Historical Materialism and Political Change: The Rise of the Judicial Ghetto in the United States.

Phil Wood Department of Political Studies

Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario Canada K7L 3N6

E-mail: woodpj@qsilver.queensu.ca

Prepared for “Class and Other Four Letter Words or Classic Concepts of the Left”, Department of Politics, University of Huddersfield, 16-17 November 2002. Draft for conference purposes only. Not for citation or quotation.

“Marxism is definitely dead for humanity”1 Marxism “remains the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not yet gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it”2 “If you want to ask certain central questions of history, namely those of the historic evolution of societies – as to what it is that structures societies and causes society to change – you have to recognise the enormous importance of Marxism … if you don’t … it seems to me you limit the scope of what you can do in history and lessen the value of history for understanding the world in which we live. History becomes just one damn thing after another”.3 “Theory ought to create the capacity to invent explanations”4 “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”5 “So long as the social consciousness is not in the position to comprehend and act upon the necessary connection between a progressive penal policy and progress in general, any project for penal reform can have but doubtful success, and failures will be attributed to the inherent wickedness of human nature rather than to the social system . The inevitable consequence is a return to the pessimistic doctrine that man’s evil nature can be tamed only by depressing the prison standard below that of the lowest free classes. The futility of severe punishment and cruel treatment may be proven a thousand times, but so long as society is unable to solve its social problems, repression, the easy way out, will always be accepted. It provides the illusion of security by covering the symptoms of social disease with a system of legal and moral value judgements."6 “the way prisons are run and their inmates treated gives a faithful picture of a society, especially of the ideas and methods of those who dominate that society”7 Contemporary conventional wisdom tells us that Marxism died (again) with the fall of the

Berlin wall, the advance of the liberal democratic cargo-cult through Eastern Europe and

elsewhere8 and a decade of corporate euphoria arising from the long boom of the 1990s. In fact,

what has been called the “death of Marxism” is rather less than this: the collapse of an

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authoritarian system of primary accumulation and forced industrialization that used a Stalinized

version of Marxism as its ideological cover, a justification for a bureaucratic dictatorship. This

having been swept away, at least for now, there remains in existence a much broader and more

vibrant tradition of humanist Marxian thought that has repeatedly rejected the Stalinist model

and continues to present a fundamental challenge to the atrocities carried out recently in the

name of economic efficiency and competitive markets.

This paper discusses one central aspect of this tradition – Marx’s method – in order to try

to assess its contemporary relevance for social science. The first part of the paper discusses two

very different ways of interpreting Marx’s dispersed and often ambiguous methodological

guidelines. Orthodox historical materialism proceeds by largely ignoring these ambiguities in an

effort to build an abstract theory of historical development for use as a weapon in the struggle to

defend “actually existing socialism” against its enemies. In contrast, in a context of global

change that has raised the stakes associated with race, gender, nationalism, the environment and

a variety of other factors more or less alien to the older orthodoxy, a more recent revisionist

interpretation has begun to emerge. This view stresses the need to take the ambiguities in

Marx’s work seriously rather than sweep them under the carpet. Its goal is a more experimental

and non-deterministic empirical Marxism that “provides the essential elements for the

comprehension of history, society and the individual in their complex relationships”9 and is

dedicated to the proposition that changing the world cannot be attempted until its dynamics have

been adequately documented and theorized. The second half of the paper tries to assess the

relative merits of these two schools of thought by looking at one of the most significant and

malignant tendencies at work in American politics (but not only there) in recent decades – the

massive expansion and racialization of the prison system. It argues that explanations of this

3

phenomenon based on the orthodox model are lacking in that they fail to get to grips with the

specifically racial part of the problem – the rise of the “judicial ghetto” 10, and that an adequate

explanation requires the more empirically-sensitive approach of the revisionist model.

Historical Materialism: Traditional and Modern

Despite its central importance to his overall intellectual and political project, Karl Marx

nowhere provided a comprehensive or systematic treatment of his method of political economy.

The name given to this method, the materialist conception of history or historical materialism,

comes to us from Friedrich Engels, who took it upon himself, with Marx’s blessing, to try to

systematize Marx’s ideas about method in the decades immediately preceding and following his

friend’s death. The problem that Engels, and all subsequent efforts at systematization have had

to confront, as Jorge Larrain and others have demonstrated, is that Marx’s methodological

writings are as ambiguous as they are ambitious11. For one thing, they are scattered through

writings that have political and intellectual goals specific to particular points in time, spanning

half of a century in which both the material world and the way it was theorized were repeatedly

turned upside down. For another, the enormity of the task Marx set himself – to develop an

understanding of social and historical development; to explain both specific conjunctural events

and large-scale structural transformations; to integrate the insights of English and Scottish

political economy with those of French materialism and German idealism; and to unify science

with critical and/or revolutionary practice – hardly suggests analytical rigour and tight theoretical

systems, as opposed to methodological ambiguity and theoretical flexibility, as the most likely

outcomes.

The resulting ambiguities are not difficult to find. In a preface to the first volume of

Capital, Marx famously states that he has succeeded in standing Hegel’s dialectic on its head,

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appearing to adopt his predecessor’s theory of historical form and movement12. Elsewhere, and

frequently, Marx rejects the use of abstract historical formulae, stressing the crucial importance

of concrete historical analysis and suggesting that trans-historical abstractions are of limited

value13. With respect to the role played in history by ideas and consciousness, the Marx of the

German Ideology argues that consciousness is but a passive reflection of material life.14 In

Theses on Feuerbach, where the point is to criticize the materialists rather than the idealists, the

argument is substantially amended, to allow for “sensuous” and “practical-critical” intellectual

activity that can play a role in the constitution of material reality15. Similarly, Marx’s theory of

socio-historical change in the Preface is a structural theory of the interplay of forces and

relations of production, of base and superstructure, in which individuals play no part16. The

historical process is an objective, universal, natural process that can be appropriated with the

methods of science, and whose end can be known. In contrast, in the Communist Manifesto and

a variety of historical writings, Marx gives class struggles and subjective factors priority, while

the historical process can be modified by conscious human action, and outcomes are uncertain17.

These ambiguities have provided Karl Popper and other critics with plenty of ammunition

over the years for a variety of one-sided attempts at demolition.18 The key question is not

whether the ambiguities are real, but how to deal with them. The traditional strategy, embodied

in what Larrain refers to as “orthodox historical materialism”, has been to stress the universal,

the structural and the philosophical at the expense of the conjunctural, the social and the

practical.19

The origins of this tendency are the subject of some dispute. In his classic reconstruction

of the Marxism of the Second International, for instance, Lucio Colletti argues that the source

can be traced back to Engels’ attempts to systematize historical materialism in the 1870s and

5

1880s and to his letters on historical materialism to Bloch, Schmidt, Mehring and others after the

death of Marx.20 In Anti-Duhring and the Dialectics of Nature, Engels introduced the idea of an

objective and independent natural dialectic that gave shape and predictability to the historical

process. In the letters, Colletti argues, Engels’ defence of historical materialism against the

charge of economic determinism stressed the reciprocal role of ideas and political factors, the

operation of cross-cutting forces, the interplay of individual wills and the relative autonomy of

the state, but maintained that the economic was the determining factor “in the last instance” and

simultaneously established a false distinction between economic and non-economic production

relations. In addition, the first post-Marx generation of Marxists had their own axes to grind, and

read Engels’ work through the lenses of their need to defend still fragile social democratic parties

and workers’ organizations. They “were concerned in different ways to systematize historical

materialism as a comprehensive theory of man and nature, capable of replacing rival bourgeois

disciplines and providing the workers’ movement with a broad and coherent vision of the world

that could be easily grasped by its militants.”21 For Colletti, Engels’ letters thus amounted to an

unfortunate invitation, in an historical context dominated by the ideologies of positivism, science

and progress, to stress economic determination in the last instance while largely ignoring all the

other instances, and to inaugurate a view of historical materialism as a general materialist

philosophy, divorced from its critical origins and applicable at all times and in all places. In

Larrain’s words, historical materialism was thus transformed into a “theory which is derived

from supposedly universal laws of dialectics inherent in nature, which conceives of

consciousness as a mere reflection of material life, which propounds a kind of technological

determinism, and which results in a general, teleological and unilinear theory of history which

sketches the necessary path of development of all nations.”22 These axioms became the

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orthodoxy of the Second International, and were transformed into the philosophy of dialectical

materialism during the Third when they were used to justify collectivization, forced

industrialization and Stalin’s purges (and when Marxism as critical practice was reduced to little

more than a “memento.”23) Finally, they were given new life in the second half of the twentieth

century in the structuralism of Louis Althusser and, more recently, Gerald Cohen’s attempt to

reconcile the theory of history suggested by the Preface with the world of analytical

philosophy.24

Predictably, while orthodox historical materialism may have been useful as a justification

for disciplining generations of Soviet and Eastern European citizens and members of some

western communist parties, its economic and/or technological determinism could not contribute

much to an understanding of the actual historical development of capitalism or the social

formations in which it has taken root. Derek Sayer has recently argued that part of the reason for

this lies in a systematic misreading of Engels’ letters and that, in addition to downplaying the

reciprocal effects of non-economic forces in Engels’ account, his legatees also neglected the anti-

determinist and expansive spirit in which he wrote. The forces that do the determining in the last

instance are described by Engels in various ways – as the economic situation, economic

movements, economic development, economic necessities and so on - almost always in ways

that defy efforts to make a narrow, materialistic interpretation.

