Tony Platt GoodToGo

SHINE A LIGHT ON POLICE FUNDING

The movement to defund the police in the United States should be taken seriously. It urges us to try something that has never been tried on a national scale: question the assumptions of a policing goliath that requires almost five times as many employees as the nation’s social workers; and imagine a society without  systemic inequality and injustice that does not need a policing, guarding, and security force of at least 4.3 million.

In addition to demanding a massive reduction in police forces and a transfer of resources to public services, we should also demand transparency about how the police are funded and equipped. To fundamentally change the funding of policing requires that we know who foots the bill and who is on the payroll.

Given the inflammatory rhetoric and policy debates devoted to the “crime problem,” government should keep us informed and current about the number of police employees, the cost of policing, and who does the work of policing. Our government fails on all accounts. Police departments are not even mandated to report to the U. S. Department of Justice how and why they kill on average one thousand people every year.

The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics used to be a barely adequate source of up to date information, but it is no longer even that since the Trump administration drastically cut its funding and politicized its leadership.

To figure out what policing costs requires demystifying streams of national funding and tracking intra-governmental transfers of equipment, weapons, and technology. It is not enough to be familiar with only local budgets because the police receive a considerable amount of funding, as well as their marching orders, from Congress and the federal departments of Homeland Security and Justice.

National political initiatives make a significant impact on policing. To Lyndon Johnson, the police were “frontline soldiers” in the War on Crime; Richard Nixon elevated Law and Order into a national ideological slogan and rallied his base to turn back “the wave of crime”; during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the FBI’s budget almost doubled; by the time that Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the New Democrats also had taken the low road to demagoguery and passed legislation that funded 100,000 more police and slashed welfare programs.

Private security workers must be included in the count and cost. They outnumber public police by more than 25 percent and perform most of the same functions as urban cops, either as subcontracted by government agencies or as the direct employees of industries, shopping malls, and middle-class communities. In times of social upheavals, such as tribal opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and today’s protests against police racism, they are routinely mobilized to supplement local and state police and sheriff’s departments. 

No centralized source of information exists for the number of private security personnel, nor for keeping track of the companies that benefit from contracts for security-related products and services that cost more than government expenditures on criminal justice operations nationally. The corporate-security complex with its dangerous “acquisition of unwarranted influence… in the councils of government” is the latest reincarnation of what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in 1961.

We activist researchers do not operate totally in the dark.

We know that municipal governments have increasingly sacrificed social services for policing. The cost to cities of police protection almost tripled from the 1980s to the 2000s; and local spending on policing, adjusted for inflation, went from $29.3 billion in 1972 to $84.1 billion in 2012.

Since the mid-1950s, when criminal justice expenditures at all levels of government constituted about one-half of one percent of the GNP, the carceral state has persistently increased its share of the public coffers, with policing and security the primary beneficiary. By 1974, the police received 57 percent of the country’s $15 billion criminal justice budget, eight times the amount they received a decade earlier. Since 2002 the Department of Homeland Security has sent billions of dollars to regional and local governments for “terrorism prevention.”

Then there are the many known unknowns. We can only speculate about what it costs federal agencies to subsidize local policing via special grants and materiel. Moreover, some important parts of national funding are a mystery, including the undisclosed costs of covert operations by intelligence agencies and how much the State Department spends on training foreign police forces.

To be successful in achieving structural reforms at the local level will require cutting ties with federal agencies that have framed and subsidized the military model of professional policing since the early 20^th century, from J. Edgar Hoover’s doubts in the 1920s about the “Negro’s fitness for self-government” to Donald Trump’s commitment to make the United States into “a country of law and order.”

Local activists should urge progressive Democrats in Congress to add another demand to the Justice in Policing Act: Make transparent how the federal government funds, equips, and arms local policing.

As Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leader, used to say about racism: Let’s bring this out to the light. Then we can see what we’re up against.

AN EMBARRASSMENT TO HISTORY: SIMON SCHAMA'S 17th CENTURY NETHERLANDS

I’ve started to do some general reading about the history of the Netherlands. I’m particularly interested in learning about the emerging nation in the late 16th and early 17th century during a period when modernity, slavery, academia, and the prison co-existed. 

