As
the line between the military industrial complex and the criminal
justice system continues to blur, Peter B. Kraska, Professor of
Criminal Justice at Eastern Kentucky University, brings readers
his timely Militarizing
the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the
Armed Forces and the Police.
With
contributions from an intriguing combination of academics, military
writers, and attorneys, Militarizing the American Criminal Justice
System covers a broad scope of topics, including the military’s
involvement in drug and immigration enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico
border and the creeping role of high-tech surveillance methods in
the context of increasing domestic militarization.
In
the last 15 years, as Kraska explains, the U.S. has witnessed a
“rapid acceleration”of both militarism and militarization
in civilian governmental functions. Nowhere has that acceleration
been as pronounced as in law enforcement.
Since
the Reagan era, writes Kraska, successive American presidential
Administrations—with the support of the Congress—have
“further militarized crime control discourse by radiating the
master metaphor of ‘war’ into a flood of taken-for-granted
martial expressions and submetaphors.”
It
was Reagan who began to routinely equate the “evils of communism”
with the threat of drugs and crime, and then took the first step
toward the present-day omnipresence of drug war rhetoric by declaring
illicit substances as an official threat to national security.
In
subsequent years, both the Bush and Clinton administrations, notes
Kraska, eagerly engaged in a game of “political one-upmanship”
arguing over who could push for the most authoritarian and punitive
approach toward the War on Drugs. As a result, the military and
criminal justice systems now work together to handle the drug/crime
problem as a veritable social or political “insurrection.”
The
newly evolved perception of drug use and criminal behavior as a
national security issue has thus served to justify a militaristic
response, as Kraska explains, “including campaigns to occupy,
control, and restore state-defined order to public and private space,
as well as operating detention facilities designed to punish and
warehouse the prisoners of this ‘war.’”
In
this acceleration of a militaristic approach toward criminal justice,
Kraska argues that the military and the criminal justice system
have emerged as the clear and indisputable victors. The military,
for its part, has been able to stretch its mandate to include internal,
social national matters, and thereby guarantee the expansion of
its already-inflated budget. The criminal justice system, in addition
to a gross inflation of its overall budget, has also been able to
tap into the surveillance, high-tech weaponry, computer technology,
and personnel assistance of the military industrial complex.
The
losers, regrettably, have been the rest of us.
To
take one example, police paramilitary units (PPUs) now conduct some
40,000 drug raids annually, with hundreds of such incidents resulting
in fatalities, injuries, and wrongful arrests of innocent citizens.
These
PPUs, often referred to as SWAT teams or special response teams,
are modeled after military special operations groups including the
Navy SEALS.
Once
a peripheral part of larger metropolitan police departments, PPUs
are now commonplace across America: By 1995, over 77 percent of
police departments had a paramilitary unit, notes Kraska, a 48 percent
increase since 1985. Altogether, nearly 30,000 paramilitary “deployments”
were reported in 1995, at a stunning 939 percent increase over such
call-outs in 1980.
“The
bulk of deployments that paramilitary units engage in today are
for the execution of no-knock warrants,” explains Kraska. “In
both large and small departments, PPUs routinely carry out dangerous
contraband raids on people’s private residences, often in predawn
hours, for purposes of conducting a crude form of investigation
into drug and gun law violations.”
In
one of the most egregious examples cited by Kraska, 11-year-old
Alberto Sepulveda was shot to death in his own home in the predawn
hours of September 13, 2000. With a SWAT officer standing over him
screaming at the boy to lie down on the floor with his arms outstretched,
Alberto complied. Less than 30 seconds later, writes Kraska, “he
was struck in the back and killed by a shotgun blast from a SWAT
officer who stood over him—from all indications, an unintentional
discharge.”
No
guns or drugs were ever found in the house. The elder Sepulveda
did not have an arrest record. Yet 11-year-old Alberto paid the
price of the ill-informed raid with his life.
In
“Waging a War on Immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico Border,”
sociologist Timothy J. Dunn recounts the shooting death of goat-herding
teenager Esequiel Hernandez by a U.S. Marine in Redford, Texas.
The Marine who killed Hernandez was a member of Joint Task Force
6 (JTF-6), a special unit that now coordinates nearly all military
support for law enforcement/anti-drug efforts in the U.S.
JTF-6,
which works extensively with the U.S. Border Patrol, carried out
3,300 missions from 1990- 1997, reports Dunn. But with no requirement
for regular reporting of its activities, the operations of this
secretive task force remained largely unknown and out of the spotlight
until the 1997 shooting.