More important, Sayer argues, is the way Engels’ letters “repeatedly, and emphatically,

underline the limitations of any general theory or model when it comes to analyzing particular

historical events, processes or societies.”25 In his letter to Bloch, Engels accepts that he and

Marx must take responsibility for over-emphasizing the economic side in their debates with

idealism, “but when it came to presenting an era of history, i.e. to making a particular

7

application, it was a different matter and there no error could be permitted.”26 And when writing

to Schmidt, he states plainly that “our conception of history is above all a guide to study, rather

than a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian”27.

For Sayer, the letters are not so much an invitation to economic determinism as “a

general warning against a certain pre-emptive use of theory, and a plea for empirical, and in

particular for historical study”. It is no accident, he argues, that Engels refers his readers to

Marx’s 18th Brumaire as a classic example of historical materialism in action28. And there is no

inconsistency with Marx in any of this. It was Marx, after all, who anticipated some of the

words chosen by Engels when he presented the schematics of the Preface, taken by Cohen and

many others as the defining text of Marx’s theory of history, as “a few brief indications

concerning the course of my politico-economic studies” and “a guiding thread for my studies”,

not a fully thought out theory of historical development.29 Years earlier, in the German

Ideology, Marx argued that ‘[e]mpirical observation must in each separate instance bring out

empirically , and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and

political structure with production.”30 And years later, his work on Russia led him to think that a

different form of evolution might be possible there, based on the peasant commune and the forms

of consciousness and experience associated with it. In a letter to Mikhailovsky, Marx rejected

the tendency of some of his followers to transform his image of the evolution of capitalism in

western Europe into an abstract historical theory: “one will never arrive [at a proper historical

understanding] by using as one’s master-key a general historico-philosophical theory, the

supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.”31

Perry Anderson argues that a key turning-point in the history of Marxism occurred as a

result of the crises of the 1960s and 1970s, when relative economic decline in the west combined

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with racial upheavals, the women’s movement, the politicization of students in the anti-war

movement, the events of May 1968 in France, the suppression of the Prague Spring and the

emergence of an ecological politics left orthodox Marxism unable to cope either practically or

intellectually, “clearing the way for another sort of Marxism to emerge.”32 With respect to

historical materialism, the most important effect of all this was to develop a “sudden zest, a new

appetite, for the concrete”33, which had been nurtured by a generation of historians whose

research had tested the limits of the old orthodoxy and which helped to revive historical political

economy, especially in Britain and the United States. The key intellectual event was Edward

Thompson’s polemic against Althusserian structuralism, after which it was “impossible for

Marxists to proceed as if their history and their theory were two separate mental worlds, with

little more than an occasional tourism, mildly curious, between them. Theory is now history,

with a seriousness and severity it never was in the past; as history is equally theory, in all its

exigency, in a way that it typically evaded before.”34

The attempt to turn historical materialism back towards the concrete is best exemplified

in the work of Larrain and Sayer. Both use Cohen’s defence of an abstract, deterministic,

functionalist, technological theory of history on the basis of Marx’s 1859 Preface as an exemplar

of orthodox historical materialism and its limitations as a “guiding thread” in the study of social

and political development. Cohen’s argument rests on the ability to distinguish productive

forces, which he says are material things whose development is driven by a natural human

propensity for problem-solving, from productive relations, which are about the exercise of power

and control. These in turn must be distinguished from the superstructure, which is made up of an

ensemble of legal relations and other institutional phenomena (but not the realm of ideas, whose

location in Cohen’s scheme is not clear). The productive forces, in this view, have causal

9

primacy, functionally determining the rise and fall of production relations, which are in turn

conceived of as the economic base. Those production relations that emerge in a given epoch do

so because they are best suited to enhance the development of the productive forces. The base is

the foundation on which arises the legal and institutional superstructure and it does so because it

reinforces the system of social relations from which the base is constituted. Both the social

relations of production and the superstructural ensemble, in this image, are ultimately dependent

on the way in which the pattern of technical and technological development unfolds.

Whatever the merits of Cohen’s work in terms of clarity and analytical rigour, Larrain,

and Sayer argue that it is alien to Marx’s relational view of the world and of limited value in the

study of historical political economy. Precisely delimited definitions and finite, one-way causal

events necessarily involve abstractions from a complex and dynamic socio-historical reality in

which the meaning of concepts must necessarily vary according to the relational and historical

context in which they are being considered. Marx’s own historical writings and more recent

Marxist historiography suggest the practical impossibility of making the analytical distinctions

Cohen needs in order to defend his rendering of the Preface. For example, an assembly line is a

productive force, but is also a materialization of the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor and

others, and of the social relations and intellectual milieu within which they worked. Social

phenomena such as forms of cooperation and scientific knowledge of various kinds can also be

productive forces, which are products of human association, not solely material things.35 The

list of non-material productive forces mentioned in various places by Marx is quite long, as

Sayer indicates.36 To decontextualize social phenomena and treat them as if they were material

things is to fetishize them, in the sense that Marx used that word. Once materialized, a second

danger is that these phenomena can then be taken out of historical and social context and

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universalized. Cohen’s error with respect to the forces of production is directly akin, in other

words, to the one committed by neo-classical economists with respect to the supposedly

universal “factors of production”.

A similar logic holds with respect to productive relations. Cohen’s definition of the

relations of production in terms of power and control neglects the broader issue of the

phenomena – laws, the state, ideas, culture, morality and so on – that shape them. For Marx, the

economic structure was a much broader totality of social relations than the traditional model

suggests, and his writings are full of references to the non-economic relations that constitute the

social relations of production. In a long section of the Grundrisse, for instance, Marx discusses

the forms that precede capitalist production and considers as production relations such complex

ensembles of social and political relations as “community” (the primitive commune and the

ancient mode of production), relations of kinship (the Germanic), and relations of personal

dependence (feudalism).37 He argues that there is a fundamental difference between pre-

capitalist and capitalist modes of production in that it is only in the latter that economic pressure

(the need to sell labour-power in order to survive) suffices to ensure that the worker produces

surplus for the capitalist. In all other forms, the fact that the direct producer remains the

possessor of the means of production means that non-economic forms of extraction are necessary

– personal dependence, lordship, coercion, and violence38.

Sayer concludes that there is “no good reason for excluding any kind of social relation

from being a possible relation of production, or for arbitrarily assigning some social relations to

the ‘base’ and others to the ‘superstructure’ of society a priori. These questions could only be

resolved for particular historical forms of society, on empirical criteria.”39 This view, if correct,

establishes a much broader conception of production relations than is the case in orthodox

11

historical materialism, opens up new lines of research and practice, and makes it possible to

integrate research from intellectual traditions usually thought external to Marxism. Sayer

specifically discusses the crucial importance of human and social reproduction in this context.

He suggests the possibility of rethinking the social relations of capitalist production in such as

way as to include familial and gender structures, alongside class, as factors that shape the

historical process and individual choices, but the point could be just as plausibly extended to

race, ethnicity, ideologies and a variety of other structuring factors.

This, in turn, has clear implications for the way we think about superstructural relations.

