Social Insecurity:

The Transfornfiation of American

Criminal Justice, 1965-2000

Anthony M. Platt

Just from a Christian standpoint, you can't see one of these and not
consider that maybe it's not right.
Jim Willet, warden of Huntsville prison in Texas, after supervising 40
executions in one year (Rimer, 2000a)

We're Number One!

F OR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY YEARS, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT WAS NOT A CONTESTED
issue in the 2000 presidential race. By the end of Clinton's second term, the
Democratic and Republican platforms shared the same premises about law
and order, and disagreed only on details. Unlike Michael Dukakis in the 1988
campaign. Bill Clinton made sure in 1992 that he would not be labeled a "card-
carrying member of the ACLU" or represented as the kind of governor who
releases a Willie Horton into a work furlough program. While governor of
Arkansas, Clinton approved the death penalty and as a presidential candidate he
accused Republicans of being soft on crime. During the 1994 midterm election
campaign. President Clinton supported a "three strikes" provision in a federal
crime bill (Cole, 1999: 147). George W. Bush arrives in office with a record of
presiding over a state with the second largest prison population and almost half the
executions carried out in the country in 2000.
The recent presidential election may have been in doubt for several weeks, but
as far as criminal justice policies are concerned, it made little difference which
party triumphed. By 1992, the traditional liberal agenda on crime prevention,
community development, rehabihtation, and abolition of the death penaltyhad,
like liberalism itself, disappeared from official political discourse, to be replaced
by a bipartisan consensus of demagoguery. In 2000, Republicans and Democrats
echoed each other's position: Clinton and Gore "fought for and won the biggest

ANTHONY M . PLATT (amplatt@earthlink,net) is a member of the Editorial Board of SocialJustice and

professor of social work, California State University, Sacramento, CA 95819-6090, This article was
originally published in Working Papers in Local Governance and Democracy 3 (2000), The author
thanks Julie Stewart for her research assistance on this article,

138 Social Justice Vol. 28, No. 1 (2001)

The Transformation of American Criminal Justice, 1965-2000 139

anti-drug budgets in history,,,. They funded new prison cells, and expanded the
death penalty for cop killers and terrorists.... But we have just begun to fight the
forces of lawlessness and violence," called the Democrats, "We renew our call,"
the Republicans responded, "for a complete overhaul of the juvenile justice system
that will punish juvenile offenders" and for "no-frills prisons" for adults (Demo-
cratic National Convention, 2000; Republican National Convention, 2000),
Meanwhile, given the rush to retribution, most people would not know that
people's safety is for the most part unrelated to the number of police or severity
of punishment; or that most crime is not even reported to the police; or that the
overall crime rate has declined over the last 20 years. The drop in the crime rate
in the 1990s resulted from a complex interplay of demographic, economic, and
social factors. Even mainstream criminologists admit that imprisonment and more
punitive sentencing accounted for only five to 25% of the decline in crime
(Butterfield, 2000b), According to a recent New York Times survey, 10 of the 12
states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average;
and during the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has
been 48 to 101% higher than in states without the death penalty (Bonner and
Fessenden, 1999: 1), When the law-and-order campaign was at its height in the
early 1990s, the rates for murder and rape were high, but about the same as in the
early 1970s; other crimes of violence, such as robbery and assault, had declined;
and youth violence was a small and decreasing part of serious crime in the United
States,' Victimization rates in 1999, reports the Department of Justice, are the
lowest recorded since the National Crime Victimization Survey' s creation in 1973
(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999),
Yet, by the early 1990s, a moral panic about crime and lawlessness was in full
swing throughout the country, from Puerto Rico, where the National Guard was
called upon to police housing projects, to the beaches of southern California,
where curfews were imposed to prevent gang violence, and to Florida, where state
politicians proposed reducing the age of execution to 14 and fining welfare
mothers for their kids' crimes (Navarro, 1994: 6; Rimer, 1994: 1; Rohter, 1994:
10). Legislators at every level of government were in fierce competition to prove
their devotion to criminalization and punishment. In 1994, Congress passed a
$30.2 billion crime bill that funded 100,000 new police and $8.8 billion in prison
construction. Between 1981 and 1999, the budget of the Department of Justice
grew ninefold, from $2.35 bilhon to $21.09 billion. At the local level, budget-
strapped city councils and boards of supervisors were hard at work expanding the
justice net through legislation that criminalized "aggressive panhandling" and
crammed already overcrowded jails with the homeless and chronically unem-
ployed. These policies recall the English Poor Laws that filled workhouses with
"sturdy beggars" some 400 years ago.
Variants of "three strikes and you're out" (mandatory life imprisonment for
prisoners convicted of a third felony) now operate in more than 24 states
140 PLATT

