We are already living in a Police State.

Dammit Ann

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Mon Mar-05-07 03:16 AM
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We are already living in a Police State.

Edited on Mon Mar-05-07 01:48 PM by newyawker99

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=1257§ionid=3510301

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For the past thirty years, the United States has been on an imprisonment binge unprecedented in world history. In 1980, the total number of people incarcerated in the U.S. was 500,000.

Today the number stands at 2.2 million, with a further 4.8 million on probation or parole. The total U.S. prison budget increased from $9 billion in 1980 to $61 billion by 2003.

While the U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world's population, it now has 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In other words, the country that often proclaims itself the freest in the world, imprisons its population at a rate over six times higher than the rest of the planet. The U.S. incarceration rate stands at 737 per 100,000, over five times higher than Great Britain and over twelve times higher than Norway.

The statistics for minority populations are even more shocking. For Latinos, the imprisonment rate is twice the national average. For Blacks it is four times the national average, with over one million African-American men in prison or jail. In 2002, 10.4 percent of all Black males between the ages of 25 and 29 were imprisoned, and the numbers have not improved since then.

In a report presented to Congress last year, the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons concluded, "We should be astonished by the size of the prisoner population, troubled by the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos, and saddened by the waste of human potential."

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Conservative politicians first began making crime a major political issue as part of a strategy to roll back the reforms won by social activists in the 1960s. The civil rights movement made it no longer respectable to make openly racist arguments, so political figures declared a war on crime to send a coded racial message to the voters. One of the first was Richard Nixon. In notes taken at an Oval Office meeting shortly after Nixon's election, H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, wrote, " emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." Ronald Reagan pushed these policies further in the 1980s. At a time when social spending was being slashed and inequality and poverty were increasing, conservatives blamed bad individuals rather than underlying social conditions for crime.

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The American ruling class is well aware that it needs to solve its major prison crisis, but it finds itself unable to abandon the ideological framework that it has relied on for over thirty years. Once again, California provides a clear example.

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