A radical need for criminology.

Simon, Jonathan

Our reality was not supposed to be this future --(signed) the 70s (1)

Introduction: A Basic Course in Time Travel

IN THE FALL OF 2012, I JOINED WITH TONY PLATT AND NEARLY 30 UC BERKELEY AND San Jose State University graduate students in a course aimed at the intellectual equivalent of time travel. In my eyes, our mission seemed straightforward enough. (2) Mass incarceration, a term scholars of punishment and society use to describe the great paroxysm of incarcerating people for criminal offenses in prisons and jails, which saw the US prison population (relative to population growth) more than quadruple between the mid-1970s and the end of the 2000s, today shows signs of subsiding, with imprisonment rates down throughout the nation and dramatically in some states. (3) However, the damage done to future generations from incarcerating an unprecedented number of Americans, especially from communities already disadvantaged by economic marginalization and legacies of racial discrimination, will require sustained demand from grassroots activists and sustained attention from legal elites. (4)

It will also require new ideas, untainted by the beliefs that have underpinned mass incarceration. Unless something is done to address the dominant criminological ideas of the past generation, we are likely to remain in a sort of "mass incarceration lite," with an imprisonment rate two to three times the historic norm. Many Americans who have been reliable supporters of "tough on crime" measures in the past are beginning to reject prison for drug offenders, women convicted of non violent crimes, and many technical parole violators caught up in the web of incarceration-favoring laws enacted during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the appeal of incarcerating people involved in "violent, "serious," and "sexual" crimes remains very strong (and all three represent very broad categories, historically influenced by the racialization of violence). If we want to achieve significant reductions in incarceration rates, we face a radical need for a criminology untainted by the catastrophe we have gone through--that is, for an updated and accurate knowledge about what crimes are being committed, what harms are being done, by whom and against whom, and how the state and community can make amends to those harmed and prevent others from being harmed.

This is where I saw the value of a targeted time-travel mission. The criminological ideas in contemporary America are as tainted as the criminal justice policies they have grown up with and helped to determine (Feeley and Simon 1992). To go forward, we must look back. Along with tens of thousands of individuals, mass incarceration also swept away a landscape of criminological ideas and projects that, as of the late 1970s, was a thriving field of intense intellectual competition, largely between "liberal" and "radical" approaches. (5) In this recent, but now invisible past (much of it played out in the remarkably productive environment of UC Berkeley's School of Criminology), liberal and radical criminologists collaborated in researching the potential for empowering poor communities to fight crime. Crucially, they were focusing on the same communities that would become the epicenters of mass incarceration (Drucker 2011).

Whereas liberal and radical criminologists shared a commitment to social justice (especially in terms of civil rights), political arguments loomed over whether American democracy was capable of overcoming the legacies of racism and internal colonialism to address the sources of the astounding increase in street crime, especially armed robberies, murders, and rapes. (6) These political differences would be driven farther apart by the US escalation of the war in Vietnam and the repression of the growing peace and social justice movements at home. It is Vietnam, more than theory, that truly accounts for the boundaries between radical and liberal criminology in that era. The criminological gap remained productively small. The "labeling theory" wielded by liberal criminologists provided radicals with the tools they needed to understand the role of criminal justice agencies in shaping deviance. Meanwhile, the nascent Marxist analytic toolkit wielded by radicals informed the liberal analysis of criminal justice institutions.

America had not yet shifted from the "war on poverty" to a "war on crime" (and the wars on drugs and terrorism that would follow). The goal of opening the affluent American economy to the urban poor (then almost exclusively native born) still remained a tenet of at least one of the two major political parties. The idea that serious crime problems might be addressed through some combination of organized community action, democratization of local government, and reform of criminal justice institutions was at the cutting edge of both social science and social policy (Kerner Commission 1968). It is little wonder that the discipline of criminology at Berkeley was attracting some of the best and most idealistic students of the 1960s generation.

Our class revisited some central texts of radical and liberal criminology produced at Berkeley and elsewhere during that period, between the late 1960s and early 1970s. To reread these discourses some forty years later was to enter a kind of literary Pompeii in which the authors have been captured in positions of struggle relevant to the fault lines of the moment, oblivious to the lava flow about to overtake them. Mass incarceration remained unseen (although the militarization of urban police forces, then viewed in relation to riots, uprisings, and the international revolutionary situation, was an important prequel and precondition to it). The positions taken in these debates about community control of police forces, abolition of prisons, and rapid democratization of local and state institutions seem impossibly utopian in our new carceral landscape.

