Showing papers in "Social Justice in 2000"

State Crime, Human Rights, and the Limits of Criminology

Abstract: THE AIM OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO SUGGEST HOW CRIMINOLOGY CAN REMEDY ITS neglect of the important phenomenon of state crime, without adopting such a broad definition of "crime" as to destroy what coherence criminology has as a distinct field of study. To assess the universality of our approach we employ examples from two different state traditions, Anglo-American and Turkish. Our definition allows us to examine countries as diverse as Turkey and the United Kingdom from the perspective of a continuum, rather than as two discrete, incomparable state formations -- authoritarian and democratic. One of our reasons for selecting Turkey as a comparative example is that it is a democratizing state with an authoritarian historical backdrop. Torture of detainees, extrajudicial killings and disappearances, violent public order policing, forced evacuations, the razing of whole villages, and the routine harassment of trade unionists, media workers, and human rights defenders form the human rights landscape in much of Turkey (see Amnesty International, 1998; European Commission, 1998; Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, 1997, 1998; Human Rights Watch, 1999). Torture is, however, in breach of Article 17 of the Constitution and Articles 243 and 245 of the penal code, and is punishable by up to five years of imprisonment. Proposals documented in the new draft penal code are set to increase the powers of the courts in punishing state officials found guilty of torture and ill treatment of detainees. In some celebrated cases, state officials have been charged with criminal conduct, but they are few and the crimes a re many. In 1999, six police officers were sentenced to five and one-half years each for torturing a suspect to death in 1993, but most other cases against state officials have resulted in very lenient sentences, fines, or acquittals. The violence of the Turkish state is of a different order of magnitude to that employed in most liberal democracies. Yet instances of violent crime by British and American state officials are not difficult to find -- recent revelations about the Los Angeles Police Department, and allegations of brutality against officers at the Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth prisons in England are among the more obvious examples. Less well-publicized is the extent to which legally unjustifiable violence is routinely used by police to enforce social discipline in some working-class areas (Choongh, 1997; Waddington, 1999). Despite the arguments of some theorists (e.g., Giddens, 1985) to the contrary, the use and threat of physical violence remain central to state power in liberal democracies. Cover's remarks on American criminal trials bring this out vividly: If convicted the defendant customarily walks -escorted--to prolonged confinement, usually without significant disturbance to the civil appearance of the event. It is, of course, grotesque to assume that the civil facade is voluntary." ...There are societies in which contrition and shame control defendants' behaviour to a greater extent than does violence.... But I think it is unquestionably the case in the United States that most prisoners walk into prison because they know they will be dragged or beaten into prison if they do not walk (Cover, 1986: 1, 607). The legal limits of legitimate force are inherently vague -- it is impossible to define in advance exactly what form of dragging or beating the prisoner may legitimately receive -- and strict enforcement of what limits do exist is intrinsically difficult and will often be contrary to the interests of the enforcing agency. It would therefore be surprising to discover any state in which criminal or legally ambiguous acts of violence by state agents did not occur. It would be equally astounding if any state were able to eliminate the innumerable opportunities for predatory crime inherent in economic regulation and revenue-raising (Smart, 1999). Some states, however, plainly commit far more and more serious crimes than others do, and it might be expected that these differences would be among the central concerns of criminology (Comfort, 1950). …

Can Restorative Justice Reduce Battering? Some Preliminary Considerations

Abstract: Introduction DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, OR BATTERING, [1] IS A SEEMINGLY INTRACTABLE PROBLEM Given its persistence over individual lifetimes, generations, and societies. Although recent years have seen a decline in battering incidents in the United States, in step with violent crime generally, it remains a problem affecting large numbers of women. In 1996, American women experienced an estimated 840,000 violent victimizations by an intimate (U.S. Department of Justice, 1999a). Some critics say that contemporary responses to battering actually magnify abuse by reproducing women's powerlessness. Two common strategies that are designed to help the battering victim, law and mediation, may undermine her power to act. Laws that "get tough" on batterers have fallen short of their intended goals, in part because the extralegal causes of women's oppression remain unchanged (Smart, 1995: 156-157). Mediation, a non-legalistic alternative, is criticized for reinforcing the view of battering as a private matter (Lerman, 1984; Rowe, 1985; Menard and Salius, 1990). Moreover, both approaches circumscribe victims' action. Legal authorities assign to the victim a passive role; mediators direct participants toward a single outcome, reconciliation. Thus, though typically polarized, law and mediation both "govern" the victim in the sense of determining the options available to her (Foucault, 1982: 221). In recent years, the restorative justice movement has introduced new variations on mediation. These interventions promise social justice through healing encounters between victims and offenders, sponsored by community members. While feminists have all but rejected traditional mediation, restorative justice is being called a "feminist vision of justice" (Harris, 1991; see also Pranis, 1998). Increasingly, the potential for restorative justice approaches to reduce domestic violence is being revisited from this perspective (Yellott, 1990; Pennell and Burford, 1996; Nicholl, 1998). The purpose of this article is to evaluate the potential of restorative justice programs to reduce domestic violence. First, we examine current interventions that rely, respectively, on the power of law and the power of dialogue to stem domestic violence. Second, we describe the restorative justice philosophy and consider the promises and the problems of restorative justice interventions for domestic violence. We discuss the lessons of the shelter movement, which has taken both legal and extra-legal action, for developing restorative justice responses to battering. Contemporary Responses to Battering Since the 1970s, two parallel approaches have been taken concerning battering. These two dominant and often contrasting approaches are here referred to as the legal model and the mediation model. [2] The legal model is most often championed by feminists. The mediation model is associated with the informal justice movement, and has sustained heavy criticism from feminists. The Legal Model The Criminalization of Battering. In the United States, before the mid-1970s, battering was largely hidden from the public eye (Tierney, 1982). Women's abuse at the hands of their male partners was generally viewed at best as a private matter or, at worst, the prerogative of men. Accordingly, legal protections for battered women were limited except in some unusually brutal cases. Law enforcement officials maintained an explicitly "hands-off" approach to the problem (Schechter, 1982: 157). Police officers were instructed "to do anything except arrest violent husbands" (Fagan, 1996: 8). Likewise, prosecutors were discouraged from actively pursuing cases. These policies were driven by cultural tolerance of domestic violence against women and legitimated by the view that women would later drop the charges (Ibid.). Vigorous activism by grass-roots feminist groups in the 1970s brought about legal reforms in three areas: arrest and prosecution policies, treatment of batterers, and restraining orders (Ibid. …

Complexity and Irony in Policing and Protesting: The World Trade Organization in Seattle

Abstract: Introduction DURING A LARGE DEMONSTRATION AGAINST THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION in Seattle, tear gas fired by police affected many WTO delegates, shoppers, and city officials, but was relatively ineffective against protesters who had brought their own gas masks. As a result, police escalated their use of force, including the use of rubber bullets to disperse crowds. Initially, as police pushed against the lines of demonstrators, the nonviolent activists closed ranks and locked arms tightly. The more the police pushed, the more resilient the line became. However, the demonstrators' success in blocking police and WTO delegates also inhibited other demonstrators from moving to new locations and blocked their own medics from reaching the injured. The degree of secrecy accompanying the preparations of both police and protesters, while believed to be strategic, also inhibited cooperation with allies. These examples illustrate an ironic perspective on protest, which we develop below. Briefly noted are commonly heard explanatory stories about the Seattle events, along with some of their limitations. We suggest that a neglected perspective involving irony is needed to understand the complexity of these events. We then detail police and demonstrator activities on the first day of the WTO meetings, noting organizational, planning, and tactical efforts. We identify 10 forms of irony inherent in the structure of the situation or that may emerge from interaction. These factors bring a significant degree of indeterminacy and trade-offs, no matter what decisions are made. We conclude with suggestions on limiting violations of constitutional rights and police and demonstrator violence. Our method involves interviews, news accounts and other documents, e-mail discussion lists, videos, and direct observation. Four Stories About Seattle Police and demonstrator interactions during the 2000 Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests can be viewed through multiple lenses involving political-economy, rationalization, and the supposed irrationality of crowds. These yield varying explanatory and evaluative conclusions. The initial story involves police as the first line of defense of a capitalist economic system and the protest of subordinates as a natural consequence of structures of inequality. The WTO, after all, is a loose coalition of world businesses. The laws on the books and those given enforcement priority do not equally reflect all social interests, even if they exist within an ethos of universal enforcement, which in principle focuses on behavior, not the characteristics of those against whom the law is enforced. [1] On balance, police actions tilt decisively in favor of the more powerful, who have a disproportionate role to begin with in defining what the law will be and how it is enforced. In Seattle, the focus of law enforcement was on trying to insure conditions that permitted global business to do business. Their focus was not on investigating legal and moral crimes against labor and the environment, conditions in poor countries, or questionable alliances between businesses and governments. However useful as a stage setting, a broad political-economic approach has limitations. Many Seattle protest groups did reflect the unprivileged, such as the poor and those in developing countries, but many other protest groups, such as those concerned with environmental issues, [2] were hardly disadvantaged in traditional economic terms. [3] Such an approach tells us little about variation within and across demonstrations, and it cannot explain police protection of demonstrators or repression of protest demonstrations in noncapitalist societies. Neither can it account for the often competing and conflicting interests of diverse elites by economic sector, institutional affiliation, and region. Many Seattle residents viewed the mayor and police chief as relatively progressive, rather than as draconian enforcers of a 19th-century capitalist order. …

Urban Violence and Police Privatization in Brazil: Blended Invisibility

Abstract: Martha K Huggins [1] AT THE TURN OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM, VISIBLE STATE-SPONSORED ATROCITIES in Brazil may seem to be only a pale reflection of the ethnic and political cleansing and other large-scale, often genocidal, violence in places such as Guatemala, East Timor, Rwanda, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya The extent and scope of violence in these countries -- with its raw brutality, military context, and state and overt paramilitary state-sponsored murder and mistreatment of civilians -- make contemporary peacetime violence in Brazil, or even during its 21-year military dictatorship (1964 to 1985), appear to be much less noteworthy and significant Yet, that assumption suggests the questionable moral thesis that smaller numbers or a lower percentage of victims out of the total Brazilian population reduce the significance of this and similar situations of state-permitted or encouraged violence Whether defensible or not, the validity of such a proposition cannot be considered without examining the extent and nature of violence in Brazil, where interpersonal violence is prevalent and dramati c, although disguised because it is ethnically and class selective as well as geographically focused To indicate the extent of violence in Brazil, in Sao Paulo alone (the largest city in South America), between 1984 and 1996 there were 69,700 homicides -- over 10,000 more deaths than known US casualties during the entire Vietnam War Between 1979 and 1997, the homicide rate in Brazil increased from 115 murders per one hundred thousand population to 254 This 18-year period spans the six years before the military left power through the 12 years after formal democratic government had returned Between 1979 and 1997, Brazil's population increased 65%, but its homicide rate went up 120% (Folha, 1999b: 3-1) In contrast to Brazil's 1997 homicide rate of 254, the corresponding US homicide rate was 101 per 100,000 population (Internet: wwwIABDorg), which then steeply declined in 1998 to 63 (Internet: wwwojpusdojgov/bjshomicide/hmrthtm) By the 1990s, Brazil's homicide rate approached that of countries recently riven by militarized internal conflict In the 1990s, Brazil had the fifth highest murder rate in the world, following Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and Jamaica (Buvinic et al, 1999), with the latter also a country under nonmilitary but militarized social control Selective Violence Although Brazil's countrywide homicide rate [2] is already high by most international comparisons, the homicide rates in some of its districts and for some population sectors are equal to or even higher than Latin American countries still involved in internal guerrilla and military conflict For example, Colombia -- formally democratic, yet in a militarized drug and guerrilla war with large regions of the country under military, paramilitary, or guerrilla control -- had a homicide rate in the early 1990s of 895 murders per 100,000 population (ibid), clearly higher than Brazil's 1997 countrywide rate of 254 (NEV, 2000) Yet the overall homicide rate was lower than the 1998 rates for Sao Paulo City's Diadema district (140), where the auto industry has been downsizing amid slums and poverty, and the city's poor Embu district (9732) (Folha, 1999b: 3-3) Colombia's rate was also lower than the cities of Recife (105) in Brazil's impoverished northeast, and Vitoria (103), in Espirito Santo state east of Rio (NE V, 2000) Indeed, Diadema's homicide rate is closer today to Guatemala's and El Salvador's national murder rates (150) in the late 1980s (Buvinic et al, 1999), when those countries were experiencing intense internal guerrilla and counterinsurgency conflict Brazil's pattern of urban violence is clearly most dramatic for selected regions and segments of the population In 1997, the country's two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, ranked third and fourth after Recife and Vitoria, with 65 …

