Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America
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Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America
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Overview
The politics and policies that led to America's expansion of the penal system and reduction of welfare programs
In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period.
When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. Kohler-Hausmann rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the "underclass" could be managed only through coercion and force.
Getting Tough illuminates this narrative through three legislative cases: New York's adoption of the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, Illinois's and California's attempts to reform welfare through criminalization and work mandates, and California's passing of a 1976 sentencing law that abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, Getting Tough offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400885183 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2017 |
| Series: | Politics and Society in Modern America , #129 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Getting Tough
Politics and Society in Modern America
By Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8518-3
CHAPTER 1
Addicts into Citizens
THE TRIBULATIONS OF NEW YORK'S TREATMENT REGIME
When Nelson Rockefeller proposed his draconian drug penalties in 1973, he presented them as a rupture with the recent past — a sharp repudiation of the drug-treatment programs he had championed for almost a decade. Many scholars and commentators have largely echoed this assessment, positioning the Rockefeller Drug Laws as the origins of the modern, punitive War on Drugs. There is no doubt that the political theater of enacting these policies reverberated nationally and dramatically escalated the prescribed penalties for selling illicit drugs. But emphasizing only the radical departure the laws entailed risks obscuring the continuities with the earlier period and impeding our ability to understand the transformation. Carefully locating Rockefeller's dramatic proposal in the longer history of the state's efforts to manage drug use and street crime reveals that the 1973 policy both repudiated and built upon the treatment regime that came before them.
Contemporary political rhetoric also obscured the complexities and continuities. A newspaper at the time captured the tidy narrative in the simple title: "Drug Addiction in NY: Once an Illness, Now a Crime." Though Rockefeller emphasized drug rehabilitation before 1973 and penal sanction afterward, it is imperative analytically to recognize that criminalization and medicalization are concurrent, intertwined, and at times mutually dependent strategies. Rockefeller — and most other participants in these debates — never categorically rejected a role for treatment or law enforcement. They more typically debated the appropriate balance between them. Policymakers endeavored to establish which strategy was appropriate for which groups: what enticements, services, and deterrents were needed to manage different consumers and sellers of illicit drugs. In other words, the architects of New York's drug policy were engaged in a (largely futile) effort to sort the various participants in the drug economy into distinct categories: between victims and perpetrators, addicts and pushers, or the redeemable and incorrigible. As has often been the case throughout the state's frustrated efforts to regulate intoxicating substances, a person's social location — race, ethnicity, neighborhood, gender, and class — had a profound influence over where in the state's taxonomy he or she landed.
While rhetoric in the 1970s presented "addicts" and "pushers" as stable, essential identities, these terms are best understood as artifacts of the ongoing historical struggles over narcotics. Instead of objective divisions within the social body, the distinct categories of drug users were actually constituted through debates over policy. The term "addict" suggested that habitual drug users suffered from a uniform affliction rooted in individual pathology and that there was some consistency in the perils generated by physical or psychological dependence on substances. Although the rhetoric of addiction typically worked to affix an indelible label to a person, the relationship of drug users themselves to the concept of addiction often changed depending on context, policy regime, and time period. The same person might desperately struggle to be certified by the state as an addict in one setting while shunning the label and its stigma in another.
"Pusher" referred to someone who sold drugs at the street level and was typically imagined to be an African American or Latino man. There was considerable slippage between this term and "addict," since many habitual users, particularly with little income, sold and traded drugs to sustain their habit. The term "pushers" implied that drug sellers were involved in aggressively recruiting new customers and creating more addicts, as opposed to responding to consumer demand. The distinctions between "victims," "addicts," "pushers," and "addict-pushers" grew increasingly important as addiction was medicalized and consternation about crime and drugs grew. While these categories were highly fluid, mutable, and contested on the ground, the state's prescribed classification would have profound consequences for the fates of those labeled.