Cohen’s definition, intended to constitute superstructures as real things, restricts the category to

non-economic institutions. Marx used the term much more broadly however, and Engels’ letters

refer to the “ideal” or “idealistic” superstructure, encompassing ideas and forms of consciousness

as well as their institutionalizing in the state, religion, culture and the law. Marx’s arguments

about both the realm of ideas and the other superstructural elements are similar: he denies the

validity of the distinction between the ideal and the material and the cause-effect image of their

relationship and insists that superstructures are not analytically distinct from material reality, but

rather another side of the same coin. The components of the superstructure are ideological forms

of appearance (“sublimates”) of the totality of social relations. The “phantoms formed in the

human brain” have “the semblance of independence”, but this is illusory. Consciousness “can

never be anything else than conscious existence.”40 Likewise “all struggles within the State, the

struggle between democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., are

merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out

among one another.”41 Nevertheless, though superstructural relations are illusory, they are

“empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.”42 These material premises, in turn,

12

must be grasped “in definite historical form … If material production itself is not conceived in its

specific historical form, it is impossible to understand what is specific in the spiritual production

corresponding to it and the reciprocal influence of one on the other. Otherwise one cannot get

beyond inanities.”43

The formation of superstructures is an extremely complex historical process that connects

the reproduction of ideas and institutions with the production and reproduction of material and

social life through human thought and practice. Cultural production and institutional

development are not made up of sequences of single causal acts through which changes in

material life give birth (and death) to superstructural reflections. Rather, they make up “a

process of continuous reanimation of ideas in the context of new practices.”44 Ideas and

institutional activity may be anticipatory as well as reflective; they may be products of the past

that have survived the conditions of their formation while continuing to shape an evolving

reality; they may lack contemporaneous empirical referents, which have been destroyed or

amended through the process of social change or the accumulation of scientific knowledge; they

may combine with phases of social production and reproduction in ways that produced complex

patterns of uneven development in time and space; they have their own life-histories, produced

by their reciprocal relations with the human life-process. The cultural and institutional legacies

of the past are a powerful material constituent of the present, framing experience and shaping

development, creating a social stock of ideas and practices that can be drawn upon by

individuals, classes and organizations for use in political and other battles.45

The overall result of this turn to the concrete is obviously a very different image of

historical materialism than the orthodox determinist one that has dominated Marxism in the

twentieth century. The distinctions necessary to the orthodox conception break down under the

13

weight of the documentary and historical evidence. In place of a universal causal chain of

technological/material forces, economic relations and social and political superstructures, we

must now confront a more complicated and historically variable set of relational possibilities.

Any social relation (economic, social, legal, political, ideological, or racial; conventionally

superstructural or otherwise) between classes in a given social formation may be an essential

production relation, and consequently may play a part in the development of the forces of

production. Any point in the causal chain is in fact a product of the interplay of material and

social and the choices made by social agents within the constraints of these relation. In place of

relatively simple cause-effect events that operate outside the historical process in other words,

we confront “a rich totality of many determinations and relations” with what Larrain refers to as

“conditional agency” at its core.46 Production is a social, rather than a technical or material

process. In the social process of producing goods and services for market, capitalism also

produces and reproduces societies.

For Cohen and others, the classic text of historical materialism is the Preface. Reflecting

on the need for a more concrete, empirically useful historical materialism, Goran Therborn

suggests that the most systematic formulation of Marxism’s methodological core is not the

Preface but a summary passage in Volume 3 of Capital:

The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers – a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power – in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short the specific form of state in each case. This does not prevent

14

the same economic basis – the same in its major conditions – from displaying endless variations and gradations in its appearance, the result of innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural conditions, racial relations, historical influences acting from outside, etc., and these can only be understood by analysing these empirically given conditions.”47

The advantage of this formulation, as Therborn points out48, is that it begins with the social

relationship between necessary and surplus labour, rather than autonomous technological

development. Moreover, it recognises that the form in which unpaid labour is extracted is

socially and historically variable, both within and between modes of production, allows for the

codetermination of this process by both relations (very broadly conceived) and forces of

production, and stresses the importance of empirical analysis in the investigation of variations in

the core productive relations. The orthodox image of historical materialism is an image of a

causal sequence made up of ontologically distinct entities. In contrast, the conception suggested

here suggests a more flexible and empirically useful relationship between the core social,

material and political relations that cluster around the process of exploitation and the rest of the

complex social edifice in which this process is embedded, without in any way jeopardizing the

central and vital Marxian emphasis on production.

This in turn produces a dramatic alteration in the way we explain historical tendencies

and events. Theory is no longer a priori but empirically-open, the methodological counterpart of

the notion of “political possibilism” used by Terence Ball to characterize Marx’s view of

progress under capitalism.49 The “turn to the concrete” privileges politics, or the class struggle,

as opposed to the structural economic or technological forces that always, in the orthodox view,

get their way (in the last instance). There is no guarantee here that the class opposition that

emerges from the relations of production will be resolved through the movement to a higher

level of development of the productive forces, either within capitalism, or by means of its

15

supersession. In a crisis, the basic contradictions of a capitalist society are simultaneously

evident in economic problems related to the production and realization of surplus value on the

one hand and in parallel and widely variable crises of political order.50 Given the variety of

forms in which crises can be simultaneously experienced and the complexity of the historical

process through which they are addressed, outcomes are highly contingent. Empirically, the

further development of the forces of production is only one of a menu of choices that are on the

table and, as Antonio Gramsci pointed out, in these circumstances a host of “morbid symptoms”

can appear.51 In the west since the 1960s, for instance, it remains an open question whether

technological development or an increase in the oppressive capabilities of public and private

agencies (or both) have been the main response to the multiple crises that began to emerge in that

decade.

Historical Materialism and the Rise of the Judicial Ghetto

The goal of the “turn to the concrete” was to reconstruct historical materialism as a

“guiding thread” for empirical analysis. The proof of the methodological pudding is to be found

therefore in the empirical eating. This part of the paper is an attempt to bring together elements

of the above discussion of historical materialism as a set of tools for empirical studies with an

investigation of the massive expansion of the American prison system in recent decades and the

increasingly disproportionate presence of racial minorities under correctional control.

Conventional explanations of these phenomena, based on American culture and

variations in crime rates are found wanting. A materialist account, emphasizing crisis and

restructuring since the late 1960s and the relationship between incarceration and the size of the

relative surplus population generated by this restructuring, fits much better with the twentieth-

century pattern of incarceration. It has more difficulty with the scale of the recent increases

16

however, and clearly falls short with respect to the racial pattern, itself a large part of the

explanation of changes in scale. While not abandoning the materialist emphasis on long-term

shifts in strategies of exploitation and accumulation (as opposed to the conventional crime and

culture explanations), this section argues that an adequate account requires that it be

supplemented in some of the ways suggested by Sayer, Larrain and others; that is with ideas

about structured agency, cultural and institutional legacies, and in general a richer totality of

determinations that orthodox historical materialism has traditionally neglected.

The prison boom in the United States since the 1970s is a multidimensional phenomenon.

The focus here is on two of its dimensions: the huge expansion in the size of the corrections

system; and its disproportionately black and Hispanic population. With respect to the first,

Figure 1 uses data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics52 to chart the growth of the incarceration

rate in the US during the last three quarters of the twentieth century. It shows a period of

substantial growth (73.4 percent) from 1925 to 1939. This is followed by a rapid decline during

the Second World War and a long period of relatively slow growth from the end of the war

through to about 1961. The 1960s saw the rise of the civil rights and other social movements,

strengthened by Supreme Court decisions about rights and the Constitution and by a growing

commitment to political reform by the Democratic Party. As a result, a period of liberal criminal

justice policy emerged between 1961 and the early 1970s, causing the incarceration rate to fall

by almost a quarter53. After 1972, and even more so after 1980, Figure 1 is dominated by a

sharp, uninterrupted upward trend.

For most of the period between 1925 and 1972, the prison population varied between

100,000 and 200,000 inmates. From 1972 to 2000 it increased about six and a half times, from

less than 200,000 to over 1.3 million, and the incarceration rate increased from 93 to 478. On a

17

decade-by-decade basis, the prison population grew by 53 percent in the 1970s, more than

doubled (+115 percent) in the 1980s and increased by a further 77 percent in the 1990s.

In 2001, the United States had about 5 percent of the world’s population but was

estimated to account for nearly a quarter of its prisoners. Though comparative data are not

altogether reliable, its incarceration rate may have overtaken that of Russia to become the highest

in the world.54 If we add the population of local and municipal jails to those in state and federal

prisons, the total number of people incarcerated in the US passed two million in February 2000,

and by the end of the year reached almost 2.1 million.55 The annual rate of growth of the prison

population has been falling since it peaked at 8.7 percent in 1994, but the numbers are so large

that even a 1.3 percent growth rate in 2000 (the lowest since 1972) added about 27,000 inmates

to the prison population.56 The broader population of those under correctional supervision (in

prison, jail, or on parole or probation) grew by about 117,000 in 2000 and now stands at about

6.5 million people, or 3.1 percent of the adult population.57 Reflecting these trends, spending on

corrections at all levels increased from less than $7 billion in 1980 to $43.5 billion in 1997. Total

criminal justice spending in 1997 reached $130 billion, about half of that year’s spending on

defence.58

Alongside this overall pattern of growth, a second significant dimension is the massively

disproportionate incarceration rates among communities of marginalized people, coupled with

the replacement of rehabilitation as the system’s main ethic with a stress on warehousing. The

racist application of law and order has a long pedigree in the United States, and the use of

imprisonment as both a means of racial control and of proletarianization and exploitation goes

back to the immediate post-Reconstruction era in the South.59

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As Figure 2 shows, however, the current racial composition of the American prison

system is a product of recent decades, rather than an historical constant. Since 1950, when the

ratio of whites to non-whites in the prison system was roughly 2:1, the pattern has been

reversed.60 In recent decades, racial profiling, a “war on drugs” that targets African American

neighbourhoods and the drug dependencies of the poor, a zero-tolerance urban policing strategy

and “three strikes” legislation have all combined to create a prison system whose demographics

are wildly at odds with the social profile of modern America. In 1996, blacks accounted for 15.4

percent of drug users, 38.4 percent of drug offenders arrested, and 63 percent of drug offenders

admitted to prison.61

In the 1990s, African Americans made up about 12 percent of the US population. On

