Soc 329 Parenti

Chapters 4-7

Start with the end of Chap 3 pp. 65-66 “The Details of Disaster”

Parenti details the “war on crime” buildup -- points out that effects of the war are “felt unevenly” “economic geography” (class!)

He will focus on cities, border regions, and prisons

Who are the “enemies” in the war on crime/drugs?

Soc 329 Parenti

Details of the war: driven by federal govt (both demos and repubs!)

- Police grants- Prison grants- Drug crackdown- Expansion of state and federal death penalty- Three strikes and other long/mandatory sentences - A new war on immigrants- Much new technology – domestic surveillance/”intel”

Soc 329 Parenti

Chap 4

Broken windows theory and “zero tolerance” policing (mainstays of conservative criminology/policing)

meets

The changing status of cities (where most of us live) -- “dangerous” but also “newly valuable” (more about this in Chap 5)

Soc 329 Parenti

BW/ZT policing focuses on the vast amounts of petty crime that go mostly unreported and uncleared

Much of chapter from “cops point of view” -- but “criminalizing” massive numbers of people also has a huge “human cost”

Soc 329 Parenti

Superficially, street “deviance” lowers the quality of life in cities and this is the rationale for “war”

Graffiti, street vendors, hustlers and cons, druggies, window washers, juvie truants/runaways, gang bangers

So millions of poor people are left behind by economic development and then their young are not just poor and unemployed but are also “criminalized” which means they can be left behind forever and it is their own fault

Soc 329 Parenti

Chap 5

p. 90 contradiction caps need the poor

suppress wages, discipline workers, polit scapegoats

but on the ground, poor people are threat and problem

poor people plus changes in cities = big problem!

Soc 329 Parenti

Decline and outsourcing of manufac and trans has changed

US economy to a service economy and changed the status

of cities from factory towns to service centers.

FIRE/Themepark development

Finance, insurance, real estate, plus culture and tourism

dominate the economics of the new city – along with “gentrification” (move of some mc back into cities)

Soc 329 Parenti

This means that the urban centers have to be taken back

from the poor and made suitable for elites and tourists

So BW/ZT policing was and is about forcing the relocation

of poor people out of urban centers and into mid-urban

areas between city centers and middle class suburbs

Soc 329 Parenti

… These areas become “the badlands” …

and keeping them there while suppressing “trouble” -- containment and control

Criminalizing huge numbers of poor people makes this work and also serves various political purposes – criminals/poor people are blamed for all urban

problems.

Soc 329 Parenti

Chap 6

As poor people are concentrated in “the badlands” military-style intervention increasingly becomes the mechanism of containment and control – reactive

policing(like patrol) is not enough.

With the concretization of classes over several generations, we get Foucault for the top half – “docile bodies” self-regulating to produce for the capitalists – even for declining wages/benefits …

Soc 329 Parenti

and the reemergence of “terror” for the poor – the pre-Foucault mechanisms of graphic violence harnessed to social control

- harassment/violence by paramilitary police- broad criminalization of petty offenses/offenders- jail, prison, probation, parole, etc. “ruined identities”- further exclusion of poor people from the “normal” economy -- permanently!

(And brutalization in the prisons – later chapters)

Soc 329 Parenti

Chap 7 Immigrants and “policing the crisis”

What drives large-scale immigration to begin with?

Transition to a service economy means outsourcing industrial production (and large scale farming for global markets) to poor countries – like Mexico and Central America (mostly still owned by multi-nationalCorporations who get the profits)

Soc 329 Parenti

This leads to modern-day enclosures of land there and drives millions of peasants into cities (where there are no jobs) and worse poverty than before and thus pushes them toward out-migration

Meanwhile, the split in the US service sector (growth of

low-paid jobs) “pulls” immigrants to our cities so that immigrants are now split between the traditional agricultural workers (migrant) and newer urban

service workers (restaurants, hotels, etc.) who are permanent

Soc 329 Parenti

Like other poor people, immigrants are both useful to capitalists – as cheap labor, domestic servants,

suppress wages at the lower levels of the work force, etc.

… and a threat that has to be regulated and policed – contained and controlled!

Soc 329 Parenti

Summary of Chapters 1-7

The falling rate of profit in the 1970s(both the chronic long term trend and the drop off the post WW2 spike)

leads to a new “class war” by capitalists against the working class since the 1980s …

focused on reengineering the economy to reverse the declining profits

Soc 329 Parenti

The reengineering seeks to “discipline” the working class, lower their expectations, and destroy the “culture of entitlement” among workers

Caps do this by engineering economic recessions (using economic policy – manipulating interest rates,

etc.)

which opens the door to tax cuts, destruction of unions, deregulation, outsourcing of jobs, etc. (neo-liberalism)

This has worked!

Soc 329 Parenti

The growing prosperity (and numbers) of the US “middle class” (top half workers) stopped

and profit rates (and aggregate profits) skyrocketed (rich become richer – everybody else becomes poorer)

(there was also a huge shift in ownership of wealth from the top half to the rich – several trillion dollars worth – over the last three decades – leaving the US middle class with almost no wealth – no net assets – other than their retirement accounts, which are now under attack)

Soc 329 Parenti

Predictably, the worst effects of this “trickle down” to the bottom half of the class structure

creating the “social junk” and “social dynamite” that make up the “new rabble” – surplus populations

and the problem of how to contain and control them while blaming all the newly-engineered social problems on them

the policy response to this included the war on drugs, the war on petty crime (BW/ZT), and a new war on immigrants

Soc 329 Parenti

Top half workers can be “disciplined” economically thru cuts in wages and benefits and threatened jobs (thru downsizing and cost-cutting by corps and repeated

budget cuts for govt agencies and public workers (teachers,

etc)

they are also encouraged to blame poor people, minorities

and immigrants for the economic and social problems

(by politicians, media, education, etc.)

Soc 329 Parenti

Police and the criminalization of millions of poor people become the key mechanism of containment and control of the bottom half

BW/ZT policies and policing focus on petty crime (really petty offenders) in cities – which are becoming FIRE/ Themepark cities

requiring the ongoing displacement then c & c of surplus pops in the badlands thru paramilitary policing

Soc 329 Parenti

Meanwhile, outsourcing and “free trade” have led to new

“enclosures” in developing countries (like Mexico and Cent

America) displacing millions of peasants and “pushing” them toward immigration

and the split in the service sector plus FT changes in US

cities pulls immigrants here where they become part of the cheap workforce and thus also targets of c & c

Soc 329 Parenti

I think Parenti’s analysis is pretty much right on target –

but I think that he misses two key things:

1. Contradictions of police and policing (unions, street cops vs. brass, etc.)

2. Rise of illicit economies in the badlands (drugs, stolen goods, sex industries, etc.)