December 9–16, 1999

book quarterly

Lighting Fires

A frankly inflammatory book calls for an end to incarceration.

by Cindy Fuchs

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

By Christian Parenti
Verso, 290 p., $25

The United States prison-industrial complex is a currently thriving machine, grinding up the underclasses (the "social junk") under the banners of national progress and protection. In the current culture, where fear and ignorance of difference shapes most political, social, legal and economic decisions, the prison system has been touted as the last and best answer to the many visible (and spectacularized) problems of daily life. Afraid to walk down the block at night? Worried that your kids aren’t safe at school? Wondering where the drugs and guns come from? Any of these concerns make you a prime target for faith in what Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America, calls the "emerging anti-crime police state, or criminal justice industrial complex."

You may already know that this state is founded on perennial moral paradoxes and systemic corruptions (or, as Parenti puts it, "Dickensian contradictions"), at least if you’ve cast even cursory glances at TV’s Cops or Oz, or the films The Keeper, American Me, The Siege and Slam, not to mention the many dispatches and analyses by people like Mike Davis, Angela Davis, Sanyika Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Katherine Beckett, Elliot Currie or William Bratton and Peter Knobler. But Parenti doesn’t claim to be delivering news. Instead, he assembles a disturbing array of facts, stories and statistics to make the point that the U.S. legal and penal systems are designed (not necessarily on purpose) as the "form of class control currently preferred by elites because it does not entail the dangerous side-effects of empowerment associated with the co-optative welfare model."

Divided into three broadly defined and interrelated sections — "Crisis," "Police" and "Prisons" — Lockdown America takes you on a fast trip through post-civil rights era history, arguing that enduring racism (or, "a postmodern version of Jim Crow") and panicky classism propel today’s rage for law and order. (And the consequences are already upon us: By 2000, Parenti observes, it’s "estimated that one in ten black men will be in prison. Already, though African Americans make up only 13 percent of the total U.S. population, half of all prisoners are black.") Parenti sees this crisis as a "response to the vicious economic restructuring of the Reagan era," such that the "new" joblessness produces a class to be contained and exploited. The project of "policing the new rabble," he says, is big business, at once ideological, moral and material.

Parenti — who has written for The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times and The San Francisco Bay Guardian, among other publications — makes no bones about his own convictions, using frankly inflammatory language and calling for that most alarming and unpopular solution — decarceration — rather than prison reform. To set the scene for his analysis of prisons, in the first two sections, he borrows from Foucault ("panopticon," "spectacle of terror") and Frantz Fanon, cites flashpoint examples (Amadou Diallo’s homicide by the NYPD, Abner Louima’s abuse by plunger and the 1997 border patrol murder of shepherd Esequiel Hernandez) and calls out obvious culprits (Nixon, Richard Daley, Rudolph Giuliani, the DEA, Daryl Gates [inventor of SWAT], the INS, Reagan and Edwin Meese, who initiated a "for-profit prison" plan as attorney general, Verhoeven’s Robocop made painfully real), calling them "unctuous" and "ghoulish."

He also uses subheadings like "Carrying the Big Stick," "Snouts in the Federal Trough" and "Zero Tolerance: The Science of Kicking Ass," while asserting that "criminalizing workers" is good for capital (keeping workers desperate and de-voiced), and "paramilitary policing" (domestic law enforcement using the tactics and rhetoric of warfare) can’t help but position the civilian population as "the enemy." In other words, look out.

For Parenti, American "law" is based in macho alpha-copism, strategic terrorizing of the poor, "kiddie sweeps," corporate-friendly high-tech surveillance methods and "sentencing enhancements" (used against suspected gang members). Abuse and rape in prison are an established system of control deployed by corrections officers and administrators to feminize men and mortify women.

For all its numbers and mentions of specific cases, Lockdown America is a fast read, angry and compelling in its call for organized protest and activism. Likely it will be preaching to those already converted, however — a tragic but predictable result of precisely the increasingly fortified structure that is America, locked down.

Back to the Book Quarterly directory page