As a study of Milwaukee in the 1950s and early 1960s reveals, a policy known as “close surveillance,” which focused on Black areas, “flooded the inner core with large numbers of police personnel, a concentration not found elsewhere in the city.” As early as 1952, this led to the “a staggering one arrest of a Black resident for every three African Americans in the city.” This same study notes a similar policy in Chicago where the city’s Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, complained in 1958 that the Chicago Police “prey on racial districts.”6Simon Ezra Balto (2013) “”Occupied Territory”: Police Repression and Black Resistance in Postwar Milwaukee, 1950-1968” The Journal of African American History 98(2).
Historian Heather Ann Thompson quotes a Detroit resident about the police presence there, “the ugliest part of the problem in the ‘50s was police brutality against Black people.” This led to rising complaints and efforts against police brutality in the 1960s well before the 1967 rebellion.7Heather Ann Thompson (2001) Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 21, 38-41.p/mfn] In Birmingham, Alabama, where deindustrialization in the 1950s and 1960s had increased poverty among Blacks and brought about “the concentration of poverty in core city and North Birmingham,” police brutality and arrests of Blacks had become so extreme over the years that in 1967, the local civil rights organizations put the fight against police brutality at the head of their agenda for the first time.7[Robin D. G. Kelley (1994) Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press), 79-93
In the period of northern Black ghetto formation following World War II, the number of Black arrests grew significantly faster than those of whites. Reflecting this reality, the disproportionate percentage of Black citizens arrested each year has become consistent over the decades even as the total number of arrests grew. African-Americans accounted for 28% of all those arrested in 1950, 30% in 1960, and 27% in 1970, compared to 25% in 1980, 31% in 1999, and 28% in 2010 even after the number of annual arrests levelled off by the late 1990s.8U.S. Census Bureau (1975) Historical Statistics of the United States Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office), 415; U.S. Census Bureau (1981) Statistical Abstract of the United States 1981 (U.S. Government Printing Office), 180; U.S. Census Bureau (2001) Statistical Abstract of the United States 2001 (U.S. Government Printing Office), 191; Bureau of Justice Statistics (2012) Arrests in the United States, 1990-2010 (U.S. Department of Justice), 2. The fairly constant proportion of Blacks arrested over time is particularly significant in relation to Mark Jay’s analysis which attempts to link incarceration to the different periods following WWII. Since both incarceration and overall crime statistics depend on arrests, the constant disproportion of Black arrests points to race as a continuous factor in these. Racism in policing, the entry point into the criminal justice system and incarceration, has been a constant feature of the American law enforcement for generations.
Indeed, police brutality and “over-policing” in Oakland’s Black ghetto in the mid-1960s gave rise to the Black Panthers, who, Johnson warns “can’t save us now”, well before Nixon declared war on crime in the nation’s Black communities. The Black and white politicians and police officials who made sentencing mandatory, accelerated and lengthened sentencing in the 1970s and 1980s, and introduced “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” policies later that accelerated incarceration, were building on older practices and entrenched assumptions about policing. More importantly, they were acting in the context of a class and racially biased framework of law enforcement that had been established decades before and which would make police targeting of Blacks and Latinos virtually inevitable.
Given the weight that Johnson gives to Forman’s arguments in diminishing the importance of race, it is worth quoting Forman’s own caveat to his readers:
But in focusing on the actions of black officials, I do not minimize the role of whites or racism in the development of mass incarceration. To the contrary: racism shaped the political, economic, and legal context in which the black community and its elected representatives made their choices.9Forman, Locking Up, 11-12.
Class and Race in the American Criminal Justice System
While crime and its punishment have a long history as a class-based project, the criminal justice system as we know it had its origins in the rise of capitalism, wage labor, and increased urbanization. The first professional police forces were established in the early 1800s by Sir Robert Peel first in Ireland in 1822 with the Royal Irish Constabulary as a sort of colonial occupation force. This was followed in 1829 with the formation of the London Metropolitan Police to patrol the streets of London, its officers known as “Bobbies” and “Peelers” after their founder. The earliest penitentiaries and professional municipal police forces in the US were established between the 1820s and 1850s as industry began to take shape, concentrations of urban wage workers grew, the first efforts at trade unions and worker political action were attempted, and public “disorder” or riots committed by the “dangerous classes” became common.10Dr. Gary Potter (2013) The History of Policing in the United States, Part 1, Eastern Kentucky University, Police Studies Online, https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/hisotry-policing-united-states-part-1; Dr. Kirk A. James (2014) The History of Prisons in America, https://medium.com/@kirkajames/the-hisotry-of-prisons-in-america-618a8247348. Law and order in the slave South was a different matter. Despite all the changes in society since that time, the police remain the dependable frontline street-level defenders of capitalist “order,” whether in breaking up a union picket line, shooting down “rioters”, or arresting and disbursing social protesters from suffragists and civil rights and anti-war activists, to Wall Street Occupiers and Black Lives Matter demonstrators. At the same time, they insulated the elite from both “street crime” and punishment for the crimes committed in elite circles.