The goal of our seminar (from my perspective) was to recover some pure strains of the left-liberal criminology of the 1970s, uncorrupted as it were by the narrowed boundaries of the penal imagination that would soon surround the prison. In many states, the oncoming tide of mass incarceration completely wiped out criminological and correctional cultures that had once offered promising anchors for legitimacy and humanity in criminal justice, replacing them with a new culture steeped in a permanent war mentality (Feeley and Simon 1992; Simon 1993; Page 2011). Criminology, for a long time an arm of liberal legality under capitalism (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1970), moved into a new alliance with military and corporate engineering to produce what Malcolm Feeley and I called the "new penology" (Feeley and Simon 1992). The debates that liberal and radical criminologists were having in the 1970s are a valuable resource to reseed the present with ideas and projects uncontaminated by the lethal strains of mass incarceration.

Such a mission posed a critical interpretive challenge that was also an ethical one. Like other time travelers, we would be "interacting" with people in the past exposed unwittingly to our superior knowledge of what has come to pass. Moreover, those people were responding to compelling moral narratives in their present that we are no longer confronted with. Two examples are highly salient and run through many of the texts. The first is the Vietnam War. Although most liberals and radicals were in agreement that the war was wrong and that the United States should withdraw, there were important differences in how the two perspectives read the war and its implications about the sustainability and reformability of American democracy. The second point of divergence concerns the emergence of a mass protest movement that at least suggested the proximity and viability of a revolutionary break with conventional politics.

This discontinuity was to our advantage as time-traveling researchers. Provided that we respected the profound moral and emotional toll paid by all who lived through that time of choice and consequence, we could also choose to work around the force fields created by Vietnam and revolutionary change. (7) By disconnecting radical criminological discourses from their immediate context, it becomes possible to place them in a broader history that reaches both deeper into the past and closer to our own time. One direction I will explore briefly here reaches back beyond 1968 to World War II, when the recruiting of marginalized workers to supply war industries brought Jim Crow social mores and Jim Crow policing to the Bay Area. A second direction looks forward to the full expression of neoliberalism in America during the 1980s, when the promise of a new economy based on knowledge and unbound by conventions of race, gender, and sexual identity was first being tested.

In navigating the intellectual and ethical challenges of this mission, my collaboration with Tony Platt was absolutely critical. Unlike me, who had experienced those years in a protected status as a juvenile, Platt would be revisiting a landscape he lived as an adult. Indeed, as one of the intellectual leaders of the Berkeley criminology school at that halcyon and fatal moment, his own work, the decision by the chancellor to deny him tenure over the recommendation of his school, and the shuttering of the school itself could hardly be ignored. As in so many other aspects of teaching and scholarship, Tony proved a wonderful role model for all of us by treating the past with compassion but also intellectual curiosity, and demonstrating with elegance that if you choose a path with a heart, you can walk it wherever it leads.

This article is a preliminary report, from my perspective, on our investigations. I wish to highlight two texts of the many we read and discussed during the seminar. First, the famous Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, published and written by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (Newton 2000). Newton and Seale were students at Merritt College, one of the community colleges created in 1954 as part of a surge in higher education that swept the nation and especially California, where in 1960 the state adopted a "master plan" aimed at assuring all high school graduates an opportunity for a college degree. (8) The Black Panthers program, written in the spring and first circulated in the early summer of 1967, provided one of the first and only political programs anchored in resistance to policing and criminalization (Bloom and Martin 2013).

The second document is Susan Griffin's pathbreaking article on rape, "Rape: The All-American Crime," published in Ramparts in September 1971 (Griffin 1971). Griffin was born in California in 1943, attended UC Berkeley, and became involved in social justice and antiwar politics. Her article in Ramparts was one of the first to raise the treatment of rape as a central feminist issue.

These texts, published a few years apart at the apex of the New Left, belong to a common geography as well as history. Both originated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Whereas the Bay Area's role in the political formations of the 1960s is widely appreciated, less known is the prehistory of these struggles in the local concentration of war industries during the World War II era, which simultaneously brought women and Southern blacks and whites into the Western industrial workforce, albeit in racialized and gendered hierarchies. Police brutality and rape were not unique to the Bay Area in the postwar era or at any time, but their role in governing a new workforce during and after the labor emergency of World War II reveals the historical and geographical specificity of that violence.