(Blomberg and Lucken, 2000: 214-216), California, whose voters overwhelm-

ingly supported a three-strikes referendum in 1994, is currently building a
maximum-security, 5,000-bed prison in Delano, the 24th new prison in the state
since 1980 (Nieves, 2000b: 12;Parenti, 1999:227; Cole, 1999:146-49), To avoid
any accusation of being soft on crime. New York and Ohio have reduced
recreational programs in prison, while Mississippi became the first state to put
convicts back in striped uniforms (Nossiter, 1994: 1).
When it comes to biggest and best, you cannot beat the U.S. criminal justice
system 14 million arrests annually, and over 1,7 million employed as police,
guards, and other functionaries at a total cost to taxpayers of about $74 billion (or
about three times as much as the economic relief allotted to 4.5 million families
on welfare in 1994). The number of prisoners in local, state, and federal prisons
has quadrupled in the past 20 years to over two million, at a cost of about $40 billion
a year (Butterfield, 2000b: 16). There are more than 3,500 prisoners stacked up in
a waiting pattern on death row, with Texas under Governor Bush leading the nation
with 37 executions in 1999 and 40 in 2000, the highest number in one year in any
state in the nation's history. By 1993, almost five million people in this country
were under some kind of correctional supervision (jail, prison, probation, and
parole) and no signs indicate the trend is abating (Bureau of Justice Statistics,
2000, 1994, 1993; Butterfield, 2000a, 1992: E4; Rothman, 1994: 34-38; Rimer,
2000a: 15). While the United States has five percent of the world's population, it
now has 25% of its prisoners (Gonnerman, 2000:56), According to one prediction,
by the year 2006, one out of every 10 Americans will be enmeshed in the criminal
justice system. "We are becoming a medium-secure society," suggest Thomas
Blomberg and Karol Lucken (2000: 226).
The U.S. has the largest, most complex, most expensive, and most punitive
system of justice in the world and the most insecurity about crime in the West,
with no relief in sight. "Public safety" is an illusion: it is every individual woman,
man, and child to his or her own defense. Even the police advise everybody to learn
techniques of "target-hardening" and "defensible space" organize neighbor-
hood watches, look out for suspicious characters, and, if you are a woman, carry
a whistle and mace, take classes in martial arts, and stay off the streets after dark.
In other words, take personal responsibility and good luck! How did we arrive at
this conjuncture of pervasive institutional security and social insecurity?
Panics and Panaceas

The pohtical preoccupation with crime and justice in the 1990s had little to do
with either. With the collapse of liberalism and the Keynesian regulatory state, the
old Fordist social pact has been broken, giving rise to more coercive and
exclusionary forms of social control. What posed as moral outrage about crime
was in fact recognition ofthe weakening political authority ofthe state. Some 20
years of structural unemployment and subemployment in the former industrial
The Transformation of American Criminal Justice, 1965-2000 141

zones, ruthless cuts in public spending, declining participation in the electoral

