The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War PDF
Preview The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War
The Punitive Turn in American Life This page intentionally left blank The Punitive Turn in American Life How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War Michael S. Sherry the university of north carolina press Chapel Hill This book was published with the assistance of the William R. Kenan Jr. Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. © 2020 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Designed by Richard Hendel Set in Miller and Geogrotesque by codeMantra, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Jacket illustration: special ops police officer by Getmilitaryphotos, shutterstock.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sherry, Michael S., 1945– author. Title: The punitive turn in American life : how the United States learned to fight crime like a war / Michael S. Sherry. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020026484 | isBn 9781469660707 (cloth : alk. paper) | isBn 9781469660714 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Criminal justice, Administration of—Political aspects— United States—History—20th century. | Criminal justice, Administration of— Political aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Punishment. | Militarization. | Intelligence service—United States. Classification: lcc hv9950 .s547 2020 | DDc 364.973—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026484 Contents Introduction 1 1 The Crisis of a Militarized Order, 1963–1969 9 LBJ and the Punitive Turn 10 Before LBJ 16 “From Uniform to Uniform” 20 Militarization from Below 26 2 War on Crime in Vietnam’s Wake, 1969–1973 35 Nixon’s Crime Politics 35 The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal 38 Nixon’s (Not-So) “Winning War against Crime” 42 Soldiers to Cops 47 3 The Uncertain Advance of the Punitive Turn, 1974–1981 55 Gerald Ford, Forgotten Promoter 55 Toward a Punitive State 64 Jimmy Carter, Outlier 69 Sex, Children, Evil 72 Crime Cultures 75 4 The Triumph of Militarized Crime-Fighting, 1981–1993 87 Reagan’s New War 87 Spreading the Word 97 Beyond the White House: “These Guys Get into the Real Shit” 106 Bush, Punisher in Chief 117 5 The Sprawling Punitive Turn, 1993–2001 131 Clinton, the Artful Policeman 132 “Superpredators” and Much More 143 The Punitive Turn in Culture 155 How Bases Became Prisons 160 The Call of Vengeance 170 6 The Punitive Turn in an Age of Vengeance, 2001–2009 173 American Vengeance Goes Global 173 War-Fighting or Crime-Fighting? 181 Torture in Two Silos 190 7 Reversal or Redirection? 2009–2017 205 Push and Pull 206 The Limits of Resistance 215 The Twilight of War Talk 222 Epilogue: The Enduring Punitive Turn 225 Acknowledgments 237 Notes 239 Index 291 A gallery of illustrations begins on page 127. The Punitive Turn in American Life This page intentionally left blank Introduction Advertisements urging civilians to buy guns suggest how the punitive turn had played out by the 2010s. “As Close as You Can Get without Enlisting”—that is, get to war—stated one rifle ad, while another ad promoted a semiautomatic shotgun with the slogan “Iraq Afghanistan, Your Livingroom,” and a handgun ad pictured an infantryman above the words “Built for them . . . Built for you.”1 The message: Americans at home could carry the same weapons of war that soldiers carried in battle. Many Americans believed, or at least were asked to imagine, that the line between war-fighting and crime-fighting had al- most disappeared. This book is about how that happened. The title of this work, The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War, captures the sweeping process, starting in the 1960s, that moved punishment and surveillance to the center of American life and imbued them with militarized lan- guage and practices. Its obvious forms were mass incarceration, as the United States became the world’s foremost jailer, and “the militarization of policing,” as critics called it. But the punitive turn also encompassed other practices—public schools entered through metal detectors and patrolled by police, gated communities shooing away the unwanted, cameras peering to catch red-light offenders, armies of private police, familiar rituals of airport screening, and fads like the child-spanking movement. Scholars often refer to “the carceral state.” The “punitive turn in American life,” a phrase I first used in 2005,2 signals a broader process that included what the state did but went beyond it. The punitive turn faced countercurrents—it did not move forward inexorably and uniformly. As a result of authorities’ indifference, court rulings, or legislative action, some acts once deemed criminal no longer were: most abortions after Roe v. Wade in 1973, and sodomy between adults later on. Military conscription, certainly a coercive system and to some draftees a punitive one, ended in 1973, and the death pen- alty faced persistent and partially successful opposition. These coun- tercurrents churned the waters but did not halt the onrushing tide, [ 1
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