The Panthers' program and Griffin's article also anticipate the coming struggle for equality within the new service economy that has dominated US economic growth in the years since; this economic paradigm is often celebrated as the "knowledge economy" by its friends and "globalization" or "neoliberalism" by its critics (although none of these terms is altogether satisfactory). In both the Panthers' antiracist contestation of police brutality and Griffin's feminist confrontation of rape, we can see reflections of a new production system that was just coming to prominence, and for which the Bay Area was indubitably a prototype (in part as another legacy of its World War II role, in this case as a hub for military research and development).

Premised primarily on access to higher education, the new economy offered an appealing message to women and racial and ethnic minorities, one that juxtaposed merit and talent to the corporatist New Deal, with its reliance on local networks of power tied ultimately to ethnicity, race, and gender hierarchies. From this perspective, police brutality (for blacks and later for students and youth more generally) and rape (for women of all races and ethnicities) represented the dark side of resistance to the shift away from the New Deal's industrial economy.

The Ten Point Program

A great deal has been written about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, (9) a social movement that arose at the interstices of the "black power" and "civil rights" wings of the black liberation movement of the 1960s in several locations, including the cities of Los Angeles and Oakland, California. The charismatic leaders of that Oakland branch, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, leapt to national attention in the spring and summer of 1967 thanks to a sensational march with guns through California's legislative capital building (to protest the state's first ever gun control law, aimed squarely at their armed confrontation tactics) and the release of the Ten Point Program.

The Program, together with the parallel ten points on "What We Believe," includes in an embryonic form a great deal of the Panthers' philosophy and strategy, and it provides unmistakable evidence of the influence that law was having on their thinking at the moment (especially the invocation of the Declaration of Independence: see Bloom and Martin 2013, opening epigraph). Three points of the ten in the eponymous program speak directly to criminal justice--or, more precisely, to the end of criminal injustice:

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.

8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.

9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black community. (Bloom and Martin 2013, 71-72)

These points were followed by parallel provisions in the accompanying statement of beliefs, which also dealt with criminal justice and injustice:

7. We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States gives us a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.

8. We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We believe the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical, and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been and are being tried by all White juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the Black community. (Ibid; my italics)

The Ten Point Program represents an early stage in the evolution of the Panthers from a civil rights organization with a domestic agenda into an internationally oriented revolutionary organization. It may well be that in the context of the 1960s this turn to revolution, and its radicalizing effect on the largely white-led "New Left," was the most important influence of the Panthers. But, seen from the second decade of the twenty-first century, there are other features of the Ten Point Program that stand out as more relevant.

First, the program expresses a radical need for criminology in the sense I would like to use here. It expresses a need for criminological knowledge, that is, for a strategy to legally confront a rampant criminal threat named "robbery" and "murder" in the Program. The fact that much of it was directly perpetrated by the police is critical, but should not halt us from recognizing these events as crimes and from trying to understand them in a scientific way. The Program expresses a need for criminology that is radical in the existential sense. Like the Klan violence directed against freedmen during the Reconstruction (Stuntz 2012), this threat of violence was an existential threat to the viability of black freedom within the legal regime of the United States and California, and especially to the gains of the civil rights struggle.

Second, there is an acute "sociolegal sensibility" here about the role of legal institutions such as courts Juries, and police. Newton had been taking undergraduate law classes at Merritt and another Bay Area public college, San Francisco State University (Bloom and Martin 2013, 39). (10) Whatever its specific origins, the critique of legal institutions in the Ten Point Program clearly grasped that the American constitutional apparatus relied on democratic localism to keep the system fair and that blacks were being excluded from it by the violent denial of franchise in the deep South and by political isolation enforced by police violence in the North and West.

Today, following three decades of mass incarceration and a rise in the scale and racialization of imprisonment unseen since the days of the convict lease system in the post-Civil War South (Lichtenstein 1996), it is widely appreciated that legal equality in the United States requires local political power and that procedural justice without the latter is less than nothing (Tonry 1996; Butler 2010; Stuntz 2012). The Panthers understood this in 1967 and asserted a legally based strategy. Indeed, the Program focused on correcting what many experts now agree is the core locus of structural racism in the criminal justice; the hostility of front-end decision-makers (police and prosecutors) to the needs and interests of the black community.

