Abstract
Over the past decade, mass incarceration has received much scholarly attention from historians, social scientists, and legal scholars. Despite the substantive contributions of this research, the overreliance on functionalist and top–down political explanations has undermined its descriptive force and explanatory power. Many accounts fold the peculiarities and nuances of the “law and order” discourse of the late 1960s and early 1970s—the period during which the seeds of mass incarceration were sown—into neat, imprecise narratives that render black politics invisible and relegate white politics to the stifling abyss of whiteness. Consequently, in order to understand the miscellany of law and order concerns and identify the role African Americans played in the construction of this discourse, this essay returns to the social and cultural context of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It situates the cultural concepts of law and order within local contexts in order to excavate their meanings, relative importance, and relationships. It describes the “black silent majority” and argues that the individual components of law and order were united by class considerations rather than racial motivations.
Over the past decade, mass incarceration has received much scholarly attention from historians, social scientists, and legal scholars. 1 Much of this literature has been written in black and white, focusing on the politicization of white victimization 2 or the construction of black criminality and imprisonment of black people. 3 Either by analytic inadvertence or theoretical design, each perspective minimizes the agency of African Americans. They exist as victims overwhelmed by the power of the racial order, neoliberalism, or reactionary Republican politics. Yet the dominant history of the Civil Rights era belies these propositions: it emphasizes the agency of the black middle class and chronicles the ways in which they mobilized indigenous resources to generate racial change. 4 This essay attempts to reconcile these theoretical and descriptive tensions.
Michelle Alexander, in a widely popular book, describes mass incarceration as the “new Jim Crow.” “Although it is common to think of the Jim Crow regime following immediately on the heels of Reconstruction,” she assays, “the truth is more complicated.” Elucidating this complicated truth, Alexander writes: “And while it is generally believed that the backlash against the Civil Rights movement is defined primarily by the rollback of affirmative action and the undermining of federal civil rights legislation by a hostile judiciary, the seeds of the new system of control—mass incarceration—were planted during the Civil Rights movement itself, when it became clear that the old caste system was crumbling and a new one would have to take its place.” 5 Alexander and other adherents of this functionalist theory, most notably Heather Ann Thompson, claim that the contemporary criminal justice system emerged to stabilize a social order upset by Civil Rights activism. The modern carceral state, according to the new Jim Crow thesis, exists for a specific social function: the maintenance of a racial caste. 6
While drawing needed attention to the disparate and tragic effects of mass incarceration, the new Jim Crow thesis’s exclusive focus on white power and black powerlessness renders the black crime victim invisible and the causes of mass incarceration obscure. “Any discussion of the racialized nature of crime and punishment in the United States,” Lisa L. Miller avers, “must take account of the day-to-day violence that inheres in many black and Latino neighborhoods and the political mobilization of these communities for greater public safety.” 7 She also notes: “While scholars have been attentive to the role that primarily white victims’ groups have played in the politics of crime and punishment, they have far less to say about the political agitation by groups representing minority victims.” 8 The new Jim Crow thesis, however, assumes a sense of “linked fate” 9 among African Americans. It places the black offender and the black victim in the same conceptual category, making indigenous political mobilization for greater public safety difficult to observe and interpret. Even assuming the instrumentality of linked fate, the history of the Civil Rights movement presents a significant challenge to this thesis. While it is plausible that Civil Rights activism prompted a racial reaction, this theory does not explain why African Americans, particularly the black middle class, achieved racial victories at one moment and experienced racial defeat at another.
Narratives emphasizing evolving market capacities fit Alexander’s racial account within a broader teleological history of neoliberalism. 10 Loïc Wacquant, the foremost exponent of this perspective, supplies a history that is at once striking and amorphous: “By the end of the seventies, then, as the racial and class backlash against the democratic advances won by the social movements of the preceding decade got into full swing, the prison abruptly returned to the forefront of American society and offered itself as the universal and simplex solution to all manners of social problems.” 11 Wacquant never fully specifies who or what abruptly returned the prison to the forefront of American society: mass imprisonment was simply an inescapable consequence of the necessary resolution of economic and social dislocations generated by the dissolution of the “Fordist-Keynesian order.” 12
Besides the inherent flaws of functionalist theories, 13 neoliberal explanations for mass incarceration, like their racial analogs, do not clarify the role of middle-class African Americans in this history. The economic and social transformations Wacquant describes fundamentally altered the lives of working and middle-class African Americans by delinking their fate from that of the urban black poor while undermining the economic and social health of their communities. 14 Moreover, while it is plausible that these macro-structural forces overwhelmed the urban black poor, it is not immediately clear how they overwhelmed working and middle-class African Americans who had just won consequential Civil Rights protections. In a perspicacious critique of Wacquant, Francis Fox Piven notes that “the tendency to treat policy innovations as functional for a given regime can be treacherous for it blinds us to the potential for opposition and resistance that these policies may generate.” 15 Similarly, neoliberal claims do not sufficiently problematize the potential for black “opposition and resistance” to or support of punitive policies.
Eschewing the reductionist tendencies of functionalist reasoning, others have fashioned political explanations for mass incarceration. From this perspective, the carceral state represents a political project: conservative politicians, like Richard Nixon, constructed “law and order” as an issue in order to dislodge working-class whites from the New Deal Coalition and build a new Republican majority. These narratives suggest that Republican political elites exploited the “evocative symbols” 16 of the period, such as black militants and black criminals, in order to tap white prejudice and fear and foster white opposition to the Democratic Party. For example, Katherine Beckett, based on her analysis of national crime and attitudinal data, concludes that “political elites have played a leading role in calling attention to crime-related problems, in defining these problems as the consequence of insufficient punishment and control, and in generating popular support for punitive anticrime policies.” 17
Her theoretical clarity and empirical sophistication notwithstanding, Beckett’s analytic strategy conceals important causal dynamics operating at the local level. Relying on highly aggregated data renders black politics invisible and relegates white ethnic politics to the stifling abyss of whiteness—the conceptual and theoretical tendency to treat post–World War II white ethnics as members of a coherent racial status group and minimize significant variation across ethnic and class categories. Furthermore, urban and suburban histories attribute the conservative shift in white attitudes to uniquely local factors and concerns. 18 These narratives indicate that the timing and content of white reaction varied across space, time, and white ethnic groups and that white “backlash” frequently erupted from specific forms of group threat fostered by policy conflicts or black residential mobility. Thus, it is plausible that Beckett’s main finding that law-and-order attitudes followed rather than led elite opinion is simply an artifact of her analytic strategy rather than a reflection of reality.
Some have documented black opposition and resistance to the emerging carceral state. 19 These narratives, however, tend to select on the dependent variable. That is to say, these accounts find opposition and resistance because they look for opposition and resistance. Instead of providing a thorough treatment of black politics, these studies focus on sites where the material interest is in or the dominant ideological orientation is toward opposition and resistance to punitive crime policies (e.g., inmates and Black power groups). As a result, these narratives neglect divergent interests within urban black communities and diverse ideological impulses within urban black politics.
Given these theoretical gaps and analytic weaknesses, this essay returns to urban history and positions the “invisible black victim” 20 rather than the black prisoner or activist at the center of the historiography of mass incarceration. This essay recasts the descriptive history of “law and order” and fashions an alternative explanation for the development of the American carceral state. The rich literature on mass incarceration features varied thematic concerns and a diversity of causal explanations, including cultural analyses, 21 traditional Marxist accounts, 22 and Foucauldian frameworks. 23 Yet, as Marie Gottschalk indicates: “Explanations for the establishment of the carceral state vary enormously, but many of them do have one thing in common. They adopt a relatively short time frame as they focus on trying to identify what changed in the United States since the 1960s to disrupt its generally stable and unexceptional incarceration rate and to bring back capital punishment with a vengeance.” 24 Given this, I interrogate the descriptive force and explanatory power of three theoretical models that are grounded in the events of the 1960s and 1970s and that carry much scholarly and popular currency: the new Jim Crow thesis, arguments about neoliberalism, and political theories that focus on the strategic behavior of Republican political elites. 25 This essay marshals a variety of materials in order to expose the analytic imprecision and explanatory weaknesses of the aforementioned approaches and to explain and defend the analytic potential of rendering the “invisible black victim” visible.