I’m doing this because I’m in the early stages of a possible project on the late 16th century origins of Leiden’s prison. The Netherlands was a pioneer in creating a “house of correction” designed to terrify vagrants and other subverters of mercantile capitalism into industrious labor. Leiden was among the first Dutch cities to create a workhouse-prison, a model that was emulated throughout Europe, an early precursor of the 19th century penitentiary-as-factory. Dignitaries and writers from England, France, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia came to take notes.

An internet search tells me that a good place to start is Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. First published in 1987, it was reprinted in 1997. No changes or preface to the 2nd edition, so I assume that a decade later the author is happy with his first effort. Schama is a biggie in the UK: a public, university-based intellectual who is popular via his BBC pop-history programs. His name trumps the title on the book’s cover.

From what I know of his work, I don’t like his culture-centric approach to “national character.” But I’m a learner reading this book for basic information, so I’ll try to put a hold on critique. At first, I succeed.

I’m encouraged that Schama thinks crime and punishment is a sufficiently important topic to bookend his 700-page tome. The first chapter describes in some detail Amsterdam’s Tughuis, also known as the Raspuis (Saw-House), where, from 1595, a regime of forced labor backed up by punishments of exquisite cruelty were carried out “in dead earnest.” (p. 19) Women were held in the Spinhuis where, from 1597, “vagrants, whores and thieves,” in Schama’s words, “were sent for stiff doses of improvement at loom and wheel.” The Spinhuis’ motto, etched in the entrance, expresses its catch-22 creed: “I exact no vengeance for wrong but force you to be good.” (p. 16)

Schama’s last chapter returns to the same theme with which he begins the book: describing how houses of correction were intended to “dissolve the stain of vagrancy” and turn the idle poor into productive workers. (p. 582) There’s also a coda on early 18th century campaigns against “unnatural practices” and “homosexual witchhunts.” (p. 605)

The rest of the book catalogues in exhausting and often amusing detail how the Netherland emerges as a nation, and the particularities of Dutchness: from the rise of a consuming bourgeoisie to marriage and family life, the arts, and everyday cultural habits. The opening and closing chapters on the harshness of prison regimes and moral panics about sexuality no doubt signal that the country’s 17th century embarrassment of riches came at a price, but Schama offers no insights about the significance or insignificance of the houses of correction to the country’s textile industry or to shaping a capitalist labor force or to constructing the boundaries of citizenship. Without analysis, the vivid descriptions of punishment, prostitution, and penal regimes have a titillating quality, the stuff of entertainment.

As for the material riches that Schama describes in prurient excess, one might expect a book written in 1987 and reprinted in 1997 to at least make a connection between Dutch involvement in the slave trade of some half a million black bodies from Africa to the Americas – an investment that began in the same decade as the Spinhuis – and, say, the “Dutch hankering for confections and delicacies,” with more than fifty sugar refineries operating in Amsterdam alone by the 1640s. (p. 165) But there’s nothing, not even rhetorical speculation.

Prostitution gets thirteen pages in The Embarrassment of Riches, but slavery, Africa, Brazil, and Suriname don’t even make it into the index. “Wonderfully inclusive” and “history on the grand scale” read blurbs on the back cover. “Extraordinarily exclusive” and “history with blinders” is more accurate.