December 31, 2000, 46.2 percent of prisoners under state or federal jurisdiction were black, up

from 44.5 percent in 1990. Another 18 percent were Hispanic. For black males in age categories

20-24, 25-29, 30-34 and 35-39 incarceration rates at the end of 2000 were 7,276, 9,749, 8,690,

and 7,511 respectively, compared with 886, 1,108, 1,219, and 995 for white males.62 According

to 1997 Bureau of Justice Statistics study based on 1991 rates of incarceration, the probability of

a black male doing time during the course of his life was 28.5 percent, compared with 16 percent

for Hispanics and 4.4 percent for whites.63 In 1997 in the South, 63 percent of state prison

inmates whose race was known were black.64 African Americans make up 63 percent of North

Carolina’s prison population, 76 percent of its drug offenders and 92 percent of those imprisoned

for selling and possessing schedule II narcotics, which include both powdered and freebase

(crack) cocaine. 65 Although drug use rates among African Americans and whites are similar,

federal guidelines use five grams of crack cocaine to trigger the same five-year mandatory

sentence as 500 grams of powdered cocaine, the recreational drug of choice for affluent whites.

19

Race and drugs are not the only markers worn by those in prison. A third of the 1999

prison population had been unemployed when incarcerated, and almost a third of those employed

had incomes below $5,000. Sixty-five per cent of inmates had failed to complete high school, 70

percent were illiterate, while as many as 200,000 suffered from mental illnesses.66

How do we account for the expansion and increasing racial disproportionality that

dominate the transformation of the American corrections system in recent decades?

Conventional approaches explain large prison populations as necessary reflections of high rates

of crime in American society. In turn, the explanation for these high crime rates is to be found,

according to some observers, in America's cultural exceptionalism, which has its roots in the

frontier, rugged individualism and easy, court-protected, access to weapons.67

Figure 3 charts the relationship between the overall crime index and the incarceration

rate in the US since 1960.68 While it indicates that both crime and imprisonment have risen in

the last four decades, it also suggests that the relationship between the two is far from direct. The

overall crime index fell in fourteen of the 27 years since the incarceration rate began its increase

in the early 1970s. It peaked in 1980, and by 1999, stood at 71.7 percent of its peak – lower than

in any year since 1973.69 There is no clear relationship between the two sets of data.

The evidence also undercuts arguments that the real cultural effect is on violent crime

rather than crime in general, and those that stress the minority crime rate. Regarding the former,

if violent crimes are the focus, the pattern described above is not dramatically altered. Property

crime peaked just prior to the Reagan era in 1980. By 1999 it had fallen to less than 62 percent of

that peak, the lowest level since 1967. Violent crime peaked later (in 1991), but has also fallen

since then, to 75 percent of its apex in 1999, a level similar to the early 1980s.70 By the 1990s,

20

over two thirds of those imprisoned in any given year were convicted of non-violent property,

drug or public order offences, many of which would not result in prison sentences elsewhere in

the world. Drug offences alone accounted for nearly 31 percent of all new state admissions in

1998, 21 percent of the state prison population, and almost 58 percent of federal inmates.71

With respect to race, most of the available evidence suggests that while crime rates for

minorities are higher than those for whites and can therefore explain part of systemic racial

disproportionality, they are not high enough to explain all of it, nor can they explain the huge

acceleration in racially disproportionate sentences since the 1980s.72 The incarceration boom

appears not to be a direct product of increases in rates of crime, violent crime, or crime

committed by minorities. Rather it is a product of almost three decades of criminal justice

legislation that have transformed the relationship between crime and punishment in the United

States.73

The second problem with the argument about American exceptionalism is that with

respect to the broad tendencies described above, it no longer appears to stand the test of

international comparison. The American pattern of decreasing crime rates, increasing policy-

driven rates of incarceration, prison privatization, disproportionate victimization of racial and

ethnic minorities and deteriorating prison conditions is also the pattern in several other countries,

including Canada74, Australia75 and the United Kingdom.76 The organization of criminal justice

in a country may well be an expression of its culture and history. But if this is the case, the

United States has more in common with the UK and other white settler colonies than the

exceptionalism argument allows. Cultural explanations work well if there are inter-cultural

differences that are stable in the long-run. They are less compelling when those differences

appear to be eroding in a period of profound social and cultural instability.

21

As the above suggests, a compelling account of the rise of the prison boom in the United

States must be able to do more than explain the disproportionate size of the prison population. It

must also explain a specific historical pattern: a three decades-long uninterrupted expansion that

appears not to be crime-dependent and is dominated by its racial component. Comparisons with

other liberal democracies during the same time period suggest that the trends towards expansion

and racial disproportionality are not uniquely American, though this case remains quantitatively

distinct.77

Materialist accounts that look at crime and punishment in the context of the ebb and flow

of the business cycle and the periodic system transformations experienced by capitalism, rather

than as national cultural artifacts or responses to criminal behaviour, appear to provide a better

explanation of some of these longer-term trends. The classic historical analysis can be found in

the work of Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, who argued in the 1930s that the war on crime

is only a part of the explanation of transformations in punishment regimes. Rather, they argued,

“[e]very system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive

relationships. It is thus necessary to investigate the origin and fate of penal systems, the use or

avoidance of specific punishments, and the intensity of penal practices as they are determined by

social forces, above all by economic and then fiscal forces.”78 They argue that the most

important factor that produces changes in punishment systems is the condition of the labour

market, specifically the size of the population that is surplus to the requirements of production,

and the technological factors that primarily shape this fact. There is no precise fit between ideas

about punishment, which are historical products and highly variable, and material circumstances,

but labour market conditions determine which ideas are activated at which times.

22

In a similar vein, Quinney argued in the late 1970s that the phenomena of crime are part

of the superstructure and that “[a]t each stage of economic development, the particular notion of

justice has been tied to the material basis of production”.79 The “new criminal utilitarianism”

that began to emerge in the late 1960s is a response to the tendency of late capitalism to expand

the size of the relative surplus population and the failure of America’s minimal welfare state to

cope with the problem. The result is a “new state strategy of social control through criminal

justice” in which “prisons are differentially utilized according to the extent of economic crisis …

the prison population increases as the rate of unemployment increases.” Other empirical work

has also found evidence of this unemployment – incarceration connection, especially in the

1970s and early 1980s.80

Along similar lines, theorists associated with the “social structure of accumulation”

school have placed the roots of the incarceration boom in the shift from a “Golden Age” of

American capitalism that lasted from the end of World War II to the late 1960s with a

succeeding age usually described as one of crisis, decline or insecurity.81 In the first period,

social and political order was maintained primarily by means of a “Fordist” virtuous circle of

rising productivity, profits, wages, standards of living, high levels of employment and mass

consumption and an increasingly interventionist and redistributive state. Since work and the

incentives associated with it are forms of social control, incarceration rates were low and falling.

In contrast, rising unemployment, longer hours, falling real wages, growing levels of work

insecurity, increasing poverty rates, dangerous levels of consumer debt, more competitive labour

markets, and relative economic stagnation have characterized the second period. As the size of

the surplus population has grown, control by incentives has given way to the “stick.” As David

23

Gordon’s cross-national analysis of the relationship between managerial expansion and

incarceration rates demonstrates, the managerial and social uses of the “stick” are related.82

In contrast with the crime and culture arguments, the advantages of this type of approach

ought to be clear: it takes seriously the epoch-making character of the prison boom and tries to

explain it as part of a larger process of restructuring. Moreover, the argument is further

strengthened by the fact that other capitalist societies that have restructured economically in

similar ways have also experienced the same broad penal trends. That said, however, the

argument is found wanting in a number of respects. In the first place, the available empirical

evidence since the mid-1980s undermines the argument that imprisonment varies with the

unemployment rate. The unemployment rate fell continuously from 1983 to 1989 and again

from 1992 to 2000.83 Yet the rate of incarceration increased in all those years, as Figure 1

shows. In the late 1990s, unemployment was lower than at any other time since the late 1960s

and the incarceration rate continued to increase. Even if the unemployment rate is less than a

perfect indicator of the size of the surplus population, the materialist explanation leaves

something to be explained.