First, I, examining crime statistics in states and cities with large black populations, situate the politics of crime within local social contexts, and expose the harsh reality of crime-related problems facing African Americans during the 1960s and early 1970s. Second, I, analyzing national and local surveys and newspaper accounts, situate law and order concerns within urban contexts and explore how interpretations of the evocative symbols of the period varied over time and space and across racial and ethnic groups. Specifically, I document the existence of the “black silent majority” and identify how this indigenous cultural frame shaped how many African Americans understood crime and crime-related problems in their communities and influenced how they responded to these perceived threats. Finally, I examine how both the urban black silent majority and the urban white silent majority interpreted one evocative symbol: the police.
Crime, Race, and Reality
A central contention in both functionalist and political explanations for mass incarceration is that actual crime is largely unrelated to crime policy. Scholars frequently cite the mismatch of crime rates and crime policy as evidence of the invalidity of individual concerns about crime. For instance, Heather Ann Thompson, based upon her analysis of national crime trends and polls, proposes that “[the] perception [of crime] was not necessarily reality, and historians must more carefully examine how the politics of crime and punishment played out in the postwar period to determine that reality.” 26 The perceived absence of a direct causal relationship between crime and crime policy prompted many analysts to look to the effects of mass incarceration for indications of its causes (or functions). 27 The perceived mismatch of crime trends and attitudes prompted others to spend more historical attention and analytic energy exploring the ways in which politics constructed individual perceptions of crime rather than carefully tracing how individual experiences with crime shaped politics and policy. 28 Though certainly plausible, this perception is a product of three faulty, imprecise analytic claims or strategies: (1) the reliance on aggregated national crime and attitudinal data that conceal unique local patterns; (2) an incomplete and unsatisfying critique of crime statistics; (3) a heavy focus on white “victims” and black “offenders.” In order to illustrate these points, I excavate the social conditions—the “reality”—from which the Rockefeller Drug Laws emerged in New York State in 1973. The drugs laws provide an excellent opportunity to test these substantive claims and analytic proclivities: that the punitiveness of the measures seemed so disproportionate to the problem and that these measures so disproportionately affected people of color suggests either the importance of their racial or economic functions or the casual significance of Rockefeller’s political ambitions. 29
Following Thompson’s logic, crime rates in New York State should reveal a mismatch between the degree of the actual crime problem and the punitiveness of the law. Indeed, Figure 1 supports Thompson’s contention. New York State’s violent crime rate actually declined from 1971 until 1973, and the state’s crime rate was much higher in 1980 than it was when Rockefeller signed the drug laws. Still, aggregating different offenses into one measure of crime carries its own analytic pitfalls. While descriptively useful at times, aggregate crime measures obscure the unique properties of particular crimes: different offenses may emerge from different economic and social origins, and different offenses may have different social and political implications. 30 For example, murder and forcible rape may have systematically different causes, but both are included in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) measure of violent crime. 31 Murder and burglaries, which are both included in the UCR’s definition of violent crime, may have different social and political implications. They could provoke different policy responses with varying levels of punitiveness. 32 Furthermore, statewide figures could mask more jarring trends at the local level. As Table 1 demonstrates, New York City experienced a substantial increase in its crime rates from 1960 to 1968. In 1960, crime rates in the city stood around the national average.
New York State crime rates, 1965–1980 (per 100,000 inhabitants).
Major Crimes in New York City and United States: 1960 and 1968 (Rate per 100,000 Population).
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigations, Uniform Crime Reports, 1960 and 1968. Jameson W. Doig, “Crime, Police, and the Criminal Justice System,” in Agenda for a City: Issues Confronting New York, ed. Lyle C. Finch and Annmarie Hauck Walsh (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1970), 252.
With that said, even disaggregated crime measures, specifically those from the UCR, should be treated critically. The data-generating process (i.e., individuals reporting crime and agencies’ classifying schemes) could be sensitive to cultural norms and political imperatives. “After 1965,” Thompson writes, “thanks to a new federal commitment to fighting crime, local law enforcement could net substantial infusions of money and equipment by demonstrating that crime was on the rise in their area.” 33 Though certainly true, Thompson does not tease out the specific analytic implications of this observation. That urban law enforcement distorted the size of increases in crime rates at one or several points does not mean that individuals living within cities did not experience some form of and respond to rising crime rates. Thompson’s observation, in and of itself, does not make crime a fiction: It does not follow that these statistics provide little to no information. Moreover, the individual properties of particular crimes can make some reporting processes more sensitive to social and political forces than others. For example, while the reporting of rape by victims, the classification of rape by law enforcement professionals and bureaucrats, and individuals’ subjective interpretation of rape were systematically biased by cultural norms, 34 Beckett, who is critical of UCR data, concedes: “More serious crimes are more likely to be reported to and recorded by the police; the rate of violent crime is therefore probably less influenced by changing reporting and recording practices.” 35
With this in mind, it is possible to develop a more nuanced reading of crime rates in specific neighborhoods in New York City during the 1960s. Table 2 lists crime rates for precincts in impoverished, nonwhite areas, such as the South Bronx (41st Precinct) and Bedford-Stuyvesant (79th Precinct), a middle-class, white-ethnic area in Queens (112th Precinct), an upper-income area on the east side of Manhattan (19th Precinct), and an area on the west side of Manhattan that included ghetto areas and affluent sections of the Upper West Side (20th Precinct). Table 2 demonstrates that, while white areas experienced high rates of property crimes, individuals, specifically racial minorities, living in high-poverty areas experienced very high rates of violent crime. Table 3, which features a larger sample of crime rates in predominately white and nonwhite precincts, expands and clarifies the data in Table 2. It reveals a dramatic increase in crime rates from 1968 to 1973. For all of the types of offenses reported in Table 3, white areas only experienced higher rates of car theft than nonwhite areas, and rates of violent crime, homicide and burglary, were exceptionally higher in nonwhite areas than in white areas.
Crimes Reported, Selected Precincts, 1968 (Rate per 100,000).
Source: City of New York, Police Department, unpublished data. Jameson W. Doig, “Crime, Police, and the Criminal Justice System,” in Agenda for a City: Issues Confronting New York, ed. Lyle C. Finch and Annmarie Hauck Walsh (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1970), 255.
Crimes Reported in 1971, Selected Precincts (Rate per 10,000).
Source: David Burnham, “A Wide Disparity is Found in Crime Throughout City,” New York Times, February 14, 1972, 1.
Additionally, an analyst can bolster claims about crime rates by triangulating multiple sources, especially sources with observations produced by different data-generating processes. In this vein, examining trends in drug addiction provides additional insight into New York City’s rising crime rates. Figures 2 and 3 reveal the truly exceptional nature of New York’s drug problem. In 1963, half of all registered narcotic addicts in the United States lived in New York State (see Figure 2). Figure 3 reveals two additional important trends. First, it indicates the concentration of drug addiction within urban centers with large black populations, including New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Second, it illustrates that, even when compared to other large cities, New York City’s drug problem was unique. It was great. It was extensive and encompassing.
Active narcotic addicts as of December 31, 1963.
Active narcotic addicts reported in the United States as of December 31, 1963.
