The Perpetual Prisoner Machine by Joel Dyer, 2000, Excerpts
“We promise to pass an anti-crime package including stronger truth-in-sentencing, “good faith” exclusionary rule exemption, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer’s “crime” bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools.” Republican Party, Contract with
The title of section 2 of the contract, “The Taking Back Our Streets Act,” implies that we have lost control of our streets to crime. Most people are safer now than they were twenty-five years ago, and at the time the contract was written, crime was already well into its decline. The contract even admits that it will fund its new prisons and other anti-criminal measures by diverting money out of social programs that have been shown to be a deterrent to criminal behavior. And finally, the contract offers the all-important “incentive” through its claim that more cops, more prisons, longer sentences, and more executions will “keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools.”
Welcome to the real war on crime – a political war of “crime-gap” propaganda designed to transform society’s media-generated crime anxiety into political capital. It’s not just Republicans who are playing the crime-fear game. Consider the title of Democrat Bill Clinton’s crime legislation – the “Twenty-First Century Law Enforcement and Public Safety Act.”
When we couple the existence of hard-on-crime sentencing laws – such as three strikes – with the power of prisonization, we are basically creating a scenario where taxpayers will eventually be picking up multi-million-dollar prison tabs for many of the people we initially sentence into prison for trivial, nonviolent offenses such as breaking marijuana laws.
The weapons of the war on crime - mandatory sentencing, including “three-strikes laws and “truth in sentencing” - have increased our prison population ten times over in recent years. We have been sold a war against violent crime, but the government has delivered something else – a war with its roots in race and class, a war that has resulted in the imprisonment of millions of low-income citizens for nonviolent offenses, 60 percent of whom would not even have received a stay in prison for their actions prior to Congress’s meddling with the sentencing guidelines.