Then
a 4-member team of Marines on a special operations mission for the
Border Patrol noticed Hernandez tending to his goats and carrying
a single-shot .22 caliber rifle to ward off attacks from animal
predators.
The
Marines, dressed in full camouflage, and moving stealthily through
the surrounding brush, got into a firefight of unclear origin. By
all accounts, Hernandez didn’t know who was shooting at him.
The soldier who fatally wounded Hernandez was subsequently interviewed
and quoted as saying that he believed he had taken down a “bad
guy.” The team of Marines, it was later revealed, administered
no medical aid to the dying boy and made no effort to call for medical
assistance.
The
soldiers, as Dunn notes, had “little preparation for civilian
contact, which they were supposed to avoid on the clandestine surveillance
mission.”
What
this scenario exemplifies is the incremental erosion of the 1878
Posse Comitatus Act, which was signed into law after a host of Reconstruction
Era abuses of the civilian population because of collusion between
local law enforcement and military personnel. The Posse Comitatus
Act that clearly demarcated the differing roles of these armed segments
of society, first began to be whittled away by the Reagan administration.
In
his essay, “The Thick Green Line,”Colonel Charles J. Dunlap
goes on to explain that the dismantling of the Act was justified
by the perceived need for a reunification of the domestic functions
of the military, local law enforcement, and the criminal justice
system as a whole. “[T]he end result of almost two decades
of statutory change and billions of dollars in budgetary expenditures,”
writes Dunlap, “is the entrenchment of both regular and part-time
military personnel in a variety of counter- drug efforts, including
Joint Task Force 6.”
The
central role of American “hypermasculinity” in perpetuating
a militaristic mode of social control is also key to understanding
the union of the military and the criminal justice system, explains
Kraska in his essay, “Playing War: Masculinity, Militarism
and Their Real-World Consequences.”
Kraska,
who embarked on a two-year ethnography of rural police officers
and military soldiers working in collaboration on SWAT teams, presents
a harrowing description of his time spent observing an ad hoc training
session of cops and soldiers. “[T]he group armed itself with
shotguns and several boxes of odd-looking shotgun ammunition,”
Kraska recounts. “One of the officers fired a round into a
junked clothes dryer. The explosion was unbelievably loud, despite
ear protection; simultaneously, a large flash was visible in the
dwindling daylight. The men also experimented with other ‘special
event’ shells, including a ‘shredder round,’ which
cuts the locking mechanism out of doors. After witnessing its effect
on a metal file cabinet, a younger officer said jokingly that he
might load up with these shells on his next crack raid.”
But
by using words like “jokingly” to describe the actions
and words of these officers, Kraska seems to underestimate the degree
to which the training session is far from a joke for the officers
and soldiers engaged in it.
In
perhaps his only omission of perception in this otherwise engaging
essay, Kraska could have done better to dig deeper into the psyches
of the men whose lives—personal and professional—are devoted
to the twin purposes of gunplay and gun-focused law enforcement.
But
such omissions aside, Kraska leaves the training session with a
firmer grasp of the troubling societal implications of the paramilitary
exercise he’s been allowed to witness.
The
book’s female contributor, sociologist Susan L. Caulfield,
in her essay, “Militarism, Feminism and Criminal Justice,”
argues for feminist analysis in the context of a militarized criminal
justice system. “How, then, is an examination of feminism and
militarism relevant to those who work within criminology and criminal
justice?,” asks Caulfield. “The relevance can be found
at many levels, including theory building, law enforcement practices,
courtroom dynamics, law creation, [and] sentencing practices.”
One
aspect of the criminal justice system sorely in need of feminist
analysis and criticism is that of correctional boot camps which,
says Caulfield, exist to provide a form of “shock incarceration.”
“Given
that in the military, to fail at a task often leads to being labeled
‘woman’ or ‘little girl,’ boot camps, by promoting
military ideology, reject both women and what are labeled as female
characteristics,” she writes.
Caulfield
and her fellow contributors to Militarizing the American Criminal
Justice System are not off the mark. Clearly, the future integrity
and democracy of our society depends on our commitment to understand
and challenge the militaristic model, which now governs an increasing
portion of American existence.
Silja
J.A. Talvi is a Seattle-based freelance journalist. She is a regular
contributor to publications ranging from the Christian
Science Monitor to In These Times,
and is co-editor of LiP Magazine.