The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation

Abstract: Dylan: Your emergence as a radical prison activist was deeply influenced by your experience as a prisoner. Could you talk a bit about how imprisonment affected your political formation, and the impact that it had on your eventual identification as prison abolitionists? Angela: The time I spent in jail was both an outcome of my work on prison issues and a profound influence on my subsequent trajectory as a prison activist. When I was arrested in the summer of 1970 in connection with my involvement in the campaign to free George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers, I was one of many activists who had been previously active in defense movements. In editing the anthology, If They Come in the Morning (1971) while I was in jail, Bettina Aptheker and I attempted to draw upon the organizing and legal experiences associated with a vast number of contemporary campaigns to free political prisoners. The most important lessons emanating from those campaigns, we thought, demonstrated the need to examine the overall role of the prison system, especially its class and racial character. There was a relationship, as George Jackson had insisted, between the rising numbers of political prisoners and the imprisonment of increasing numbers of poor people of color. If prison was the state-sanctioned destination for activists such as myself, it was also used as a surrogate solution to social problems associated with poverty and racism. Although imprisonment was equated with rehabilitation in the dominant discourse at that time, it was obvious to us that its primary purpose was repression. Along with other radical activists of that era, we thus began to explore what it might mean to combine our call for the freedom of political prisoners with an embryonic call for the abolition of prisons. Of course we had not yet thought through all of the implications of such a position, but today it seems that what was viewed at that time as political naivete, the untheorized and utopian impulses of young people trying to be revolutionary, foreshadowed what was to become, at the turn of the century, the important project of critically examining the political economy of a prison system, whose unrestrained growth urgently needs to be reversed. Dylan: What interests me is the manner in which your trial -- and the rather widespread social movement that enveloped it, along with other political trials -- enabled a wide variety of activists to articulate a radical critique of U.S. jurisprudence and imprisonment. The strategic framing of yours and others' individual political biographies within a broader set of social and historical forces -- state violence, racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, the growth and transformation of U.S. capitalism -- disrupted the logic of the criminal justice apparatus in a fundamental way. Turning attention away from conventional notions of "crime" as isolated, individual instances of misbehavior necessitated a basic questioning of the conditions that cast "criminality" as a convenient political rationale for the warehousing of large numbers of poor, disenfranchised, and displaced black people and other people of color. Many activists are now referring to imprisonment as a new form of slavery, refocusing attention on the hi storical function of the 13th Amendment in reconstructing enslavement as a punishment reserved for those "duly convicted." Yet, when we look more closely at the emergence of the prison-industrial complex, the language of enslavement fails to the extent that it relies on the category of forced labor as its basic premise. People frequently forget that the majority of imprisoned people are not workers, and that work is itself made available only as a "privilege" for the most favored prisoners. The logic of the prison-industrial complex is closer to what you, George Jackson, and others were forecasting back then as mass containment, the effective elimination of large numbers of (poor, black) people from the realm of civil society. …

The Role of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Prison-Industrial Complex

Abstract: Introduction THE UNMISTAKABLE FEATURE OF THE IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE (INS) over the past two decades is that it has downplayed its mission of social service (i.e., assisting undocumented immigrants in their pursuit of naturalization), while emphasizing its law enforcement role (INS, 1999; Calavita, 1992; Kahn, 1996; Welch, 2001). Flexing its police powers, the INS has benefited financially from its hard-line stance on immigration insofar as the agency has been rewarded with additional funding from Congress. The fiscal year 2000 budget for the INS totaled $4.27 billion, an eight percent increase over the previous year. Whereas the INS has allocated funds to improve social services, the lion's share of the budget is devoted to "strengthening its successful multi-year strategy to manage the border, deter illegal immigration, combat the smuggling of people, and remove criminal and other illegal aliens from the United States" (INS, 1999: 1). [1] These structural and organizational developments in the INS do not occur in a vacuum. Clearly, the INS is responding to ideological and market forces in American society that rest on the uncritically accepted notion that more enforcement activities and less service provision is rational and legitimate, as well as lucrative. This article furnishes evidence that the INS is not merely imitating the larger criminal justice machinery, but is operating under the same canopy of social control. In concert with other components of the criminal justice system, the INS responds to the market imperatives of the prison-industrial complex, an enterprise whereby lawbreakers and undocumented immigrants are commodified as raw materials for private profit. The discussion begins with recent trends in social control in which state managers have overhauled conventional mechanisms designed to deal with surplus populations. This new penology marks a significant departure from traditional jurisprudence and contributes to the commod ification of prisoners and INS detainees. The New Penology and INS Detention The prevailing response to the U.S. immigration "problem" has been law enforcement and detention, thereby pushing social service to the periphery of the INS charter. Since the 1980s, government officials have extolled the virtues of detention, claiming that it is necessary to combat and deter illegal immigration. Conversely, experts on immigration and human rights insist that detention is costly, unnecessary, and unjust for most undocumented immigrants (ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, 1993; Marks and Levy, 1994). The popularity of detaining undocumented immigrants mirrors the larger pattern of incarceration. In 1999, the total number of prisoners under the jurisdiction of federal or state adult correctional authorities was 1,302,019, with an annual growth of 4.8%. The current incarceration rate is 461 prisoners per 100,000 residents, up from 292 in 1990 (BJS, 1999). In explaining the government's commitment to imprisonment, Feeley and Simon (1992) issued an alternative view of correctional policy, one they call the "new penology." They contend that a new set of terms, concepts, and strategies have begun to replace those of traditional penology. Whereas traditional penology stems from criminal law and criminology and has emphasized punishing and correcting individual offenders, the new penology adopts an actuarial approach in which specialists assess the risks of specific criminal subpopulations (for example, drug offenders) and recommend strategies that attempt to control these aggregates. The central objective of the new penology is to improve social control measures for high-risk and dangerous groups. Since the new penology represents a strikingly different course for the future direction of correctional policy, there are several areas of concern. The new penology does not intervene or respond to either the individual offender or the adverse societal conditions that serve as the root causes of many forms of street crime. …

Slavery and Prison -- Understanding the Connections

Abstract: "I'M BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT 'U.S.A.' STANDS FOR THE UNDERPRIVILEGED Slaves of America" (Esposito and Wood, 1982: 149), wrote a 20th-century prisoner from Mississippi in a letter detailing the daily violence he witnessed behind prison walls. His statement resounds with a long tradition of prisoners, particularly African-American prisoners, who have used the language and narrative of slavery to describe the conditions of their imprisonment. In the year 2000. as the punishment industry becomes a leading employer and producer for the U.S. "state," and as private prison and "security" corporations bargain to control the profits of this traffic in human unfreedom, the analogies between slavery and prison abound. This year the U.S. prison population cascaded past 2,000,000, [1] with millions more under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system in local jails awaiting trial, in INS prisons awaiting deportation, or in their homes linked with criminal justice authorities through ankle bracelets that track thei r every move. Recent studies of the prison boom stress the persistent disparities in sentencing according to race -- prison populations continue to be disproportionately African American and Latino. With longer sentences being imposed for nonviolent drug offenses, with aggressive campaigns aimed at criminalizing young people, and with the growing number of children left orphaned by the criminal justice system, the carceral reach of the state and private corporations resonates with the history of slavery and marks a level of human bondage unparalleled in the 20th century. Scholars and activists have plunged into an examination of the historical origins of racialized slavery as a coercive labor form and social system in an attempt to explain the huge increase in mass incarceration in the U.S. since the end of World War II. Drawing these links has been important in explaining the relationship between racism and criminalization after emancipation, and in connecting the rise of industrial and mechanized labor to the destructive effects of deindustrialization and globalization. The point of retracing this history is not to argue that prisons have been a direct outgrowth of slavery, but to interrogate the persistent connections between racism and the global economy. Mass imprisonment on the level seen in the U.S. in the 20th century occupies a phase along the spectrum of unfree labor related to, yet distinct from, chattel slavery. As many scholars of the punishment industry have shown, regardless of the labor prisoners do to service the larger economy (either private or public), pr isons increasingly function in the U.S. economy as answers to the devastation unleashed by the dual forces of Reaganomics and the globalization of capital (Parenti, 1999; Gilmore, 1997; Manning, 1983). The immediate post-emancipation period is a key place to start in outlining the investment of the U.S. state in this trade in humanity. Related to the above is the growth of new abolitionist movements whose goals are the elimination of mass imprisonment as a method of treatment for addiction and mental illness, as an economic ameliorative, and as a method of social control -- what one scholar has termed "the carceral management of poverty" (Wacquant, 1999: 349). The connections between slavery and imprisonment have been used by abolitionists as an historical explanation and as part of a radical political strategy that questions the feasibility of "reform" as an appropriate response to prison expansion. As a leader in the creation of this new abolitionist movement, Angela Davis (1996: 26) has written, "I choose the word 'abolitionist' deliberately. The 13th Amendment, when it abolished slavery, did so except for convicts. Through the prison system, the vestiges of slavery have persisted. It thus makes sense to use a word that has this historical resonance." Though some 20th-century abolitionist movements connect themselves expressly with the tradition of 19th-century abolitionists and antislavery advocates, abolitionism as defined here is the conglomerate of many local movements that express abolitionist aims indirectly through challenging the fundamental methods of the prison-industrial complex -- mandatory minimum sentences, harsh penalties for nonviolent drug offenses, and the continuous construction of prisons that goes on regardless of crime rates. …

Globalization, the Palestinian Economy, and the "Peace Process"

Abstract: ALTHOUGH GLOBALIZATION IS AN INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON, ITS EFFECTS ARE experienced differently in advanced capitalist countries (the center) and in "developing" countries (the periphery) Thus, while Western capitalist countries benefit from the liberalization of trade, access to expanded markets, and free movement of capital and goods (though not labor power), the effects of globalization for the periphery lead to the decline of the nation-state's power, restriction of its markets, and further blocking of its development These effects have been known for some time and have been raised in many international fora At the ninth session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in May 1996, for example, "several leaders from developing countries described how globalization and liberalization had forced their local companies out of business and marginalized their economies" (Third World Network, 1996) Tanzania's President Benjamin Mkapa told UNCTAD that countries undergoing liberalization and privatization under World Bank/IMF-style policies have suffered heavy social costs, including job losses, cuts in health care and education, and instability (Third World Economics, 1997) This article examines the effects of globalization on the West Bank and Gaza (WBG), territories occupied by Israel in 1967 and subsequently integrated into its own economy, which is highly integrated into and heavily subsidized by the world capitalist center Despite the "peace process," those parts of the occupied territories that have come under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority (PA) have remained dominated by Israeli economic policies Moreover, the entire WBG has been subordinated to the prescriptions of international financial institutions, mainly the World Bank and the IMF, the principal vehicles for the economic globalization that constitutes this latest phase of capitalist development Unlike other formerly colonized countries, the PA's economy may be alone in having been designed from its very beginning by the policies and prescriptions of globalizing institutions In the immediate wake of the Oslo signing, the international community, led by the World Bank, drew up the Emergency Assistance Program for Palestinian infrastructure development and institution building The private sector was given a central role: one of the program's principal aims was to "stimulate private investment in sectors such as industry, tourism, housing, telecommunications, and agriculture by channeling long-term finance to local entrepreneurs" (World Bank, 1993:4) It was also the World Bank that in essence created the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR), whose main function was to disburse the donor funds ($24 billion pledged) according to the Bank's directives (al-Labadi, 1999: 382) As for the possibility of an independent Palestinian economy, "for the World Bank, the econo mic delinking of the self-rule areas from the Israeli economy is a contradiction of the Paris Protocol It should be noted that assistance to the Palestinians is based on these protocols" (Inbari, 1995) The "peace process" launched in Madrid has unfolded during a period when globalization has dominated international relations Consequently, as long as the "peace process" sponsored by the United States (the main controller of globalizing financial institutions) continues, the occupied territories will continue to be deeply affected, economically and socially, by these institutions to the extent that PA policies will be globally, not internally, oriented Despite the experiences of the many developing countries that have already taken this route, the PA unquestioningly adopts the wave of globalization, with seemingly little awareness of alternatives The Legacy of Direct Occupation Within days of Israel's conquest of the WBG in June 1967, the Israeli military governor began to issue military orders that would reshape the lives of the territories' residents …

