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JERRY BROWN ON CRIME CONTROL
"THAT'S THE WAY I SEE IT"
With the emergence of global trade, products that used to be
made in America are now made cheaper in foreign countries, and Americans
who would have made those products are redundant. But the dark evil geniuses
who run this country have figured out another use for these surplus people-arrest
them in the war on drugs or the war on crime and put them into prison, adding
to the gross domestic product! A million and a half people are locked up
in jails, state facilities, and federal institutions. Corrections Corporation
of America is running 24 prisons and is listed on the stock exchange. The
stock went up 100%. A number of other companies are getting into the business.
This is a $100 billion industry growing at 10%, 15%, and 20% a year. Meanwhile,
the cities of America rot, and the income gap between the poor and the rich
keeps widening. Something really sick is going on here.
The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It's the direct result
of the collapse of the economy, the rise of poverty, and great economic
gaps between different segments of the population. Neighborhoods with a
high crime rate are always poor neighborhoods: 4.2 million American males
are officially out of work; 4.6 million men are locked up or on parole or
probation. Here is a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist
system that is breaking down. In Europe they put them on a guaranteed income;
in the United States, they lock them up as raw materials for a new class
of white collar worker-bureaucrats, prison guards, prison managers, prison
surveyors.
In New York City, 7 people are seeking work for every job available-7 to
1! The Federal Reserve Board policy keeps at least 10 million people out
of work or underemployed. The disproportionate impact on poor people means
that crime is not just an individual decision, but a social pattern. People
of color are locked up seven times more often than Whites-about 1500 African
Americans to only 200 Whites per 100,000. If you leave race out of the picture
and go to income, the people who get locked up for street crimes are lower
income people. When they come out of prison they have no job, don't get
any skills, and nobody wants to hire them. Wall Street folks who rip off
a few hundred million generally don't go to jail, or else get out quickly
with a lot of money left over to start again.
The big lock-up is about drugs. Here's the real scam. The drug war is one
of the games to get more convictions and prisoners. There's a lot of chemicals
out there and when certain ones are made illegal, they become a huge profit
opportunity and bring violence, crime, and more people to imprison. Drug
arrests in the U.S. in the last ten years have doubled, from just under
500,000 to just about a million, and the chances of going to prison for
that drug crime have increased fivefold. We are told if we just lock up
more people we're not going to be raped, robbed, and mugged, but most of
the people going to prison are going for drug crimes set up by the authorities
or by snitches. What is particularly unjust is that first-time possession
of crack cocaine, found mostly among African Americans, gets you five years,
while 5 grams of cocaine powder, used mainly by Whites, gets you no jail
time! That's wrong.
And what about the use of the military in drug enforcement? The Pentagon
didn't want to go to the Gulf War, doesn't want to go to Yugoslavia, didn't
want to go to Haiti-but maybe they can go to the inner cities. Who's the
enemy now? That's spooky! Once you breach the line between civilian and
military functions, you are in a police state. We are marching toward totalitarianism.
Actually, the violent crime rate is not increasing in proportion to the
population. There is a lot of violent crime in America, but it's been that
way for the last 25 years. It's the media that manipulates our perception
of it. Whether it be the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman or the
Polly Klaas kidnapping murder, one crime stands as the proxy for a million
crimes, and emotionally has the same or even greater impact on us. So we
are being systematically trained to fear this false "rising crime"
tide. This is all part of a system to lock up more people, and impose more
control and surveillance. Today it's the so-called criminal-mostly poor
people, African Americans, then Latinos-but you'll be next. It's only a
matter of time.
The overall crime rate is not increasing either. It goes up, then down,
but overall doesn't change much. Again, it's the media that manipulates
our perception of it. Take the drug war. In 1989 ABC, CBS, and NBC ran 518
primetime stories on drugs. In 1990, the number dropped to 215. In 1991,
it dropped to 61. In 1992, it was only 45. Was the use of drugs changing?