When New York faced escalating drug use after World War II, politicians and their constituents offered a range of interpretations of it and policy responses to it. Doctors, activists, law enforcement, and an emerging cadre of addiction treatment experts — some of whom were themselves "ex-addicts" — also entered the fray to assert their own authority and policy proposals. The result of these deliberations was an evolving set of therapeutic programs and criminal sanctions aimed to manage drug users and mitigate crime and drug use. The state's varied anti-drug programs rested on distinct conceptualizations of addiction, empowered different groups, and produced divergent outcomes. Each presented political problems stretching beyond the considerable difficulties entailed in controlling drug markets and users. Building a substantial network of treatment programs proved to be controversial and expensive. It was dependent on fraught political coalitions, opposed by powerful interests, besieged by critics of all political persuasions, and ostensibly designed to serve some of the most reviled groups in society. Drug users and their allies began using the state's purported commitment to rehabilitation to make demands for very different programs and more profound reforms. And in the midst of these ordeals, other local, national, and international developments intervened in the early 1970s to make the drug use in New York an even more explosive issue. It was this thorny landscape that Rockefeller would endeavor to navigate with his infamous 1973 proposal.
The Menace of Heroin
World War II interrupted heroin supply routes, but the drug reappeared as trade reopened after 1945 and it soon presented a host of new challenges for the state. The estimated number of heroin users increased tenfold during the 1960s, from fifty thousand nationally in 1960 to approximately a half million in 1970. A number of forces contributed to this rising use. Between 1960 and 1970, the gross national product doubled, increasing consumer demand for all types of commodities, legal and illegal, at the same time that a large cohort of baby boomers reached the ages most prone to initiate drug use.
New York City's heroin markets were primarily concentrated in the densely populated African American and Latino communities created by mass internal migration and discriminatory housing practices. Just as international conflicts and the escalating Cold War shaped the global supply and circulation of heroin, the profound political economic transformations and dislocations in the decades after World War II shaped the domestic heroin markets. Decline in the industrial and manufacturing sectors started early in New York City, driven in part by relatively high production costs, corporate migrations, and changes in technology and infrastructure. At the same time, substantial groups of Puerto Ricans and African Americans migrated to the city, searching for jobs that were increasingly unavailable or simply nonexistent. Many of them encountered instead extreme residential segregation that concentrated the poor and people of color into ghettos systematically underserved by state programs. This spatially structured economic and racial inequality was the product of market forces and state action (and inaction). "Urban renewal" and highway and bridge developments displaced and disrupted many working-class neighborhoods. These infrastructure projects, coupled with discriminatory lending and real estate practices, facilitated rapid suburban development and the mass migration (of the predominantly white middle class) to hitherto less accessible areas, such as Long Island and Staten Island. The unemployment rate for teenage African American men was consistently higher than that of other groups and doubled between 1960 and 1970 to 35 percent.
Declining licit economic opportunities propelled more and more young men into drug markets, which in turn increased access to and use of heroin. Police neglect and corruption also served to corral drug markets into urban communities of color, further multiplying the number of people exposed to drugs and the drug trade. Accurate or consistent measurements of drug users and addicts were notoriously elusive. At one point, government officials estimated that the number of addicts increased from 25,000 in 1966 to 200,000 in 1973. The New York State Narcotic Control Commission, however, claimed that there were 60,000 heroin users living in New York City in 1967, three-quarters of whom were African American or Puerto Rican.
This mounting drug use became an increasingly politically urgent issue through its connection to the era's rising crime rates. Although many researchers rejected a direct link between addicts and violent crime, politicians and popular media alleged that heroin users who needed money to purchase drugs were responsible for street crime, particularly mugging and robbery. The vexed political rhetoric of the period often inflated the amount of theft committed by heroin users. For example, in assessing the extent of crime heroin addicts committed, the Rockefeller administration would multiply the estimated number of addicts by the amount of money it cost to maintain a daily heroin habit; thus addicts were said to have stolen $1,095,000,000 worth of goods in 1970. Since there was never more than $100 million of property reported stolen in all of New York during this period, the billion-dollar figure was clearly inaccurate.
This association between crime and drugs was especially salient in an era when dramatic rises in crime rates were widely reported and highly politicized. Since crime statistics are imprecise and malleable, debates raged at the time (and continue today) over the actual extent of the "crime wave" during this period. They are affected by factors such as changes in police departments' reporting practices or police discretion in arrests and crime classification. They were inflated to some degree in this period by demographic factors. Since the large cohort of babies born after World War II began reaching early adulthood — the age bracket most prone to commit crime — in the late 1950s, some increases in crime were predictable. Between 1960 and 1968, burglary in New York City increased 480 percent and the number of reported robberies grew by 825 percent. Some of this growth reflected the more diligent crime reporting initiated by New York City mayor John Lindsay. Despite these factors, crime rates were not wholly statistical artifacts. The murder rate — one of the more reliable crime measurements — also increased significantly when compared to that of preceding decades. There were 390 murders in the city in 1960 and 1,117 in 1970. While it was still lower than it was at many points in the first half of the twentieth century, the national murder rate escalated from 5.5 per 100,000 in 1965 to 7.3 per 100,000 in 1968.
