Beyond These Walls by Tony Platt

Author:Tony Platt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

IV

8

THE DISTANT PRESENT

After decades of enduring a political monologue of law and order, suddenly we were surrounded by a volatile argument about justice and injustice, followed by a glimmer of hope, then a serious setback that changed everything.

Crime is a national defense problem.

—Senator Joe Biden

Tough crime policies are the most important form of national defense.

—Donald J. Trump, The America We Deserve

NO FRILLS

When news spread that guards had killed George Jackson in San Quentin State Prison on August 21, 1971, prisoners at Attica demonstrated their solidarity at the noon mess: “Not a man ate or spoke—black, white, brown, red. Many wore black armbands,” wrote Sam Melville, a white leftist doing time for a series of politically motivated bombings. “No one can remember anything like it here before.” A few weeks later the bloody quelling of a revolt at Attica that resulted in the deaths of dozens of guards and prisoners, including Melville, sent a clear message to politically active prisoners throughout the country. It also inaugurated the rise of supermax, high-tech prisons designed to isolate troublemakers and enforce the Jim Crow–style racial segregation that persists today.1

The modest reforms of the late 1960s and early 1970s were quickly rolled back, almost as though they had never occurred, and the strong links between community and prison were broken, as were efforts to build racial unity among prisoners.

The often-acrimonious debate between liberals and radicals about whether treatment was punishment in disguise became irrelevant, as the ideological discourse about crime shifted far right with rehabilitation dismissed as softhearted sentimentality. With the decline of mass movements for social justice, and the increasing sophistication and repressive capacity of government agencies, the criminal became racially demonized and politically isolated, fair game for politicians stoking populist anxieties. In his run for the presidency Richard Nixon devoted seventeen speeches to law and order. By the time Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the New Democrats had also taken the low road to demagoguery, abandoning a traditional liberal agenda on crime prevention, community development, and rehabilitation. The consequence of this political consensus was an orthodoxy unchallenged for almost forty years: unprecedented expansion and increased militarization of policing, a boom in prison construction and mass imprisonment that gave the United States the distinction of being “the world’s warden,” and the gutting of public services in poor communities.2 How did this happen?

While the Nixon government (1969–74) made law and order a central plank of its politics, a shift that the Democrats later would enthusiastically replicate, the previous administration of Lyndon Johnson (1963–69) was not exactly soft on crime. Johnson took a tough stand on the widespread urban riots, beginning in 1965 with the roundup of more than four thousand African Americans during the Watts uprising, one of many mass protests against police brutality and the broken promise of desegregation. Johnson’s vow that the War on Poverty would expand the New Deal to communities of color and poor whites was quickly supplanted by the war on crime. For forty years the federal government siphoned

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