The End of the (Mass) Line? Chinese Policing in the Era of the Contract [1]

Abstract: The Roman slave was held by fetters: the wage-labourer is bound by his own invisible threads. The appearance of independence is kept up by means of a constant change of employers, and the ficto juris of a contract. Karl Marx, Capital In our country we are establishing legal views on the commodity economy and these help us reflect upon traditional legal theories and legal systems.... The system of the contract ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) is the most appropriate legal shell for the commodity economy. It clears away blockages in personal relationships caused by status-based evaluations that are formed because of low or high evaluations of bloodlines and pushes forward a process that releases the great capabilities of the society's productive forces. It also leads to a renewal of legal concepts and turns law into a "holy writ of human freedom." Kong Li and Zhang Weiguo (1987) Introduction: Money Talks POLICE, OR AT THE VERY LEAST, THE NOW FAMILIAR WESTERN CONCEPT OF THEM AS law enforcement agencies, only began to arrive at the scene of the crime in China after economic reform. [2] From this time onward, police increasingly claimed to base their operations on the law, not Party dictates. The problem was that as the Party dictatorship faded, the police sirens no longer seemed to stir the masses to action. Increasingly, it seemed as though the only thing that would open their eyes was money ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Neither was this attitude confined solely to the urban populace. As the old Maoist slogan about the forward march of socialism ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) was parodied and replaced by a new colloquial expression that spoke of the forward march of money ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), millions of peasants packed their bags and marched to the city in search of work and wealth. Some found it, but others lost their way. These losers, aptly named the "floating blind" ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII ]), became the rabble from which emerged the urban fear of a new, mobile, and dangerous criminal class. [3] Although this transient or mobile criminal group would remain one of the most intractable problems facing contemporary China, it was far from being the only one. Indeed, it was as though market reform had, quite literally, produced its nemesis, "criminal reform." New crimes began to emerge just as old ones, long considered vanquished, reappeared. Moreover, all crimes, new and old, appeared in unprecedented numbers. The market not only produced a new money-making ethos and new social mobility, but also brought in its wake a dangerous and paradoxical situation: crime figures would rise just as the old social control structures fell. These latter structures would begin to crumble because they had been built upon the activism of local Maoist-inspired mass-line organs and kept in place by a tight system of demographic policing organized around the household register. This system had worked well in the era of the plan, but would prove to be far less successful in the depoliticized and fluid conditions produced by China's new marketized economy. From the "pull of the cities," with their need for labor, through to the "tug" of a newly monetarized economy with its fetishization of material things, reform produced a new demographic and social mobility that eroded these old Maoist social structures and the ideological certainties upon which they were built. No longer could China claim to be the land where no one picked up other's things from the road and no one needed to lock their door ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) Instead, it was the land of crime waves, where the new high tide of crime ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) seemed never to recede (see Table 1). [4] Little wonder that this new and quite unprecedented wave of crime occasioned something of a social panic and this, in turn, led to calls by Party and government officials for a reform of policing. …

America's One Million Nonviolent Prisoners

Abstract: I. Introduction OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, NO AREA OF STATE GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES has increased as rapidly as prisons and jails. Justice Department data released on March 15, 1999, show that the number of prisoners in America has more than tripled over the last two decades from 500,000 to 1.8 million, with states like California and Texas experiencing eightfold prison population increases during that time. America's overall prison population now exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. What is most disturbing about the prison population explosion is that the people being sent to prison are not the Ted Bundies, Charlie Mansons, and Timothy McVeighs -- or even less sensationalized robbers, rapists, and murders -- that the public imagines them to be. Most are defendants who have been found guilty of nonviolent and not particularly serious crimes that do not involve any features that agitate high levels of concern in the minds of the public. Too often, they are imprisoned under harsh mandatory sentencing schemes that were ostensibly aimed at the worst of the worse. As this analysis will show, the very opposite has been true over the past 20 years. Most of the growth in America's prisons since 1978 is accounted for by nonviolent offenders and 1998 is the first year in which America's prisons and jails incarcerated more than one million nonviolent offenders. The cost of incarcerating over one million nonviolent offenders is staggering. The growth in prison and jail populations has produced a mushrooming in prison and jail budgets. In 1978, the combined budgets for prisons and jails amounted to five billion dollars. By 1997, that figure had grown to $31 billion (Camp and Camp, 1997). States around the country are now spending more to build prisons than they do on colleges, and the combined prison and jail budgets for 1.2 million nonviolent prisoners exceeded the entire federal welfare budget for 8.5 million poor people last year. This report will analyze the growth in the nonviolent prisoner population. We will explore some of the implications of the increase in nonviolent prisoners in terms of cost and public safety, and suggest some approaches that local, state, and federal governments should consider to address the incarceration of one million nonviolent prisoners. II. One Million Nonviolent Prisoners The percentage of violent offenders [1] held in the state prison system has actually declined from 57% in 1978 (Hindelang et al., 1981: 577) to 47% in 1997 (Gilliard and Beck, 1998:11). However, the prison and jail population has tripled over that period, from roughly 500,000 in 1978, to 1.8 million by 1998. According to data collected by the United States Justice Department, from 1978 to 1996, the number of violent offenders entering our nation's prisons doubled (from 43,733 to 98,672 inmates), the number of nonviolent offenders tripled (from 83,721 to 261,796 inmates), and the number of drug offenders increased sevenfold (from 14,241 to 114,071 inmates). As such, 77% of the growth in intake to America's state and federal prisons between 1978 and 1996 was accounted for by nonviolent offenders (see Table 1 at the end of the article). [2] According to Department of Justice data, 52.7% of state prison inmates, 73.7% of jail inmates, and 87.6% of federal inmates were imprisoned for offenses that involved neither harm, nor the threat of harm, to a victim (Ibid.; Harlow, 1998:2). Assuming these relative percentages held true for 1998, it can be estimated that by the end of that year, there were 440,088 nonviolent jail inmates, 639,280 nonviolent state prison inmates, and 106,090 nonviolent federal prisoners locked up in America, for a total of 1,185,458 nonviolent prisoners. The combined impact of the growth of prison and jail populations in general -- and the accelerated growth of the nonviolent segment of the incarcerated population in particular -- has given 1998 the dubious distinction of being the first full year in which more than one million nonviolent prisoners were held in Americas jails and prisons for the entire year. …

Reflections on Inside/Out Organizing

Abstract: AS PRISON ACTIVISTS, WE KNOW A LOT ABOUT MEN IN PRISON, BUT MUCH LESS about women. There are far fewer incarcerated women, and they are seldom in the news. My purpose here is to briefly reflect on certain events during three decades of prisoners' rights activism: first, the early days of activism in California, through which I identify seven organizing and unifying principles, and second, more recent activities in Canada. Years ago, I lived, worked, and studied in a variety of countries. Everywhere, I saw criminal justice systems as instruments of injustice. In the United States in the late 1950s, it was Blacks who were getting rounded up. In France in the 1960s, it was North African "gypsies"; in Eritrea it was Muslims. In Jamaica in the 1970s, it was Rastafarians and other anticolonialists. Globally, the patterns have been clear -- the people most likely to be criminalized, incarcerated, and tortured are primarily young men of political minority groups. In the late l960s, the civil rights, black power, antiwar, and women's movements spawned other social movements, such as organized homemakers, midwives, farm workers, welfare recipients, people with physical disabilities, and antiwar Vietnam War veterans. From within this melange of issues, prisoners' rights movement surfaced with a certain clarity and political force that recognized prisons as a key convergence of social injustices. While the prisoners' rights movement was taking shape as an offshoot of antiwar, anti-racism, and socialist movements, academic research and university courses were producing data and critical analyses of carceral enterprises. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I was an undergraduate (and later a graduate student), economist John Isbister and psychologist Ted Sarbin were producing empirically grounded critiques of prisons. In the Bay Area, attorney Faye Stender was exposing the lawlessness of prison regimes. The fledgling Crime and Social Justice journal (now Social Justice) became a valued aid in examining the intricacies of punishment as a state enterprise. Prisoners' writings and defense committees, especially those of war resisters and black power figures (particularly George Jackson, Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, and Huey Newton), were stirring the public consciences of liberals and radicals alike. By the time the FBI went on a shoot-'em-up cross-country rampage against the Black Panthers, political prisoner support groups had been sprouting all over California and throughout the U.S. At U.C. Santa Cruz, we were being influenced by the writings of Richard Quinney, Jessica Mitford, and the Quakers' abolitionist book, Instead of Prisons. Educators such as Rafael Guzman, for whom I worked as a teaching assistant on campus and at Soledad prison, were taking students into prisons and bringing newly released prisoners to the university, three of whom were teaching assistants in his popular on-campus prison course. Prisons and universities represented antithetical institutions, and the contradictions between them exposed fundamental societal inequities and the mechanisms of social tracking. Taking the university into the prison felt like a revolutionary act. I also studied with, and later assisted, Herman Blake in a Black History course, which presented a perspective on the disproportionate numbers of African Americans in prison. These sorts of liberatory educational experiences were not uncommon in the 1970s, when, for example, Women's Studies was in its nascent stage. Benefit concerts, rallies, and grass-roots conferences on prisoners' rights generated extensive networks of activists with a primary focus on prisoners in the hardcore maximum-security men's institutions, such as Soledad, San Quentin, and Folsom. Many women, including self-identified feminists, participated in defense committees and other prison-related work, which most commonly focused on men. In the early 1970s, few people knew anything about women who were locked up. …

Social Wrongs and Human Rights in Late Modern Britain: Social Exclusion, Crime Control, and Prospects for a Public Criminology

