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The Cincinnati Beacon
Want Less Crime? Vote No on the Jail Tax (Issue 27)
Monday, October 01, 2007
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
 Photo courtesy of here.
Guest article by Thomas A. Dutton.
One “fact” reigns supreme in the minds of most Cincinnatians—"crime."
We shouldn’t be surprised by this. After 50 years of mostly white suburbanization, a deindustrialized economy that has produced “jobless ghettos” and underemployment, and a rollback on most governmental initiatives associated with the New Deal and Great Society Programs in favor of an unfettered market, all of which have created large pools of expendable people in the nation’s core, is it any wonder that crime would grip the haves’ imagination?
I remember the many letters to the editor that came in from the white suburbs after the urban uprising in April 2001, expressing relief that suburbanites avoided racial issues. Apparently race means black, and crime is a black thing. With whites safely ensconced in their suburbs and gated communities, their “experience” of reality primarily mediated by the infotainment of sound-byte news, who would know that while “African Americans use drugs at approximately the same rate as whites—and thus constitute only 13 percent of the all drug users in a given month—they are 35 percent of all those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of all those convicted of drug possession, and 74 percent of all those incarcerated for drug possession” (Leith Mullings)? Who knew?
Tantamount to a moral panic, for too many people crime is code for an urban underclass of blacks and other people of color who are thought to be so murderous and deviant that through their “black-on-black violence,” rampant criminality in “drug dealing and welfare dependency,” “aggressive panhandling,” their “teen pregnancy and prostitution,” and their “family breakdown and school dropout rate,” they are a menace to the citizens of Cincinnati.
Cincinnatians equate crime to a call for more jail space, more police officers, more weaponry and technological gadgetry, more surveillance cameras, more police sweeps ("Operation Vortex"), and more legislation regulating behavior in public spaces. These are punitive measures. They arise from a militaristic consciousness, from what sociologist C. Wright Mills cautioned long ago (1958) as “military metaphysics.” And they all illustrate a marked shift, in the making now over the last 20-30 years, in urban policy from a focus on urban revitalization to social control.
This worries Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and former career military officer who is now professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. In his The New American Militarism (2005), he lays out how Americans today, more than ever before, “are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys—and is bent on perpetuating—has become central to our national identity.” The American consciousness is militaristic to its core.
It is a consciousness that disproportionately impacts people of color. The war on welfare morphs into the War on Drugs, which then morphs into a straight-up war on the poor, especially poor people of color and the homeless. The military-industrial complex morphs into the prison-industrial complex. After slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto of the 1950s and ‘60s, the prison becomes the next racially enclosing device to define blackness to an ignorant nation. The fallout is catastrophic. For African Americans, as scholar and activist Manning Marable characterizes it, the contemporary situation is a time of “mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disenfranchisement.” In Cincinnati and Over-the-Rhine, aggressive legislation targets panhandlers and the homeless, essentially criminalizing them. Street vendors who sell StreetVibes for a living, the locally produced newspaper of the Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, are tarnished as “beggars with newspapers” to be removed from the streets. In Over-the-Rhine specifically, the police began Operation Vortex last year, a crucial frontline operation for gentrification that sweeps up anyone littering, jaywalking, spitting, loitering, drinking for an open container, crossing against the light, dealing drugs, and appearing to deal drugs.
This is what passes for urban policy today, and calls for a bigger jail only reinforce that policy.
Given these circumstances in Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati, and other cities across the nation, you have to wonder why the country—and Hamilton County—chooses to enact its military consciousness against its own citizens over other alternatives. As global shifts occur in the economy and impact everyday life in urban neighborhoods, better theoretical lenses can help to understand these overall conditions and especially social inequity and crime more deeply. Instead of linking crime automatically to punitive, militaristic measures, we could understand crime as the local fallout of global political-economic patterns producing joblessness and underemployment, increased geographic racial segregation, increased family debt, decreased real wages for the working class, a stepped-up imperialist campaign to control land internationally and domestically, the exploitation of “cheap” labor and oppressed nationalities, and the dismantling of the welfare state and the public sphere more generally.
Instead of rants about the “need” for more jail space (Leis) and self-bred delusions about social and treatment programs that are nothing close to addressing true need and kick into effect after one is jailed (Portune and Pepper), what would happen if the citizenry of Hamilton County were to have a deep conversation about the real sources of crime and why poverty and mental illness are considered crimes? Coming out the other side of that conversation, I doubt seriously that calls for a new jail are going to be near the top of the list, if it even makes the list at all. Law enforcement will never solve crime; social well-being can.
Notes
Leith Mullings, “Losing Ground,” in Manning Marable, ed., The New Black Renaissance (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005).
Manning Marable, “Race-ing Justice, Disenfranching Lives: African Americans, Criminal Justice and the New Racial Domain,” Black Commentator (posted December 7, 2006).
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