process, plus sustained policies of malign neglect of the growing racial divide,
ripped open the social fabric and created widespread anxieties about personal
well-being and security (Wallerstein, 1994: 15),
By the end of the 20th century, the entire U.S, political establishment had
followed the lead of the New Right in successfully staking out this terrain of
insecurity and couching its repressive measures in a populist moralism, to use
Stuart Hall's term. Also, a number of leading intellectuals once again jumped
aboard the bandwagon with opinions that echoed the prevailing anti-intellectual-
ism (Platt and Takagi, 1977), "The public supports more gun control laws but
suspects they won't work. The public is right," proclaimed James Q. Wilson
(1994: 47), "The case for more police and additional punishment rests on the
immediate impacts these measures can achieve," argued Gary Becker (1993:26).
"They do not take a generation to become effective: They can reduce crime
straightaway," Recently, neoconservative criminologists have called attention to
the "lax attitude" of probation officers for allowing too many of their charges to
violate the conditions of probation (Dilulio and Tierney, 2000: 27).
"The point seems obvious to most Americans," writes criminologist Morgan
Reynolds in Newsweek (2000: 46): "punishment reduces crime..,. Everyone
prefers prevention to prison, yet apprehension, conviction, and punishment
remain the backbone of the system. It's sad and expensivebut true," he observes
in the language of common-sense folk wisdom, belittling the complexity of out-
of-touch liberals. Without any competing interpretations that explain the demise
of the American dream or provide a vision of a more compassionate society,
simpleminded panaceas resonate widely with people who want solutions right
now and are willing to concede democratic rights to a more authoritarian regime
(Hall et al., 1978; Hall, 1988),
There is nothing particularly new about politicians, intellectuals, and the
media constructing moral panics to mobilize public opinion against illusory crime
waves. We have seen it before with crusades against the "dangerous classes" in the
19th century, against vice and degeneracy in immigrant communities during the
Progressive Era, against delinquent mothers in the 1950s, and black "muggers" in
the 1970s, Today, as often in the past, the law-and-order discourse is a thinly coded
representation about race and class, an "ideological conductor" for both popular
discontents and the state's inability to manage racial antagonisms (Hall et al,,
1978). Nobody had any doubt about the racial subtext when Time magazine, in its
special issue on crime in 1994, noted that "randomly, irrationally, crime pounds
at the door of a slumber party. It pulls up beside a tourist at a highway rest stop.
It catches the 5:33" (Lacayo, 1994: 51),^
The law-and-order campaign ofthe 1990s was not simply an ephemeral storm
of outrage that emerged suddenly and will quickly dissipate. It was part of a
profound shift that occurred in state power over several decades. If we are to have
 142

any hope of reconstructing a progressive agenda on crime and justice, we must

first understand that there have been significant, qualitative changes in the
structures of criminal justice, a process that is almost 40 years old and still
unfolding. In the rest of this article, I will identify and discuss five key elements
in this transformation.

Policing the Crisis

First, it was not crime but social movements and grassroots protest, plus the
growing decay of urban centers, that motivated national leaders in the 1960s to
modernize criminal justice bureaucracies that had developed regionally, haphaz-
ardly, and with little coordination since the 1930s. The anarchic rage unleashed by
the post-civil rights ghetto revolts, as well as the obviously chaotic response to
them by city police departments and National Guards, prompted the federal
government and corporate elites to establish a series of investigative commissions
(including Johnson's Crime Commission, the Kerner Commission, and
Eisenhower's Violence Commission), One immediate result of this attention was
the availability of federal funds to stimulate far-reaching reforms and impose
national standards and strategies on local and state agencies. Between 1955 and
1971, criminal justice expenditures throughout the country doubled to one percent
ofthe GNP. The rate of increase from 1966 to 1976 was about five times what it
was in the previous decade (Platt et al,, 1982).
The main beneficiary of this new largesse was the police, who by 1974
received 57% ofthe nation's $15 billion criminal justice budget, eight times the
amount they had received 10 years earlier. From 1965 to 1975, the number of
police increased by about 40% and in large cities like Los Angeles, they grew even
faster. This development was shaped by the rise of a police-industrial complex
that, backed by government subsidies and a heavy reliance on military expertise,
introduced technology (in weaponry, communications, and information systems)
and managerial techniques of conmiand and control into policing. During the
1970s, the police were reorganized and diversified (from SWAT units to team
poUcing), armed for every occasion, and plugged into nationally coordinated
databases. There was considerable political opposition to these innovations
(notably from African American, Latino, and New Left organizations that coun-
tered with deniands for civilian review boards and "community control"). But by
the end of the 1970s, the Left was silenced on these issues and policing had been
transformed into a much more disciphned and militarized occupation, loyal to the
state, but litUe else (Platt et al,, 1982; Platt, 1987: 58-69; Parenti, 1999). Though
financing of policing slowed down in the 1980s, its growth resumed in the
following decade. Between 1993 and 1997, local poUce employment increased by
about three percent per year, compared to one percent from 1987 to 1993 (Bureau
of Justice Statistics, 1997),
The Transformation of American Criminal Justice, 1965-2000 143

