America Incarcerated

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Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda. Through the process of frontlash, rivals of civil rights progress defined racial discord as criminal and argued that crime legislation would be a panacea to racial unrest. This strategy both imbued crime with race and depoliticized racial struggle, a formula which foreclosed earlier “root causes” alternatives. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.

Of course, this argument (for which Weaver adduces considerable circumstantial evidence) is speculative. But something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and on social policy.

Before 1966 public attitudes on the welfare state and on race varied year to year independently of one another. You could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing the person’s attitudes about race. After 1966 the attitudes moved in tandem as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950 to 1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966 to 1996.

The association in the American mind of race with welfare, and the association of race with crime, have been achieved at a common historical moment. Crime-control institutions are part of a larger social-policy complex—they relate to and interact with the labor market, family-welfare efforts, and health and social work activities. Indeed, sociologist Garland argues that the ideological approaches to welfare and crime control have marched rightward to a common beat: “The institutional and cultural changes that have occurred in the crime control field are analogous to those that have occurred in the welfare state more generally.” Just as the welfare state came to be seen as a race issue, so, too, crime came to be seen as a race issue, and policies have been shaped by this perception.

Consider the tortured racial history of the war on drugs. Blacks were twice as likely as whites to be arrested for a drug offense in 1975 but five times as likely by 1988. Throughout the 1990s, drug-arrest rates remained at historically unprecedented levels. Yet according to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, drug use among adults fell from 20 percent in 1979 to 11 percent in 2000. A similar trend occurred among adolescents. In the age groups 12–17 and 18–25, use of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin all peaked in the late 1970s. Thus, a decline in drug use across the board had begun a decade before the draconian antidrug efforts of the 1990s were initiated.

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