Nevertheless, data-generating processes similar to the ones adopted to create the UCR produced these data. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics based these statistics on data reported to them by local agencies. Consequently, I augment these data with statistics reported by New York City’s medical examiner. While New York City’s Police Department (NYPD) may have had an interest in distorting crime rates, they do not possess the capacity to manufacture actual deaths or label deaths narcotics-related as these data were reported by a different agency with different reporting procedures and standards. Figure 4 depicts the number of deaths due to drugs and homicides in New York City from 1960 until 1980. 36 It confirms previous data. It paints a grim picture. In 1960, New York City recorded 127 deaths due to drugs in 1960 and 536 in 1980, after hitting an all-time high of 867 in 1971. In 1960, New York City recorded 425 deaths due to homicide and 1908 deaths in 1980. Though not as high as the level in 1980, the city’s death rates due to homicide in 1972 and 1973 were more than four times the rate in 1960.
Number of deaths by drugs and homicide in New York City, 1960 to 1980.
Figures 5 and 6 confirm previous data and clarify the racial dimensions of these patterns. Although blacks constituted 14% of New York City’s population in 1960 and around 19% in 1970, they constituted a disproportionate share of deaths due to drugs, representing anywhere from 50% to 60% of all such deaths from 1960 until 1973. In fact, this rate dips below 50% only after the passage of the drug laws in 1973. Similarly, blacks, despite being a minority, constituted a disproportionate share of deaths due to homicides, representing around 50% of all such deaths from 1960 until 1974. Given these data, the timing and punitiveness of the Rockefeller Drug Laws seem less unusual—much less suspicious. They demonstrate the enormity of the city’s drug and crime problems during the 1960s and 1970s and their devastating effects on the city’s black community.
Racial distribution of deaths due to drugs in New York City, 1960 to 1980.
Racial distribution of deaths due to homicide in New York City, 1960 to 1980.
The New York experience suggests that the emphasis on national trends and inattention to local crime rates may undermine the clarity of the historiography of mass incarceration. To be clear, I am not asserting a direct causal relationship between crime and crime policy. Rather, I am suggesting that dismissing the significance of crime rates may be premature. The question is not whether crime rates and crime-related problems matter but how they matter. Still, New York is just one case and this discussion does not clarify how the meaning and importance of other elements of “law and order” operated within and varied across urban contexts and across and within racial categories. The next section takes up this challenge, exploring how these concepts functioned within white and black communities in large urban areas experiencing significant crime and drug problems, specifically, New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. These areas were noted above for their exceptionally high rates of drug addiction and are areas for which substantial attitudinal data that disaggregate by race, class, and, frequently, ethnicity are available. Plus, all of these cities feature black newspapers and mainstream newspapers with substantial reporting on black communities. These conditions and sources permit me to observe the precise dynamics of white victimization and isolate black opposition to or support of punitive policies.
“Law and Order” and “The Silent Majority”
The perceived nonexistent or weak relationship between crime rates and crime policy caused exponents of the three explanatory models to look to the cultural and political content of law and order for clues into the origins of mass incarceration. Each model emphasizes the prevalence of evocative symbols—such as crime, welfare, and riots—that separated Americans into two racial categories: the white “silent majority” of deserving, decent citizens and the undeserving nonwhite “other.” Other students of the period have focused less on “law” concerns and more on “order.” These accounts suggest that race was just one of many law and order issues. 37 They argue that the cultural and political content of law and order separated Americans into two moral categories: the “silent majority” of deserving, decent citizens and the moral “other,” including feminists, hippies, and student protestors that threatened traditional norms and values.
Neither perspective, however, offers a precise assessment of the relative salience of the constitutive elements of law and order. Scholars emphasizing racial constructions simply lump all evocative symbols into one category. For example, Beckett measured “public concern” by the percentage of respondents listing “crime,” “juvenile delinquency,” “the breakdown of law and order,” “general unrest,” “drugs,” or “drug use” as the nation’s most important problem in two surveys—the Gallup Poll and New York Times/CBS poll. Yet lumping the individual components of “public concern” may not be a wise analytic strategy, as these components might not have been generated by similar social and political forces. This collapsed measure may capture different and competing dynamics.
Scholars that emphasize moral categories tend to be splitters, but, despite the descriptive virtues of this strategy, it leaves one important question unanswered: if race was just one of several components of law and order, what relative importance did whites attach to these various concerns? Finally, both sets of arguments ignore how evocative symbols operated within African American communities. Consequently, this section disaggregates “law and order,” examining how the salience and meaning attached to its multiple symbols varied across local contexts and across and within racial groups.
It is also important to note the conceptual boundaries of and theoretical relationship between material and moral concerns, instrumental interests, and subjective symbols. Despite a small sample size and a very unique location, Tom R. Tyler and Robert J. Boeckmann’s study of attitudes toward California’s “three strikes law” is highly suggestive. They challenge instrumental explanations that explain support for punitive policies as a result of concern for threats of serious violence. They find that “public punitiveness is linked most strongly to judgments about social conditions and to underlying social values. Concerns about crime and the courts have very little influence on support for the three strikes initiative.” 38 Their account, however, rests upon a faulty analytic distinction between objective threats and subjective values. Contrary to their conceptualization, values frequently operate as interpretative frames individuals employ to understand their material interests and objective threats. 39
Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins provide a useful corrective. In a very careful analysis of crime statistics and their social and political implications, Zimring and Hawkins identify three major “social causes of fear”: “(1) the amount and seriousness of violent crime, (2) the level of fear-arousing social conditions in the immediate physical environment of the subject, (3) the amount and perceived seriousness of fear-arousing cues in the mass media and the personal social universe of the subject.” 40 While the first two propositions yield clear, compelling explanations for the salience of violent crime, the third conflates two competing dynamics. The media and political elites may heighten a climate of fear. 41 Or the local “personal universe of the subject,” including social networks, institutions, and grassroots leaders, may exacerbate individual anxieties. 42
Additionally, Zimring and Hawkins do not give sufficient weight to values. While values alone may not be a sufficient cause of fear, moral codes may help individuals comprehend threats and evaluate policy prescriptions. 43 After recognizing the importance of values, it is possible to derive from Zimring and Hawkins’s work compelling claims about the causal origins of the salience and meaning of various law and order issues and symbols. First, objective conditions matter. They influence the importance individuals attach to specific law and order concerns. Second, values affect how individuals interpret objective conditions and the policy prescriptions they attached to them. Given this, I will examine how objective conditions and the moral predispositions of members of the black and white silent majority shaped their politics.
In 1969, Richard Nixon first employed the metaphor of the “silent majority” in a speech on the Vietnam War. He appealed for the support of the “great silent majority of [his] fellow Americans” and contrasted this group of “great” Americans against antiwar demonstrators who tried to “impose [their point of view] on the Nation by mounting demonstrations in the street.” “For almost 200 years,” Nixon declared, “the policy of this Nation has been made under our Constitution by those leaders in the Congress and the White House elected by all of the people. If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society.” 44 While delineating the foundational claims of law and order, the 1968 Republican Party platform helps clarify the conceptual boundaries of the group Nixon would call the “silent majority” in 1969. Part of the platform’s crime plank read: “We must re-establish the principle that men are accountable for what they do, that criminals are responsible for their crimes, that while the youth’s environment may help to explain the man’s crime, it does not excuse that crime.” 45 Nixon himself blamed the “insufficient curbs on the appetites or impulses that naturally impel individuals towards criminal activity.” 46 The “silent majority,” then, denoted responsible, hardworking, tax-paying, middle-class Americans who controlled their appetites and impulses and whose interests were overshadowed by the disorderly conduct of radical students, black militants, and criminals.