Privatization

Second, during the last 35 years, privatization has come to play such an
influential role in the routine operation ofthe criminal justice system that the line
between its public and private functions has become quite blurred. Again, this is
not new (see, for example, the routine contracting out of prison labor to local firms
before World War I, or the widespread use of Pinkerton and Burns cops against the
labor movement), but its recent growth and scope are unprecedented. There has
been a significant shift from the post-World War II emphasis by pohcymakers that
crime control is best left to the experts, to today's widely held assumption that the
criminal justice system can control only a very small portion of serious crime
and even this requires active "public cooperation."
The privatization of criminal justice operates in the arenas of security,
administration of prisons, exploitation of prison labor, contracting out of jail
services, and purchase of equipment. Aided by deregulation policies and the
increasing privatization of public services during the Reagan years, large corpo-
rations found lucrative contracts in the expanding criminal justice market for
everything from riot batons and surveillance systems to modular prison units and
electronic restraints. In the 1980s, criminal justice became a growth industry with
bond measures for prison construction and new institutional designs. By the late
1990s, some five percent of prisoners nationwide were housed in private institu-
tions, primarily in Texas and Florida (Ramirez, 1994; Parenti, 1999: 218).
While private prisons and convict labor represent a modest example of
privatization, security firms forged an indispensable niche for themselves as the
class and racial divide widened in the 1980s and downtown businesses sought to
put a moat around their free-enterprise zones. In 1969, private security firms
employed some 290,000 personnel and generated about $3.3 billion in business.
By 2000, private policing was an estimated $100 billion per annum business
(outspending public policing by more than 70%), employing between 1.5 and 1,8
million personnel (compared to about 540,000 in the public sector), an increase of
80% since 1980 (Cunningham et al., 1991; Spencer, 1996-1997).
The brave new world of downtown, as Mike Davis has illustrated in his
analysis of Los Angeles, is now a complex, multifaceted operation, combining a
mix of public and private cops, architectural barriers, technologies of omnipresent
surveillance, and new forms of instrumental discipline adapted from Disney
World and stadium rock concerts (Davis, 1990, 1992; Shearing and Stenning,
1987). Meanwhile, out in the suburbs there are some 30,000 guarded or gated
private housing developments, and another estimated 120,000 private communi-
ties. Between 1985 and 1995, there was afivefoldincrease in the number of homes
with burglar alarms. The price of fortification varies, ranging from low-cost
guards to expensive high-tech security, such as a computerized projectile-launch-
ing device that fires a cyhnder into the bodies of unauthorized cars trying to enter
144 PLATT

Santa Clarita's Hidden Valley near Los Angeles (Pertman, 1994; Cunningham et
al,, 1991), Some gated conununities create their own police systems, such as the
exclusive Frenchman's Creek in Florida's Palm Beach Gardens, which boasts a
Special Tactical Operations Patrol equipped with night-vision scopes, infrared
heat detectors, and high-speed vehicles (Stark, 1999).
For the urban poor stuck in unsafe, largely unprotected ghettos, barrios,
housing projects, and abandoned real estate security comes and looks cheaper:
walls topped with claws, spikes, and razor-ribbon wire; fenced-in roofs and bolted
doors fronted by iron gates; guard dogs and cheap guns. "Throughout the nation's
cities," observes Camilo Jose Vergara (1994: 121-124), "we are witnessing the
physical hardening of a new order, streetscapes so menacing, so alien, that they
would not be tolerated if they were found anywhere besides poor, minority
communities. In brick and cinderblock and sharpened metal, inequality takes
material form," The police may be a constant presence in the poorest communities
of color, but this does not stop African Americans, for example, from being
victimized by robbery at a rate 150% higher than whites (Cole, 1999: 5),
The privatization of justice has bought some security for the upper strata,
which are willing and able to pay top dollar. For most people, however, the
emphasis on security just nourishes their anxieties and feeds the short-lived
illusion that well-being can be consumed with quick-fix solutions. More signifi-
cantly and dangerously, this trend concedes authority over traditionally public
institutions of civil society to what are essentially private armies, close relatives
of the mercenaries and vigilantes who are fast becoming indispensable to state
power around the world (Kaplan, 1994), The concern, writes Andrew Stark
(1999), "is not so much the diminution ofthe public sphere as its balkanization,
as private communities and businesses struggle to hive off chunks of public police
power and resources."