Is news about reporting facts, or about creating facts? Take the war on
crime. In 1991, there were 571 crime stories; in 1992, they jumped to 785;
in 1993, they jumped to 1632-double the '92 levels and triple the coverage
of murder stories. But the crime rate didn't change. Government Crime Reports
and the Random Victim Survey-two separate sources of valid information-showed
no appreciable increase in overall crime or violent crime rates between
June of '93 and January of '94, the six-month period preceding an election
year. But guess what? The number of Americans naming crime as the nation's
most important problem jumped sixfold, from a mere 5% of the people to 31%.
That's how one murder projected a hundred times on television can produce
the incarceration of 10,000 people who would otherwise not be locked up
or who would be locked up for a shorter period. That's how massive pressure
was created, first for Clinton's crime bill, then to elect people who say,
"I can crack down on crime more than the other fellow." That crackdown
has tripled the incarceration rate. That's sheer dishonest manipulation,
based not on truth-telling, but on greed, on profit, on getting higher television
ratings and on moving America toward a more authoritarian, surveillance-controlled
society.
The people who are making out are those who are building the prisons, those
who are selling to the prisons, and those who are working in the prisons.
Politicians love crime control because they can run on law and order. Voters
love it because they think their streets will be safe. TV likes it because
they can program violence as news and get the same audience that they get
for melodrama. One other group inside California loves it-the prison guards,
the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Here's the scam.
The prison guards in California are a major campaign contributor to create
their own Employment Act. Since 1984, California has added 26,000 employees
to the Corrections Department-the prison industry. All other state employees
combined are less than 16,000. Higher education has experienced an 8,000
reduction in that same period. In 1984 the corrections budget in the state
of California was less than 4%; higher education was a little over 10%.
In six short years, the corrections budget skyrocketed to 18% and the higher
education budget rose only about 1%. How did that happen? I have to take
some credit and blame: as governor, I signed the first mandatory prison
sentences in 25 years: the first use-a-gun-go-to-prison sentence, the first
sell-heroin-and-go-to-prison, the first
assault-the-elderly-and-go-to-prison. Since then, over 1,000 bills have
been enacted creating new crimes and lengthening sentences. The number of
inmates has climbed from 19,000 to 126,000.
How does that all happen? The guards have a vested interest. Every time
you get more prisoners, you get more guards. That's the simple equation.
The Three Strikes law, lobbied heavily by the guards, will add 276,000 additional
people to the prison system in California. Taking the existing staff ratios,
that will mean 49,218 additional guards. Every time you get a new guard,
you get a potential new union member who pays hundreds of dollars of dues
and Political Action Committee money that creates an enormous war chest.
Mr. Pete Wilson, the present governor of California, got about a million
dollars of it for his campaign in 1990 and about half a million dollars
in 1994. That's real money!
We hear about people whose child is murdered, whose parents are the victim
of a horrible crime-but we don't hear about the growth of victims' lobbies
and PACs. Almost all the money that went into the Crime Victims United PAC
came from guess who? The guards! The Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau, housed
in the guards' splendid office building on the edge of Sacramento, was supplied
$50,000 by the guards to lobby for victims against criminal defendants.
The Victims Bureau and the Victims' PAC, with money from the guards, vigorously
fought against an alternative version of the Three Strikes law that required
the third strike to be a violent crime. Why? Because if that alternative
proposal had passed, only 80,592 people would have been locked up, producing
only 14,391 jobs for the guards.
If you write a bad check to feed your family, and already have two strikes,
you can go to prison for the rest of your life. The first and second strikes
can be burglaries committed as a juvenile, then ten years later, in hard
times, you forge a check, and it's a felony-you can go to prison for life.
That's why it's going to cost $27 billion. And while the prison budgets
are going up, the rest of the budget is going down. This crackpot psychology
makes higher education more expensive, takes the guts out of the greatest
engine of progress the state of California ever had-its university system-and
replaces it with the biggest gulag in the history of the Western world.