Abstract: Setting the Scene: New Labour, Old Anxieties IN WAYS ECHOING THE LATE-VICTORIAN TRANSITION FROM THE 19TH TO THE 20TH century, the late-modern anxieties of fin-de-siecle and new-century Britain [1] coalesce around themes of social exclusion, fear of crime, and questions about the morality and waywardness of young people. Sociopolitical images of "falling standards" and a "decline in moral values" are commonly expressed in the otherwise competing discourses of the new Labour government and the Conservative opposition, and find further representation in news features and editorials, TV documentaries and talk shows. The recurrence of such perceptions is now well established (Pearson, 1983) and hence we should, perhaps, not be surprised to see them ascendant again. However, for many people, it was hoped that a new Labour government, elected with a dramatic majority in 1997, would bring a new political vision. Intimations were that "New Labour" (as it had restyled itself) would be committed to addressing social exclusion and "social wrongs" and to championing social justice and human rights. As the political parties and media sta rt to prepare for the next election, this essay reviews aspects of Labour's period of office, particularly in relation to criminal justice, and places developments and debates in recent historical, as well as comparative, contexts. Since the early 1980s, complex concerns have repeatedly been addressed by Conservative and now New Labour administrations through appeals to nostalgia and promises to recreate the safety, security, and reasons to "feel good" of earlier decades (Young, 1999: 49-50). The Conservatives promised a "Back to Basics" return to the moral values of a more settled, orderly, and consensual past, but then faced an embarrassment of rich news stories about the moral failings of senior members of their own government. Under New Labour, Prime Minister Tony Blair has shown a fondness for speeches that political commentators compare to the kind of moralizing sermons one would expect to hear from the Church pulpit -- satisfyingly reassuring that values are still important, but nonthreatening in their implications for the converted of the congregation. Perhaps intended for a different audience, early on in its administration, New Labour's spin doctors and supportive media promoted the vision of a new Cool Britannia, an idea har king back to an earlier period, the 1960s. This was a time when postwar renewal was achieved and now Britain was experiencing cultural excitement and economic prosperity, coupled with (measured and controlled) liberal social reforms, all of which reflected well on the Labour government of the day. It is obviously attractive to political parties to find that they can woo voters with comforting promises of a return to less-troubled times. Even New Labour's declaration that it is the party of "modernization" carefully adds that this is to be achieved by valuing and building upon the strengths of tradition. Such promises are contradictory and unrealistic. They appeal to images of the past that are now so reconstructed by memory and media that these have become edited versions of history, repackaged by a thriving nostalgia industry (McQuire, 1997). Inevitably, the realities of crime and victimization in the here and now remain unchanged, and invariably governments--of the Right and now the Left--turn to calls for "more policing, more law, more punishment" as "the answer." This social policy prescription for crime control represents one of the clearest areas in which political convergence between the Right and Left has occurred in British politics. In 1997, at his first Party Conference as home secretary of the new Labour government, Jack Straw told delegates: "We said we would make Labour the party of law and order. And we did." Since this title had previously been the proud claim of the Conservative governments of the 1980s and early 1990s, some on the Left complained that they could see little difference between the criminal justice policies of the new government and those of their predecessors. …

American Exceptionalism and the Death Penalty

Abstract: In historical context, the worldwide abandonment of capital punishment marks an overwhelming repudiation of the death penalty as an atavistic barbarism.... It is an extreme and mindless act of savagery, practiced on an outcast few (Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt, 1984: 67). -- NAACP Legal Defense Fund brief in Aikens v. California (1972) IT HAS BEEN NEARLY 30 YEARS SINCE NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE FUND ATTORNEYS argued, in the above brief, before the U.S. Supreme Court that the death penalty is a "cruel and unusual" punishment. Since that time, the United States [1] has maintained the death penalty, both in law and practice -- alone among Western industrial nations. [2] At the turn of the 21st century, the retention of capital punishment in American criminal justice remains a seeming anachronism in a nation that otherwise prides itself on democratic values and its place among "civilized" nations. Although others have noted this peculiarity of American criminal justice (Currie, 1985: 41; Kappeler, Blumberg, and Potter, 1996: 290- 291), few have offered explanations (Bowers et al., 1984: 131-167) [3] This essay is an attempt to fill that void, seeking to decipher what is distinctive about American society -- compared to other Western democracies with advanced economies -- and how that distinctiveness is related to crime control and, notably, the conti nued execution of criminal offenders. The Abandonment of Capital Punishment in the West The origin of the movement to abolish the death penalty is generally traced to Cesare Beccaria's writings [4] in the 18th century and to the broader influence of the European Enlightenment (Bowers et al., 1984; Melton, 1995; Bedau, 1997). Beccaria understood the modern arguments against the death penalty, including its ineffectiveness as a deterrent and the possibility of executing innocent persons. In calling for reform of the legal institutions of the old regime, Beccaria advocated a legal system based on principles of equal justice and deterrence, arguing that certainty and swiftness were more important than the severity of the punishment. In an analysis of the evolution of the death penalty and civilization, Reiman (1995: 175) argued that the "abolition of the death penalty is part of the civilizing mission of modern states." Drawing upon Durkheim' s laws of penal evolution, he notes this civilizing trend as societies move from less to more advanced types and moderate their criminal punishments accordingly. Abolition is, thus, intertwined with the development of the modern state and the intellectual revolution known as the Enlightenment (Hazard, 1965). Before the American Revolution, all 13 colonies authorized public hanging. The founding of the United States during the Enlightenment did not change the legal status of the death penalty. Although the 8th Amendment proscribes "cruel and unusual" punishments, the prevailing legal view has been that capital punishment per se was not prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the constitutionality of the death penalty was not seriously challenged until the mid-1960s (Bedau, 1997:4,15). Beginning in the 19th century, public executions were gradually outlawed, initially in the Northeast and later in the South, and replaced by hangings within prison walls (Johnson, 1998). In addition, between 1890 and 1930, most states brought executions under centralized, state authority -- since many jurisdictions had allowed offenders to be executed by local authorities, in the county of offense (Bowers et al., 1984: 14). Moreover, throughout the 20th century, the method of execution changed from hanging, to electrocution and the gas chamber, and finally to lethal injection, the most prevalent method currently in use (Johnson, 1998). In spite of these legislative changes, few states abolished the death penalty -- only five states were abolitionist in 1900 and six in 1950, at mid-century (Bowers et al., 1984: 9). …

The Cultural Commodification of Prisons

Abstract: POP CULTURE IS ABOUT ACCULTURATION MORE THAN IT IS ABOUT CULTURE. IT IS about defining the norms and parameters of society. More than 100 years ago, Karl Marx wrote about capitalism's ability to turn everything into a commodity. Commodities are items, whether goods or ideas, which can be bought and sold. In his day, Marx observed that capitalism had converted labor, raw materials, manufactured goods, even sex, into commodities, and that traders and merchants had eagerly made a fetish out of the commodities themselves. By the mid-20th century, a mass consumer culture had evolved, which was capable of commodifying much more than Marx had ever envisioned in his day. By the 1950s, abstract ideas like lifestyle and art were marketed and sold as pop culture. Hugh Hefner sold the idea of the playboy -- the suave, cultured, swinging bachelor. Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegal sold the Las Vegas idea that anyone could strike it rich at the gaming tables. Jack Kerouac helped create the Beatnik culture. Hollywood contributed to this phenomenon, with the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando, the individualistic, albeit apolitical, social rebel. After all, a rebel without a political cause is hardly a threat to the status quo. Probably the biggest and most successful cultural marketer is the Walt Disney Corporation. Disney, with its global empire of theme parks, films, television, radio, music, and publishing, produces and sells the physically intangible commodity of American pop culture. It is pop culture with an upbeat, pro-capitalist, American theme, but pop culture nonetheless. One aspect of cultural commodification is its ability to co-opt, neutralize, and render powerless any challenges to the economic and political status quo. In this way, cultural hegemony is enforced. Rock and roll music, characterized in the 1960s as the music of protest and rebellion, became, within 20 years, the music of selling beer, tennis shoes, and cars. Even revolutionary activist Malcolm X has been commodified and marketed as a fashion statement. This ability to tam anything into a commodity, and make a profit doing so, contributes to the short collective political memory in capitalist consumer societies. While culture as a commodity tends to be upbeat and cheerful (happy, optimistic people buy more), it also has its darker side. Few people question the policy choices that have led to the objectively abnormal situation that constitutes mass imprisonment (and the rise in executions). The commodification of prisons as culture has contributed to normalizing the abnormal. Prison as Concept and Reality The social and physical reality of prisons is constantly mystified and mythologized. Incarceration is a tool of social control. Its purpose is to discipline those workers and poor people who are not imprisoned, yet. Each prisoner serves as an example of what could happen to the other 150 Americans who are not currently imprisoned. The intimidation and deterrence factor of prison is served by keeping it distant, remote, and unknown, but at the same time, nearby, an immediate threat of imaginable evil. On the surface, these seem to be contradictory and impossible goals. Amazingly, American pop culture has largely succeeded in having it both ways, while simultaneously ensuring the belief in the general population of nonprisoners that what occurs in prisons does not affect them. Popular culture, mainly through film and television, but also with cheer leading from the corporate media and opportunistic politicians, has ingrained two conflicting images of prison into the collective American consciousness. When it is for the purpose of social control, to get the weak and poor into line, prison is the dark, barred world of brutal, sweaty, muscled, tattooed men, a world of sodomy, stabbings, and razor wire. This world was alluded to when federal prosecutor Gordon Zubrod told a Canadian television interviewer that three Canadian men who were resisting extradition to the United States on fraud charges "would face along, hard prison term as the boyfriend of a very bad man. …

Legitimacy, Civil Society, and State Crime

Abstract: CRIMINOLOGY HAS TRADITIONALLY FOCUSED ON THE STATE AS AN ENFORCER OF rules, rather than as an observer or breaker of rules. A cursory glance at world events suggests, however, that genocide, torture, and war crimes, which are legally classed as "international crimes," punishable by any state regardless of where they occur, eclipse all other forms of violent crime. Together with the predatory activities of regimes such as the former military government of Nigeria, [1] they constitute (even by the most conventional of definitions) a major proportion of all serious crime. Such crimes are generally committed by or with the complicity of state agencies, or by state-like entities (such as the Taliban regime in Afghanistan) that have not achieved international recognition as states. If criminology is to break away from its parochial obsession with the behavior of poor people in rich countries, it urgently needs an adequate conceptual framework for thinking about state crime. This article will borrow concepts from the disciplines of political science and international relations and attempt to integrate them into a criminological framework. A key concept is that of legitimacy, along with the closely related concept of hegemony, which connects legitimacy to economic interests. A state's legitimacy must be considered in the context of the state's relationship to civil society and to other states, as well as of class relations within the state. This will lead us to an examination of recent work in international relations theory on the processes by which human rights become institutionalized. When we discuss "the state" in this context, we use the term in a traditional Marxist sense to refer to a "public power" comprising personnel organized and equipped for the use of force, "material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds," and agencies that levy taxes (Engels, 1968:577). Of course, there is more than this to present-day welfare states, and the boundary between the state in this extensive sense and civil society is not easy to define. [2] Yet state agencies in the old-fashioned sense share a criminologically crucial characteristic in that they claim an entitlement to do things that, were anyone else to do them, would constitute violence and extortion -- Weber' s "monopoly of the legitimate use of force." "State agencies" in this sense include some technically private bodies such as private prisons, and "states" (or perhaps we should say "protostates") include entities that deploy organized force, control substantial territories, and levy formal or informal taxes, but are n ot accepted members of the international society of states. Legitimacy, Deviance, and Human Rights What does it mean to say that a state's use of force or its demands for money are "legitimate"? Beetham (1991) argues persuasively that legitimacy, as a social-scientific concept, must be distinguished from "belief in legitimacy" (as Weber, 1968, fails to do) and "legitimacy" in the philosophical sense of a morally justified claim to obedience. To borrow a term from legal philosophy that is not used by Beetham, social-scientific statements about legitimacy are detached normative statements (Raz, 1979). These are statements to the effect that a given action is or is not rationally justified given the actor's normative beliefs, which the maker of the statement does not necessarily endorse. They are quite different from committed normative statements that, for example, an action is "evil or unjust" (Friedrichs, 1986: 36), or (in our case) the description of a state as upholding or violating human rights, which apply critical standards independent of the state's own norms. They are also quite different from stat ements as to whether an action is deviant, which may be descriptive statements about the reaction to the act by a particular audience, or hypothetical statements about how the audience would react if it knew of the act, or descriptions of the actor's perception of the audience's likely reaction (e. …