More important for our purposes, however, is the racial dimension. These materialist

analyses typically account for racial disproportionality in imprisonment is by appealing to the

above-average representation of minorities among marginal populations. Gordon, for instance,

argues that race is a key to the character of the prison system, but goes on to argue that it is their

structural economic position among the poor and blue-collar workers that leads black males to

criminal activities as a way to survive, while also making them vulnerable to the attentions of the

police in a way that white-collar criminals are not.84 The argument is not only empirically

flawed, as Michael Tonry has demonstrated,85 but also spurious. If the function of prisons is to

24

control the surplus population, the key test is not the poverty rate among blacks, but the size of

the black component of the population of poor people. While there are no entirely adequate

measures of the size of the surplus population, most of the available indicators suggest that racial

disproportionality in the prison system far outweighs racial disproportionality among the

marginalized. Whether we focus on the official definition of poverty86, or a more liberal low

family budget-based definition87, or the working-poor88 or low-wage workers89, the results are

similar: the black share varies between roughly 16 percent and 24 percent, at best no more than

about half the black share of the prison population. The white component of these populations

varies between three fifths and two thirds. If the prison population reflected the racial makeup of

the surplus population, its racial profile would look more like it did in 1950 than it does in 2002

(see Figure 2). If we want to explain the rise of the judicial ghetto, economic explanations are a

good place to start, but there is a large racial residual that is not adequately dealt with.

The first step in this direction is to take seriously the arguments made by Sayer and

Larrain, and recognize that restructuring is not just an economic process, even though the

economic dimension may play an important part. Orthodox historical materialism sees the

development of the economic and/or technological forces as both the motor and the end result of

capitalist development. From an empirical point of view however it seems likely, based on our

experience with a generation of restructuring under the aegis of the new right, that this is only

one option among several. In addition to technological modernization, for instance, one

possibility might be to reduce labour costs, increase the intensity of work by non-technological

means, raise the rate of exploitation, lower unit costs and increase competitiveness. In the vast,

complex and spatially differentiated American economy, different strategies might be used in

different industries, sectors or regions, depending on the specific class characteristics of each.

25

Economic theories of the prison boom discussed above exaggerate the postwar national

dominance of Fordism and neglect the fact that Fordist accumulation strategy was resisted in the

South and other parts of the country. As a result, they fails to address the origins of the post-

1960s restructuring in a distinct, race-structured southern strategy of accumulation that survived

the Fordist era and was “reanimated” at the national level beginning in the 1970s. This southern

accumulation strategy has its roots in the period after Reconstruction, and was based on low-

wage, labour-intensive, high exploitation production, and hostility to unions. Since social and

political control were achieved through the cultivation and preservation of racial antagonisms,

industries and labour markets were in most cases racially segregated.90 The South’s “de facto

industrial policy” was to provide a safe haven for “footloose” capital by providing an extensive

package of relocation incentives and a business climate that protected low-wage, labour-

intensive, non-union employers from the regulatory and industrial relations regime and tax

structures of the Northeast and Midwest.91

In addition to low wages, the South was a region committed to low taxes, especially on

capital, and limited social service provision, especially for African Americans and poor whites.92

It also had a long tradition of using the law as a tool to build and protect a racialized political and

economic order. In the nineteenth century for instance, the convict-lease in Alabama was used to

create a coerced black working class for use in the coal and iron industries.93 The Magnolia

Formula, the foundation of political demobilization for several generations, was a complex menu

of legal, constitutional and political provisions pioneered in Mississippi in 1890 and copied in

whole or in part throughout the South in the next decade and a half. It was designed to insulate

the state from popular discontent by disfranchising those who had least to gain from low-wage

accumulation in the South and who had demonstrated what was deemed to be a dangerous

26

willingness to consider interracial cooperation and radical reform.94 Unable to establish control

by economic means, southern planters and industrialists used a combination of coercion and

racial manipulation.

Consequently, the South was a region with disproportionately high prison populations

who often lived under brutal conditions. In 1971, towards the end of the period of criminal

justice policy liberalism, the rate of incarceration in the South was 220 percent higher than that

in the Northeast. Moreover, some states, such as Georgia, Texas and North Carolina, had rates

that were considerably higher than the regional average.95 Though there is some evidence that

state incarceration rates have converged during the prison boom of the 1980s and 1990s as the

rest of the country has played catch-up, southern states continue to play a leadership role in this

area, and their incarceration rates still exceed the national average. At the end of 2000, thirteen

states exceed the national rate. Nine of them were in the South, whose regional incarceration rate

in 2000 was 539.96

From the New Deal on, the southern accumulation strategy was threatened by, but fought

off, a variety of attempts to nationalize the Fordist regime – the Wagner Act, the Fair Labour

Standards Act, Operation Dixie and so on. Later, during a period when the South had lost much

of its political strength, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the following

year promised to destroy the foundations of the southern model. Southern sociologists began to

speculate about the “Americanization of Dixie” and the disappearance of the low-wage, high-

exploitation regional accumulation strategy.97 But the southern strategy survived, in part as a

result of internal restructuring along urban-rural lines.98 In the context of the economic crisis

that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the region became the fastest-growing region in

the country as corporations fled their traditional locations in the Northeast and Midwest in search

27

of “good business climates”. In the process, the political weight of the South increased and the

southern regional accumulation strategy became the template for the national economic

restructuring that took place after 1980.

At least since 1980, and perhaps since the second half of the Carter administration,

American economic policy has followed the southern template. Reaganism, like its counterparts

in the UK and elsewhere, was a strategy to deal with the growing economic crisis by reducing

wages and raising the rate of exploitation in order to move to an export-oriented accumulation

strategy. This required a significant shift in the balance of power between capital and labour in

order to increase downward pressure on wages.99 To this end the Reagan administration’s tax

reforms, ostensibly dedicated to removing the state from the backs of all people were, in reality,

heavily skewed to benefit corporations and the wealthy. The distribution of income and wealth

was consequently polarized. Federal Reserve decisions to raise interest rates contributed to a

large industrial shakeout, increased unemployment, underemployment, and poverty. The ranks

of the working poor grew rapidly, and there was a general reduction in the quality of life. In

addition, the labour and civil rights movements came under attack, part-time and “flexible” work

was expanded, and the threat and reality of unemployment in an already slack labour market was

used to maximize insecurity and attack wage levels and the non-wage benefits of those still

employed. Environmental, workplace and consumer protections were weakened. Public

services – especially at the state and local levels – were cut back or privatized. Confined to the

lower reaches of the occupational structure and reliant on the state for a wide range of services

from job training, hiring provisions, affirmative action and the welfare system, minority workers

were the main victims of this campaign. The unemployment rate among black workers increased

from 12 percent in 1979 to 20 percent by 1983.100

28

Since the 1970s, sociologists and other observers report the “Dixification of America”

rather than the reverse,101 suggesting that in the battle between regional accumulation and control

strategies, the South has won, at least for now. According to Stephen Cummings, “the economic

development policies that we have implemented in the United States over the past three decades

have taken on the characteristics of an up-to-date, modified version of those that have been in

effect in the American South for decades.”102

Race has been central to the southern accumulation strategy since Reconstruction. The

manipulation of racial antagonisms was a lever used to maintain low-wage labour markets,

construct a racial political order, lower taxes and minimize social services for the poor of all

colours. The nationalization of this strategy required the reanimation of a racial political

ideology that had come under serious attack in the 1950s and 1960s. So the main question we

need to confront is how this revitalization occured. The answer is to be found not so much in the

economic crisis itself but in the way it was presented ideologically and thus “lived”: as a dual

crisis not just of economic relations but also of the social and political order. What was, and is,

seen to be at stake in the popular mobilizations of the 1960s was not only authority at the

workplace but also social and political hierarchies generally: gender, the family, the domination

of the military and especially race. Alongside the nationalization of the southern accumulation

strategy since the 1970s, we need to take into account the nationalization of the post-

Reconstruction southern political formula as a way of combating popular democratic

mobilization, and the increasing power of race and racial thinking in American life that resulted.

The punitive politics of law and order that emerged within the Republican Party in the

late 1960s as a response to the various political challenges of that decade came to be known as

the “southern strategy”.103 This strategy was an attempt to criminalize where possible, and

29

demonize where not, a range of activities that challenged the limits of American democracy and

especially the large-scale political demobilization that had been its foundation since the

implementation of the Magnolia Formula in the 1890s. Chief among these were civil rights and

antiwar demonstrations, civil disobedience of all kinds and Supreme Court decisions that

expanded rights for defendants, African Americans and women.

