The America that Christian
Parenti describes in Lockdown America is rabidly anti-Other and unconscious
of echoing unforgotten evils. An event like the murder of Amadou Diallo does
not even need to be highlighted as an example of contemporary policing. In this
book the criminal justice system stands unadorned, the assembled weapon of Americans’
rage at violent, impoverished, marginalized groups.

In this terrifying, informative
and gripping book, Parenti cuts back and forth between the outrages of the East
and the excesses of the West, as New York and California play different leadership
roles in the new policing. As he zeroes in on New York as the hotbed of the
re-engineered, amped-up policing of the 90s, the NYPD stars throughout the book.
Its policies have led the revolution in policing across the country. And in
California we see a hybrid between traditional beat policing and a military
buildup that is worthy of the Balkans.

Parenti prompts us to wonder
what happened to the United States that we find ourselves moving toward police
statehood at the end of this century. There are economic forces that create
populations who must be kept in line because they have no role in the new global
economy. But Parenti’s analysis lacks the punch that gritty, real-life
tales would give it. Lockdown America gives readers of all perspectives
plenty of fodder to chew on when pondering what happened to all the opportunities
we’ve had in the past 50 years to develop a civil society, yet provides
few answers.

This is a detailed history
of American criminal justice since the Civil Rights era, starting with the devolution
of law enforcement from 50s-era donut-munching beat cops with no greater technology
than a pistol and club. Confronted with the social turmoil of the 60s, America
turned against itself in ways that it hasn’t begun to recover from. The
history that Parenti recounts is one of increasing segmentation, segregation
and internal conflict from the 60s to the present. Weaponry graduated from handguns
to SWAT-tech. The Police Foundation–funded at startup by the Ford Foundation–turned
policing into a science. And by 1993 in New York, "killings were so clustered
that 12 of the city’s 75 police precincts…

reported…43.6 percent of the total."

The new policing is the
law and order of the New Economy. Apparently a scion of Wired’s
corporate node-culture, Giuliani-appointed commissioner William Bratton created
this landscape by reengineering the NYPD as if the new management technique
was going out of style. Describing Bratton and his henchman Jack Maple, Parenti
writes that "[they] set about streamlining and decentralizing bureaucracies,
‘empowering’ the seventy-six precinct commanders, and instituting
new mechanisms of performance-related accountability." In this perfect
merger of clean-pressed management theory with social control, it is clear that
the New Economy is more than just a pop social and economic trend. It is a broadly
applied way of doing business in the 90s that fits right in with the needs of
the elite to marginalize the people they failed to come to terms with in the
past four decades.

Parenti presents one creepy
factoid after another to illustrate his argument that this total quality management-style
policing works in goosestep sync with increased militarization of American police
forces. The result is a country where an aura of rifle-enforced purity of lifestyle
is becoming the norm, and where more people are employed in the prison industry
than in any Fortune 500 company except General Motors.

Clinton’s proposal
to put 100,000 more cops on the streets is fingered as a root of the malignant
growth. In Lockdown America, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act (VCCLEA) is the starring ogre. Featuring nearly nine billion dollars
in federal matching grants for police funding, and only one billion less than
that for prison building, this Democratic spending juggernaut also allowed for
the expansion of federal capital punishment and three billion dollars to be
spent on the war against immigrants.

In California Parenti finds
the big guns–western style. The book’s most vivid and disturbing chapter
describes the marriage between SWAT teams and beat policing in Fresno, an out-of-the-way
frontier through which America’s new love for paramilitary policing is
sweeping the (nonwhite) populations. Policing the people with machine guns,
"flash-bang grenades," blunt trauma ordnance and smoke bombs, cops
in camouflage and body armor cruise in helicopters over hollowed-out suburbs.
This is Fresno’s Violent Crime Suppression Unit. Parenti rode with the
VCSU, so that chapter has a hyperreal vividness of point-of-view dramatic narrative,
reading like tales from Blade Runner.

Lockdown America
leans hard on the drama inherent in visions like these, and the suggested images
of the Army and the Navy SEALs encroaching on white suburban America. For readers
who are likely to be insulated for the time being from the terrors of "dynamic
entry" policing, it would be helpful if the militarization were explained
more clearly. Parenti assails his readers with descriptions of MP-5s, APCs,
AR-15s and M-79s. Unless you’re a regular reader of Guns & Ammo,
the fear these acronyms generates is generalized to firepowers that can only
be imagined. The book could be improved by detailing the names, characteristics
and firepowers of the various weapons described, adding a dose of reality to
the text that would surely be more frightening than the specters of mysterious–and
therefore unreal–arsenals.

The armored, SWAT-enhanced
and high-tech police systems Parenti declaims would be terrifying enough by
themselves, but, as he reports, police forces are also cross-fertilizing with
other nonpolice paramilitary forces such as the INS’ Border Patrol. He
describes a "growing trend toward increased cooperation and ‘cross-deputation’
between law enforcement and immigration authorities." This is the militarized
war on immigrants that is being fought across the country, as the INS in places
like Jackson Hole teams up with police, the FBI, the DEA and the military to
create "multi-agency interior enforcement operations."

Parenti meticulously details
this iron grip that the nation’s police forces hold on marginalized populations.
His report is so graphic and convincing that the few tales of successful civilian
opposition stand out starkly, and then are largely ignored. For example, he
describes what happened after Border Patrol agents in Fresno stormed a high
school and arrested and deported three Latino youths: "The next day students
walked out in protest and managed to get one of the youths brought back from
Mexico." We’re left wondering how they managed to do that. For one
thing, the protesters are teenagers–a marginalized population–even
if they happen to be white and middle-class.

Although Parenti acknowledges
that his book is "short on tales of protest," he doesn’t explain
why. Whatever those kids did, it was awfully effective if they managed to get
a deported alien allowed back into the country. Lockdown America would
be more powerful if more stories like that were mined from the dirty depths
of American criminal justice.

In the rundown of America’s
big growth industry, the prison industrial complex, it is clear that modern
incarceration exists more to neutralize the unwanted than to rehabilitate the
deviant. For example, prison literacy has basically been banned. In spite of
ample evidence that literacy and education are powerful tools that enable people
to escape poverty and criminal association, the VCCLEA wiped out Pell grants
to prisoners. "With the loss of that money, degree-granting programs in
thirty-two prison systems simply ended." Within the Prison Litigation Reform
Act (PLRA), prisons have also eliminated law libraries, in line with punitive
anti-access legislation that harshly restricts prisoners’ ability to use
the legal system.

I wish that Parenti had
done more to connect the horrors he describes to the lives of his safe, educated
readers. Most Americans live comfortably indoors with their television versions
of the news, indifferent to the arsenals building up around them. As they watch
Cops and the like, the police state becomes normalized as entertainment.
In Portland, OR, Parenti reports that recent police acquisition of military
AR-15 rifles has "provoked very little political complaint," in contrast
to the public acrimony that accompanied the police’s acquisition of shotguns
in the 1970s.

Apparently, brainwashing
with banality may be the American state’s most effective weapon against
its people–inside the joint as well as out. Literacy for prisoners is being
downsized, but, as Parenti quotes convict journalist Adrian Lomax discussing
Wisconsin’s prisons: "[H]aving your own TV is not permitted, it’s
encouraged… Prisoners who can’t buy their own TVs can borrow the state
owned sets at no cost."