The law and order discourse that spoke to the anxieties of the silent majority encompassed a variety of concerns. A cartoon published in 1969 lists the multiple actors that earned the derision of the average Joe: “student protesters, peaceniks, hippies, yippies, militants, rightists” (see Figure 7). Interestingly, these groups do not share a common racial background: the average Joe’s animosity resulted not from the threat these groups posed to the racial order but their threat to the social and moral order. For members of the silent majority, groups like the Yippies and black militants exhibited a violent contempt for the moral order, defined by middle notions of responsibility and respectability, traditional gender roles and sexual norms, and nonconfrontational forms of democratic practice.
Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1969.
As the cartoon intimates, the traditional framing of law and order overemphasizes its focus on inner-city crime. The cultural concepts that populated this discourse varied across time and space (and so did the intensity attached to them). A 1972 Gallup Poll, in which respondents listed their top concerns, reveals its multiple dimensions and their relative importance: “Laws are too lenient/penalties not stiff enough” (25%); “Drugs/drug addiction” (21%); “Lack of supervision by parents” (13%); “Too much permissiveness in society” (10%); “Lack of proper law enforcement” (8%); “Ill feelings between groups/races” (7%); “Lack of responsibility among younger people/disrespect of the law” (6%); and “People have too much money/luxury” (4%). 47 Table 4 confirms the diversity of law and order concerns and exposes their historical contingency. In 1965, race clearly defined American anxieties. Sixty-three percent of Americans believed that “Blacks who demonstrate for civil rights” did more harm than good to the nation. That same year, a similar proportion of Americans also believed that “student demonstrators that engage in protest activities” harmed the nation.
“People Who Harm the Nation,” 1965–1973.
Source: Louis Harris, “Harris Survey,” Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1973, 22.
By 1973, the Nixon administration had become a victim of its own meme. As Americans learned that the Nixon administration also lacked “curbs” on its “appetite or impulses,” they began to view political corruption as another manifestation of the breakdown of social order. Americans believed that “Government officials who try to use official intelligence agencies for political advantage,” “Businessmen who give illegal campaign contributions to candidates,” and “Military leaders who conduct secret bombing raids and then cover up such raids” did more harm to the nation than either student demonstrators or black activists. Furthermore, as the number of Americans that considered black demonstrators a threat declined from 1965 to 1973, antipathy toward the institutions and individuals (e.g., criminal defense attorneys and college presidents) that Americans believed sanctioned cultural permissiveness and lawlessness increased.
These trends begin to expose descriptive inaccuracies in the prevailing history of the period. Capturing the essence of the “backlash” dynamic at the center of functionalist explanations, Wacquant writes: “[W]hile whites begrudgingly accepted ‘integration’ in principle, in practice they strove to maintain an unbridgeable social and symbolic gulf with their compatriots of African descent. They abandoned public schools, shunned public space, and fled to the suburbs in their millions to avoid mixing and ward off the spectre of ‘social equality’ in the city.” He continues, “They then turned against the welfare state and those social programmes upon which the collective advancement of blacks was most dependent. A contrario, they extended enthusiastic support for the ‘law-and-order’ policies that vowed to firmly repress urban disorders connately perceived as racial threats.” 48 To the extent that whites considered urban disorders “racial threats,” this fear was not constant over time and frequently paled in comparison to the opprobrium they heaped upon white student protesters, political corruption, and other moral threats.
Additionally, Wacquant mistakenly assumes a sense of linked fate among whites. Over the course of the twentieth century, a conjuncture of historical social, economic, and political forces 49 clearly created a racial hierarchy where “the collective interests of the dominant race (whites in contemporary United States) lie in preserving the racial status quo, the interests of the subordinate race or races (blacks and other minorities) lie in attempting to change their position in the system.” 50 Nonetheless, reducing white (and black) law and order attitudes to interests and threats removed from specific material contexts and divorcing them from the values individuals employ to understand those interests and threats has masked important political variation across white ethnic groups. Though beneficiaries of whiteness, not all whites experienced the same threats. Not all whites shared the same values.
Therefore, disaggregating the cultural concepts of “law and order” and situating them within local contexts strengthens our grasp of their salience and functions within and across racial groups. In 1970, a statewide survey revealed that 63% of New York voters considered themselves members of the “silent majority.” 51 When asked to list the most important issues facing the nation, 44% said Vietnam, 30% said inflation, the high cost of living or unemployment, and 18% said student unrests. Furthermore, as Table 5 demonstrates, the salience of law-and-order issues also depended on whether individuals reflected on the condition of the nation or the condition of their communities. In 1970, 43% of New York voters listed “ending war in Vietnam” as the main issue or problem facing the country. Twenty-six percent listed inflation followed by drugs (24%), student unrest (18%), crime (15%), and discrimination (10%). When asked to list the problems facing their communities, the ratings changed: New York voters listed drugs (19%) and crime (19%) as their top concerns.
Voter Attitudes in New York State in 1970 (N = 1,912).
Source: Daniel Yankelovich, “Voters in State Sampling Stress Moral Positions of Candidates,” New York Times, October 30, 1970, 46.
Despite the diversity of law and order concerns, whites, as the backlash narrative suggests, grew conservative. Another statewide survey of voter attitudes in 1970 confirms this. However, it also reveals important variation. 52 While only 13% of Roman Catholics identified as “liberal,” only 16% of Jews identified as “conservative.” 53 In fact, 77% of Jewish respondents reported being registered Democrats, 55% identified as liberal, and 76% gave Nixon a negative approval rating. Irish Americans, probably because of their overrepresentation in law enforcement in New York, rated student protests as the issue of most concern to them—27% of Irish Americans mentioned this issue while only 19% of the entire sample mentioned it. Thirty-three percent of nonwhites identified drugs and crime as major issues while only 18% of the entire sample mentioned either drugs or crime. Furthermore, only 16% of nonwhites reported being “very happy” while 35% of the entire sample reported being “very happy.” By 1970, student protests more so than drugs and crime in black neighborhoods defined Irish Catholic backlash to liberalism in New York. Nonwhites, by 1970, represented the unhappiest group in the state, and drugs and crime disconcerted them.
Nevertheless, it is quite plausible that blacks, though concerned, opposed punitive solutions and whites, though less aggrieved, supported harsh measures. Beckett insists that “those most fearful of criminal victimization—blacks and women in particular—are less rather than more supportive of punitive policies.” She also states: “It is clear that one’s risk of or anxiety about criminal victimization cannot explain support for tough anticrime policies.” 54 Alexander shares this view: “It is frequently argued in defense of mass incarceration that African Americans want more police and more prisons because crime is so bad in some ghetto communities.” To this, she responds: “The argument implies that African Americans prefer harsh criminal justice policies to other forms of governmental intervention, such as job creation, economic development, educational reform, and restorative justice programs, as the long-term solution to the problems associated with crime. There is no evidence to support such a claim.” 55
Early 1970s polling on the Rockefeller Drug Laws challenge both Beckett and Alexander’s contentions. The results in Table 6 are telling. Although support among whites is clearly higher than support among nonwhites, the results do not reveal a wide disparity. The national poll also suggests interesting local variation. Though its effect is not linear, city size seems to matter: individuals living in large cities reported the highest level of support for the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Given this and given New York City’s acute drug problem, it is important to observe policy preferences of individuals living in the city. A poll taken in late 1973 (after the passage of the controversial proposals and after virtues of the laws would have been adjudicated in the white and black press) revealed that blacks were the group most concerned about crime and drugs (see Table 7). Blacks and Puerto Ricans were less likely than whites to describe their neighborhoods as safer than other neighborhoods in the city. The New York Times also reported that “about three-quarters of New York’s blacks and Puerto Ricans—more than whites—favored life sentences with no parole for drug pushers. Three in five blacks and seven in ten Puerto Ricans felt that certain crimes should be punished by the death penalty.” 56 Additionally, the potential alternatives to punitive policies, methadone treatment and heroin maintenance, were not extremely popular ideas. Fifty-five percent of New Yorkers opposed the placement of methadone centers for drug addicts in residential areas, including 53% of blacks. Thus, evidence from New York City directly contradicts the popular notion that whites support punitive policies more than blacks. 57 Now, this may just be an artifact of this particular historical moment and local social context. But that is precisely the point: attitudes about crime and crime policy abstracted from specific settings cannot yield precise explanations about their social and political origins.
