BY AKIL VICKS

 

The racial composition of the American prison system is staggeringly unequal, with black people incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people, despite accounting for just 12 percent of the overall population. On the surface this system appears straightforwardly designed to enforce our society’s racial hierarchy. But new research suggests a more complicated picture. A 2018 study, for example, concludesthat the racial inequality in America’s prison population is mostly a second-order effect of the racially unequal makeup of America’s poor. In other words, the problem of imprisoning racial minorities can’t be disentangled from the general exploitation and dispossession of America’s working class — who, due to the legacies of slavery and racist exclusion, are disproportionately black.

With racial undertones that frequently turn into overtones, Republicans blame incarcerated people and the communities they come from for their own misfortunes. On the other hand, Democratic politicians have recently grown more comfortable condemning the criminal justice system’s obvious racial inequalities. But as staunch proponents of capitalism, they refuse to openly acknowledge the link between economic inequality and the oppressive institutions set up to manage the effects of that inequality. They’re thus only capable of tepid critique and a lukewarm reform program. Most cling to a set of police accountability measures that are further proven insufficient with each new viral video of police violence. Others make performative declarations at demonstrations while covertly affirming the status quo.

The Democrats’ inconsistent and ultimately useless approach to police and prison reform owes in large part to an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the economic function of American policing. To understand how it works, we can look at two examples separated by a century and a half: the rates of incarceration by race in the North and South after Reconstruction, and current New York City mayor Eric Adams’s strategy for policing the homeless today. Both reveal that under the capitalist economic system, the police function to manage populations excluded from the workforce and clear the human detritus created by the process of capital accumulation. If we want a world free of racist policing and incarceration, we will need to take capitalism itself to task.

The North-South Paradox

In a recent paper titled “Exclusion and Exploitation: The Incarceration of Black Americans from Slavery to the Present,” Christopher Muller, who researches the intersection between political economies and incarceration at UC Berkeley, provides some historical context for the relationship between capital accumulation and racial disparities in the prison population. In particular, he’s interested in what at first glance seems like an implausible historical fact: rates of black imprisonment were lower in the post-Reconstruction South than they were in the North. Muller writes:

In 1880, Black men in Georgia were least likely to be imprisoned in the cotton belt and most likely to be imprisoned in urban counties or in counties where Black Georgians had accumulated an unusually large amount of land. This pattern held only for property crimes — those crimes white Georgians had the most discretion to enforce — and did not hold for imprisonment among white men. Notably, the Black incarceration rate for property crimes remained comparatively low in the cotton belt despite historical evidence suggesting that agricultural workers often “chose to commit criminal trespass or petty larceny, in order to dispose of what they saw as their share of the crop without the landlord’s interference.”

It seems counterintuitive that a region where anti-black racism was an explicit part of the cultural identity and legal code would imprison fewer black people than the abolitionist North. For Muller, the key to decoding it lies in the political economy of the time.

Moving north drastically increased migrants’ likelihood of being incarcerated.

The southern economy was largely dependent on uneducated black agricultural labor, Muller observes. When black prisoners were leased as labor, they were often sent to perform grueling and dangerous industrial work, as opposed to servicing the agricultural labor needs of southern planters. But it was the planters, not the industrialists, who held the most power in southern society and were subsequently most able to influence the enforcement of the laws that governed it. And they typically found black workers more useful outside of prison.

Some planters held onto accused workers by serving as character witnesses or using their influence over local courts to intervene in prosecutions. Others punished workers themselves, often using violence. But planters also used courts to procure a supply of forced labor. They gathered at courthouses and offered to pay the fines of “any defendants who seemed to be desirable workmen.” Then they forced these defendants to work to pay off the debt. Defendants faced the impossible dilemma of choosing between the brutality of the convict lease system and the trap of peonage.

Contrast this dynamic with the labor market in the North, where black people who had arrived in the first Great Migration found themselves in direct competition with white workers for jobs. In Muller’s analysis:

The first Great Migration had two kinds of effects on the Black incarceration rate. First, migrants left a region where planters routinely tried to keep agricultural workers out of prison and in the fields. The absence of a similar practice in the North meant that the Black incarceration rate was higher in the North than in the South even before the migration began. Census microdata can be used to compare migrants’ probabilities of incarceration to those of similar northerners and southerners who stayed in their respective regions. Moving north drastically increased migrants’ likelihood of being incarcerated, even though migrants had higher average levels of education than those who remained in the South.

Second, the scale of the migration provoked a punitive reaction. Black migrants were forced into competition with northern workers, particularly European immigrants who were both concentrated at the bottom of the northern labor market and overrepresented on northern police forces. Many of these workers blamed migrants for their plight and greeted them with hostility rather than solidarity.

The competition between black and white workers for scarce industrial jobs in the North generated a great deal of racism — and racism both justified capitalists’ exploitation of a large share of the workforce and made class solidarity against the wealthy all but impossible.

The narrative changed over time: what was once a matter of intractable biological deficiency was eventually attributed to a nigh-inescapable cultural deficiency, easily identifiable through skin color. Where black labor was needed, these deficiencies could be atoned for through hard work. Where it wasn’t, the law was used to repress and remove populations not needed in the workforce, whose lack of employment inclined them to crime and vagrancy or whose visibility was a source of unpleasantness to more privileged members of society. It is this dynamic that explains the high rates of black incarceration in the industrialized North.

The Modern Surplus

In early March, Mayor Adams began to make good on his promise to clear the New York City subway system of crime and the homeless. Because the nearby presence of homeless people can negatively affect property values, they must be removed — and Adams, who received massive sums of campaign money from New York City real estate interests, is just the man to do it. In the first week of the crackdown, the NYPD arrested 143 people and removed 455 from trains and stations.

Part of Adams’s strategy involves sending social workers into the subway along with officers to help homeless people find somewhere else to go other than jail. A 2019 estimate by the NYC Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) put the number of New Yorkers living in train cars and stations at 2,178, although that number is likely an undercount. In that first week, the outreach teams assisting officers in sweeping the subway were able to connect only twenty-two people with shelters. At the same time, Mayor Adams has decided to balance his budget by cutting a fifth of the funding for the city’s already inadequately funded homeless services agency.

 

READ MORE:

https://jacobin.com/2022/06/capitalism-racism-exploitation-homelessness-policing-incarceration

 

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In an article for the Financial Times last year, journalist Martin Sandbu announced the return of class conflict as a central theme for economics. According to Sandbu, “Every downturn rekindles interest in John Maynard Keynes. This one should call attention to Michał Kalecki.”

Kalecki developed many of the ideas associated with the “Keynesian Revolution” in economics independently of John Maynard Keynes. The Polish economist is best remembered today for his celebrated essay on the politics of full employment, which has lost none of its topical value. A recent discussion paper published by the US Federal Reserve drew on Kalecki’s thinking to explain why the bargaining power of workers had declined since the neoliberal offensive of the 1980s.

Jan Toporowski is a professor of economics at SOAS in London and the author of a two-volume intellectual biography of Michał Kalecki. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the episode here.

 

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https://jacobin.com/2022/06/michal-kalecki-economics-socialism-capitalism-employment

 

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GusNote: employment figures and unemployment sgtatistics are rigged as often people "working one hour a week" are counted as employed....

 

 

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