Imprisonment Redux
Third, as public spending on the police peaked in 1977, the fiscal and policy
emphasis shifted to incarceration. The unprecedented growth of policing in the
1970s and prisons in the 1980s was financed by drastic cuts in public education,
health care, and welfare, only compounding the fiscal crises facing local and state
governments. When the economy expanded in the 1990s and boosted government
treasuries, criminal justice lobbies and politicians ensured that prisons and police
would have first call after the military on the surplus.
The prison population grew throughout the 1970s (by 42%, or almost 100,000,
between 1975 and 1981), but at an even faster and unprecedented rate in the 1980s
(Platt, 1987), Between 1984 and 1990, there was a 70% increase in the number of
guards and other personnel working in state prisons, from 144,855 to 245,750
(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993:93), In California, the state's prison population
alinost tripled in a decade (1983 to 1994), making prison guards into some ofthe
The Transformation of American Criminal Justice, 1965-2000 145

best-paid public employees (averaging $44,000) and the California Correctional

Peace Officers Association into one of the most powerful unions in the state
(Marine, 1994: B4),
By 1993, there were over 1.5 million adults and youth (overwhelmingly male)
incarcerated in prisons, jails, and detention centers each day. By 1994, California,
for example, was spending more on its prisons than it did to educate students in all
its 20 state universities and 107 community colleges combined (Hill, 1994: Forum
1), In the decade ofthe 1990s, the prison population increased by 77%, or almost
600,000 prisoners. By 1999, for the first time more than two million people were
incarcerated, a result of a significant increase in the number of parole violations,
longer prison sentences, and imprisonment of drug offenders (Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 2000),
The significance of this trend is demonstrated most dramatically in the
changing rate of imprisonment: in the late 1970s, the national rate of imprisonment
per 100,000 citizens was just over 100 (relatively unchanged since the 1930s), It
increased to 139 by 1980 and to 210 by 1986; by 1994, it had increased more than
threefold in just 20 years; and by 1998, it was 690 and still growing (Bureau of
Justice Statistics, 1999b). Just when the rest ofthe West began to abandon the 19th-
century penitentiary and turn to other less coercive and humiliating forms of social
control, the United States resuscitated its prison system. The rate in England is 124,
45 in Japan, and 89 in the Netherlands, The U.S, now leads the world in rates of
incarceration, far ahead of South Africa and between six and 12 times higher than
other Western countries (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1992: 8; Rothman, 1994;
Butterfield, 1992; Mauer, 1992, 1994; Tonry, 1999; Cose, 2000; Blomberg and
Lucken, 2000: 224),
Prisons in this country have always been punitive and demeaning, but they
reached a new low in the 1990s, Most institutions are now so hopelessly
overcrowded that they are routinely in violation of court orders mandating basic
human rights. The gutting of pubUc services during the 1980s meant that prisons
and jails have become dumping grounds for people with serious health problems,
such as tuberculosis and HIV-related illnesses. For example, there were 200
AIDS-related deaths in New York's state prisons in 1992 (Rothman, 1994:34); by
1994, ofthe 3,200 prisoners in California's largest prison at Vacaville, 450 were
HIV positive. Also, with the closing of mental hospitals and community clinics,
prisons and jails are turning into psychiatric facilities. It is estimated that one-
quarter of California's prisoners, for example, suffer from some kind of serious
mental illness (Sward and Wallace, 1994), The deterioration of penal conditions
was recently acknowledged by the United Nations Committee Against Torture,
which cited the United States for violations of an international treaty against
torture for its use of electroshock stun belts and restraint chairs against prisoners,
sexual assaults of female prisoners, detention of juveniles, and revival of chain
gangs in state prisons (Olson, 2000: 11).
146 PLATT

In the 19th century, there was at least an expectation that prisoners might
become disciplined and productive citizens. And on those rare occasions during
this century when value was attached to prisoners' work (as during World War II
when all able-bodied men were drafted into the mihtary and the labor reserve was
depleted), penal conditions improved. For at least the last 30 years, however, there
has been no productive work for prisoners.^ Prisons have become absolute dead-
ends for millions of men in the same way that our welfare system has become a
punitive and humiliating experience for milhons of poor women and children.
Those who survive the experience leave embittered, angry, and unskilled, con-
vinced that in a dog-eat-dog world only the toughest and meanest survive
(Bergner, 1999). Unlike the 1950s, when the economy was expanding and the
"rehabilitation" of prisoners made some sense, ex-prisoners must now compete for
low-paying, nonunion servicejobs against millions of laid-off, part-time, and new
workers who have not done time. The current crackdown on prisoners' rights and
"country-club" living standards is as much driven by the economic realities of
unprofitable prison labor, which have made millions of prisoners marginal even
to the reserve army of labor, as it is by the New Right's search for easy scapegoats.

