Customer Reviews

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New Edition)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In this remarkable book, American journalist and researcher Christian Parenti shows how the USA's economic and social crisis has produced a huge growth in criminalisation, especially through the war on drugs. He explains how capitalism creates poverty, through both crisis and policy.

From 1966 to 1974, profits fell by 30%. Reagan put interest rates up to 16.4% in 1981, causing a slump - ten million people were unemployed by 1982 and wages were slashed by 8%. Real unemployment for African American men has been more than 25% for three decades.

As Alan Budd, an economic advisor to Thatcher, said, "Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes." Capitalism creates a surplus population, the reserve army of the unemployed, to drive wages down.

To manage the rising poverty, inequality and unemployment that capitalism causes, the state uses paramilitary forms of repression, segregation and criminalisation. These include paramilitary policing, SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, zero tolerance policing, national surveillance and mass imprisonment. Both crime control and crime keep the people suppressed.

The US imprisonment rate was 100/120 per 100,000 until the 1981 slump. 31% of prisoners are in for property offences, 30% for drug offences, 9% for public order offences, and 29% for violent offences.

Parenti examines the USA's appalling prison industrial complex, which surely provide the rest of us with a model - of how not to run prisons. However, this has not stopped Labour ministers rushing to the USA trying to copy their masters.

Parenti shows how US prison guard unions have often successfully opposed the opening of privatised prisons, which have proved to be even worse than the public ones. Prisons have become ever bigger, with Titan prisons making the problems even bigger as well.

Everyone has to choose whether to blame the system that produces poverty, or to blame the poor. Parenti quotes Lenin, "every state is a `special repressive force' for the suppression of the oppressed class."

Parenti concludes, "My recommendations, as regards criminal justice, are quite simple: we need less. Less policing, less incarceration, shorter sentences, less surveillance, fewer laws governing individual behaviors, and less obsessive discussion of every lurid crime, less prohibition, and less puritanical concern with `freaks' and `deviants'."

This is the best book I've ever read that deals with the burgeoning police state in the United States. Parenti ranges far and wide by giving a sound structural analysis as to why police and their paramilitary style tactics have oversaturated our streets.

Economics and politics are often at the crux of most social problems. Parenti understands this and gives the reader an intellectually fascinating and stimulating journey documenting just how our country has been transformed over the last 30 years into a civil libertarian's nightmare.

As Lockdown America demonstrates, the "social dynamite" and "social junk" must be quartered and corralled by the ruling class, otherwise the economic elites would be forced to routinely put down rebellions and riots. Given this reality, the new American prison boom is dealt with by Parenti along with a myriad of other criminal justice (sic) issues.

As mentioned above, the most astute and gratifying aspect of the book is the manner in which it intelligently ties a politico-economic critique into its analysis of criminal justice (sic).

Go beyond nonsense television programs that purport to deal with crime and society by devouring Parenti's magnificent book.

Often over the top and uncompromising to the logic of some tactics but still great book on the prison system.

Came in the described condition(good). Had a great start up, but as it went it seemed to drone on a bit, but if you want to hear how arbitrary laws against harmless (pretty much just MJ) drugs came into existence and why the prison industry is doing so well, this is the book you are looking for.

If you've ever wondered why people go to jail for a little pot, or why the population in jail is 2/3 black or why our prison systems on average are operating at over 150% capacity then this book will intrigue you. It is a little thick of a read but you will learn more crooked things about our legal system than you thought existed. It is sad that we live in "the land of the free" but yet every chance they get they imprison as many people as they can. We live in a fake country with a fake facade. And "Change" isn't gonna come from a new puppet president, it will come from a revolution.

In this very silly left-wing rant, Parenti inveighs against everything to the political right of Karl Marx and, as is indicated by the title of the book, focuses much of his screed against the American criminal justice system for doing its job: locking up criminals. In no change from the traditional conspiratorial leftist view of blaming "AmeriKKKa" for all the ills in society, Parenti argues that the criminal justice system is overtly racist and is responsible for championing policies that attempt to pull innocent young black men off the streets and into jail cells and prison houses.

His final argument in the book, believe it or not, is essentially calling for the abolishment of the criminal justice system, or, at the very least, a minimization of it to the point where it is inconspicuous.

My advice: If you are looking for serious scholarly studies and analyses on the copious problems that the American criminal justice system faces, then please look elsewhere. However, if you are looking to be disgusted (or entertained - depending on your political leanings and tastes) by a pseudo-intellectual who traffics in ad hominem absurdities and deliberate falsehoods on criminal justice, economics and politics to promote his ultra left-wing ideological viewpoint, then Parenti is your guy.

If there was anything less than one star, Parenti would have gotten that...