Via WiscoDave
From the workplace to our private lives, American society is starting to resemble a police state.
If all you've got is a
hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and
prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone
will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of
life, a path that involves "solving" social problems (and even some
non-problems) by throwing cops at them, with generally
disastrous
results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday
life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable
just a generation ago.
By
now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where
"the War on Crime" and "the War on Drugs" are no longer metaphors but
bland understatements. There is the
proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use of
shock-and-awe
tactics to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace
amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if
not family members; and in communities where drug treatment programs
once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency war.
(All of this is ably reported on journalist Radley Balko's
blog and in his book,
The Rise of the Warrior Cop.)
But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported
up-armoring of your local precinct. It's also the way police power has
entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of
American life into a police matter.
The School-to-Prison Pipeline