Apartheid Justice

Fourth, as South Africa moves closer to Western-style democracy, we are

moving back to an apartheid system of justice. There is nothing particularly new
about the raciahzation of U.S. criminal justice: witness the use of lynching in the
South after Reconstruction, or the selective enforcement of opium laws against
Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century, or the routine use of police brutality
against black and Latino communities after World War II. Yet, in the wake of the
civil rights movements and pubhc exposes of the double standard of justice, there
was an expectation that due process and the rule of law would bring some
significant changes. That promise has been betrayed. In the 1990s, the return to
hyper-segregation in pubhc housing and education finds its parallel in criminal
justice.
By 1979, African Americans comprised 46% of all prisoners; in several states,
they greatly exceeded the national average 60% of all prisoners in Delaware,
74% in Louisiana, 77% in Maryland, and 97% in Washington, D.C, (Christianson,
1981; Platt, 1982, 1987; Mauer, 1990). Similar racial disparities could be found
for Latinos in the Southwest and for Native Americans in states hke Alaska,
Montana, and North and South Dakota (Grobsmith, 1994).
African Americans bear the brunt of the law-and-order crackdown. Almost
one in every three arrests now involves an African American, typically male and
young,'' According to Marc Mauer (1990) of The Sentencing Project, almost one
in four black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is either in prison, jail, on
probation, or parole on any given day. This means that there are more young black
men in the criminal justice system than the total number of black men of all ages
The Transformation of American Criminal Justice, 1965-2000 147

enrolled in college. For every one black man who graduates from college, 100 are
arrested (Cole, 1999: 5).
Nationwide, African Americans make up 12% ofthe general population, but
over 48% of prisons. The disparity is even more exphcit, according to criminolo-
gist Michael Tonry, when we look at rates of confinement per 100,000. In 1973,
the black rate was 368; in 1979, it was 544; andin the 1990s, it was an extraordinary
1,860 (compared to 289 for whites), a fivefold increase in 20 years (cited in
Rothman, 1994: 34). Imagine the public and political outcry if a comparable
percentage of young, white men were arrested and incarcerated! How bitterly
ironic that those communities with the deepest suffering from racial persecution
and economic deprivation are now being demonized as criminal icons.

Criminalizing Youth
From the beginning of the juvenile justice system, anti-delinquency policies
were marked by issues ofclass, race, and gender. In the late 19th century, African
American youth were placed in segregated reformatories with inferior resources;
Native American youth were forced into boarding schools and stripped of their
cultural heritage; young women were targeted by the juvenile court for their sexual
behavior; and middle-class delinquents were largely exempt from court referrals
and imprisonment (Chesney-Lind and Shelden, 1998; Howell, 1997; Platt, 1977),
This double standard has permeated juvenile justice for more than 100 years, but
in the last 20 years, there has been a significant shift to the right in policies and
practices. The discourse of punishment and responsibihty increasingly has re-
placed an earlier emphasis on prevention and rehabilitation. More and more
juvenile offenders are now regarded as adult criminals in-the-making.
Between 1979 and 1984, the number of juveniles sent to adult prisons rose by
48%. In 1997, the U.S, Department ofJustice reported that during the previous 12
years the number of persons under 18 years of age who were sentenced to adult
state prisons each year more than doubledfrom 3,400 in 1985 to 7,400. The rate
(per 100,000 arrested) increased from 18 to 33 in the same period (U.S. Depart-
ment ofJustice, 2000b). Conditions in juvenile institutions also hardened during
this period. By 1985, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that two-
thirds ofthe nation's reformatories were chronically overcrowded (Krisberg and
Austin, 1993: 50). In 1983 and 1984, Georgia and Oklahoma introduced "boot
camps" as a form of "shock incarceration" for first-time offenders. With their
emphasis on military-style discipline and physical labor, they represent a return to
the regime of the 19th-century reformatory (Talbot, 1996; National Criminal
Justice Association, 1997), By 1993, some 60 boot camps were established
throughout the country (Little Hoover Commission, 1995).
The political justification for increasingly punitive pohcies is that they were
necessitated by the alarming growth in the juvenile crime rate. Government
studies, however, suggest that "the rate of serious juvenile offending as ofthe mid-
148 PLATT