National Poll on Rockefeller Drug Laws (1973).
Source: Gallup 1973; “Top Concern in Cities Gallup Survey Finds 67% Back Governor’s Bills,” New York Times, February 11, 1973, 46.
Attitudes toward Crime and Drugs in New York City in 1973.
Note: N = 1,341. Blacks were 21% of the sample and Puerto Ricans were 10% of the sample.
Source: Maurice Carroll, “After Crime, Big Issues Are Prices and Fares,” New York Times, January 17, 1974, 34; David Burnham, “Most Call Crime City’s Worst Ill,” New York Times, January 16, 1974, 113; Nathaniel Sheppard, “Racial Issues Split City Deeply,” New York Times, January 20, 1974, 1.
Survey evidence from California reveals similar patterns. In 1973, Californians listed crime as the top issue: 35% of Anglos listed crime as the top issue while 55% of blacks listed crime. 58 Polls taken in Los Angeles in the early 1970s clarify the racial dimensions of these attitudes. A survey of only blacks commissioned by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1972 confirms the priority blacks assigned to crime and narcotics: 28% of respondents listed unemployment as the most pressing problem in the community, 28% listed crime, 16% listed narcotics, 12% listed housing, 10% listed schools, and 6% listed a variety of other issues. 59 Of course, we should treat the results of a survey of African American opinions on crime commissioned by the LAPD during the early 1970s with some skepticism given the tense relationship between the city’s black community and the police after the Watts riot. Nonetheless, these results are consistent with a poll taken by an independent polling firm commissioned by a local politician. That poll suggested that whites in Los Angeles were more concerned about pollution and noise than crime, while crime was the number one issue for blacks. In one predominately black district, 52.5% of respondents listed crime and better crime control as the number one issue and in a mostly black district 55.5% listed crime. In councilman Tom Bradley’s racially mixed district, only 12.5% listed crime while 72.5% listed pollution. 60
These trends are also consistent with the racial and class dynamics of Los Angeles politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Based on a comprehensive analysis of polling data and election returns from the 1969 mayoral election in which African American candidate Tom Bradley lost to the white incumbent Sam Yorty, Raphael Sonenshein suggests, “Liberal ideology mattered a great deal among those Jews, whose social class placed them in a position to avoid direct racial threats. Many Latinos were in a sort of lower-class coalition with Blacks. One might argue that in 1969, there was an ideological coalition linking Blacks and white liberals and a class coalition linking Blacks and poor Latinos.” 61 By Bradley’s win in 1973, Sonenshein concludes, “the winning strategy was established.” He explains: “If they could resist the label of ‘radicals,’ Blacks, middle-class white liberals, and less well-off Latinos could sweep the city.” 62 Thus, similar to vote choices in the 1969 and 1973 mayoral elections, attitudes toward crime in Los Angeles cannot be explained by race alone. Rather, these attitudes were a mix of racial, class, and ideological concerns mediated by individual experiences with objective factors (i.e., crime rates and pollution).
The attitudinal variation just documented presents a serious challenge to elite-driven political explanations for mass incarceration. 63 Elite-driven theories cannot account for variation in the relative salience of issues over time (i.e., law and order concerns vs. others, including transportation, taxes, and pollution) or variation in the salience of the particular dimensions of law and order. It cannot explain the differing evaluations individuals in New York attached to issues, depending on whether they were asked to consider the condition of the country or the state. These top–down accounts cannot explain variation in law and order concerns across ethnic groups, cities, and specific neighborhoods. It cannot explain the class character of the variation in the salience and ordering of law and other concerns. It cannot explain the class-based features of black attitudes toward crime.
With that said, it is possible to derive from Thompson’s genealogical critique of crime statistics a similar challenge to these attitudinal and behavioral data. Such a critique would maintain that, instead of reflecting popular opinions, these polls were structured to manufacture consent to punitive policies and confer legitimacy upon them. Most of the attitudinal evidence reported here come from surveys with open-ended questions rather than closed-ended questions. While closed-ended questions would support the critique that institutions employed polls to manufacture a “crime problem” or consent, open-ended questions are less susceptible to these dynamics. Additionally, this analysis does not place significant weight on one particular survey. Rather, this discussion places great weight on over-time trends within the same and across different open-ended polls and on trends in open-ended polls taken in multiple cities. The analytic strategy is to observe whether longitudinal and cross-sectional trends are either consistent with dominant arguments in the historiography of mass incarceration or consistent with the claim made here about the importance of local social and political conditions. The data above do not adhere to a consistent functional racial or neoliberal logic. These data suggest that the particular objective conditions of local communities and the threats they do or do not present greatly influenced the formation of law and order attitudes.
Yet these data are certainly limited. They do not provide much texture. They do not offer much insight into the local social and political construction of law and order concerns. Additionally, although the evidence from New York City suggests that black victimization was directly related to support for punitive policies, it is quite plausible that New York City was unique. It is quite plausible that black communities in other cities suffering serious crime-related problems opposed punitive policies. Lastly, while the attitudinal and behavioral evidence from Los Angeles suggests that class divisions matter in the local social and political construction of “law and order” concerns, these data do not clarify how class matters. Given these limitations, the next sections provide some texture, examining how class categories shaped how blacks and whites negotiated and framed the law and order problems they faced and how these class categories influenced the prescriptions they attached to these concerns.
“The Black Silent Majority”
In 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan prepared a memorandum for President Nixon on the position of African Americans. In it Moynihan reasoned: “There is a silent black majority as well as a white one. It is mostly working class, as against lower middle class. It is politically moderate (on issues other than racial equality) and shares most of the concerns of its white counterpart.” 64 A multiracial group of scholars, Civil Rights activists, and elected officials issued a public statement vociferously denouncing the memorandum. 65 The statement, however, focused on Moynihan’s suggestion that racial issues would “benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect,’” 66 not his discussion of the black silent majority. 67
Two months later, Charles Hamilton, an African American political scientist, published an essay titled “The Silent Black Majority.” In it Hamilton both complicated and challenged Moynihan’s assessment. The essay began: There are a lot of black Americans who have never been in jail, never been on dope, never participated in a riot or even a civil rights demonstration, are not on welfare—and they are not members of the so-called black bourgeoisie or black middle class. . . . The facts are that there are millions of black Americans who go to work every day, pay their taxes, root for the home team, worry about the high cost of living, shop for bargains, and go over the children’s homework just like millions of other Americans.
68
Hamilton accepts Moynihan’s premise, applying the conceptual core of the “silent majority” model to responsible, hardworking, tax-paying working-class African Americans that possessed sufficient curbs on their appetites and impulses.
Still, Hamilton sought to situate his conceptualization of this class-based status group within a racial framework. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his discussion of the black silent majority’s view of hippies. Hamilton wrote: What is not usually understood by some white radicals is that the black culture is not a permissive culture. The cult of individualism, in the sense of “do your own thing” is subordinated to a communal characteristic much more dominant in the black culture. Thus, the scene at Woodstock in the summer of 1969 was not appealing to many blacks who are far more tuned in to day-to-day struggle than to the essentially middle-class youth culture of “freedom high.”
