1989. South Africa ranked second with 333 and the Soviet Union came in third with 268. In Europe the figures range from 35 to 120 per 100,000. Asian countries range from 21 to 140. For Black males the figure is 3,109 per 100,000 in the United States and 729 per 100,000 for South Africa.(1)

But throwing so many people behind bars hasn't done much to stop crime. Since 1980 the United States has doubled its prison population, and overall crime only fell 3.5 percent, according to the DOJ. The nation's murder rate is seven times higher than most European countries. Over the last decade, six times as many robberies and three times as many rapes were committed in the United States as there were in what used to be West Germany, the Sentencing Project report said.(1)

Following the release of these statistics, the mainstream press and a few Democrats vomited up a spate of liberal editorials and columns, railing against the burden on the law- abiding tax-payers (about $16 billion a year, according to the DOJ) that such massive repression creates, and the need to find a different solution.

"We've got to stop jailing and start rehabilitating," Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) declared.(1)

Prisons don't work Confronted with such glaring statistics, some liberals come to the correct conclusion: putting people in prison does not deter anyone from committing crimes. The problem with the liberal response is that it fails to recognize both crime and the criminal justice system as political problems. Amerika's ruling class defines "crime" as anything that may threaten its hold on power. Anyone attempting to rectify the vast income inequalities inherent in the capitalist system (through means not sanctioned by the bourgeoisie) is locked up. Anyone not respecting the god-given "right" to private property is locked up. And certainly, anyone attempting to undermine the very foundations of the capitalist state is thrown behind bars as soon as that person becomes a serious threat.

MIM is not attempting to analyze all of the roots of crime in Amerika in this article. But the fundamental root is that under capitalism some classes of people cannot meet their basic needs by abiding by the laws of the system. Reforming the prison system and turning to more "humane" forms of "rehabilitation" will not stop crime in Amerika. Only a revolution will.

Police don't work either Those who realize that prisons do not deter crime often argue that instead of more prisons, Amerika should have more police. But the number of police that a city hires does not affect the crime rate. If a city hires more police than its neighboring city, it is just as likely to have a high crime rate as its neighbor.(2)

Studies comparing different cities, as well as studies of one city with different size police forces, both demonstrate that over time, hiring police is not a solution to crime.

As one might suspect, if there were no police or if everyone were a police officer it would make a difference. But outside of these extremes it does not matter how many police there are. In the real world of the wide range of U.S. cities, it does not matter to the crime rate how many police officers there are.(2)

Revolution Amerikans have a very hard time thinking rationally about crime. Unlike other countries without rugged individualist frontier pasts and settlers on their own pieces of land, the Amerikan people have a strong belief in people making it on their own.

Despite the reality that Euro-Amerikans committed genocide against Native-Americans to obtain their farmland in the United States, the myth arose of the rugged frontierperson "making it" through hard work. That mythology carries forward in another way today in the United States: the United States has the largest middle class in the world. This class of people makes the United States even more individual-minded than other capitalist countries in the world.

Crime is a political problem. It cannot be solved by the current political system because politicians have to say and do what is popular with the middle class and upper class. They are the firm believers in blaming individuals for their lack of determination to work hard, uphold good morals, and so on. These middle and upper class people believe they have achieved their good position through their individual merits. Hence, criminals must be people without these merits and should be locked up.

As the prison population soared over the last decade, the proportion of citizens who said they believed criminals were not punished harshly enough increased from more than 70% of the population to more than 80%.(3) Putting people in prison makes many middle-class people feel good. But capitalist attempts to justify their criminal justice system don't solve the problem.

Some Trotskyist groups uphold the dogma that the working classes in the imperialist countries like the United States are most advanced because they live in the most technically advanced societies. Yet it is the pervasive individualism of the U.S. working class that made it possible for George Bush to win his election merely by referring to a Black rapist in his political advertisements. Far from being advanced, the Amerikan working class falls prey to fascist anti-crime politics far more readily than most other working classes with the possible exception of the South African white working class.

In other societies the problem is not so bad, especially in societies without a middle-class of white workers who benefit from the plunder of the Third World. For more on this subject read J. Sakai's Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat and H.W. Edwards's Labor Aristocracy: Mass Base for Social Democracy. These books explain why white workers as a group enjoy a different relationship to the means of production than other working classes. It is the absence of a white proletariat that partly explains the attitudes of the U.S. public toward crime.

People who want to go on tolerating murder, rape, teenage suicide, wife-beating, drug-dealing, alcoholism and property crimes of the criminally deprived should go on blabbering about more cops, prisons and death penalties. People who really want to "get tough" on crime should get tough with their analysis first. They should join MIM to work against the causes of crime and all other oppression.

Notes: 1. New York Times 1/7/91, p. A14. 2. John E. Conklin, Criminology, 3rd ed., (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1989), p. 438. 3. Washington Post National Weekly Edition 3/4/91, p.29.