1990s was comparable to that of a generation ago.,,, [C]rime and arrest statistics
provide no evidence for a new breed of juvenile superpredator." The murder rate
for youth, for example, was lower in 1997 than it had been since the 1960s (OJJDP,
1999: 130, 132, 133),
The impact of punitive policies has fallen hardest on children of color. By
1996, African American males accounted for 44% of all cases referred from
juvenile to criminal courts, an increase of five percent since 1987 (Ibid.: 171). A
federal study found that although minority youth constituted about 32% of the
youth population in the country in 1995, they represented 68% ofthe incarcerated
juvenile population. These figures refiected a significant increase of over 12%
since 1983. In two states studied, it was estimated that one in seven African
American males (compared with approximately one in 125 white males) would be
incarcerated before the age of 18 (Hsia and Hamparian, 1998). In 1996, black
juveniles were referred to juvenile court at a rate more than double that for whites.
In addition, once in the system, they are overrepresented in detention and
reformatories. Although black youth constituted 30% of all dehnquency cases
processedin 1996, they represented 46% of all detained cases. By 1997, two-thirds
of all incarcerated juveniles were African Americans, Latinos, and Native Ameri-
cans (OJJDP, 1999: 150, 155, 195),
An estimated 25% of young people arrested every year are girls (Chesney-Lind
and Shelden, 1998: 2), Girls are more hkely than boys to be arrested for running
away from home, prostitution, and other "status offenses" (Ibid.: 8), This current
preoccupation with regulating the sexual behavior of teenagers can be traced to the
child-saving movement during the Progressive Era, when women's organizations
initiated moral campaigns to rescue "wayward girls" (Odem, 1995; Chesney Lind
and Shelden, 1998: Chapter 7; Platt, 1977), During the 1970s, when Congress
called for more selective enforcement of noncriminal laws, girls benefited
dramatically from a decrease in incarceration. Nevertheless, a sexual double
standard still operates: girls are more likely than boys to find themselves in trouble
with the law for "status offenses" (Chesney-Lind and Shelden, 1998: 139-149,
158-159).
Race plays a decisive role in how young women get involved with the juvenile
justice system. Black girls are arrested at over twice the rate for white girls (Ibid.:
23), and girls of color make up about 50% of incarcerated youth, A 1993 study by
the National Council on Crime and Delinquency found that African American
girls had an overall one in 188 chance of being incarcerated before their 18th
birthday, compared to a one in 454 chance for Latinas, and a one in 1,000 chance
for white girls (cited in Ibid.: 169-170).
The increase during the last 20 years in the imprisonment rates of adults has
had an impact on families as well as adults. According to a federal study, of the
nation's 72 million children and youths under the age of 17, an estimated two
percent (or 1,5 million) have a parent in prison an increase of more than 500,000
The Transformation of American Criminal Justice, 1965-2000 149

since 1991. Over 70% of these children are African Americans or Latinos (U.S,
Department ofJustice, 2000a).
By the mid-1990s, juvenile court systems in large cities were overwhelmed by
huge caseloads, insufficient resources, and under pohtical pressure to emphasize
punishment over rehabilitation. Chicago, for example, has one of the largest
juvenile court systems in the country, with a staff of more than 600 and an annual
budget that exceeds $20 million. On any given day, there are between 1,500 and
2,000 cases pending on each judge's docket, numbers that add up to about 75,000
delinquency, abuse, and neglect cases awaiting disposition. Caseloads in Cook
County are twice the national standard, and an average case is dispensed with
every 12 minutes. Of the close to 13,000 kids who come through the detention
center each year, the overwhelming majority are poor, African American (80%),
Latino (15%), and male (90%) (Ayers, 1997),
Of the 23 states that permit the execution of youthful offenders, seven
(Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia)
have carried out executions since 1976, There have been 14 such executions in the
last 10 years, more than all other countries combined that permit executions of
people who commit capital crimes while under the age of 18, according to
Amnesty Intemational (Rimer and Bonner, 2000b: 16), As a result of international
protests against the pending execution of a mentally ill man sentenced to death for
a murder committed when he was 16, the Georgia Supreme Court recently stayed
the execution of Alexander Williams, two days before his scheduled death.
Currently, 80 youthful offenders are on death row in 16 states Texas has 26,
followed by Alabama with 14 (Bonner, 2000b: 12), According to a recent study,
"the nation that gave birth to the juvenile court is the only non-Third World, post-
industrial society on the planet to continue to hold out the death penalty as a viable
and potential legal sanction for juvenile crime" (Watkins, 1998: 221).