Regardless of their imprecision, crime and drug figures had very real consequences for policy and public perception. A 1968 New York Times article explained that "the public does not weigh the unseen forces behind statistics. Their ears and eyes are exposed daily to television and radio accounts of the most sensational aspects of crime. Newspapers tend to group isolated crimes into 'waves.' Dinner conversations and office chatter are filled with personal knowledge of crime." New Yorkers' daily experience and individual fears were contextualized and given meaning by the persistent media reports about broader crime patterns.
But crime alone cannot account for the timing and fervency of the popular sentiment that "law and order" had eroded during the 1960s. The high-profile unrest and movements of the time exacerbated anxieties about social stability. These upheavals were not a news story from far away; New Yorkers directly participated in or witnessed the high-profile resistance. In 1963, housing activist Jesse Gray helped organize widespread rent strikes of 4,500 tenants in Harlem to redress degraded living conditions. The next year, the shooting of a fifteen-year-old African American boy by a white police officer triggered the "Harlem Riots." Many white citizens resisted the fundamental renegotiation of rights and privileges that such movements demanded. In political rhetoric and media portrayals, activism, especially African American civil rights organizing, was increasingly portrayed as crime. Street crime, urban rebellions, and protests blurred together, and the "drug epidemic" offered one explanation for the ills that seemed to threaten the nation. In many instances, it also became a racially sanitized way to blame urban problems on pathological individual criminals and drug users instead of on the factors identified by movement participants, such as moneyed elites, racial subordination, and gross economic disparities.
The anxiety about drug use in the 1960s was not historically unprecedented. The United States has experienced cycles of intense public consternation about intoxicating substances, usually influenced as much by who was publicly associated with the drug as the dangers posed by the substance itself. Efforts to control drug use have typically been connected to state-building projects and efforts to manage suspect populations and enforce societal norms. These long struggles over the appropriate societal, governmental, and personal responses to drug use resulted in the uneven yet steady development of two seemingly contradictory phenomena: the increasing medicalization of drug abuse and criminalization of drugs and their users. On one hand, the twentieth century witnessed an escalating prohibition of drugs (along with the prohibition and subsequent legalization of alcohol), coupled with the development of various state institutions and programs, such as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, designed to prosecute their use and trade. On the other hand, the growing number of adherents to the "disease concept of addiction" enabled the development of new specialists, bodies of knowledge, and institutions dedicated to curing individuals of the compulsion to consume alcohol or drugs. Despite political rhetoric that consistently positioned medicalization and criminalization as oppositional strategies, the disease concept of addiction was not the antithesis of criminalization. Both law enforcement and addiction scientists approached illicit drug use as an aberrant behavior that was a threat to public order. Both saw addiction as an individual pathology, located in a person's biology or personality. Both assumed that public institutions beyond the family or social network should be enlisted in encouraging sobriety and abstinence.
As the notion that compulsive drug or alcohol use was a medical problem gained currency in many circles, the federal government established two narcotic farms in Lexington, Kentucky, and Fort Worth, Texas, in the mid-1930s. Addicts could be committed to these hybrid prison-hospitals by court order or "voluntarily" (although they were also often under duress from family or threat of prosecution). When drug use increased in the postwar period, policymakers intensified both treatment efforts and criminal penalties. Panic about juvenile delinquency, particularly the fear that white middle-class teens were becoming addicted to drugs through contact with urban pushers, helped inspire Congress to enact the 1951 Boggs Act. The law dramatically increased penalties and introduced harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug distribution and possession. Five years later, Congress doubled the penalties for selling heroin and marijuana and limited the availability of parole and probation. For the first time in U.S. history, the law allowed juries to sentence those convicted of distributing drugs to life in prison and those selling drugs to minors to death. These harsh penalties failed to curtail drug use and, for many, the dramatic spread of heroin in the late 1950s and early 1960s strengthened the case for treating addiction as a disease. It emboldened groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association to advocate for reevaluation of punitive law enforcement strategies.