Today, in a society conditioned to accepting streamlined incarceration-oriented criminal procedures on the explicit theory that incapacitating enough marginalized subjects will allow a tolerable level of social order, the demands of the Program seem strange indeed. Freeing any prisoner today is politically dangerous territory, but the Panthers had a plausible argument that the prison population produced by the unrepresentative institutions they were protesting had no reliable relationship to serious threats to the community. In demanding that black prisoners be freed and that trials take place before black juries, the Panthers were challenging the political inputs to mass incarceration by demanding local influence over legal institutions.

The Panthers 'legal strategy is further elaborated in the beliefs section, where their much-noted enthusiasm for the Second Amendment is discussed. This is no doubt another part of the Program that many, even those in the anti-mass incarceration movement, would have trouble embracing. It is true that bearing arms was a central part not only of the Panthers' beliefs, but also of their early practice; but to make sense of this today, we must attend very carefully to what Newton and Seale actually wrote. While current NRA enthusiasts love to lay claim to the Panthers (Carlson 2013), the constitutional analogies are inapt. The NRA asserts a libertarian right of individuals to bear arms, leaving the first clause of the Second Amendment referencing a "well-regulated militia" meaningless. The Panthers, in contrast, were in fact a well-regulated militia. They always emphasized the role of discipline in the bearing of arms (indeed, it was not so much an individual choice as a military decree), and they viewed their arms carrying as a practice not only of self-defense, but also of defense of their community. (11) Nor was their claim based on a lawless use of firearms to create power (as in the Maoist slogan, "power comes from the barrel of a gun"), but rather on the legal use of firearms to confront racist violence from local law enforcement in a manner calculated to prevail in court. (12) When California effectively criminalized the carrying of loaded weapons in the public street (even in open carry, which was long protected by common law traditions), this strategy in its specific form was at an end.

Whatever one makes of the revolutionary turn that followed the closing off of the Panthers' legal armed confrontation strategy, we have in this early moment a radical-liberal vision of community safety and social justice comparable and complementary in many ways to the radical-liberal criminology being produced at the Berkeley School of Criminology in those years. (13)

The All-American Crime

Susan Griffin's September 1971 Rampart essay, "Rape: The All American Crime," was one of the first widely circulated feminist articles on rape in what became by the end of the 1970s a definite movement of second-wave feminism. By the 1980s, this would turn into a full-fledged alliance with professional law enforcement at the state and local levels, consecrated at the federal level by the 1994 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA; Gottschalk 2006). Although Griffin's powerful account of her own journey to understand rape contains few hints of that future possibility, it also identifies the nexus of sexual violence and hierarchy, race, and privilege that is crucial to understanding and reversing it today (Ritchie 2012).

The dramatic opening of the article (Griffin 1971, 26) underscores one of the essay's strongest themes, the power of rape to shape the lives of women across history and across the life course:

   I HAVE NEVER BEEN FREE OF THE FEAR OF RAPE. From a very early age
   I, like most women, have thought of rape as part of my natural
   environment--something to be feared and prayed against like fire or
   lightning. I never asked why men raped; I simply thought it one of
   the many mysteries of human nature.

Rape for Griffin is something learned from one's grandmother: "I observed my grandmother was meticulous about locks and quick to draw the shades before anyone removed so much as a shoe. I sensed that danger lurked outside" (ibid.). Griffin, a poet and humanist, picked up clearly on the complex ideological baggage of rape, with its division of men into rapists and rescuers. In the United States, this also implies a racialized narrative in which black men are presumed to pose a distinct threat to white women and white violence against blacks is rationalized as a form of protecting women (something that will be realized in a different form in some aspects of VAWA) (Ritchie 2012).

"Rape: The All American Crime" expresses a radical and historically specific need for criminology. Griffin wrote as a woman and as a feminist to understand, analyze, and contest the existential threat that rape posed to the freedoms promised to women by 1960s liberalism and the higher education revolution promised by liberalism and feminism. As a radical journalist, Griffin engages in a kind of popular empirical criminology. Her major finding is nothing other than what criminologists have long called (evocatively) "the dark figure" of unreported crime against disempowered communities (in this case, half the population). Griffin's subject in a sense is precisely this dark figure, and the indifference of official policy and law enforcement authorities to its bleakest implications.

Griffin's feminism is a sociolegal feminism seeking to move the reader away from the legal code into the practices of rape investigation and prosecution. Her main focus is on the rules of trial procedure that in the early 1970s still allowed defense lawyers to cross-examine rape victims on the stand with questions about their sexual histories. They were protected by a number of judicial doctrines favorable to the defense that may have once shared a kind of parsimony about criminalization with the common law, but which by the 1960s had come to be unique to rape cases (Stuntz 2012).