Why? Because a bunch of guards buy the politicians. This embedded group-the
lobbyists, the industry, the guards, the politicians, the media-love crime
control. It's selling, it's making money. But it is a perverse source of
pump-priming. Look at the corrupt money, look at the exploitation of the
tragedies of victims, look at the media sucking it up and spitting it out
for ratings and corporate profit. It's working to the detriment of our society,
destroying our liberty and leading to fascism. Unless this system changes,
there will be more people locked up, more dope, more drive-by shootings,
and the nation will become a prison camp. You won't have any freedom, you'll
have an internal passport, your guns will be taken away, your kids will
be regimented, and we will be a less diverse, less creative, less open society.
What can you do about it? First, be aware of what's happening. When you
see 387 victims marching around the capitol carrying coffins or white boxes
for their slain loved ones, telling their stories on television, testifying
before legislative hearings, don't compound their terrible tragedy by locking
up for life somebody who forged a check or grabbed money out of the cash
register from McDonalds. Crime is generated and manipulated by the new-world-order
destruction of wage levels and job opportunities in a competitive, global
game that ranks the human being below the machine. Capitalism at its present
stage is generating millions of people without market-type utility, from
whose ranks the criminal element is drawn. Wealth has never been more unequally
distributed. Jobs that pay are rationed, and more and more people are unable
to get those jobs. The result is a society that is going to blow up and
pull apart.
We have 500 people locked up per 100,000. France has 80, Belgium has 40,
Japan has 30. It costs about $25,000 to put someone in a cell, plus $85,000-90,000
to build one of those cells; a prison guard who's been on the job for five
years is paid more than a tenured professor at a great university. It would
only take a fraction of that money to create the jobs and schools to reduce
dramatically the conditions of crime. It costs $100,000 a year, counting
the pension, to add another policeman to San Francisco or Oakland. But if
you take that $100,000 and put it into public service jobs, so people can
work and feel some pride, you could reduce the crime rate. When you weigh
the evil and failure of a $25 billion anti-drug war, we'd do a lot better
putting a massive campaign against drug use in the hands of doctors, while
we helped people overcome their addiction. And if we linked that program
to other economic changes, there wouldn't be so many people with no prospect
in life washing away their misery with alcohol and drugs.
Exuberant adolescents in poor communities can get guns, can sell dope, can
swagger around the street because that's all they've got, and it's being
created and reinforced by television and commodities that these kids can't
buy except through crime. Kids need to be inspired and disciplined and loved
and given an opportunity to work and develop their skills. That's not happening
because the logic of the marketplace is not the logic of humanity or the
logic of justice. It's a rendering of the economy to make 30 million Americans
surplus.
As people are divided by income and by class, it's easier to lose empathy
and come to the conclusion, "It's the welfare mother, it's ghetto crime,
crime in the streets," forgetting about the "crime in the suites,"
where they deal in billions rather than in a few hundred bucks. A lot of
street crime is horrible, but in terms of the dislocation, the undermining
of the family-the corporate criminals, many of whom reside in Congress and
the White House-are getting away literally with murder.
If we're going to get serious about cutting crime and creating a society
that hangs together, we're going to have to set a floor below which people
can't fall. That's a "family," and that's a "nation."
We have to cut down the bloated military, the bloated subsidies, the corporate
rip-offs, and invest in jobs that will allow people dignity and a living
wage. You've got to train kids in high school to do the kind of work that
is needed. You have to repeal GATT and protect jobs in this country so people
can live off their wages. I would shrink government in a minute if I could
shrink GM, shrink the Bank of America, and rein in these immortal corporations
that operate by an undemocratic code and have no soul and no conscience.
Let's take back this country from those who play with our minds and turn
our values upside down. When you rein in big corporate/government power,
you just might get democracy, true freedom and a free market.
Please call "We The People," in Oakland, 1-800-426-1112
or write us at 200 Harrison St., Oakland, CA 94607. We'll send you some
material and ask you to join our efforts. Together we can build a new movement
of real democratic activism. Material for this article was excerpted and
edited by Doret Kollerer from Jerry Brown's "We The People" radio
broadcasts. North Coast XPress, October/November 1995
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