Language

mass incarceration and giant agribusiness

Submitted February 8, 2005 - 5:10 am by Andrew Grice (not verified)

Don Henry Ford Jr. asks "Do you think we really want to turn over the production of coca to groups like these? Because that’s what you’re talking about when you say legalization. (That’s how I see it anyway.)"
No, I wouldn't want that anymore than I want the likes of Cagrill and Archer Daniels Midland having anything to do with the global food supply.  Their impact on global health, environment and living standards is beyond deplorable.  But even if ADM were to become "The Coca Market to The World," it would still be preferable to global prohibition.  And at least without the repression, incarceration and other traumas inflicted on people through prohibition, we might have a better shot taking on the likes of Cagill and ADM.  
Ben Melançon (and this time I'm spelling it right, thank you) is onto something extremely important about the politics of the United States.  Prohibition is the engine of mass incarceration.  Mass incarceration itself is a serious form of political repression, but no matter the degree to which it is used for repression at a given time, its infrastructure of prisons, probation and parole apparatus serve as a ready reserve to ratchet up political repression in the future.  
At that time in the 1960s when African Americans were perceived as a distinct revolutionary threat, the United States had no ready made infrastructure to lock up hundreds of thousands of political prisoners.  Even as late as the early 1980s when the Reagan administration pondered what to do about domestic opposition to an invasion of Nicaragua, they had to plan the construction of temporary camps.  But now that they've got so many hundreds of thousands of prisoners who could be quickly and safely released, that's a lot of prison bed space should the state ever need it for targeted political repression.  
Not that a lack of prison bed space did anything to slow the destruction of the Black Panthers through the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO program of surveillance, dirty tricks, frame-ups and various forms of assassination.  There are still Panthers in jail from the politicized prosecutions of that era.  One only need look at the extra-legal methods used to keep Veronza Bowers Jr. in prison (who fortunately appears slated for release later this month) to get an idea of how the "criminal justice" system feels even 30 years later.  

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