Finally, a new building rises from the wreckage of the once thriving Brooklyn waterfront. It’s a 1,000-cell federal detention center set to open in June. Photo ©2000 Michael Kaufman. Impact Visuals

The United States passed a major threshold a couple of months ago: We now have more than two million people behind bars.

We’re way ahead of most of the rest of the world when it comes to locking up our own population. In fact, our closest rivals were the old Soviet Union and the old South Africa, both now out of business.

The number of Americans incarcerated has increased steadily over the last twenty years or so, with no relation to actual crime rates. The rate of incarceration increased when the crime rate was going up and when it was going down.

The real source of the staggering growth in the percentage of our population in jail is the wave of punitive legislation and law enforcement policy that has spread across America. Most recently it was the Clinton administration’s 1994 crime bill and local crackdowns on "quality of life" offenses — arresting people for jumping subway turnstiles, spraying graffiti, playing loud music on the street, panhandling, or just hanging out.

PETTY DRUG OFFENSES

Most of all, though, it is the so-called war on drugs that is responsible for the surge in incarceration. About two-thirds of the people in federal prison now are in for petty drug offenses, and we’re talking about people being put away on long sentences for possession and sale of small quantities, not so-called "drug kingpins."

How do we wind up with so many people locked away? What is behind the creation of what author Christian Parenti calls, in the title of his new book, "Lockdown America"?

A look at history is instructive. Bosses have been using incarceration as a club against the working class for centuries. In the 1500s and 1600s, English bosses used law and government to close off common fields (which anyone in the community could use to grow food), drive people off the land, and then force them into jail as vagrants. It was called the "enclosure" movement. The threat of execution, jail, or corporal punishment — like being whipped, pilloried, or put into the stock — were used to make people accept work in the country’s new factories on whatever terms the bosses offered — or else to become indentured servants in the American colonies.

'CRIME' IN AMERICA

In the colonies, the bosses used their control of government to outlaw any challenge to their authority. Even speaking "disrespectfully" to them could lead to having tongues clipped or ears and toes lopped off. After a while, the supply of English indentured servants, who usually had to serve a master for about seven years, dried up as people learned of the harsh treatment awaiting them. That declining supply of servants helped give rise to the expansion of slavery.

After the Civil War, southern plantation owners devised and enforced laws to suppress the freed slaves, depriving them of civil rights and the right to sit on juries. Freedpeople who made "insulting gestures," caused "mischief," or sold "intoxicating liquors" could be incarcerated.

Most useful for the planters were vagrancy laws, which made it possible to jail anyone who did not have written proof of a job at the beginning of each year. "Enticement" laws made it illegal to encourage a former slave worker to leave his or her employer.

In Mississippi, the "Pig Law" made theft of a farm animal or any other property valued at more than $10 an offense punishable by five years in prison. And just as in the enclosure movement, poaching laws gave landowners rights to all wild game on their property. This effectively outlawed hunting and trapping, further reducing people’s ability to feed themselves and live independently of the planters.

The capstone of these efforts was the infamous chain gang system, in which people jailed for all those bogus offenses were leased by the state to private employers who could use their labor without pay. This amounted to a return to slavery, this time with the state as a collective slavemaster. It was also a public welfare program for private employers.

BACK TO THE PRESENT

This brings us back to the present. Twenty years of bipartisan Reaganism — cuts in education and other public services, intensified union-busting, attacks on collective bargaining gains — have made it easier for bosses to force us to accept work on whatever terms they offer. So-called welfare reform, including "workfare," is the direct descendent of the enclosure movement — an attempt to force people to take substandard jobs.

Like the old convict lease system, the new prison industry also uses incarceration to line the pockets of private interests. This time around, prisoners are used more as raw material than as labor: their presence justifies huge public contracts with private companies for prison construction and management.

In the 1600s there was the myth of the "sturdy beggar." This supposed class of lazy, dangerous vagabonds justified the repressive laws and practices of the enclosure movement. In the 1870s planters relied on racial prejudice to justify the convict lease system and other forms of repression of freedpeople.

Today, the myth of a lazy, dangerous "underclass" and racial scapegoating of black and Latino people work the same way. The stigmatizing of these communities helps justify urban police strategies that resemble military occupation, including widespread police brutality.

CRIMINALIZATION CAMPAIGN

In New York City, dramatic instances of flagrant police brutality like the Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima cases have brought some public attention to the racial dimension of this phase of the bosses’ attack on our civil rights. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently charged that city police were stopping and frisking people purely on the basis of their color. And a new Justice Department study of the New York juvenile justice system found that at every step — from arrest through sentencing — black and Latino youth are treated more harshly than whites. Black youths charged with drug offenses are 48 times more likely than whites to go to prison. Today, in some states as many as one-fourth of black men have lost the vote because of felony convictions.

Both Democrats and Republicans have led this spreading criminalization campaign. The Labor Party understands it for what it is: an attempt to keep power out of the hands of working people, in part by pitting us against one another. Our program opposes this "criminalization of dissent and poverty" on the time-honored principle that an injury to one is an injury to all.

– Adolph Reed, Jr.

Adolph Reed, Jr., is editor of Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality (Westview Press, 1999), a political science professor at the New School for Social Research, and a Labor Party organizer.