The Silencing of Maya Women from Mam[acute{a}] Maqu[acute{i}n to Rigoberta Mechu[acute{u}]

Abstract: Introduction A COOL BLUE RIVER CUTTING THROUGH GREEN PASTURES LOSES ITS COLORS. THE crispness of water rushing over white rocks is silenced. The fresh scent of damp earth is soured. The river is a weapon. A handmaiden to pain. It quenches no thirst. It denies air. Instead of green and blue, the mind's eye sees the struggle to breathe. The effort to lift a broken limb. The water hits the rocks like elbows, ankles, and knees. A face is lost as it grates across a boulder, a boulder smooth and slick only to the hand that slides over it, grasping. Nails ripping. Teeth breaking. The water cold, almost frozen. Moving. Rocks bloodied. Everything hurts. The body is thrown to shore. Crumpled. Empty. The river carries away the evidence. Washes the pain off the rocks. Carries it down through the valley where women collect drinking water and children bathe. A child finds a tooth and tosses it to shore where it turns into sand. The tooth is lost, forgotten, a missing part of the landscape of the scarred face. Its absence, like the empty army camp, is a reminder of terror. Terror is a place that occupies memory long after the base has closed. It is a filter, the lens through which we understand the past, interpret the present, and upon which we base our hopes for the future. To understand Guatemala's current transition from authoritarian rule and its efforts to construct a democratic society based on the rule of law, we must first try to comprehend how the majority rural Maya experienced state structures of terror and how they internalized these structures as part of their individual and collective identities. Violence was not merely an effect of state terror; it was one of myriad instruments the state used to assert its domination. In the early 1980s, violence against individuals and communities was selectively and massively enacted as an instrument of state terror throughout the country. Despite an internationally brokered peace process, violence has yet to become an artifact of the past. Rather, for victims and victimizers, the experience and survival of particular instrume ntations of state violence have fused discrete experiences of physical and psychological violence, for both individuals and communities, within a continuum of survival. Over time, the making and remaking of this continuum of survival creates what I call a living memory of terror, wherein the memory of surviving a past physical or psychological act of violence is as real and current as today's experience with an act of violence, or its threat. This living memory of terror can reinvoke the physical and psychological pain of past acts of violence in unexpected moments. A tree, for example, is not just a tree. A river, not just a river. At a given moment, a tree is a reminder of the baby whose head was smashed against a tree by a soldier. The tree, and the memory of the baby it invokes, awaken a chain of memories of terror, including witnessing the murder of a husband or brother who was tied to another tree and beaten to death -perhaps on the same day or perhaps years later. [1] Unfortunately, these are not exceptional stories of the horrors of war. They were common occurrences in Maya villages throughout La Violencia [2] and now form a part of individual and collective memory, the living memory of terror. This living memory of terror, internalized in individual and community identities, demarcates and defines contemporary life and culture for the majority rural Maya today. The concept of a "living memory of terror" is used here to understand and contest the violence of the past, as well as the fear, borne of this violence, that thrives long after actual physical violence dissipates. I also explore testimony, official discourse, and truth in popular memory in relation to the still contested reconstruction of Guatemalan history. To these ends, I provide an overview of the silencing of Rigoberta mechu[acute{u}] and Mam[acute{a}] Maqu[acute{i}]n, as well as an analysis of testimonies of rural survivors of La Violencia and their continuing efforts to reconstruct their lives through the public assertion of memory and the reshaping of history. …

Opening Up Borderland Studies: A Review of U.S.-Mexico Border Militarization Discourse

Abstract: Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter African proverb Introduction: The Border Patrol's "Battle Plan" en la Frontera [1] ON MAY 20, 1997, CLEMENTE BANUELOS, A US MARINE ON AN ANTIDRUG operation, shot and killed 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez, Jr, in Redford, Texas Banuelos was a member of Joint Task Force-6 (JTF-6), a federal agency that coordinates antinarcotics operations between the Border Patrol and the military Although Border Patrol and Marine officials claimed that Hernandez shot at the Marine surveillance team, an autopsy report suggests that Hernandez could not have done so Banuelos' attorney stated that while Hernandez had no previous criminal history, he fit the profile of a drug trafficker that was given to the Marines in their training for missions on the border (Los Angeles Times, 1997) Meanwhile, government officials described the killing as an unfortunate, but justified act of self-defense "This was in strict compliance with the rules of engagement," said Marine Col Thomas R Kelly, deputy commander of the military's antidrug task force (Katz, 1997: A19) Three months after the shooting, a grand jury declined to bring charges against Banuelos, despite calls for an indictment by the Hernandez family Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon defended the decision, saying, "We think Corporal Banuelos was carrying out a lawful and authorized mission, one that was authorized by the Congress of the United States He was performing appropriately as a member of the Armed Services in defense of the national interest" (Verhovek, 1997: A8; see also Dunn, 1999a: 264-266) Family and community members were outraged "I think somebody should be held responsible for the death of my brother," said Margarito Herrnindez "They made it look like it was his fault The only mistake he did was to go pasture his goats on that day" (San Francisco Chronicle, 1997: A4) The Redford Citizens Committee for Justice, which included the Hernandez family and border human rights activists, charged that the grand jury included a number of people with strong ties to the Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies Opening Up Borderland Studies: Asking the Epistemological Questions in US-Mexico Border Discourse The tragedy in Redford was just one example of the "militarization" of the US-Mexico border, a project that began in earnest under President Ronald Reagan and picked up pace under the Clinton administration To understand the more general militarization of American society, it is imperative to examine the build-up on the border This article provides a brief overview of the main theoretical and cultural critiques of border militarization The aim is to encourage writers and activists to examine the many ways in which US-Mexico boundary enforcement and state repression affect the human rights of migrants Equally important in understanding the complexities of the militarization of the border as a social phenomenon is the way in which unauthorized migrants, and those living on the US-Mexico borderlands, attempt to make sense of border policing I examine how border scholars interpret and (re)present the lives of those living in a militarized US-Mexico border and attempt to answer the following questions: What does it mean to argue for the inclusion of narratives of unauthorized migrants whose voices are hardly present in the discourse of border militarization? Can subaltern undocumented immigrants speak in a way that contests and challenges prevailing views of them merely as victims running away from their usually "Third World" countries for political or economic reasons? How can the inclusion of migrants' narratives affect dehumanizing representations of them that previously were framed primarily by policymakers, Border Patrol spokespeople, or by other immigration and border scholars? As indicated by David Spener and Kathleen Staudt, editors of The U …

Getting to the Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds, and Human Security

Abstract: IN JANUARY 2000, THE CANADIAN NON GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION, PARTNERSHIP Africa Canada (PAC), released a report entitled The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds, and Human Security. The report grew from discussions among members of an informal group in Ottawa that called itself the "Sierra Leone Working Group." Meeting under the auspices of PAC, the group concluded that diamonds were central to the conflict in that small West African country, and that no peace would be sustainable until problems related to mining and selling diamonds had been addressed, both inside Sierra Leone and internationally. Diamonds--small pieces of carbon with no great intrinsic value--have been the cause of widespread death, destruction, and misery for almost a decade in Sierra Leone. In the 1960s and 1970s, a weak postindependence democracy was subverted by despotism and state-sponsored corruption. Economic decline and military rule followed. The rebellion that began in 1991 was characterized by banditry and horrific brutality, wreaked primarily on civilians. Between 1991 and 1999, the war claimed over 75,000 lives, caused half a million Sierra Leoneans to become refugees, and displaced half the country's 4.5 million people. The point of the war may not actually have been to win it, but to engage in profitable crime under the cover of warfare. Certainly, over the years, the informal diamond-mining sector, long dominated by what might be called "disorganized crime," became increasingly influenced by organized crime and by the transcontinental smuggling of diamonds, guns, and drugs, as well as by vast sums of money in search of a laundry. Violence became central to the advancement of those with vested interests. De Beers, Antwerp, and the Origin of Diamonds Until the 1980s, De Beers was directly involved in Sierra Leone. It had concessions to mine diamonds offshore and maintained an office in Freetown. Since then, the relationship has been indirect. Until much more recently, however, De Beers maintained buying offices in neighboring countries where diamond production is much lower. Through its companies and buying offices throughout Africa, and in its attempts to mop up supplies everywhere in the world, De Beers not only sustained the artificially high price of diamonds, it also undoubtedly bought diamonds from war zones. Such diamonds, produced by rebel groups in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone, have come to be known as "conflict diamonds" or "blood diamonds." Antwerp (Belgium) is the world center for rough diamonds. As much as 75% of the world's rough diamonds -- valued at about seven billion dollars per annum -- pass through Antwerp. A factor that has eased large-scale diamond smuggling and inhibited the tracking of diamond movements is the manner in which Belgium (and other countries) record the import of rough diamonds. Rather than recording the country of origin, they record the country of "provenance" -- the last country through which a diamond passes. At least 40% of the diamonds going into Britain, for example, are recorded as being Swiss, because they stopped in Switzerland on their way to Britain. From Britain, many go back to Switzerland where they are recorded as "British," and so on. Because the first countries of import, notably Belgium and Switzerland, give import documents only a cursory glance, it is not difficult to disguise "conflict diamonds" as something else. Sierra Leone Diamonds The first Sierra Leonean diamond was found in 1930, and significant production commenced in 1935. Sierra Leonean production is characterized by a high proportion of top-quality gem diamonds. Siaka Stevens became prime minister seven years after independence in 1968. A populist, he quickly turned diamonds and the presence of the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), a colonial inheritance with a monopoly on the best diamond fields, into a political issue He tacitly encouraged illicit mining and became involved in criminal or near-criminal activities. …

Transatlantic Visions: Resisting the Globalization of Mass Incarceration

Abstract: I got in an accident and I wasn't able to work. I was in a hospital for three months and then I was in a therapy center for another month and a half. So I went through a lot of hassle, I had applied for disability, and I was on my first appeal against rejection of that. I guess it was 6 months after the accident that I was granted a welfare grant. I mean I appreciated it and the food stamps, but I had a $500 car, a $500 apartment. So I lost my car, was about to get kicked out my apartment. They were real nice because they knew I'd been in an accident, but I just didn't have any income. That's when it came up that a friend of mine was having problems too because she'd just had a baby and naturally the guy was no good and you know that story. She came to me, she said we could make these couple of runs and be alright. That was how I ended up here. [1] DENISHA'S STORY is TYPICAL OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WHO CROWD jails and prisons in the U.S. as a result of a "War on Drugs" that in reality is a war on the poor, on communities of color, and on women who rely on welfare to survive. Yet Denisha is not incarcerated in the U.S. This interview took place in Winchester, a small scenic town and former capital of England, where Denisha is detained "at her majesty's pleasure" in the women's annex of a closed (medium security) prison. Denisha was arrested at Heathrow airport and sentenced to five years for importing cocaine from Jamaica. She is caught up in a dramatic increase in women's imprisonment in England and Wales, which has more than doubled since the early 1990s. This article will focus on the emergence of, and resistance to, the prison-industrial complex in Britain. By mapping the genealogies of resistance that have emerged out of the anti-racist, feminist Left in Britain, I hope to identify possibilities for transatlantic coalition-building and prison abolitionism. The article draws on interviews that I carried out with activists during the years 1999 to 2000, but there are undoubtedly pockets of resistance, which have been overlooked. Hopefully these absences will become more visible as global connections are accepted as an essential part of activism against the prison-industrial complex. Mapping the PIC in Britain The relatively small size of European prison populations and the accompanying low official crime rates are often used by advocates of decarceration in the U.S. to demonstrate that a viable alternative to mass incarceration exists and that Europe could be used as a model. However, although rates of incarceration in Europe are lower than in the U.S., we should pause to examine local realities before advocating a European-style penal system. Britain is the most eager incarcerator in Europe (barring Portugal), with an incarceration rate in England and Wales of approximately 128 per 100,000. [2] A dramatic increase in the use of prison during the last decade has led to "the largest prison building program since the middle of the 19th century" (Morgan, 1999: 110). As in the U.S., people of color are dealt with more harshly at every level of the criminal justice system. In 1998, 24% of women and 18% of men in prison were "black" (using the British definition for "people of color"). [3] African Caribbean men and wom en, who make up less than two percent of the free population, are dramatically overrepresented inside. British-born African Caribbean women, at 12% of women prisoners, are imprisoned at a greater rate than men, who make up 10% of men in prison (NACRO, 2000). South Asian, Chinese, and "Other" women and men make up a further five percent and 3.7% respectively. In addition, "foreign nationals," including Caribbean, African, Latin American, and European women, make up 14% of women and seven percent of men in prison. Although prison industries are not as developed as in the U.S., prisoners carry out the maintenance functions of the prison such as cleaning, cooking, and groundwork, as well as assembling electronic components, making clothes, and other contract work for as little as [pound]7. …

