Our Police State, 9-11-2010 to 9-12-2010 (part 2)

 [Continued from Our Police State, 9-11-2010 to 9-12-2010 (part 1).sch 3/26/23.]

Why are we relying on severe prison sentences and mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws?  How did it get seared in our brains that more prisons and more prison time will solve the crime problem? 

In California, the state correctional union was a big supporter of the state's three-strikes law. Guaranteed employment. The federal prison system has its own union.

We always had racial fears in this country. That made frightening us easier. Anyone objecting to or criticizing tougher criminal laws found themselves shouted down as being liberal, as being soft on crime. That California cannot afford its prison system - financially or socially - ought to lead to greater scrutiny of the pro-prison advocated. Oh, for a press that was both free and inquisitive!

But the current police state came about by also invoking morality. Marijuana, morphine and cocaine when unregulated led to bad behavior. [So does alcohol. sch 3/26/23.] We have had the War on Drugs longer than we had the Volstead Act. Read Dashiell Hammett about Prohibition's effect on the police and public morality. We have made cops - state, local, or federal - moral crusaders. We even expanded who will be cops in modern America. Again from what Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in The Nation (August 31/September 6, 2010):

...Food stamp offices, public housing complexes and homeless shelters are the sites "warrant searches" are used to gather up people who might have missed a court date concerning an unpaid debt. Public housing residents are subjected to the drug tests in many statee, the process of applying for what remains of welfare (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families0 parallels that of being booked by the police, complete with mug shots and fingerprints. Although you won't find them out campaigning against ICE raids and urban stop-and-frisk programs, some of the Tea Partyers seem to dimly understand this, with one handmade poster at last year's 9/12 demonstration in Washington saying for example Government Health Care = Pee in a Cup.

Not that I expect the Tea Partyers to see how much they have been conned by conservative politicians and pundits. Even less likely is any conservative politician saying that "tough on crime" failed to do more than make tougher and richer criminals. Criminalizing cocaine and heroin and marijuana resulted in Latin American drug cartel, steady employment in the prison-industrial complex, and the rise of prison gang culture in America. Let's give the get-tough-on-crime crew a hearty round of applause.

[Several pages omitted to keep my monitoring software happy, as it deal with topics related to my crimes. sch 3/26/23.]

And along with fear and morality, let us add something more worldly: jobs. How many government employees have lost their jobs? Is there a difference between the state and federal civil servants being laid off? Create a position which funds a person's livelihood, and pretty soon they cannot see themselves without that job. Making the office holder a moral crusader means taking away that job is immoral.

None of this is news. Balancing severe punishment against mercy was the subject of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Indiana keeps passing new criminal laws, and now we cannot afford our state correctional system. The federal system has mandatory minimum sentences. I think Indiana and federal legislators resemble Measure for Measure's Angelo:

ISABELLA Yet show some pity.

ANGELO I show it most of all when I show justice;
For then I pity those I do not know,
Which a dismiss'd offence would after gall;
And do him right that, answering one foul wrong,
Lives not to act another. Be satisfied;
Your brother dies to-morrow; be content.

ISABELLA

    So you must be the first that gives this sentence,
    And he, that suffer's. O, it is excellent
    To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
    To use it like a giant.

Yet, we have used our powers like a particularly stupid giant. We accept simplistic solutions from our politicians, even when their prior simplistic solutions did not work. If we could have Elmer Fudd as a giant, we would have what I envisage as our -get-tough-on-crime politicians.

sch 

[Continued in Our Police State, 9-11-2010 to 9-12-2010 (part 3). sch 3/26/23.]