69
Clarifying his point, Hamilton argued: “The point is that the Abbie Hoffmans and the Jerry Rubins are, in fact, irrelevant to most of the blacks who see the white radical thrust as just one more ‘trip’ black people cannot afford to take—precisely because black people must always come home to a fundamentally different reality!” 70 Hamilton’s strict racial orientation muddles the analysis. He disregards the historical significance of class distinctions within African American communities and misses that class distinctions do not follow neat socioeconomic classifications 71 but carry particular moral content and behavioral implications. 72 Class sensibilities and interests, not racial thinking, shaped the attitudes of the silent black majority toward hippies. In 1967, the Chicago Defender published an article titled “Negroes Wail Hippies Turn Frisco Area into Real Slum” that described the black reaction to hippies moving into Haight-Ashbury. The article bemoaned the threat hippies posed to black children: “Even worse is the effect on Negro youngsters. Drug taking and indiscriminate sexual behavior hardly provide the environment a conscientious parent wants for his children.” The article ended by lamenting, “Black residents must suffer in silence as a nation oohs and ahs over the filthy hippies while looking down its nose at non-whites trying to better themselves.” 73
Contrary to Hamilton’s thesis, the indigenous black working- and middle-class reaction to “the Abbie Hoffmans” and “the Jerry Rubins” was the same as working- and middle-class white ethnics’: the behavior of hippies and Yippies fundamentally challenged the norms and values they had come to believe were essential to success in the United States. For working- and middle-class blacks and whites, the hippies and Yippies represented a mockery and tragic distortion of the American dream. 74 Black and white working- and middle-class individuals believed their commitment to the American dream would yield positive results, but they watched as upper-class white students abrogated its tenets with reckless abandon and with few serious repercussions. Nonetheless, while moral codes can explain how the black and white silent majority understood hippies and Yippies and interpreted their action, the salience of hippies and Yippies as an issue varied as the objective threat they posed to material interests of working- and middle-class whites and blacks varied.
While some white ethnics prioritized student protesters as their top law and order concern, the black silent majority prioritized crime. Some African Americans, without explicitly appropriating the trope of the “silent majority,” viewed inner-city crime through its lens. In 1970, a black medical school student in Chicago composed an op-ed about escaping a robbery committed by black males. After describing the events, he wrote: “I hope my telling this incident will arouse middle-class blacks who have in the past been unduly apathetic.” He added: “There are some in both races who look to divide our city into opposing black and white factions, and thereby divert our attention from combating crime, which is colorless.” He concluded by noting: “I am acutely aware of the shameful social conditions which exist, but criminal actions by anyone cannot be condoned. The overwhelming majority of decent citizens must be protected while government takes swift action . . . to improve social conditions.” 75
Some explicitly appropriated the trope. In 1969, Vincent S. Baker, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) New York City chapter’s crime commission announced: “The silent majority in Harlem would welcome a police order to get tough. . . . The climate in Harlem favors law enforcement. Those who seek to prevent arrests of criminals are criminals themselves and should be punished.”
76
In 1970, Ebony reported: The women are angry. And they are representative of a new mood in New York’s black communities. In Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and South Bronx, a black backlash is surfacing—a backlash against the heavy drug traffic in their communities and against all who benefit from it. A black silent majority that long has suffered from the influx of community-destroying killers such as heroin is preparing to confront those distributors—they call them “murderers of our children”—of the deadly poisons that are so readily available to youths on street corners and in innocent-looking candy stores and teen hangouts.
77
The Amsterdam News published an editorial reporting that “in some sections of the so-called Harlem business section after nightfall it looks like a ghost town. People continue to be afraid to walk the streets at night. Churches, lodges and other fraternal organizations curtail or even discontinue evening services and meetings.” The editorial added: “The Silent Majority of Harlemites who sit by and watch their community be taken over by criminal elements without taking any kind of stand are simply surrendering to these elements.” 78
Similar to the white silent majority’s response to white student protestors, many in the black silent majority felt overshadowed by black activists, particularly black militants. After two white cops were shot in 1970, Audrey Weaver wrote a column in the Chicago Defender criticizing Jesse Jackson’s racial activism and his inattention to urban crime. The piece began: “The ‘silent’ black majority here seemingly is doing a slow burn over the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s role in the Windy City’s latest police killings.” She continued: “Many . . . are angrily asking— where was Jesse before those white cops were shot and what was he doing to actively help stamp out the kid violence that has been haunting us every day for over three years!” A tenant in a Southside housing project told Weaver, “we’re prisoners and the young gangs are our guards.” One person from the Northside confided, “I was born in Chicago—grew up in a rough neighborhood and we had gangs . . . but we didn’t have or use weapons like these kids do today. . . . Jackson doesn’t seem to realize that these kids are a tremendous threat—he yaps about riot action and tension because a white victim is felled—well, these gangs have the black citizens suffering the same amount of tension. 79
In 1967, William Raspberry, African American columnist at the Washington Post, reported receiving a phone call from a woman that identified herself as “an ordinary Negro.” She asked, “Why is it that people never pay any attention to what we ordinary Negroes think?” She also complained: “Let Stokely Carmichael or somebody come into town to raise hell, and you can’t see him for reporters. People get the impression that he’s speaking for us. He’s not, but we don’t have any way to make our voices heard.” Interpreting these complaints, Raspberry concluded: “There is justice in their complaints, but not much surprise. The extremists on both ends are considered news because of the sheer shock value of their utterances and actions. By this system of news judgment the man who gets up in the morning, kisses his wife, goes to work, comes home and gets a good night’s sleep isn’t news.” He reasoned: “The opinions of the silent middle—which is the overwhelming bulk of the population—simply isn’t news in the conventional sense. The eccentric view or action is.” 80 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the trope of the “silent majority” served as a useful device for urban working- and middle-class African Americans seeking to comprehend their social position in the post–Civil Rights era and attempting to articulate, during this moment of great social upheaval, their disquiet.
The Police
This account is incomplete without a comparative analysis of the urban white silent majority and the urban black silent majority. It is still plausible that race overwhelmed the indigenous class-based framing of issues. It is possible that the evocative symbols of “law and order” operated differently across the urban white silent majority and the urban black silent majority. Thus, it is important to compare how the same evocative symbol functioned within the context of both groups. And “police,” understood in actual and symbolic terms, provides an opportunity to accomplish this analytic task. The “police” played a seminal role in the “law and order” discourse of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 81 In figurative terms, “the average cop” represented the silent majority—clean-cut, hardworking people respectful of authority and victimized by the permissiveness of liberalism. In literal terms, the police officer was a member of the silent majority and represented the last bulwark of working- and middle-class people against the recklessness of drug addicts, criminals, and radicals. Within the historiography of mass incarceration, police officers represent the expansion of the penal arm of the state—the mechanism by which the racial order or neoliberalism regulated the lives of the urban poor and maintained the logic of the racial or economic system. 82 As a result, exploring the objective conditions of police officers and their views as well as the attitudes of the silent black majority toward the police will further clarify complex dimensions of the period’s zeitgeist and the origins of mass incarceration.
As Figure 8 indicates, the nation, from 1966 until 1973, experienced a significant rise in the number of police officers killed in the line of duty. From the late 1960s until the early 1970s, police officers experienced a substantial amount of violence, but the historiography of mass incarceration misses the nuances in how white police officers interpreted this moment. Some officers certainly interpreted these events in racial terms; some carried a clear racial animus. In Nicholas Alex’s ethnographic study of police in New York City, one officer shared, “Blacks have more rights than they ever had and they want more. They don’t want to be equal to whites, they want to be superior to whites!” He added: Blacks are a different breed of people, the way they think. They have no family life. They are screwing everybody here and there. . . . There is no supervising them. They want to do things for kicks. And they want more and they don’t want to work and it’s easier to steal. They love to commit crime. They love it. . . . They love to stick a knife into you. . . . They are ruthless people.
83
National numbers of officers killed in the line of duty, 1961 to 1980.
Despite the obvious racial animus here and the racial explanation for crime in other interviews, Alex reported that the “majority of respondents are more moderate and conciliatory in their tone, and modulate their racial attitudes if, and when, they express them.” 84
Despite clear racial prejudice, police officers reserved much of their ire for student protesters. “This ‘rebellion of the police,’” Seymour Martin Lipset wrote, “is a response to their being faced with ‘confrontation tactics’ by student and black radical militants.”
