Underlying the prison industrial complex, there's been a
consistency. And the consistency has been to target vulnerable people. And the definition of
"vulnerable" has some variation over time and space. And we can see
greater intensities in certain times and places, and lesser in others. So for example,
modestly educated people in the prime of life
who are not white have been targeted
significantly, but so have white people,
especially but not exclusively in rural America.
People not documented to work have been targeted, but so have people who have been documented not to work,
which is say people have been carrying convictions regardless of their citizenship status.
But what's also
key to my understanding of what's going on now is the fact that
police –
police departments,
or what they like to call themselves, police organizations, over time have gotten greater and greater power to
participate in many aspects of social life that other state agencies used to take care of.
That in other words, police
organizations, especially in big cities, here in New York City, in – in the City of Los Angeles,
and we could probably name many many others, have
internalized the mission of
social welfare
organizations. And the difference between what they do and what these other state agencies do – has done
or have done,
is that they demand a certain kind of
self-policing, or unbadged deputy status in order for people to
qualify for meager social goods and benefits. At the same time,
agencies whose mission has never been about policing and punishment, let's say the United States Department of Education,
or you know, any number of welfare and other
agencies, health, for example, have internalized the mission of policing in order to allocate the scarce resources that they have
between the so-called deserving and the undeserving.
So one case in point that I like to use as an example is the United States Department of Education has a SWAT team.
Why would they have a SWAT team?
To legitimize what they do in the eyes of the completely
delegitimized, and yet still large
set of agencies whose work is supposed to be social welfare, social goods, social benefits, and dare I say social justice.
