ONE NATION, UNDER LOCKDOWN

Teacher And Writer Investigates The Rise Of A Modern Police State -- Ours

LOCKDOWN AMERICA - Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis - By Christian
Parenti Verso; 290 pages; $15 paperback

How do we define a police state?

Is it the number of police officers per capita? The use of the police or
the military to put down strikes or to keep the trains running on time?
Perhaps it's the use of the police or the military to halt civil unrest, or
the widespread use of curfews or arbitrary confiscation of private property?

What about the number of prisons? In his powerful book ``Lockdown
America,'' Christian Parenti, a teacher at the New College of California
and a writer whose work has appeared in the Nation, the Progressive, In
These Times and the Christian Science Monitor, explores the epidemic of
imprisonment in the United States. By now we know the basics: The United
States leads the world in per capita police, prisons and prisoners.

Nearly one-third of all black men are in prison, on parole or awaiting trial.

Here in California, the state government spends more on prisons than it
does on higher education. How has all this come to be, and who benefits
from it? This book, vividly and sometimes breathlessly written, begins with
a modern history of the U.S. penal system.

In Parenti's formulation, post-1960s conservatives pushed a ``strong on
crime'' agenda as a backlash against ``the growing threat of organized
political rebellion and the culture of disobedience and disrespect that fed
it.'' He argues that Nixon and others fabricated a war on drugs to allow
increased federal influence over what, to that time, had been a haphazard
pattern of local law enforcement.

``Lockdown America'' also spells out the rapid rise of the modern
information state from 1968, when only 10 states' criminal justice systems
had computers, to the present situation in which a Fresno police officer
can say, ``If you're twenty-one, male, living in one of these neighborhoods
. . . and you're not in our computer, then there's definitely something
wrong.'' Parenti goes on to tour the anti-democratic horrors that
characterize modern America, from SWAT teams terrorizing suspected
criminals to the increased militarization of our southern border.

He shows us the beatings and killings that happen with inexcusable
frequency. From there Parenti takes us to America's prisons, crammed with
1.8 million people. (Another 3 mil lion are on parole.) He disputes the
notion that these prisons make America safer: Only 29 percent of all prison
admissions in 1994 were for violent offenses, with 31 percent for property
offenses, 30 percent for drug violations and 9 percent for such crimes as
weapons possession.

Parenti brings to light the grim reality of life in penitentiaries such as
California's Corcoran, which he calls ``a land-locked slaveship stuck on
the middle passage to nowhere.'' He describes how prisoners are placed by
the thousands in Security Housing Units, where they ``spend twenty-three
hours a day in tiny cells, with no work, no educational programs, and often
in total isolation.'' He makes clear the insanity this engenders among
inmates and the violence that often infects the guards.

Between 1989 and 1994, California prison guards shot 175 inmates with live
rounds, killing 27. Between 1994 and the first half of 1998, another 12
were killed and 32 were seriously injured. This does not include prisoners
who were beaten or maced, nor those shot with nonlethal wooden blocks
(called ``baton rounds''). As Parenti puts it, ``the unofficial prison-yard
executions once again put California in the vanguard of bad policy.

In all other states combined, only six inmates were shot by guards between
1994 and 1998.'' Parenti maintains that prisons play a necessary role in
capitalism: ``(C)apitalism needs the poor and creates poverty,
intentionally through policy and organically through crisis.

Yet capitalism is also directly and indirectly threatened by the poor.
Capitalism always creates surplus populations, needs surplus populations,
yet faces the threat of political, aesthetic, or cultural disruption from
those populations. Prison and criminal justice are about managing these
irreconcilable contradictions.'' What do we do about all this, besides
jettisoning capitalism? Parenti recommends a strong dose of ``less.'' We
need, he says, ``less policing, less incarceration, shorter sentences, less
surveillance, fewer laws governing individual behaviors, and less obsessive
concern with every lurid crime, less prohibition, and less puritanical
concern with `freaks' and `deviants.' '' How do we get there?

Parenti suggests popular protest, education and, perhaps most radical of
all, that we listen to the poor and the young, who have the most to lose --
the possibility of living free -- from an American police state.