85
Based on his analysis of several police surveys, Lipset found, “Most policemen are conservative, conventional, upwardly mobile working-class supporters of the American Way, who aspire for a better life for their families.”
86
He explained: To find the scions of the upper middle class in the best universities denouncing them as “pigs,” hurling insults which involve [the] use of the most aggressive sexual language, such as “Up against the wall, Mother F—,” throwing bricks and bags of feces at them, is much more difficult to accept than any other situation which they have faced. Police understand as normal the problems of dealing with crime or vice. They may resent violence stemming from minority ghettos, but this, too, is understandable and part of police work. But to take provocative behavior from youths who are socially and economically much better off than they and their children is more than the average policeman can tolerate.
87
Police officers, many living the immigrant story and believing that hard work and virtue yields success, believed the decadence and dishonor of the “scions of the upper middle class” generated few negative consequences. According to them, the American institutions (e.g., courts and universities) that should regulate this behavior frequently sided with the radical students that rejected them.
An incident in 1968 brings these attitudes into sharp focus. Yippies held a “yip-in,” a celebration to welcome spring, in Grand Central Station in March. 88 Around midnight, three thousand young people “in all kinds of hippie garb, in capes and granny skirts and velvet coats and top hats and one or two in tails, many in blue jeans, in floppy hats and bells and necklaces” 89 crammed into the station and “showed up, milling, smoking, grooving, chanting ‘Burn, baby burn’ and scrawling FUCK YOU on the walls.” 90 Someone broke one of the hands off the station’s iconic clock and spray-painted “Peace Now” across it. Police moved in after a protester threw firecrackers into the crowd, aggressively using their nightsticks to clear the area. One protester “climbed to the top of the information booth in the center of Grand Central and unrolled a banner with the slogan ‘Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker.’ The leaders of the protest charged the police with ‘animalistic behavior’ and brutality.” 91 Alan Levine, of the New York Civil Liberties Union, described the police response as “the most extraordinary display of unprovoked police brutality I’ve ever seen outside of Mississippi.” 92 The rank and file disagreed. One officer, employing the type of language that some argue whites reserved for black criminality, reacted by stating, “Here’s a bunch of animals who call themselves the next leaders of the country. . . . I almost had to vomit. . . . It’s like dealing with any queer pervert, mother raper, or any of those bedbugs we’ve got crawling around the Village. As a normal human being, you feel like knocking every one of their teeth out. It’s a normal reaction.” 93
Additionally, police officers believed that the decadence of the “scions of the upper middle class” warranted punitive measures. During a hearing of New York State’s Joint Legislative Temporary Commission to Evaluate the Drug Laws in 1970, Mike Amico, the Sheriff of Erie County, shared his thoughts about easing marijuana laws. Sheriff Amico remarked, “There is a great deal of talk these days about legalizing marijuana in this country. Why is there so much talk today?” Responding to his rhetorical question, the Sheriff opined, “Perhaps we should examine the class of persons who are affected by the marijuana laws. Ten and 20 years ago it was primarily those from the ghetto who were affected by the marijuana laws. Today it’s the college student, the high school student, the middle and upper class American who is affected. Could it be that the law was okay for the ghetto but terribly wrong for middle class America?” Amico added, “I think middle class America better start disciplining its children and regulating itself rather than attempting to change the laws to suit its present whims.” 94 I am not trying to downplay the presence of anti-black animus among white police officers. Rather, I am, again, emphasizing the complexities of white ethnic attitudes toward crime in the 1960s and early 1970s and attempting to expose the multiple targets of their anger and resentment. Historians of mass incarceration, therefore, must treat white ethnic attitudes toward crime with more analytic precision: probing variation over time, across cities, and across white ethnic groups in the targets of their anger and the intensity attached to them.
Exploring the black silent majority’s attitudes toward the police is also illuminating. Despite a history of police brutality and corruption, police inaction not police actions angered the black silent majority in New York. In 1973, the Amsterdam News composed “an open letter to the average cop on his beat in our communities” that not only provided a robust defense of law enforcement but also poignantly captured the black silent majority’s understanding of itself and the crime problem. “In a nutshell,” the letter asserted, “we want you to know that you are not alone when you walk your lonely post in the dark, and we would further like you to know that when it comes to the enforcement of the law, the overwhelming majority of the Black community is standing solidly behind you.” In describing the crime problem, the letter argues that a small group of black criminals have turned the homes of the black working- and middle-class majority into prisons. It declared: “Be assured that the loud mouthed vocal minority on the corners who boo and jeer when you lock up a criminal, are not representative of the hard working people watching from their apartment windows—people who are afraid to come down on the corner for fear of being mugged or robbed. Your support, your backup are the people behind those closed doors who stay off the streets because the streets have too often become the property of hoods.” Marshalling the same pejorative language that many contemporary analyses ascribe to racist white ethnics and race-baiting conservative politicians, the editorial charged: “And the poorest player on the team in the Black ghetto is the criminal element which refuses to go to work and make a decent living, but instead, chooses to make his living by stealing and robbing others of the fruits of their labor. . . . You thus become the target of the criminal—the hunter—as you go about protecting the rights of the hunted.” The letter goes as far as saying that “many decent fathers and mothers will applaud you for locking up a member of their own family when they refuse to stay within the bounds of decent society.” Finally, the editorial links crime and black militance: “We restate once again that black people have suffered too long and overcome too much to now allow themselves to be misled by a small group of cold blooded killers seeking to legitimize and romanticize their actions under the banner of ‘Black Revolutionary Liberation.’” 95
Again, black attitudes toward the police must be placed within local social and political contexts in order to decipher their meanings. In a 1964 New York Times poll of blacks in the city, 49% of respondents listed crime and criminals as their top concern while only 16% listed Civil Rights and 6% listed white prejudice. Moreover, a sizeable proportion listed “Negro behavior and attitudes,” including the view that blacks are not trying to improve themselves and raising their children “decently.” 96 A year later, a firm specializing in market research in black communities conducted a survey of 219 blacks that confirmed the previous findings. 97 Respondents listed the most pressing problem as “job opportunities, control of drug addiction and safety in the streets.” 98 The poll also asked the respondents about police brutality: 12% reported that there was “a lot”; 31% reported that there was “a little”; 20% reported there was “none at all”; 34% indicated they “were not sure”; and, 3% didn’t answer the question. 99 The next question offers additional insight. It asked, “Have you witnessed any act that you would regard as police brutality?” Eight-five percent said no. Together, the editorial in the Amsterdam News and these data suggest that black evaluations of the police and policing strategies were shaped by actual experiences with crime and police brutality and by indigenous, class-based values.