The symbolic goal of the southern strategy was to present a political challenge to the

status quo as evidence of a complete social breakdown by associating the new left and the civil

rights movement with crime and moral decay. In this way, popular support could be mobilized

behind a punitive response. Its narrower political purpose was to detach southern white

conservatives from the Democratic Party, thus enabling the rolling back of the liberal reforms of

the 1960s. Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 presidential candidacy married a law and order

campaign with support for states’ rights and opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, made the

first, unsuccessful, foray. In the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972 George Wallace took up

the theme, demonizing civil rights activists and antiwar demonstrators in the same breath as

muggers, pornographers, the hypocritical liberal elite, the Supreme Court and the federal

bureaucracy.104

This nostalgic authoritarian populism, calling for a return to political and moral order of

an earlier America, had two political effects, one short-term and one longer-term. First, it forced

Richard Nixon to play the same game in 1968, to avoid losing support to the right. In a speech in

August 1968, Nixon established the dominant discursive dichotomy of the era when he

complained that “some of our courts have gone too far in weakening the peace forces, as against

the criminal forces, in this country.”105 Second, it set the political agenda of the Republican

Party for the next generation. Though the initial audience was southern, both Wallace and Nixon

30

discovered that a veiled racism played well in other parts of the country, while the Republican

Party as a whole discovered an effective political strategy for electoral realignment around the

concerns of the angry white southern male. By the 1990s, according to Michael Lind, the

supply-side wing of the Republican Party had been defeated by “culture war conservatism”,

whose main concerns were with “[r]ace, sex, breeding, class - …the classic themes of the

Tidewater reaction”.106 Racial backlash, politicized by Wallace’s tirades, institutionalized in

Nixon’s southern strategy and “spruced up and vetted by a team of pollsters and political

marketing experts, [had] become the common currency of American political rhetoric.”107

In the process, a host of questions of social policy – taxes, welfare and welfare

“dependency”, crime and policing, prison construction, individual rights versus social

responsibility, affirmative action, drug enforcement, public housing – came to be seen in racial

terms.108 And conversely, debates about social policy became tools for racial backlash. Angry

taxpayers came to be persuaded, even though most of the “facts” are incorrect, that their efforts

were supporting socially undesirable lifestyles, as young, single, addicted, inner city black

women, encouraged by the welfare state, gave birth to children who would grow up into an

unsocializable and violent predatory “underclass”. The central rhetorical combination of race,

drugs and crime came easily since, as Diana Gordon has shown, the racial shadow agenda of

drug policy has a long history that goes back at least to its use as way to control the Chinese

population of San Francisco in 1875. 109 In the 1980s and 1990s, race, drugs and crime became

the master-metaphors of the age, used to justify a variety of political actions, including the

declaration of “war” on drug use and all that the rhetoric of warfare implies. As David Gordon

puts it, bluntly, “the U. S. criminal justice system, and perhaps large portions of the citizenry as

well, believes that many African-Americans simply belong behind bars.”110

31

This putative widespread belief has recently been reinforced by what its supporters belive

to be scientific research. Racial hereditarian theorizing has a long history going back to the

eugenicists of the late nineteenth century. According to Stephen Jay Gould, revivals of scientific

racism are a predictable consequence of periods of political and economic instability (in the late

1920s and the late 1960s, for instance).111 Since the 1930s, and particularly in the second half of

the century, these ideas have lost any scientific credibility. But like the view that creationism is

a “theory” just like evolution and should be taught as such, it festers below the surface, kept alive

by organizations that have an intellectual or practical interest in the maintenance of racial

hierarchies. Its most recent eruption, The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles

Murray, appeared coincidentally in the same year as “culture war conservatism” took power in

the House of Representatives, giving political power to a group of ideologically committed

southern Republican congressional leaders several of whom had ties to the extreme right.112

Herrnstein and Murray argued that black and Hispanic poverty is best explained on the basis of

racial inferiority rather than social structure, public policy, history, or for that matter racism. If

so, they argued, social and educational policy and the welfare state in general are all futile, since

they cannot alter facts about the race-structured inheritability of intelligence, which “keeps most

members of the underclass from fending for themselves.” 113 They are also immoral in the sense

that they subsidize unacceptable behaviour, tax citizens for no good reason and encourage

“dysgenesis”, the outbreeding of the intelligent by the unintelligent. Immigration policies should

be formulated on the basis of these “facts”. Many social policies should simply be abandoned.

The traditional defect of reactionary populism is that while it identifies scapegoats, it has

little to offer in terms of solutions. Modern versions like that of Herrnstein and Murray are no

different. They may make white, racist backlash politically acceptable by re-coding it or

32

gathering spurious “scientific evidence” to “prove” it. But the clock cannot be turned back – the

moral order of the past is no longer available. Beyond some vague proposals to “make life

easier” for those of perceived low intelligence by returning social policy to states and

communities, simplifying rules and clarifying penalties, they have nothing positive to offer.

The negative impacts are massive, however. According to Lind, the respectful reception

of these ideas in parts of the Republican Party has magnified the importance of a small group of

self-referencing eugenicists funded by organizations of the extreme right and committed to

“racial betterment” in the US. Second, it has “eroded the taboo against overt racism in

public”.114 Third, it has reinforced the case for a penal system organized along racial lines. If

social policy cannot create social progress or reduce the various social and economic gaps

between the races, and if some races are more prone to irresponsibility and criminal behaviour

than others, punishment and deterrence are all that is left. For Herrnstein and Murray this takes

the form of a neo-fascist “custodial state”, which would segregate and warehouse the

“underclass” while relieving it of child-rearing responsibilities, improve and extend the

technology of surveillance, take over welfare provision, and enhance penalties and build more

prisons. What they have in mind is “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation

[sic] for some substantial minority of the nation’s population, while the rest of America tries to

go about its business.”115 As the authors admit, these preferences are only partly normative since,

with the construction of the judicial ghetto already under way for a decade or more, many of

them are already in place.

The anti-democratic racial/cultural backlash that began in the 1960s and the economic

restructuring program of the 1980s are clearly related, as Parenti and others indicate. To the

extent that it involved a general remoralization of society, the former also served to justify a

33

broader set of traditional cultural beliefs that reinforced the restructuring of economic life,

emphasizing hard work, discipline and personal responsibility. Crime, drug use, and poverty

came to be seen not as consequences of the contradictions and collapse of Keynesianism and

Fordism but as their causes. Economic and moral revitalization demanded action to stop the rot.

Moreover, the climate dominated by the social ontology of Thatcherism – that only individuals

and families can be said to exist, not communities or societies – justified individual punishment

rather than social change as the way to deal with “unacceptable behaviour”.

It was within this context that the rapid acceleration of the incarceration rate began in the

1980s. A decade later, the Clinton administration's “triangulation” and “third way” politics

signalled its acceptance of the main components of Reaganomics, simultaneously destroying one

of the few remaining obstacles to neo-liberal hegemony, and leaving black communities more

isolated and exposed (hypersegregated according to one study116) than they had been for decades.

Penal expansion continued to accelerate, reaching unsustainable growth rates by the middle of

the decade, ironically almost coinciding with Clinton’s signing the law that abolished federal

welfare provision. Only in the late 1990s, with the economy approaching full employment and

fears of wage-driven inflation mounting, did the rate of expansion begin to slow.

Conclusion:

Though there appears to be a clear and powerful link between the prison boom and the

neo-liberal economic restructuring that has occurred since the 1970s, we cannot wholly explain

the rise of the American penal state on an economic basis. Even less can we do so along the

lines of “forces of production determinism” suggested by orthodox historical materialism. This

is not to say that controlling a large economically surplus population is not an important part of

the story. Nor is it to deny that everyday economic interests are not also at work. Increased

34

incarceration, alongside a massive spate of prison-building and the privatization of prison

services and management, provides corporate participants with expanded opportunities for profit

making and small town and rural labour forces with significantly enhanced job opportunities.

Politicians and bureaucrats benefit from campaign contributions, the “endless dramaturgical

possibilities”117 that result from being “tough on crime”, the enhanced electoral prospects that

accrue from successful job-creation records, and the revolving corporate door at the end of the

public part of their careers. Conservative southern politicians, in particular, benefit from the

reduced weight of African American electorates as a result of felony disfranchisement laws.118

Correctional Officers’ Unions welcome the increased political power that expansion brings and

lobby aggressively for more prisoners and more prisons.119 Small town and rural communities

see in the “strategic dispersal”120 of prisons the possibility of compensating for decades of

economic and decline with prison-based jobs and the transfer of population and associated

federal and state from urban ghettoes where most of their inmates formerly lived.121 For the

nation as a whole, the prison industrial complex, apparently unresponsive to the business cycle,

may act like its military counterpart as an automatic Keynesian stabilizer in the event of

recession.122

Yet in the end, none of this would be possible without the generalized white fear of the

mythical black urban predatory underclass that has developed since the 1960s, nor without the

varieties of racial ideas and practices that have been reanimated in the process. These ideas and

practices have their roots deep in the historical structures and dynamics of American

development, but they continue to shape the menu of strategic choices available in a crisis. A

disproportionately large and racialized penal system has been a permanent part of the southern

landscape since the end of Reconstruction, when “Southern prisons turned black overnight.”123

35

It reflects a political ideology designed to preserve peculiar southern race, class and authority

structures and reinforce a low-wage, high-exploitation accumulation strategy, now nationalized:

that is, a specifically southern way of pumping unpaid surplus labour out of the direct producers.