Prisons, Social Control, and Political Prisoners

Abstract: INCREASINGLY, THE GLOBALIZATION OF MARKETS AND PROFIT SEEKING HAS PRESSED U.S. prisons to become profit-generating enterprises -- hence, the prison-industrial complex. Nevertheless, prisons also continue to serve their main purpose: to warehouse and "disappear" the "unacceptable." Prisons exist to deprive their captives of their liberties and human agency, as well as to punish them. These institutions stigmatize prisoners through moralistic denunciations and indictments based on bad genes -- skin color as a crime. The law -- a political institution in itself -- provides the framework for the war of social control against oppressed nations, working classes, and noncompliant women. Most prisoners are imprisoned not because they are "criminals," but because they have been accused of breaking one of an ever-increasing number of laws designed to exert tighter social control and increase state repression. Prisoners have been scapegoated and criminalized. Witness the increased number of black, Latino, Native American, and Asian youth detained under youth crime acts and "anti-gang" laws, the number of foreign nationals (excluding most Europeans) imprisoned due to hate-inspired immigration laws, and the "drug war," in which hundreds of thousands have been kidnapped from their communities, even from other countries. These sweeping laws embody and embolden capitalistic U.S. policies to criminalize and decimate targeted populations and to keep Third World and white working-class wage laborers behind prison walls. Most prisoners, by virtue of their ethnicity and class, are victims of ethnic cleansing policies -- death deferred to incarceration. Other "undesirables" include those who have consciously or politically resisted, opposed, or attacked the injustices and inequalities of this state system of social control. These prisoners are political prisoners, historically among the most feared and despised by those who wield state power. In the 1950s, COINTELPRO (the federal counterintelligence program) was created. It employed dirty tricks, disinformation, militarized police agencies, and assassination to wage its political war against national liberation, anti-imperialist, and prosocialist forces. Imprisonment was, and continues to be, one of its weapons against political activists. The state shows little mercy to its political enemies. The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is a current, well-known example. Abu-Jamal was denied even a modicum of fairness in his trial. Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) and Leonard Peltier were both framed for murders by federal and local COINTELPRO forces. Geronimo was freed after much struggle and 27 years. Leonard is still in prison. Assata Shakur was convicted of a police killing she could not possibly have committed and is only free in exile. More than a few political prisoners have been imprisoned for nearly two decades and some for nearly three decades -- the Angola Three, the New York Three, Black Panthers and New African militants, Puerto Rican independentistas, North American anti-imperialist solidarity fighters, and other comrades. To be a political prisoner is neither a comfortable nor a privileged position. To remain committed to one's beliefs and principles exacts a heavy price. Political prisoners in New York state prisons are rarely held in the same prison. M any have spent years, even a decade, in isolation control units for no other reason than their political associations and "political crimes." Many have been denied health care for security reasons. Enemies of the state are deliberately targeted, subject to continual surveillance. The state is determined to destroy us, because the prison system is, by its very nature, a vehicle of equal opportunity punishment and casual cruelty that crushes the life and breath from its victims and hostages. To be a political prisoner is not a matter of standing higher in a "hierarchy" of prisoners. Where one stands is a matter of consciousness, not of social status or privilege. …

The Relationship between Globalization and Militarism

Abstract: GLOBALIZATION AND MILITARISM SHOULD BE SEEN AS TWO SIDES OF THE SAME coin. On one side, globalization promotes the conditions that lead to unrest, inequality, conflict, and, ultimately, war. On the other side, globalization fuels the means to wage war by protecting and promoting the military industries needed to produce sophisticated weaponry. This weaponry, in turn, is used--or its use is threatened--to protect the investments of transnational corporations and their shareholders. 1. Globalization Promotes Inequality, Unrest, and Conflict Economic inequality is growing; more conflict and civil wars are emerging. It is important to see a connection between these two situations. Proponents of global economic integration argue that globalization promotes peace and economic development of the Third World. They assert that "all boats rise with the tide" when investors and corporations make higher profits. However, there is precious little evidence that this is true and substantial evidence of the opposite. The United Nation's Human Development Report (U.N. Development Programme, 1999: 3) noted that globalization is creating new threats to human security. Economic inequality between Northern and Southern nations has worsened, not improved. There are more wars being fought today -- mostly in the Third World -- than there were during the Cold War. Most are not wars between countries, but are civil wars where the majority of deaths are civilians, not soldiers. The mainstream media frequently oversimplify the causes of these wars, with claims they are rooted in religious or ethnic differences. A closer inspection reveals that the underlying source of such conflicts is economic in nature. Financial instability, economic inequality, competition for resources, and environmental degradation -- all root causes of war -- are exacerbated by globalization. The Asian financial meltdown of 1997 to 1999 involved a terrible human cost. The economies of Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia crumbled in the crisis. These countries, previously held up by neoliberal economists as the darlings of globalization, were reduced to riots and financial ruin. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in to rescue foreign investors and impose austerity programs that opened the way for an invasion by foreign corporations that bought up assets devalued by capital flight and threw millions of people out of work. Political upheaval and conflict ensued, costing thousands of lives. Meanwhile, other countries watched as their neighbors suffered the consequences of greater global integration. In India, citizens faced corporate recolonization, which spawned a nationalistic political movement. Part of the political program was the development of nuclear weapons--seen by many as the internationally accepted currency of power. Nuclear tests have put an already conflict-ridden region on the brink of nuclear war. 2. Globalization Fuels the Means to Wage War The world economic system promotes military economies over civilian economies, pushing national economic policies toward military spending. The World Trade Organization (WTO), one of the main instruments of globalization, is largely based on the premise that the only legitimate role for a government is to provide for a military to protect the interests of the country and a police force to ensure order within. The WTO attacks governments' social and environmental policies that reduce corporate profits, and it has succeeded in having national laws that protect the environment struck down. Yet the WTO gives exemplary protection to government actions that develop, arm, and deploy armed forces and supply a military establishment. Article XXI of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) allows governments free reign for actions taken in the interest of national security. For example, in 1999 a WTO trade panel ruled against a Canadian government program that provided subsidies to aerospace and defense corporations for the production of civilian aircraft. …

Constitutive Criminology: Origins, Core Concepts, and Evaluation

Abstract: IN THE 12 YEARS SINCE DRAGAN MILOVANOVIC AND I FIRST FORMULATED THIS theoretical perspective, we have received numerous questions (many via e-mail) about various aspects of the theory. Interestingly, these have not come predominantly from academics, but mainly from undergraduate, graduate, and even high school students. In addition, there have been over 25 discussions of the theory in journals and books (for an assessment of these, see Henry and Milovanovic, 1999). Below we will address the issues raised by summarizing the constitutive position and offering an evaluation of its contribution to date. Origins and Influences In one sense, constitutive criminology has a long history in that it draws on several well-established critical social theories, most notably symbolic interactionism, social constructionism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, structural Marxism, poststructuralism, structuration theory, semiotics (for a review of these roots, see Arrigo, 1997; Bak, 1999, 2000). In another sense, it is part of the relatively recent interest in chaos theory and affirmative postmodernism. In particular, it draws on complexity theory (Mandelbrot, 1983; Gregerson and Sailer, 1993; Pickover, 1988), structural coupling (Luhmann, 1992; Teubner, 1993), strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1988; Jessop, 1990), relational sets (Hunt, 1993), critical race theory and intersections (Matsuda et al., 1993), autopoietic systems (Teubner, 1988, 1993; Cornell, 1991), dialectical materialism (Marx, 1975; Sayer, 1979), and topology theory (Lacan, 1961; Milovanovic and Ragland, 2001; Milovanovic, 1996c). Most recently, constitutive criminology was born of the application of these postmodernist concepts to critical criminology by a relatively small group of critical criminologists whose inner circle comprises Stuart Henry, Dragan Milovanovic, Gregg Barak, and Bruce Arrigo. This group has primarily been responsible for founding the position in criminology and making theoretical innovations. A broader group that is more loosely linked to the constitutive project includes T.R. Young, Rob Schehr, Lisa Sanchez, Vic Kappeler, James Williams, and Mary Bosworth. These scholars have found the theory helpful in explaining particular developments in crime and justice and have pushed the theory in new directions (see Henry and Milovanovic, 1999, for a sampling of their research). The outer circle of this group includes sympathizers who have incorporated aspects of the theory into their analysis, while developing their own theoretical analysis in new directions. There is also a growing body of students who have developed their research around the constitutive position, including Biko Azino, Andrew Bak, and Mark Faccini. Finally, there are critics of the position. Their contributions are included in an evaluation section at the end of this article. In a more narrow sense, constitutive criminology first emerged in the 1980s in Stuart Henry's studies on crime and social control in the workplace (Henry, 1983; 1985). They were considerably influenced by Peter Fitzpatrick's (1984) theory of "integral plurality" and Anthony Giddens' (1979, 1984) structuration theory, especially in The Constitution of Society. Henry outlined a sociolegal theory concerning the relationship between social forms and social action, initially defined as "integrated theory" (Henry, 1983). The actual term "constitutive theory" came from a suggestion by Christine Harrington (1988) in her constructive critique of Henry's 1983 work. It became the motif for subsequent renditions (Henry, 1987a; 1987b) and was incorporated into other work in Brigham and Harrington's series "After the Law" (e.g., Hunt, 1993). In June 1989, during a chance meeting at the 25th Anniversary meeting of the Law and Society Association in Madison, Wisconsin, Dragan Milovanovic shared similar insights. He had been developing theories in the sociology of law, particularly Lacanian postmoderism and psychoanalytic semiotic approaches (Milovanovic, 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c), and in his studies on law and the prison (1988; Milovanovic and Thomas, 1989). …