Conclusion

In the last 35 years, there has been a qualitative transformation ofthe American
criminal justice system. It has become increasingly influenced by national politics
and policies, with less and less local accountability. Pohce and prisons expanded
at unprecedented rates in the 1970s and 1980s, paid for primarily by drastic cuts
in public health, welfare, and education. Any pretense at "rehabilitation" has been
abandoned and prisoners have been transformed from an exploitable commodity into
dangerous garbage, to be quarantined out of sight, but never out of mind. Privatization
of criminal justice products, services, and ideas has developed at such a pace that it
no longer makes any sense to analyze private and public justice as separate systems.
Liberal policies with respect to youth crime, which were briefiy implemented in the
1970s, have hardened into punitive segregation. And the increasing raciahzation of
social control (from San Quentin to city planning) reinforces the conclusion that the
struggle for civil rights remains very much unfinished.
150 PLAIT

The results ofthe November 2000 elections, in which law and order played a
taken-for-granted role, might suggest that the neoconservative campaign for a
more authoritarian state has become hegemonic because it appears to mirror
"common sense," As personal security remains as precarious as ever, and as
milhons are denied the full rights of citizenship and access to economic equality,
what appears final and victorious is in fact quite provisional and unstable. Popular
support for the pohtics of law and order is certainly broad-based after some 20
years of mostly unchallenged right-wing ideology that was endorsed by both
political parties, but such support is also shallow and vulnerable to a critical
discourse.
There are several signs of insecurity in the security state. Government
investigations of "racial profihng" by the New Jersey State Police and of
systematic corruption and brutahty by officers in Los Angeles' Rampart station
have reopened a pubhc debate about institutionahzed pohce racism and the need
for watchdog measures (Associated Press, 2000; Barstow and Kocieniewski,
2000; Kocieniewski and Hanley, 2000; Hayden, 2000). Public support for the
death penalty has declined to 66% from 80% in 1984, and there is growing political
opposition to executions on the grounds that innocent people may die or that race
and region may be determining factors (Lifton and Mitchell, 2000; Butterfield,
2000a; Rimer, 2000c). Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, admitted near the
end of her term that she was "sorely troubled" by disparities in the federal death
penalty; and even the rightist Supreme Court intervened last November to halt the
execution in Texas of a mentally retarded prisoner less than four hours before he
was to be put to death by injection (Lacey and Bonner, 2000; Rimer, 2000b;
Bonner, 2000a).
In California, which leads the country in prison construction, voters recently
approved by 61 % a statewide proposition mandating treatment in lieu of incarcera-
tion for first- and second-time nonviolent drug offenders. This could possibly
reduce the prison population by 36,000, according to the state's Legislative
Analyst's Office (Nieves, 2000a; Wallace, 2000), Passage of Proposition 36 has
given encouragement to a coahtion of organizations that are trying to stop the
construction of what would be Cahfornia's 34th prison (Nieves, 2000b). Mean-
while, at the national level, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops recently
issued a statement critical of current criminal justice pohcies, noting that "the
status quo is not really working victims are often ignored, offenders are often
not rehabihtated, and many communities have lost their sense of security"
(Niebuhr, 2000),
These developments are of course insufficient to turn back right-wing policies
that have been three decades in the making. Nor should we expect a law-and-order
president, an attorney general with a taste for Confederate culture, a conservative
Supreme Court, and an opportunistic Congress to respond quickly to public
concerns about the efficacy and equity of the criminal justice system. Yet they do
The Transformation of American Criminal Justice, 1965-2000 151

indicate an opening in the facade of consensus and the possibihty that if we

revitahze a progressive agenda on crime and punishment, people will consider
reasons other than crime for their deep sense of social insecurity.

NOTES

1, According to national victimization surveys, in 1991 the rate of victimization (per 1,000) for
crimes of violence was 31,3, compared to 32,6 in 1976 and 35,3 in 1981, Rape (,8) was relatively
unchanged in 15 years and robbery rates went down from 6,5 in 1976 to 5,6 in 1991, In 1991, the rate
of household victimization was 53,1, compared to 88,9 in 1976 and 87,9 in 1981, Between 1973 and
1991, there was a 25% decrease in the rates of both personal and household victimization. The murder
rate in the early 1990s was lower than in the late 1970s (Bureau ofJustice Statistics, 1993),
2, The objectified "it" evoked three highly publicized cases: the kidnapping and killing of a
young white girl in Petaluma, California, by an alleged "half-caste"; a spate of "carjackings" and
attacks by black youth on European tourists in Florida; and a "rampage" by a West Indian immigrant
on a commuter train in New York,
3, As Christian Parenti (1999: 230-235) notes, the privatization of convict labor currently
affects a very small percentage of prisoners,
4, Ofthe 10,5 million arrests in 1991,29% (or 3,049,299) were African Americans (Bureau of
Justice Statistics, 1993:434),

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