In the twentieth century, incarceration rates began to rise during what Cummings calls “the first

conservative era” from 1921 to 1933, a period like the present when the southern model of

political economy dominated the nation.124 Depression, war and Keynesianism created the

conditions for a different accumulation strategy during the middle third of the century, confining

the southern strategy to its regional redoubt and largely discrediting the notion that imprisonment

was the answer to all social problems. A combination of democratic rebellion, economic crisis

and globalization in the last three decades of the twentieth century created the conditions that

permitted the reanimation of both the southern accumulation strategy and its associated racial

political ideology, and re-asserted the neo-liberal nexus of “free economy, strong state”. Prison

expansion and racialization across the nation soon followed.

Historical materialism can cope with this pattern, but not in its orthodox form. To cope,

it must be flexible enough to accept a series of theoretical and methodological possibilities that

are alien to the orthodox model. It must allow that ideas and ideologies are not simply

reflections of a particular set of material circumstances, but rather have their own life-process in

interaction with material life, and can be reanimated and put to use in new circumstances. It

needs to recognise the complexity of the historical process, in which development patterns are

uneven, not only in terms of the existence of distinct regionally-based accumulation strategies,

but also in terms of the way in which aspects of a new, high-tech, globalizing economy can be

combined with the social ideas and practices of the nineteenth century. Similarly, history has to

be thought of as a process which is simultaneously open-ended, in order to allow these

36

combinations to be made in practice, but also structured and path-dependent, since not all

combinations are as easily possible. Finally and most importantly, historical materialism must

reject the finite categories and sequences of the orthodox model, in order to admit the possibility

that relations traditionally thought of as superstructural can invade and shape the ‘base’ and the

way that the productive forces develop; in order to reverse, when necessary for empirical

reasons, the orthodoxy’s causal sequence. None of this requires the abandonment of Marx’s

methodological emphasis on the importance of social production and reproduction, but it does

require the abandonment of abstract and mechanical ways of thinking about the empirical world.

37

FIGURE 1:The Growth of the US Prison Population, 1925-2000

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Figure 2: The Changing Composition of the US Prison Population, 1923-2000

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Figure 3: Historical Trends in Rates of Crime and Imprisonment, United States, 1960-1999

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41

ENDNOTES

1 Benedetto Croce, 1907, quoted in Michael Lowy. On Changing the World: Essays in

Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1993) ix.

2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method. Trans. H. Barnes. (New York: Knopf 1967) 30. 3 Eric Hobsbawm, quoted in “At the age of 80 this most pre-eminent of historians

remains convinced of the moral force of communism” New Statesman (June 6, 1997) 28 4 Arthur Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and

World 1968) 3 5 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. 1852. From the third edition,

prepared by Engels (1885), as translated and published by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1937. Online: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1995, 1999.

6 Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 (1939), p. 207.

7 Milovan Djilas, Of Prisons and Ideas (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1986) 139.

8 “We might summarize the content of the universal homogeneous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic”. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” Pp. 1-25, in Fareed Zakaria (ed.), The New Shape of World Politics: Contending Paradigms in International Politics. (New York: Norton 1997) 9.

9 Jorge Larrain, A Reconstruction of Historical Materialism. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 6

10 Borrowed from Loic Waquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘race question’ in the US.” New Left Review 13, 2002, p. 51.

11 Larrain, Reconstruction; Goran Therborn, Science, Class and Society. (London: Verso, 1980); Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

12 Karl Marx, “Postface to the Second Edition”, Capital, Vol. 1. (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1976), 103

13 Note that in the same postface to the second edition of volume 1 of Capital, Marx says that he has “coquetted” with Hegel’s mode of expression in order to annoy the great thinker’s critics.

14 Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology”, Collected Works, Vol. 5. (New York: International Publishers, 1976) esp. pp. 35-7

15 Marx and Engels, “Theses on Feuerbach”, MECW 5, p.3 16 Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”. Pp. 180-

4 in Marx and Engels: Selected Works (MESW). (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968). 17 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, MESW, 35-63 18 Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies. Vol. 2. (New York: Harper, 1962)

and The Poverty of Historicism. Second Edition. (London: Routledge,1960). 19 Larrain, Reconstruction, ch. 2

42

20 Lucio Colletti, “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International”. Pp. 45-108

in From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972)

21 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism. (London: New Left Books, 1976), 6

22 Larrain, Reconstruction, 59 23 Anderson, Considerations, 20 24 Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. (London:

New Left Books, 1970); G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)

25 Sayer, Violence, p. 10 26 “Engels to Bloch”, MESW, 683. 27 “Engels to Schmidt in Berlin”, MESW, 679. 28 Sayer, Violence., 11 29 Marx, “Preface”, 180-1 30 Marx and Engels, “German Ideology”, op cit., p. 35. 31 Karl Marx,”Letter to Mikhailovsky”. Pp. 571-2 in David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx:

Selected Writings. (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1977. 32 Perry Anderson, In the Track of Historical Materialism. (London: Verso, 1983), p. 18 33 Anderson, Tracks, 21 34 Anderson, Tracks, 26 35 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy.

(Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1973, 706; Sayer, op. cit., 26; Larrain, op. cit., pp. 78-80; Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. P., 1984), ch. 5.

36 Sayer, Violence, p. 29. 37 Marx, Grundrisse, 471-514. 38 Marx probably overstates this contrast here, since it is not difficult to think of a variety

of non-economic forces in capitalist societies, such as the manipulation of racial and ethnic antagonisms that are used to discipline labour and reinforce the process of surplus extraction. See, for Instance, Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986). And Marx recognizes the possibility elsewhere, as the discussion below suggests.

39 Sayer, Violence, p. 75 40 Marx, “German Ideology”, p. 47. 41 Marx, “German Ideology”, p. 54. 42 Marx, “German Ideology”, p. 47. 43 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Part I. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), p.

285. 44 Larrain, Reconstruction, p. 71. 45 See for instance Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State

Formation as Cultural Revolution. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) 46 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 100. 47 Karl Marx, Capital III. (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 927-8. 48 Therborn, Science, pp. 373-4.

43

49 Terence Ball, “History: Critique and Irony”. Pp. 124-142 in Terrell Carver (ed.), The

Cambridge Companion to Marx. (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1991) 140. 50 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left.

(London: Verso, 1978), Part 1. 51 Antonio Gramsci, “State and Civil Society” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks.

Edited and Translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971, p. 276.

52 US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online. <http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/index.html>, Table 6.26; Allen Beck and Lauren Glaze, Correctional Populations in the United States, 1980-2000 (US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001) <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/ corr2tab.htm>.

53 Defined as the number of prisoners per 100,000 residents. 54 Human Rights Watch, World Report 2001 (2001) <http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1>;

Secretary of State for the Home Department, Prison Statistics, England and Wales 2000. Cmnd 5250. HMSO (August 2001), Table 1.21.

55 “US Jails Two Millionth Inmate,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, 17 February 2000, 1. 56 Beck and Harrison, “Prisoners in 2000”. 57 US Department of Justice, “National Correctional Population Reaches New High,”

Press Release, 26 August 2001. 58 Sidra Lee Gifford, Criminal Justice Expenditures and Employment (US Department of

Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000) <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/data/ eetrnd06.wk1>.

59 Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labour: The Political Economy of Convict Labour in the New South. (London: Verso Books, 1996)

60 Data for 1923-1980 from Margaret W. Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States 1850-1984 (Rockville, MD: Westat Inc., 1987) p. 65. Data for 1990 and 2000 from Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, Prisoners in 2001 (Washington, DC: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, July 2002). Online: <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p01.pdf>

61 Human Rights Watch, Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs. (New York, May 2000), Tables 3 and 18. < http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa>

62 Beck and Harrison, “Prisoners in 2000”. 63 Thomas P. Bonczar and Allen J. Beck, Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or

Federal Prison. (US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, March 1997). 64 U. S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Correctional Populations of

the United States 1997 (Washington: GPO, 2000), Table 5.6. 65 Ned Glasscock, “Blacks behind bars in record numbers,” Raleigh News and Observer,

22 July 2001, <http://www.newsobserver.com/standing/collections/census/ 1100000026231.html>.

66 The Sentencing Project, Facts about Prisons and Prisoners (Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project); Eric Schlosser, “The Prison industrial complex”. The Atlantic Monthly 19998 <http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/prisons.htm

67 For a fuller discussion of the crime and culture approaches to the prison boom in the US, see Elliott Currie, Confronting Crime: An American Challenge. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), ch. 2.