The attitudes were not unique. A survey of blacks in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, and Baltimore published by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization in 1966 found that the “average Negro” lives “in near anarchy”: “instead of being concerned about police brutality, he wants much more police protection.” 100 Overall, the survey revealed the harsh reality of urban life: “What exists in the ‘ghettos’ at present is apparently a situation whereby a small minority—the dope addicts, criminals, noise-makers, and so on—tyrannize over the large majority, making decent living all but impossible for the latter.” 101 Capturing the essence of these attitudes, Vincent Baker stated in 1968: “It’s not police brutality that makes people afraid to walk the streets at night.” 102 Policing brutality, Baker claimed, was declining and being “superseded by criminal brutality.” 103
Black attitudes in Los Angeles mirror these patterns. The LAPD survey of black residents revealed that 72% of blacks had a positive interaction with LAPD. Sixty-eight percent supported more police patrols and opposed the assignment of black officers to only black neighborhoods. 104 Among those that held a negative view of the police, 62% listed discourtesy, 20% mentioned racial comments, and 14% listed the use of force. Even though these findings are consistent with other polls discussed here, they contradict claims offered by scholars of mass incarceration that have focused on California. For example, Donna Jean Murch writes: “California led the nation in the scale and infrastructure of youth detention as well as the militarization of domestic policing.” “This tendency,” she continues, “reached a crisis point in the aftermath of the Watts rebellions when the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) arrested over 5,000 people, many of whom were juveniles. The state response to Watts as much as the popular uprising itself did much to radicalize California’s urban communities in its wake.” 105
Given the popularity of this view, 106 it is important to provide a serious test of these contending interpretations of black response to policing and punitive policies in California. Examining African American activism on crime in Compton, a majority-black city in Los Angeles County, during this period will both test the validity of LAPD poll results and reveal the extent to which California’s urban, specifically black, communities had been radicalized by policing practices in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1973, Compton, a city more than 70% black and 20% Chicano, had the highest per capita crime rate for a city its size. 107 And crime fundamentally reshaped life in this town, formerly a haven for the black middle class. One report noted, “Compton residents feel the impact of crime in their homes. On a tour of better neighborhoods one can see the impact of the high burglary rate.” 108 While campaigning in Compton in 1972, African American State Assemblyman Tom Rupert reported, “Just about every home has two locks and many have newly installed bars on the windows. . . . Every third house has a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign. People are damned frightened.” 109 Residents of the city seemed “exhausted by the crime wave and impatient with those who would be lenient with criminals.” One black social worker in Compton commented, “I am for not letting these criminals out on the streets. They should be kept in jail. Put ’em there and leave ’em there.” 110
In 1973, Doris Davis, an African American city clerk, defeated Douglas F. Dollarhide, the city’s first African American mayor by running on a “law and order” platform. Davis “campaigned on a pledge to beef up the quality, size and pay of the city’s overworked and much criticized Police Department; and she was endorsed by the Compton Police Officers’ Assn.” 111 Davis resented being labeled the “law and order” candidate, but she stated, “I also have to make it clear that, although I will do everything I can to provide alternatives, those who persist in crime will bear the full brunt of their actions in terms of hard law enforcement.” 112 Dollarhide, foreshadowing many arguments in the historiography of mass incarceration, blamed the media for over hyping Compton’s crime problem. 113 Yet Dollarhide ignored just how much crime altered the lives of African Americans. Despite potential inaccuracies in media reporting or small shifts in statistics, African Americans in Compton felt afraid, and the locks on their doors and the signs on their homes served as constant reminders of the dangers in their community. Dollarhide’s campaign rendered the black victim invisible, and it lost.
In Los Angeles and Compton, crimes rates were not fiction to many urban African Americans: their actual experience with crime shaped their lives and life chances. Increasing crime rates prompted many African Americans in urban communities in California and throughout the nation to support drastic policing measures. Now, it would be reckless to dismiss histories of police brutality, harassment, and corruption in urban black communities. 114 Similarly, it would be unwise to minimize black advocacy for more policing and greater imprisonment. Both occurred and together they represent a profound paradox that the historiography of mass incarceration currently cannot explain.
Conclusion
“I am an invisible man” begins Ralph Ellison’s classic novel about the travails of black individuality and agency within the American racial order and broader ideological and political projects. The unnamed African American protagonist remarks: “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms; I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.” He explains: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus shows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except for me.” 115 The protagonist’s powerful metaphor lays bare the limitations of the historiography of mass incarceration—a literature dominated by theories and analytic approaches that highlight broader social and political forces surrounding black victims of crime yet refuse to see them.
Imprecise treatments of actual crime rates solidify this invisibility and yield explanations that cannot account for important variation in the politics of crime and development of criminal justice policies. Students of mass incarceration, by treating actual crime as fiction, have not sufficiently explored when and how crime became politicized at some moments and not others, in some cities and not others. Students of mass incarceration must interrogate the space in which increasing crimes rates were initially felt, understood, and negotiated and explore how local institutions and political processes influenced the framing of these concerns and subsequent policy responses.
Furthermore, the analytic attention given to national policy making and political elites and the reliance on functionalist explanations render attitudinal and behavioral diversity within black and white working and middle classes invisible. These narratives unduly reduce urban white ethnic fears to racial fantasy, while minimizing white ethnic disdain for upper-class, young, white radicals whom they also considered a threat—in some cases and at some moments, a greater threat than urban black crime—and white ethnic, specifically Jewish, ideological rejection of key features of Nixonian “law and order” and concern for other manifestations of social disorder, such as pollution or the Vietnam War. In a moment of unrequited class solidarity, 116 the black and white silent majorities mobilized against the insecurity and instability fomented by drug addicts, criminals, and radical activists.
While focusing almost exclusively on the construction of white victimization and/or black criminality within white public spheres, some analysts have neglected the activism of the urban black middle class. In the wake of newly won Civil Rights victories, the black silent majority did not consider, within the realm of crime policy, themselves victims of white racism but prisoners of black crime. In many cities throughout the United States, the black silent majority desired and vigorously pursued the policing and removal of “juvenile delinquents,” “junkies,” “pushers,” “thugs,” and “hoods”—all threats to “decent citizens”—from their communities. Black crime threatened their businesses and children and prevented them from walking their streets and attending their churches. So they mobilized against it.
The extent to which the activism of the silent black majority is likely to be determinative is contingent upon the institutional design of the American polity. Miller’s research powerfully shows that the development of local crime policy depends upon the dynamics of the American federal system and the policy prescriptions being advocated. 117 Because of the porous quality of the American federal system, powerful interest groups, like the NRA, can use their organizational capacities and various veto points in the American political system to undermine local efforts. These barriers, however, are not insuperable. For example, New York City, Washington, D.C., Prince George’s County, and Baltimore increased the surveillance of African American males by implementing gun offender registries. The program in Prince George’s county, the nation’s wealthiest African American majority county, required that “Anyone convicted of a gun crime in Prince George’s would be required to provide police with his or her name, any aliases, and a host of contact information, including a home address, telephone number, and e-mail address. Every six months, those on the registry would be required to meet with police to verify the information they provided. Police officers would periodically visit—though not search—offenders’ homes to make sure the information is accurate and up to date.” 118 Karen R. Toles, an African American member of Prince George’s County Council, commented, “Even if it’s Big Brother-ish, it is what it is. The whole idea is to keep our community safe.” 119
Thus, the political influence of the black middle class will vary across different levels of government. In local municipalities, especially those with sizable African American populations, the attentiveness of black publics to crime-related issues create incentives for local politicians to respond to demands for greater policing and punitive policies. As crime policymaking shifts to higher levels of government, the potential effect of the black silent majority may decrease as politicians face broader constituencies, and, as a result, different and competing electoral incentives. 120 While future research should explore the role the black silent majority played in the development of the “war on drugs” and other national crime policies, it is certainly the case that national politicians face a complex and diverse set of political imperatives. Indeed, the evidence presented here suggests that instead of creating “law and order,” national politicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s used “law and order” as a rhetorical device to speak to the multiple and diverse concerns of working and middle-class Americans, both black and white. While some of its constitutive elements were understood in racial terms in some local contexts, class—defined in material and moral terms—not race united most of its components.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Michael Durfee, Richard Harris, Lisa L. Miller, Christopher Mueller, Robert Sampson, and Eric Schneider for very helpful comments on earlier drafts or in response to queries. I would like to thank Kumar Ghafoor, Jason D. Rivera, Daniel B. Stapelkamp, Jonathan Warren, and Zachary Wood for excellent research assistance. I would also like to thank Gil A. Maduro Jr. from the Statistical Analysis and Reporting Unit at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for providing mortality data. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received funding for the research and writing of this article from the Rutgers University Faculty Research Grant program.