The view on police and prisons provided by Christian Parenti in Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis is not pretty. In fact, with respect to the U.S. Constitution the view of modern policing and prisons in the U.S. seems downright unconstitutional. America leads the world in per capita police, prisons, prisoners and almost one-third of all prisoners, those on parole, or those awaiting trial are African American men. Beatings and killings by police and prison law enforcement happen routinely with little accountability. Such a strong on crime reality in today’s policing is a product of the backlash against the activism and violence of the 1960s and 1970s according to Parenti. As he argues, “It is from this political and economic crucible that today’s emerging anti-crime police state and prison industrial complex were forged” (Parenti 4).
The majority of those in prison currently are there for non-violent, drug-related crimes as a result of the war on drugs manufactured by politicians. However, economics plays a role in today’s police state because capitalism demands poverty but at the same time is threatened by the poor. It is largely the poor, minorities who are targeted by overzealous police officers who frequently beat or kill suspects with little accountability except for the most widely publicized cases. Urban professionals with a surplus of income have created the realities of poverty, but they escape to suburban “theme park” cities while leaving the poor ethnic groups in the cities to deal with the harsh tactics of law enforcement. Parenti argues that the only way we can change the current police state and undo a prison industry whose budgets often come instead of and at the expense of schools is to demand less. As he notes, we need “less policing, less incarceration, shorter sentences, less surveillance, fewer laws governing individual behaviors, and less obsessive concern with ev...