The courts also registered the broadening acceptance of the disease concept of addiction. In the 1962 case Robinson v. California, the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a California law that sentenced people to ninety days in prison for being an addict. Writing for the majority, Justice Potter Stewart explained, "It is unlikely that any State at this moment in history would attempt to make it a criminal offense for a person to be mentally ill, or a leper, or to be afflicted with a venereal
disease. ... We cannot but consider the statute before us as of the same category." The Court declared imprisonment for being an addict cruel and unusual punishment and a violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments: "To be sure, imprisonment for ninety days is not, in the abstract, a punishment which is either cruel or unusual. But the question cannot be considered in the abstract. Even one day in prison would be a cruel and unusual punishment for the 'crime' of having a common cold." This ruling opened the possibility that illness relieved addicts of legal responsibility. It was another decade before courts settled the legal questions raised in Robinson by narrowly interpreting the decision to simply prohibit criminalizing the status of addiction if accompanied by no other illegal act. The exact same ruling that decriminalized addiction also enabled the civic subordination of addicts by affirming the states' power to confine them indefinitely. Robinson v. California explicitly allowed for coerced, involuntary institutionalization, as long as it was to treat and not penalize: "A State might determine that the general health and welfare require that the victims of these and other human afflictions be dealt with by compulsory treatment, involving quarantine, confinement, or sequestration." Therefore, this foundational case forbid civic diminishment and containment for punitive ends but sanctioned restricting the liberty and rights of drug users for therapeutic purposes or when deemed necessary to protect the general welfare.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Getting Tough by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part I Pushers 29
1 Addicts into Citizens: The Tribulations of New York’s Treatment Regime 33
2 The Public versus the Pushers: Enacting New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws 79
II Welfare Queens 121
Three The Welfare Mess: Reimagining the Social Contract 125
4 Welfare Is a Cancer: Economic Citizenship in the Age of Reagan 163
III Criminals 207
5 Unmaking the Rehabilitative Ideal 211
6 Going Berserk for Punishment: A Prelude to Mass Incarceration 250
Conclusion Forging an “Underclass” 289
Index 299
What People are Saying About This
"In her groundbreaking book, Kohler-Hausmann draws important new connections between penal and social welfare policy and debunks common assumptions about poverty, crime, and drug use in the process. Getting Tough transforms the way we view the late twentieth-century United States and speaks to the problems at the center of American democracy today."—Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America"Getting Tough is an extraordinary gift to all of us who have long tried to make sense of how the United States came to build one of the world's most punitive carceral states, so closely on the heels of having constructed a redistributive welfare state. Examining the complex histories and sensibilities of political elites, grassroots activists, and voters, while illuminating the lived experiences of drug sellers, welfare recipients, and prisoners, Kohler-Hausmann profoundly upends how we understand the political, cultural, and social transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book is nothing short of pathbreaking."—Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy"Compelling and deeply illuminating, Getting Tough chronicles the contingent historical processes that gave rise to mass incarceration and welfare-state retrenchment. Kohler-Hausmann deftly juxtaposes the political battles over welfare, drug, and sentencing policies that played out across American states during the 1970s, revealing how and why state policymakers advanced increasingly punitive and coercive approaches to managing marginalized populations. Skillfully integrating top-down and bottom-up perspectives, Kohler-Hausmann reveals that get-tough policies were not simply a response to a conservative shift in public opinion, they also helped produce it. This excellent book is a must-read."—Cybelle Fox, author of Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal"This is an original, sweeping look at the political history of policies within the criminal justice and welfare domain, and the political choices that transformed the nation's approach to the poor. Most books either deal with the history of public assistance or the history of penal and sentencing reforms. Getting Tough goes further than any other book to document the interplay of dominant state approaches in both arenas."—Vesla M. Weaver, Yale University"Getting Tough makes important, creative interventions in major debates regarding political history, social policy formation, the origins of mass incarceration, and the links between the carceral and welfare states. The insights of the book's three case studies are powerful and sophisticated and provide the foundation for a pioneering reassessment of the prevailing narratives regarding law-and-order politics and criminalization during the 1960s and 70s."—Matthew Lassiter, University of Michigan"U.S. history is experiencing a wave of new work on the political and social history of incarceration. The right book at the right time, Getting Tough stands out among its peers for its examination of drug policy and sentencing alongside the transformation of the welfare state. In addition to being a critical history of mass incarceration, this book offers a significant reinterpretation of the 1970s, the decade when the wars on drugs and welfare overlapped in a larger war on the poor."—Robert O. Self, author of All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s