Crime as Social Control

Abstract: IS CRIME PROTO-REVOLUTIONARY -- A PRE-POLITICAL FORM OF REBELLION? OR IS crime a form of social control? Is it the "auto-repression" of communities that have throughout history rebelled in organized and unorganized ways? It is often alleged that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many on the Left romanticized "street crime" as proto-revolutionary rebellion. To some extent this position had currency among elements of the white ultra-Left. However, mainstream criminologists and historians of the 1960s have overemphasized this (Cummins, 1994). To the extent that there was romanticization of crime, it was based, in part, on a warped reading of Fanon's ideas about the psychologically salubrious and politically heuristic effects of revolutionary violence and his casting of the lumpen classes in colonial towns as potential militants, rather than as the declasse and dangerous dross white Marxists often took them to be. Yet, to be fair, left valorization of crime as proto-political was neither common nor even very important in shaping left politics around criminal justice; any back issue of this journal's earliest incarnations will attest to that. So what is a radical reading of crime? By crime, I mostly mean the "index offenses" or interpersonal violence, such as murder, rape, and assault, along with noncorporate theft like burglary and strong-arm robbery. To some extent, however, we can throw in the violence associated with addiction and street-level narcocapitalism. A look at the real impacts of street crime begins to reveal that crime and the fear of crime are forms of social control. Strong-arm robbery, rape, homicide, and general thuggery in poor communities leave people scared, divided, cynical, and politically confused; ultimately these acts drive the victims of capitalism, racism, and sexism into the arms of a racist, probusiness, sexist state. In short, crime justifies state violence and even creates popular demand for state repression. Thus, it helps to liquidate or at least neutralize a whole class of potential rebels. Crime also short-circuits the social cohesion necessary for radical mobilization. As one community organizer in San Francisco put it: "How do you think they get all the police in here? Without bad guys, there's no so-called good guys." Foucault recognized this point in Discipline and Punish. Commenting on the politics of crime in France at the end of the 18th century, Foucault summed up the political benefits of crime -- then and now -- as follows: Crime was too useful for them [the authorities] to dream of anything as crazy - or ultimately as dangerous - as a society without crime. No crime means no police. What makes the presence and control of the police tolerable for the population, if not fear of the criminal? This institution of the police, which is so recent and so oppressive, is only justified by that fear. If we accept the presence in our midst of these uniformed men, who have exclusive right to carry arms, who demand our papers, who come and prowl on our doorsteps, how would any of this be possible if there were no criminals? And if there weren't articles every day in the newspaper telling us how numerous and dangerous our criminals are (Foucault, 1980: 47)? How, then, does crime function as social control in the U.S. today? A comparison of crime with the most extreme example of state terrorism, death squads, is instructive. What were the hallmarks and political impacts of state terror in Central America in the 1980s? State violence against popular movements was systematic, but also deliberately random and spectacularly arbitrary - all of which helped to spread ubiquitous fear. People simply "disappeared" forever or, after being captured, showed up on public roads mutilated, their corpses serving as political advertisements. Such tactics caused thousands of activists to give up on politics completely and to retreat into their private lives. …

Neoliberalism, militarism, and armed conflict

Abstract: Goals of This Special Issue THE TREND TOWARD A NEOLIBERAL GLOBAL ECONOMY AND THE PREVALENCE OF militaries and militarism worldwide are often treated as separate, unrelated phenomena Many activists and scholars who critique and challenge the negative effects of increasing global integration emphasize economic factors (eg, Bales, 1999; Chossudovsky, 1997; Greider, 1997; Mander and Goldsmith, 1996; Sassen, 1998; Teeple, 1995) These include the fact that workers in one country are pitted against those of another as corporate managers seek to maximize profits, that systems of inequality based on gender, race, class, and nation are inherent in the international division of labor, that nation-states are cutting social welfare supports, that women and children experience superexploitation especially in countries of the global South, and that there is increasing polarization of material wealth between rich and poor countries, as well as within richer countries Critics also point to the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Wor ld Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), which require structural changes to make economies more profitable for private investors and to open markets for so-called free trade Activists and scholars who are concerned primarily with militarism and demilitarization critique the prevalence of war or the threat of war to resolve transnational and intranational disputes (eg, Reardon, 1996; Hague Appeal for Peace, 1999) They point to bloated military budgets that absorb resources needed for socially useful programs in many countries, to the fact that civilians make up the vast majority of the casualties of contemporary warfare, and that massive numbers of people are displaced--90% of them women and children -- as a result of wars They note the profitability of the arms trade They also emphasize connections between militarism and violence against women, and the incidence of human rights violations in military conflicts We are not suggesting that such analysts and commentators see no overlap between these two clusters of issues However, in critiquing and challenging neoliberal economic integration, it is essential to take account of militarism as an intrinsic element Conversely, in analyzing militarism, war, and armed conflict, it is also necessary to consider global economic forces and institutions The goal of this special issue, then, is to show how neoliberalism and militarism are inextricably linked In planning this issue, we sought to include articles from different parts of the world, with an emphasis on the work of activists We believe this collection breaks new ground and we are excited about the material included here Given US dominance in the world, many of the articles inevitably focus on the US government and US corporations We assume that the readers of this work will be academics involved in progressive issues, as well as organizers, activists, and students Editorial Perspectives Our personal connections to this topic stem from life-changing experiences Margo Okazawa-Rey undertook a research project of mixed-race Amerasian children abandoned by US military fathers in South Korea (Okazawa-Rey, 1997) Gwyn Kirk was active in the women's peace movement that supported Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in England in the early 1980s (Cook and Kirk, 1983; Kirk, 1989) The rape of a 12-year-old girl by US servicemen in Okinawa (Japan) in September 1995 precipitated our first joint writing about the complex inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation that characterize US military relations in East Asia (Okazawa-Rey and Kirk, 1996) As we learned more about US military operations in the region and local opposition to it, we began to understand the interconnections between militarism and neoliberalism In 1997, we founded the East Asia-US Women's Network Against Militarism together with activists and scholars from Korea, Japan, and the Philippines …

"One Thousand Days of Degradation": New Labour and Old Compromises at the Turn of the Century [1]

Abstract: We haven't opposed a criminal justice measure since 1988 (Jack Straw, January 1997, cited in Anderson and Mann, 1997: 269). I would trust Jack Straw's judgment. He is a very fair man (Margaret Thatcher, cited in The Guardian, January 12, 2000). ON JANUARY 26, 2000, THE LABOUR PARTY COMPLETED 1,000 DAYS IN government. In a century dominated by the Conservatives, who between 1905 and 1997 were out of power a mere 29 years (Seldon, 1996: 17), Tony Blair looked forward to the next general election and a second successive five-year term as prime minister. For Labour, this was a feat that was unprecedented in its political history. In a mirror image of the Tories' years in government, Labour had held power for only 22 years in its century of existence. Central to the party's popular legitimacy and consolidation, according to Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw, was its new, "third way" realism concerning crime, punishment, the economy, social welfare, health, and every other government responsibility. In keeping with its leader's evangelical spirit, the party's spiritual baptism in the soothing waters of the third way had transformed the nonbelievers of old Labour into the born-again, free-market zealots of New Labour (NL). In the process, the party had s hifted politically from being an unelectable pariah to a force in which the voters of "Middle England" could place their trust to deliver a promised land built on prudent accumulation, thrift, and prosperity free from the ravages of the degenerate, deprived, and depraved. "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" had become the incessant mantra that was chanted in the build-up to the 1997 election. By the time of the election and in the febrile context of a rise in the rate of reported crime, criminal justice mismanagement and inefficiency, and Tory political and moral sleaze, NL was claiming in its manifesto that it was "the party of law and order in Britain today" (The Labour Party, 1997:23). In the next three years the manifesto's comment was to prove prophetic. This article explores a number of themes in relation to NL's law-and-order strategy. First, it sets this strategy in the context of the two decades of near-Conservative hegemony and the impact and legacy of that hegemony on the government's conceptualization of crime and punishment. Second, it explores the extraordinary events that occurred in the first months of the new millennium. These events -- from the refusal to extradite Augusto Pinochet to Spain to face charges arising from the 1973 coup in Chile to the 22 life sentences imposed on an armed robber whose collective haul amounted to [pound]1,500 -- provide a penetrating case study of who are "the proper objects of power" (Fiske, 1993: 235) in NL's globalized world. Finally, the conclusion critically analyzes New Labour's commitment to human rights through the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into U.K. law. Although this development is to be welcomed, our article argues that the government's narrow, legalistic conception of human rights could lead to the obfuscation and marginalization of the material social processes that are central to the delivery of democratic accountability and social justice in a society where "the richest 10 per cent of the population own 65 per cent of the marketable wealth, excluding dwellings, while half the population between them have only 6 per cent" (Jones and Novak, 1999: 19). The Roots of New Labour's Law and Order Strategy [2] The Conservative Legacy The period of Conservative hegemony that began in February 1975 with the election of Margaret Thatcher as Tory leader ushered in an epoch of "iron times" built on the corrosive discipline of "authoritarian populism" (Hall, 1988a). There are four important points to note about the often searing law-and-order strategy pursued by the Conservatives between their first election victory in May 1979 and their crushing defeat (at least with respect to the number of Parliamentary seats they lost) in May 1997. …

The Multiculturalist Problematic in the Age of Globalized Capitalism

Abstract: What constituted a mulatto by our law? ...Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the Negro blood. But observe, that this does not reestablish freedom.... If emancipated, he becomes a free white man, and a citizen of the United States.... Thomas Jefferson (from a letter dated March 4, 1815, Monticello) WITH THE END OF THE COLD WAR AND THE RISE OF TRANSNATIONAL, GLOBALized capitalism, a new "cultural war" has erupted in the United States, an ideological-political conflict symptomatic of the interminable crisis of liberal democracy. I am not alluding here to Samuel Huntington's "war of civilizations," the replacement of class struggle with the clash between the Islamic/Confucian axis and a monolithic Western dispensation. If by "culture" we mean the "public, standardized values of a community" that mediate the experience of individuals (Douglas, 1966: 39), the war involves antagonistic sets of norms, values, and beliefs expressed in institutionalized symbolic and discursive systems open to differing critiques and interpretations. The existing maps of meaning that make the world intelligible, maps objectified in patterns of social organization and relationship, are being discarded, reformed, invented, and reviewed in an accelerated process today. In any case, history has not ended with the demise of utopia and the triumph of the free-market neoliberal gospel. What has flared up is the long-buried antngonism between polarized worldviews or frames of knowledge-production. In academic and intellectual circles, we observe the confrontation of two irreconcilable positions: one that claims the priority of a "common culture," call it liberal or civic nationalism, as the foundation for a democratic solidarity of citizens; and another that regards racism or a racializing logic as inherent in the sociopolitical constitution of the United States, a historical ground undercutting the universalist or cosmopolitan rhetoric of its proclaimed democratic ideals and principles (Perea, 1998). Attempts to mediate the dispute, whether through the artifice of a "multicultural nationalism" or a postethnic cosmopolitanism (Hollinger, 1998), have only muddled the precise distinctions laid out by the various protagonists. Multiculturalism, inflected in terms of cultural literacy, canon revision, the debate between Eurocentrism versus Afrocentrism, and so on, has become the major site of t heoretical and philosophical contestation. A drive toward uniform standards informs the goal of Establishment thinkers who seek to mediate contradictory paradigms in the "culture wars." The noted literary critic E.D. Hirsch gained a certain notoriety by producing his Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988; second edition, 1993) premised on the notion of a common knowledge or collective memory as a necessary requisite for a "truly functional literacy." The literate national language and culture on which "the unity and effectiveness" of the nation-state depend, despite its avowed conservatism, needs to be transmitted in the schools to insure "national communication" among a diverse population divided by ethnicity, party affiliation, generation, locality, and so on. This communication among "strangers," Hirsch argues as he explains in "The Theory Behind the Dictionary," repudiates conventional interpretations and provokes us to revise our liberal resistance to a traditional curriculum: We help people in the underclass rise economically by teaching them how to communicate effectively beyond a narrow social sphere, and that can only be accomplished by teaching them shared, traditional literate culture. Thus the inherent conservatism of literacy leads to an unavoidable paradox: the social goals of liberalism require educational conservatism. We only make social and economic progress by teaching everyone to read and communicate, which means teaching myths and facts that are predominantly traditional (1993: xv). …