Griffin focused in particular on one rape trial in San Francisco, People v. Jerry Plotkin, which epitomized this danger. The victim was picked up at a bar and taken to an apartment belonging to one of the two men accused of raping her. The defendants claimed consent and presented her sexual history as evidence that she was indiscriminate in choosing sexual partners Turning the freedom of the swinging 1960s against female victims.

There are elements in Griffin's Vietnam-era rhetoric that now seem dubious, at least in the terms they were put. As the title of the article suggests, Griffin insists that rape is a distinctly American crime. Rape may well be "all American" in the sense of a deeply constitutive practice for Americans, but obviously it is not a distinctive American practice. Alarming evidence of rising violence against women in India, Mexico, and other nations undergoing rapid modernization suggests that rape is better seen as emerging during periods of economic transformation in which gender hierarchies are both challenged and exploited by capitalism.

Radical Criminologies and Their Legacies

If radical criminology as an academic practice flourished in Berkeley precisely in those years, it is because a radical need for criminology was being expressed by people of color and women as an integral part of the freedom struggles in which they were engaged (Hall et al. 1978). It is therefore helpful to situate the period from 1966 to 1971, during which both of the texts discussed here were written and so much of the political history of the present came into form, as the midpoint of an arc that begins with the impact of the labor shortage of World War II upon American race and gender relations and ends in our own time, when the legacy of gender and racial domination remains, even as late-modern fragmentation of traditional and modern communities continues. (14)

The economic system of the United States would come under tremendous strain during the labor crisis created by World War II. After December 6, 1941, millions of young to middle-age white males, who formed the core of the industrial workforce, were drafted or volunteered for the armed services (Kesselman 1990). The Bay Area became one of the key geographic locations on the Pacific coast for the massive increase in industrial production required to prosecute a global war against Germany and Japan. Specifically, a massive infrastructure to build warships was constructed in the then small town of Richmond, California, on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. The new labor force required to build the ships was mainly recruited among two groups that so far had been almost completely locked out of industrial production by racist and sexist unions--women and blacks (and of course, most excluded of all, black women). In its outreach to women and African American workers, the war effort began to undermine the gender and racial order of New Deal America, establishing lines of fracture and reactivity that are still playing out today.

Thousands of blacks and whites from the rural South moved to the Bay Area to join the new workforce, bringing with them a powerful strain of Jim Crow. (15) While the new workforce was integrated on some levels, the society around it became more segregated than before. This spatial division was partly imposed by the federal government itself, which built segregated housing for African American workers in Richmond and San Francisco. The legacy of exclusion and isolation by race began in this era, and so did reliance on police to enforce it.

Once the war ended, the Bay Area labor market saw a massive drop in industrial jobs. The Richmond shipyard workforce dropped to a tiny fraction of its wartime numbers. With veterans (mostly white men) returning and a growing anxiety about a resumption of the Depression, women were rapidly pushed out of the workforce. At the same time, African Americans found themselves subject to the persistent employment discrimination that would remain a source of growing anger and feed the massive political mobilization of the 1960s.

Although it has largely escaped criminological analysis, reported rape surged during the war years (up 13 percent over the equivalent number of prewar years) and afterwards (up 11 percent over the next years of peacetime) (see Schneider and Smykla 1990, Table 3). This is even more remarkable because homicides were going down during the war years and remained largely flat afterwards. Why would rape go up even while the nation was experiencing the enhanced solidarity that generally benefits a society in the face of war or victory? The first and probably most significant factor was simply the entry of thousands of women in the labor market, many of them moving for the first time outside their homes and neighborhoods. This massive shift in routine activities clearly exposed more victims to potential attackers and in circumstances conducive to that aim (imagine the precarious security of the rooming houses, apartment blocks, or even squatter camps that emerged as a result of a rising labor demand associated with a housing shortage). A second factor (smaller but politically more relevant) of which there is only minor recognition in the historical record is the recourse to rape and sexual harassment as part of an effort to keep women workers subordinated to men within the workplace (see Kesselman 1990, 50-63, on the sexualization and harassment of women workers in the wartime shipyards).