44

68 Source of data for Figure 3 as in endnote 1 above. 69 Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online, Table

3.120. 70 Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook, Table 3.120. 71 Schlosser, “The Prison industrial complex”; Human Rights Watch, World Report 2001;

The Sentencing Project, Facts about Prisons and Prisoners. 72 Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in America. (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 79; William J. Sabol, “Racially disproportionate prison populations in the United States: an overview of historical patterns and review of contemporary issues.” Contemporary Crises Vol. 13, 1989: 405-432.

73 Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police amd Prisons in the Age of Crisis. (London: Verso, 1999), chs 1-5; David Ladipo, “The Rise of America’s Prison industrial complex.” New Left Review 7 (2001); Downes, “The Macho Penal Economy: Mass Incarceration in the United States”, in Anthony Giddens, (ed.), The Global Third Way Debate. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001)

74 In 2000, the Canadian crime rate was at its lowest since 1979, and its murder rate had been falling since the mid-1970s. Canada's prison population increased by 53.2 percent from 1978 to 1996, before falling by 6.2 percent from 1996 to 1999. On average, Aboriginal people are over 8 times as likely to be imprisoned as non-Aboriginals in Canada (Statistics Canada, Canadian Socio-economic Information and Management Database, Matrix 312, Series Nos. 91343, 91348, 91353, 91358, 91363, 91368, 91373, 91378, 91383, 91388, 91393, 91398).

75 From 1982 to 1999, the Australian prison population increased by 119.2 percent and the incarceration rate from 90 to 145. Although crime rates rose overall, the pattern during those two decades is one of increases and declines rather than a steady upward trend. From 1993 to 1998 there were no significant increases in the main crime categories. The incarceration rate for Indigenous Australians was almost 15 times higher than for non-Indigenous Australians in 2000 (Carlos Carcach and Anna Grant, “Imprisonment in Australia: Trends in Prison Populations and Imprisonment Rates, 1982-1998.” Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice no. 130 (Australian Institute of Criminology, 1999), October; Australian Bureau of Statistics, Prisoners in Australia (Canberra, 2000), <http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats>; Cheryl McDermid, “A precipitous increase in Australia's prison population” World Socialist Website 1 (2000), November: <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/pris-n01_prn.shtml>.

76 The British Crime Survey recently found that in 2000 the chance of becoming a victim of crime was at its lowest in 20 years. Between 1990 and 1998, the British prison population increased by 46 percent before leveling off until 2000 and then rising by 5.3 percent in 2000-2001. For whites in the UK, the incarceration rate was 188; for all black Britons: 1,615; for Afro-Caribbean Britons: 1,704 (“Crime rate survey claims record fall,” The Guardian, 25 October 2001, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,580678,00.html>; Secretary of State for the Home Department, Prison Statistics, England and Wales 2000; Home Office, UK, Monthly Prison Population Brief (2001), August, <http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/ prisaug01.pdf>.

77 Sir Leon Radzinowicz, “Penal Regressions”. Cambridge Law Journal 50:3 (1991) p. 439.

78 Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968 (1939), p. 5.

45

79 Richard Quinney, Class, State and Crime: On the theory and practice of criminal

justice. (New York: David McKay Co. Inc., 1977), p. 2. 80 Quinney, Class, State and Crime, pp. 16, 136; James Inverarity and Ryken Grattet,

“Institutional responses to unemployment: a comparison of US trends, 1948-1985.” Contemporary Crises, Vol. 13, 1989: 351-370; Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (Garden City, NY:Anchor Press, 1984), pp. 175-6

81 Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf, Beyond the Waste Land; Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor, The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); David M. Gordon, Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Corporate Downsizing (New York: Free Press, 1996).

82 Gordon, Fat and Mean, ch. 5. 83 Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report to the President, 2001. Washington:

USGPO, 2001. Table B42. <http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2002/pdf/2001_erp.pdf> 84 Gordon, Fat and Mean, pp. 141-2; see also Quinney, Class, State and Crime, p. 134. 85 See above, note 70. 86 US Census Bureau, Poverty in the United States 2000. Current Population Report P60-

214. (Washington, DC: USGPO, 2001), p. 7. 87 Heather Boushey et. Al., Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families.

(Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2001), p. 14. 88 John Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy, The Forgotten Americans: Thirty Million Working

Poor in the Land of Opportunity. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992) pp. 74-5. 89 Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and John Scmitt, The State of Working America,

2000-2001. (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2001), Table 5.19. 90 Phillip J. Wood, Southern Capitalism: The Political Economy of North Carolina, 1880-

1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986); Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (London: Verso, 1986), ch. 5.

91 Thomas A. Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt (New York: Praeger, 1989). 92 V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Vintage, 1949). 93 Alex Lichtenstein, “Through the Rugged Gates of the Penitentiary: Convict Labour and

Southern Coal, 1870-1900,” in Race and Class in the American South since 1890, eds. Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern (Oxford: Berg, 1994).

94 James E. Alt, “The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on Black and White Voter Registration in the South,” in Quiet Revolution in the South, eds. Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 354-6. Most of the Magnolia formula’s main components have been eliminated by federal legislation and constitutional amendment. Note however that the disfranchisement of felons continues to remove several million adult black males from the electoral rolls, is particularly effective is several southern states, where the ban is a lifetime one, and continues to have a major effect on state and federal elections, as the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests. See Jamie Fellner and Marc Mauer, Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disfranchisement Laws in the United States (Washington DC: Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project, 1998)

95 These statistics are from incarceration rate data kindly provided to me by Paige Harrison of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

46

96 Allen J. Beck and Paige M. Harrison, “Prisoners in 2000,” Bureau of Justice Statistics

Bulletin (Washington: US Department of Justice, 2001), August. 97 John Egerton, The Americanization of Dixie (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press,

1974). 98 Thomas Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt: The Growing Divergence between the Rural

and Urban South. (New York: Praeger, 1989; Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Sundown on the Sunbelt: Growth without Development in the Rural South. (Raleigh, NC: Aspen Institute/Ford Foundation, 1991); Cynthia Anderson, Michael Schulman and Phillip J. Wood, “Globalization and Uncertainty: The Restructuring of Southern Textiles.” Social Problems, 48:4, 2001, pp. 478-498.

99 Robert Brenner, “Uneven Development and the Long Downturn: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Boom to Stagnation, 1950-1998,” New Left Review (1998): #229: 1-264.

100 Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report to the President, 2001. Table B42 101 Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics

and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1996); Ron Nixon, “The Dixification of America,” Southern Exposure Vol. XXIV, no. 3 (1996): 19-22; Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America. (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 206.

102 Stephen D. Cummings, The Dixification of America: The American Odyssey into the Conservative Economic Trap (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), x.

103 Parenti, Lockdown America, xii. 104 Dan T. Carter, “Legacy of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American

Politics,” Journal of Southern History Vol. LXII, 1 (1996) 3-26. 105 Quoted in Diana R. Gordon, The Return of the Dangerous Classes: Drug Prohibition

and Policy Politics (New York: Norton, 1994), ix. 106 Michael Lind, “Brave New Right” in Steven Fraser (ed.), The Bell Curve Wars: Race,

Intelligence and the Future of America (New York: Basic Books, 1995) p. 173. 107 Carter, “Legacy of Rage”, 19. 108 Thomas B. Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights

and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991). 109 Diana Gordon, The Return of the Dangerous Classes, pp. 24-6 and ch. 11. 110 David Gordon, Fat and Mean, p. 141. 111 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. Revised and Expanded Edition. (New

York: Norton, 1996) pp. 29-32. 112 Nixon, “Dixification”. 113 Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class

Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). 114 Lind, Up from Conservatism, p. 201. 115 Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve., p. 526. 116 C. Vann Woodward, “The Crisis of Caste: From segregation to ‘hypersegregation’.

The New Republic, November 6, 1989 <http://www.tnr.com/archive/woodward110689.html> 117 Downes, “The Macho Penal Economy,” 213. 118 Andrew Shapiro, “The Disenfranchised,” The American Prospect no. 35 (1997),

November-December: 60-62; Somini Sengupta, “Felony Costs Voting Rights for a Lifetime in 9 states,” New York Times, 3 November 2000; Jamie Fellner and Marc Mauer, Losing the Vote:

47

The Impact of Felony Disfranchisement Laws in the United States (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project, 1998).

119 Mike Davis, “Hell Factories in the Field: A Prison Industrial Complex”, The Nation 260, No. 7 (1995).

120 This is the term used to denote the common practice in the military industrial complex of cultivating Congressional support for weapons systems by dispersing contracts and sub-contracts in as many congressional districts, states and regions as possible. See, for example, Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988) ch. 8

121 Tracy Huling, “Prisoners of the Census,” Mother Jones, May 10 2000, <http:// www.motherjones.com/realitycheck/census.html>.

122 Downes, “The Macho Penal Economy,” 220. 123 Waquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration”, p. 53. 124 Cummings, The Dixification of America, ch. 4.