Policing the Rez: Keeping No Peace in Indian Country

Abstract: watching our blood its journey into plasma bags laying still on tables hearing the coughs and restless movements of people bleeding for some dollars that send us out again able to face looking for something this deep red fluid that propels our hearts war is money the blood spilled to the earth blood appearing suddenly with no warning from wounds that we inflict on one another the blood is the currency by which we trade our destinies propels some to be takers on this world... No one left untouched yet some remain silent not told that our blood is currency OH, WHAT TANGLED WEBS WE WEAVE, AND NONE WERE SO CONFUSED AS THOSE woven around the issues of policing "Indians." American Indian peoples and their homelands are increasingly entangled in a web of legal jurisdiction even as they reassert their ancient sovereignties and seek to define their own polities. [1] Reservations are characterized as "internal colonies," many times without a deeper analysis of the institutions, relations, and narratives in play that make that "colonization" real. The extension of U.S. legal jurisdiction over Native people's land and their lives continues the founding narrative that naturalizes the American nation-state itself and its continuing hegemony over the country's land. Jurisdiction, a Western concept for the establishment of law and order, is at the heart of any modern practice of sovereignty. Native communities operate in mazes of law and policy well beyond those visited on other racialized peoples in the U.S. Of all the current peoples inhabiting the United States, only Amer ican Indians have an aboriginal interest and title in the national land base. Because the United States is legitimated by a legal abstraction created by and for colonists from other countries, it must keep Native peoples embedded in law in a manner particular to no other people in the nation. American Indian communities are currently caught in a double bind where they are restrained from asserting their own jurisdictions and customs to combat racism, violence, and deteriorating social conditions while the surrounding, non-Indian community is free to criminalize Indians' proactive responses. Because U.S. law "polices," but does not protect, Native communities, U.S. legal jurisdiction actually contributes to the social violence and ill health that plagues many reservations and urban Indian communities. The extension of this jurisdiction into Indian country in the 21st century may be the last battlefield of the Indian wars. Although an inordinate amount of attention is placed on the treaty relationships between Native peoples and the United States, the reduction of the myriad original American peoples into "Indians" is also part of the creation and formation of the U.S. as a racialized state. The Constitution initially acknowledged both Blacks and Indians as other than citizens. Although this status was later altered, these initial categories necessitated a legalized range of differentiated treatments for these noncitizens. The U.S. as a state has recognized race as a primary category since its conception. The Labyrinth: Who's in Charge of Indian Country? It is Friday night. A carload of non-Indian youths from off-reservation has driven into the Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana to party. By midnight the youths are very drunk. They begin vandalizing homes and smashing car windows. The tribal police do not have the authority to arrest non-Indians and the county and state police have no authority to enforce law on the reservation (O'Brien, 1989: 279). A woman who lives a mile outside the Jicarilla Apache Reservation has called the tribal police department. She can hear someone breaking into her house. …

Introduction to "Criminal Justice and Globalization at the New Millennium"

Abstract: FOR THE U.S. RULING CLASS AND ITS ASSORTED POLITICIANS, WALL STREET pundits, academic apologists (especially economists and political scientists), and media lackeys (including the editorial pages of The New York Times), the new millennium is cause for celebrating the apogee of the American Century. "This is no fluke," asserts Mortimer B. Zuckerman (1998: 18), chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News and World Report. "The unique American brand of entrepreneurial bottom-up capitalism is made up of structural elements that have wrought the stunning economic success of the 1990s and are likely to provide the basis for extending America's comparative advantage over.. .a Second American Century," he boasts. What Zuckerman is celebrating in "bottom-up" capitalism is the "winner-take-all" mentality, the exaggerated inequality and heightened punitiveness that forms the core of America's distinctive Character. The structural elements central to American hegemony are "free trade" and "unregulated" markets in labor, ec onomic forces that dichotomize the community of nations into extravagant winners and abject losers. Thus, although national self-determination and individual liberty are in the Constellation of American hegemonic values, they must be honored more in the breach. Astute observers point out that economic globalization is actually the reestablishment of the late- 19th-century Gilded Age enterprise, which was rudely interrupted by a 60-year backlash of isolationism and war-inflicted fragmentation of the international economy. Today, largely under the aegis of the U.S., laissez-faire globalization is hitting its stride again as a powerful economic and political doctrine. The Soviet menace has been vanquished. China has turned away from Communism as an economic doctrine. Third World resistance groups are in disarray and retreat, western European social democracies (with the bold exception of Denmark and The Netherlands) are shrinking their welfare states, and governments in Latin America, the former Soviet bloc countries, and much of Asia are busy deregulating, downsizing, privatizing, contracting out, reducing taxes, and cutting social spending. On the cultural front, people throughout the world are emulating the voracious consumerism of Americans. The ascendance of capitalist values and social standards among former peasants, apparatchiks, and state industrial workers is helping to finish off the old social orders in China, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The evidence of the social triumph of neoliberalism seems everywhere: a slightly smaller proportion of people live in dire poverty (measured as the number of people living on less than one dollar a day, stable at 1.2 billion people); global per capita income has tripled in the last 35 years; the gross domestic product (GDP) has risen in some long-stagnant regions; life expectancy has increased significantly; under five mortality is lower and adult literacy is increasing; the percentage of nations adopting liberal democracy doubled in the last 20 years, and the number of organizations concerned with human rights has expanded. Communication costs have plummeted, and the Internet promises to put people in the far reaches of the world in instant intercommunication (providing they have electricity). Yet globalization has been Janus-faced. Consider the less publicized ugly side of neoliberal globalization: disease, hunger, and poverty are intensifying for those living in countries marginalized by the global marketplace. The polarization of wealth and income has widened the gap between rich and poor countries. For those industrial countries on the winning side of the global divide, per capita consumption has risen at a steady annual rate of 2.3% over the last 25 years, and in East Asia, more than a whopping six percent annually. According to U.N. development studies, the upper fifth of those living in high-income countries account for 86% of all of the world's private expenditures on consumption. …

Unfinished Exorcism: The Legacy of Apartheid in Democratic Southern Africa

Abstract: THE CLOSING MONTHS OF 1989 WERE MOMENTOUS FOR AFRICA. WITH THE SOVIET empire unraveling, Cold War rivalries subsided throughout the continent. Namibia, long occupied by South Africa as a buffer against the spread of international communism, gained independence after the first all-race national elections supervised by the United Nations (U.N.). In November 1989 a majority elected the Southwest African People's Organization (SWAPO), Namibia's resistance movement, to form the new democratic government. The vote concluded more than 70 years of rule by Pretoria. The transformation in Namibia hinged on accelerating political change in the Soviet Union and South Africa. In the late 1980s, communism was on the retreat while antiapartheid protests surged. Pretoria sought to negotiate an end to racial segregation and the long crusade to silence its enemies. President F.W. De Klerk released his alleged communist nemesis, Nelson Mandela, from prison in February 1990. By 1994, multiparty talks between the ruling National Party and opposition movements had culminated in an election similar to Namibia's five years before, and a democratic government led by the African National Congress (ANC) and President Nelson Mandela. Instantly, apartheid seemed to recede into the past. Today, many people in Namibia and South Africa fear that AIDS, a disease pandemic in the region, and crime, much of it blamed on high unemployment and African immigrants who supposedly break laws, are beyond government control. There is a popular outcry to reintroduce draconian measures. These include placing the HIV-positive population, roughly one in five sexually active people, in quarantine, deportation of African immigrants, and bringing back the death penalty, especially in South Africa. Such throwbacks reflect one tenacious legacy of the old order: a deep anxiety that the enemy most to be feared lurks "within" and must be banished. The emerging climate of intolerance bewilders those who only recently celebrated miraculously peaceful elections. Did the euphoria following the liberation vote submerge unresolved problems? This article revisits the period immediately before Namibia' s historic ballot to explore the font of today's intolerance. In the final days of apartheid the specter of retribution may have offered scant opportunity for people to develop alternative strategies that could resolve major crises without resort to authoritarian methods. The Last White Colony Once a German colony, Namibia (or South West Africa, as it was called) became a mandate territory under the custodianship of South Africa after World War I, and thus subject to Pretoria's repressive racial legislation, particularly after the Afrikaner National Party came to power in 1948. The United Nations General Assembly terminated the League of Nation's mandate in 1967. but the apartheid regime disavowed this decision. During the 1960s, a fitful guerrilla campaign for national liberation began in Ovamboland in the northern quarter of Namibia This bush war pitted SWAPO fighters who espoused socialist aims against the security forces trained by South Africa. After Marxistrevolutionaries in Angola, known as the MPLA, seized power in 1975, Pretoria envisaged communist infiltrators breaching Namibia's borders and boosting SWAPO's cause. In alliance with UNITA, an African nationalist movement that opposed the MPLA, white South African Defense Forces invaded Angola. With the aid of the Soviets, Cuba sent soldie rs and materiel to bolster MPLA defenses while the United Stated backed UNITA. A regional conflict erupted into a Cold War hot spot. The U.N. sought to intervene and in 1978 devised Resolution 435, an independence plan for Namibia that established guidelines for a cease-fire, "free and fair" elections, and the framing of a new constitution. The United States and South Africa resisted U.N. Resolution 435. From the early 1980s, President Reagan's policies of Soviet containment and "constructive engagement" -- the incremental reformation of apartheid -- promoted the South African military presence in Angola and Namibia as a bulwark against communism in Africa. …

The Diallo Verdict: Another "Tragic Accident" in New York's War on Street Crime?

Abstract: THE ACQUITTAL BY AN ALBANY JURY OF THE FOUR POLICE OFFICERS IN THE AMADOU Diallo case sent shock waves through minority communities in New York. At the same time, the view of the New York press was that, although the result might be unfortunate, the city would somehow "heal" and move on. The press published Mayor Giuliani's statistics proving that New York had "fewer police shootings" per capita than other cities, and fewer than New York itself had had in past years. This "consensus" view of the problem of police violence, however, has not been accepted after a month of sustained debate on the police problem in New York. The killing of Diallo was the result of aggressive and racist police practices, deeply rooted in current New York police policy. Such practices have resulted in the killing of four unarmed black men in 13 months. The Albany trial was a travesty of justice, featuring at its core the Bronx district attorney's office inexplicable, even unbelievable, failure to challenge the police version of the facts. The trial served as a context to legally justify New York's "aggressive policing" policy, concluding that the killing of Diallo was an "accident," an unavoidable consequence of good police work. 1. The Diallo Killing: What Really Happened? At the trial, the four police officers who killed Diallo for the first time offered their version of the shooting. Their testimony was compelling: it was a carefully rehearsed performance, accompanied by tears and regret, but with the four officers perfectly corroborating each other's testimony. They were on patrol, driving slowly down the street in the high-crime Soundview section of the Bronx, when one officer noted Diallo, who looked out, then ducked into his own doorway, "acting suspiciously." The officer then testified that he believed that Diallo generally matched the description of "young black man" wanted for a rape committed a year before. They stopped their unmarked car and headed for the doorway, with two officers in front, the other two trailing by perhaps 20 feet. As they approached Diallo, they "identified themselves as police officers" and ordered him to stand still. He acted "strangely," withdrawing, and when he put his hand in his pocket and took hold of his wallet, the lead officer yelled " gun," and fell back. The two front officers emptied their 14-shot automatic pistols into Diallo's body; the two rear officers fired about half of their clips, totaling 41 shots, hitting Diallo 19 times. From this scenario, four defense attorneys presented a case of self-defense following a routine "Terry stop." The essential law on self-defense is that the police officers were in reasonable fear of their lives and reacted reasonably under the circumstances as they perceived them. It was, for them, a terrible accident, a consequence of ordinary police activity in New York. Reserving the legal aspects of this issue for later, the police version of these facts was left untouched by the cross-examination of the Bronx district attorney. It is possible, however, to work our way through the scenario, given what we know about policing in New York, and present a completely different version of what most likely happened. "Tactical" squads, like the one that killed Diallo, operate very aggressively, basically "rousting" a series of likely offenders in the hope of turning up a gun or contraband drugs that would justify a "bust." This process generates the daily statistics that make both the squad and the precinct look good under the "comstat" computer-based police accountability programs that structure police management in New York and many other cities. [1] The "rousts" are largely guesswork, based on police experience; at their core, they are also racial profiles. One after another, young men are confronted, ordered to stop, searched, verbally engaged for information about themselves or others, and then either let go or arrested on petty charges. …