THE HIDDEN COST OF 'ZERO TOLERANCE'

Lockdown America: Police And Prisons In The Age Of Crisis By Christian
Parenti (Verso, Pounds 20)

IN HIS excellent Crime and Punishment in America, Elliott Currie notes that
the 1967 Kerner Commission on Urban Disorders brought the US to a
law-and-order crossroads, agreeing that "we could never imprison our way
out of America's violent crime problem." Resisting crime meant "attacking
social exclusion".

Instead, the US took another road, resulting in "bursting prisons,
devastated cities, and a violent crime rate unmatched in the developed
world". Enter Christian Parenti and his stunning, evocative Lockdown
America. Pinpointing the political moments that shaped America's draconian
criminal-justice policies, he reveals corrupt policing and imprisonment and
the overt targeting of "problem populations".

Lockdown America is a critique of a cynical devaluation of the democratic
process. From his careful analysis of the Watergate fall-out to his "nuts-
and-bolts history of profound economic crisis", Parenti reveals the hidden
depths of an authoritarian project's "battle for hearts and minds". This
was Ronald Reagan's inheritance - the backdrop to his war on crime.
Economic libertarianism could not be delivered without social authoritarianism.

Parenti shows how the federal judiciary was stacked with "mean- spirited"
zealots; how permissive forfeiture laws were relentlessly enforced to
pursue a campaign of racist state intervention. He establishes
behind-the-scenes connections between Reaganomics, anti-communist
strategies in Central America and the "right-wing cultural backlash" - the
foundation for the construction of the "underclass". This strategy, as in
Britain, targeted "idlers" and "loafers" as marginals by choice rather than
circumstance. At its heart was "race spoken through the code of crime and
welfare".

Parenti then takes apart the myths of "zero tolerance" or "quality of life"
policing. It is a tale of "rapidly and insidiously escalating police
powers" resulting in an "American-style democratic police state".

Of course, the broken windows were fixed, the streets cleaned and the
subway secured to make Manhattan presentable. But as "zero tolerance" swept
the US, policing became "overly aggressive". The clampdown exacerbated a
climate of fear. Virtually unaccountable, the police routinely violated
civil liberties. Paramilitary Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) units
literally went to war: "their task, destruction and conquest... the
civilian community, the enemy." For politicians, this was a small price to
pay for urban renewal.

Parenti relates this social pathologisation to the spiralling incarceration
rate, which is used to manage "the contradictions of restructured American
capitalism" while giving politicians a bankable ballot-box currency. Yet
mass imprisonment "terrorises the poor" and "warehouses social dynamite".

These detailed chapters are painful, as Parenti catalogues the rape,
torture and brutality endemic within US prisons. His argument is
convincing: rape has become "central" to the politics of incarceration. In
male jails, prisoner rape is condoned; in women's prisons, coast to coast,
"guards routinely rape women prisoners with near-total impunity".

In 1985, 500,000, were incarcerated in federal prisons. By 1998, the figure
was 1.7 million. This includes a 500 per cent rise in women's imprisonment.
Such numbers cannot be effectively managed, with prison life dominated by
powerful gangs. At the end of the line come super-maximum prisons run on
regimes of "extraordinary isolation". The key has, literally, been thrown away.

The financial rewards of prison expansion are staggering, with over half a
million full-time employees and an annual expenditure of US$35 bn.
Increasingly privatised, prison is bigger than "any Fortune 500 company
except General Motors". For "industrial-military complex", now read
"prison-industrial complex" - a form of "carceral Keynesianism" that
revives "economically moribund regions".

Parenti's conclusion is clear. With "soft" forms of control easily grafted
on to repression, executions and brutalising regimes have been made
compatible with anger management, restitution and shaming. "Therapy and the
gas chamber are by no means mutually exclusive." Decarceration is his first
priority, followed by decriminalisation.

Lockdown America is impressive: hardly a sentence passes without a
reference. Direct quotations from politicians, commentators and witnesses
are painstakingly reproduced. The book is in the best tradition of
investigative journalism, paced like a fine novel, and carries the
authority of meticulous academic research. It should be compulsory reading
on Home Office course 101.

The reviewer is Professor of Criminology at Edge Hill University College
and author of 'Hillsborough: The Truth' (Mainstream)