A CAUTIONARY TALE*

    I must confess that my first thought on being asked to review yet another book about “mass incarceration” was jaded disinterest: There can’t possible be anything more to say about this topic. I was wrong. It turns out there’s a lot more to be said, and Elizabeth Hinton's From The War on Poverty to The War on Crime (Harvard University Press, 2016)  says it thoughtfully, passionately, and clearly. The conventional wisdom about the “punitive turn” in the United States locates its origins in the rise of free market economic policies and the political shift to the right, emerging first under Nixon, consolidated by Ronald Reagan, and then fully embraced by the Clinton administration. There is a tendency in this viewpoint to characterize the post-World War II period in binary terms: liberals versus conservatives, social democracy versus neo-liberalism. Hinton, an Assistant Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard, takes issue with this interpretation, arguing that the modern carceral state has deep and wide political roots, and owes as much to the liberal social-democratic tradition as it does to the rise of the New Right and Neo-Cons. She adds an important chapter to the revisionist tradition in American historiography: from Gabriel Kolko’s analysis of the repressive underside of social democracy in the Progressive Era (The Triumph of Conservatism, 1967) to Naomi Murakawa’s insight about the role of “liberal law and order” in the Truman administration (The First Civil Right, 2014).
    Delving into government documents, policy statements, and legislative debates, Hinton’s focus is on the politics of urban governance from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty through Reagan’s War on Drugs. This approach can easily get mired in empirical details, but her smart analytical narrative and choice use of source material make for a lively read.
    Hinton demonstrates that from the beginning the Kennedy-Johnson War on Poverty was a battleground of ideas and policies between mostly grassroots struggles to extend the benefits of the New Deal to communities of color, and top-down efforts to construct the foundations of the urban carceral state. For a very brief moment, the civil rights, black liberation, and feminist movements, in alliance with liberals in government, created the possibility that the United States would follow the social democratic path forged by most countries in the West, with guarantees of income, health, education, and equal access to public services.
    The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act planted the seeds of equal opportunity and community empowerment. But, says Hinton, the Johnson administration also planted the seeds of repression. The book’s title notwithstanding, the War on Crime was a central component of the War on Poverty, with “statistical discourses of black criminality and pathological understandings of poverty serving as its intellectual foundation.”
    Hinton leaves no doubt that racism was at the core of the new urban carceralism, a fierce pushback against rebellions in Watts and other cities that resulted in the arrest of tens of thousands of African Americans and new strategies of social control, from velvet glove techniques of cooptation and management, to an iron fist of counter-insurgency operations tested in Viet Nam. She digs up some telling examples: Nixon’s aside to his chief of staff in 1969 that “the whole problem is really the blacks…. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to”; Reagan’s statement to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1981 that “only our deep moral values and strong institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.”
    Yet, Hinton does not regard contemporary racism as simply the leftover debris of the segregated past or as an echo of slavery. She makes the important point that “the long mobilization of the War on Crime was not a return to an old racial caste system in a new guise – a ‘New Jim Crow’. Rather, the effort to control and contain troublesome groups with patrol, surveillance, and penal strategies produced a new and historically distinct phenomenon in the post civil-rights era: the criminalization of urban social programs.”
    We follow the book’s main argument about the interweaving of repressive and progressive policies in urban social programs as they were articulated and implemented by successive administrations, with an emphasis on the expansion and refinement of carceral strategies: Johnson’s investment in urban policing, backed up by corporate and military assumptions about the War on Crime; Nixon’s use of discretionary funds and executive powers to grow the penal system, and enlist academics in devising new methods of punitive control; Ford’s emphasis on special programs for “violent repeat offenders” and “career criminals”; Carter’s efforts to extend the carceral state to public housing projects in the guise of “urban revitalization initiatives”; and Reagan’s acceleration of mass imprisonment, and contracting out of penal operations to the private sector.
    By the time that Clinton became president in 1993, says Hinton, both parties shared a “deep commitment to crime control as a viable response to socioeconomic inequality and institutional racism.” Whether it was Los Angeles’ rightwing police chief in 1965 comparing the black residents of Watts to the Viet Cong, or Democratic Senator Joe Biden in 1982 describing crime as “a national defense problem” that put us “in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile,” the militarization of urban criminal justice operations enjoyed “a broad bipartisan political consensus.”
    After a compelling analysis of the repressive strain that runs through post-World War II, American liberalism, Hinton tries to provide a glimmer of hope in her conclusion by discussing what it will take to move toward “a more equitable and just nation.” She wants us to imagine “what the United States might look like today” had policymakers “steered the War on Poverty’s community action programs with the same level and length of commitment as they gave to the War on Crime.”
    Unfortunately, the mostly top-down, retrospective account of the 1960s does not make this alternative path seem like a credible choice, either then or now. Hinton wants to resurrect “the principles of community representation and grassroots empowerment” embedded in the progressive ideas of the “Great Society,” but does not address how this might be achieved in the current political climate, whether Trump’s defense of the thin blue line or Clinton’s centrist reforms. So, unlike the rest of this relentlessly unsentimental, compellingly argued book, the last few pages have a whiff of nostalgia.
    Elizabeth Hinton, however, is not alone in struggling to articulate a progressive vision that speaks to the current interregnum, when the old regime is crumbling and the new one has not yet emerged, when, as Antonio Gramsci put it, a “great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Recent protests on the streets and in prisons suggest that social activism and organized opposition can have a far-ranging impact on carceral institutions that always bend to the arc of power, but are vulnerable to struggles from below. How to build protests into a serious movement while staying alert to the carceral underside of liberal reformism is the challenge we face. In this context, Hinton’s cautionary tale is a must read for activists.

* To be published in Punishment and Society (2017).