hydrarchist writes: "The following review appeared in the first issue of The New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books (Vol. 1, # 1, November 2001). The complete text of this issue is available at: http://flag.blackened.net/nf/index.htm
Another piece titled "Theory of the Anti-Globalization Movement"
by Chuck Morse is available at the infoshop .
The Police/Prison Edifice
Review by Lex Bhagat
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
by Christian Parenti
Verso, 1999
The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime
by Joel Dyer
Westview Press, 2000
We Were Waiting for Books Like These
In 1994, Bill Clinton's election-promised “anti-crime bill” was passed. Young people in urban America could feel its effects almost immediately, as our cities were seized by a new occupying army of soldiers in blue. A new phase of revolutionary struggle was begun in earnest: continued revolution from the Right. If the election of Nixon in 1972 amounted to a sort of Bourbon Restoration of 1814, then Democrat Clinton was Napoleon III, ready to create a new landscape.
The appearance in the coming months of so many police was like the appearance of a scaffolding—a scaffold pinned securely to the ground on either coast by California’s Three Strikes Law, and in New York by the ascension of Giuliani. As the edifice then emerged within, none of it came as a surprise: checkpoints, curfews, rampant street frisking, “Truth in Sentencing,” “Contract on America,” etc.
But, as that edifice grew, and as friends and loved ones disappeared from the streets, a generation was galvanized into political struggle against police and prisons. For many years, it was an intuitive movement—motivated by rage, and informed by first-hand experience, by Public Enemy and KRS-1, or in some cases by letters to loved ones or mentor-comrades inside. We read what we could—Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Sykes's Society of Captives, Soledad Brothers, Assata, Marighella's Minimanual for the Urban Guerilla—and tried to apply what we learned to the current situation. Foucault's Discipline and Punish was precious water, and well-worn copies passed through many hands and opened many minds. Yet, it held a stark gray area that pointed to the originality of the current crisis, since the evidence in our guts told us that the root of our American situation was not Panopticon but the slave ship.