The fact that rapes went up after the war as women were leaving the workforce suggests that sexual violence was directed both at returning homemakers (as the kind of disciplinary threat outside the windows that Griffin calls fearing) and as a direct threat to women seeking to retain their place in the workforce. (16)

Now let's turn to the 1960s. Although we usually associate the full flowering of neoliberalism with the 1980s and Ronald Reagan (Harvey 2007, 24-25), the decade of the 1960s saw a major move toward this new political economy, with the shift from manufacturing to service, the rising dominance of the financial economy, and the growing geographic mobility of American workers, who were shifting toward the sunbelt and leaving behind many of the traditional forms of urban and industrial life in the United States.

The new economy also offered new possibilities of inclusion for women and African Americans, especially if they could gain access to higher education, which was becoming the gateway to the better jobs in the service economy. As with the war years, however, opportunity and progress also animated reactive forces. The radicalness of both the Panthers and Susan Griffin reflects not only the progressive push for freedom by the civil rights and feminist movements who were increasingly taking to the streets to protest discrimination, but also, and more specifically, an effort to understand and confront the forms of reaction that were threatening the ability to pursue the theoretical freedoms of the new economy.

The 1960s witnessed a rapid increase in reported rape from around 18 reported rapes per 100,000 adult residents in 1960 to 58 per 100,000 in 1982, when it began to decline. This rate of increase is higher than that for violent crime overall during the same period. (17) Thus whereas Griffin suggests, no doubt correctly, that rape is an enduring American institution of gender control, we can see her own consciousness about it, and the broader social consciousness that she reflected, as a response to the historically specific threat of rape at the dawn of the neoliberal era (and we see similar social movements against rape rising today in new economic powers like India and Mexico).

Similarly, the Panthers were responding both to the progressive signals of racial change that accompanied their lives, from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and to the intensification of police assaults on African Americans. Criminologist Paul Takagi (1974, 29; see infra) found an alarming rise in police killings of African Americans in California in those very years:

   The deaths of male civilians aged 10 years and over caused by
   police intervention gradually increased in rate especially from
   1962 to 1968.... More dramatic is the trend in civilian deaths
   caused by California police, where the rate increased two and
   one-half times between 1962 and 1969.

Noting that police deaths themselves were constant (suggesting that the increase was not a function of higher numbers of crimes that might occasion lethal force), Takagi concluded that the massive increase in the scale of police forces in California carried the prospect of higher levels of murder if not something closer to genocide:

We know that authorized police personnel in states like California has been increasing at the rate of 5 or 6 percent compared to an annual population increase of less than two and one-half percent. In 1960 there were 22,783 police officers; in 1972 there were 51,909. If the rate of increase continues, California will have at the turn of the twenty-first century an estimated 180,000 police officers, an equivalent of 10 military divisions. (Ibid.)

Thus, although police violence in the Bay Area had been a constant for blacks since the war years, there is reason to believe this violence was intensifying in response to the efforts of black youth to act on the educational opportunities that the new economy and new civil rights laws were supposed to protect. It is significant in this respect that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were both taking classes at Oakland's Merritt College in 1967 and that some of the key early confrontations between the police and the Panthers happened around the environs of the college. (18)

Conclusion: Our Radical Need for Criminology

In the years that followed, the fate of these projects would become dramatically severed. The Panthers became subject to the most concerted effort in history by the federal government to destroy a domestic political movement (Bloom and Martin 2013, 5). The young black and brown men and women they sought to organize have been the major victims of mass incarceration, and denial of access to education has been a primary facilitating factor (Western and Petit 2010). White feminist-led organizations (though not Susan Griffin personally) entered a strong political alliance with police and prosecution, becoming a major legitimating force behind mass incarceration. As a result, the more responsive use of arrest and prosecution in rape and domestic violence cases continues to operate primarily against racialized and economically marginalized subjects, whereas the protection of privileged rapists (the center of Griffin's critique) remains frustratingly difficult to erase despite lots of legal reforms.

The consequences of these developments are now painfully clear and the subject of considerable and valuable scholarship by antiviolence and social justice activists seeking to chart a new path forward (Critical Resistance and Incite! 2003; Ritchie 2012). However, we need much more; we need a wave of both grassroots and academic criminology to match the remarkable output of the period 1966-1980. Mass incarceration and the aggressive forms of policing that have constructed a carceral geography in our cities are under increasing political and economic pressure, but if the past is prolog, they will not go away on their own; nor will the huge collateral consequences burdening the most disadvantaged communities in America (Clear 2007). The prevailing forms of common sense about crime, criminals, and criminal justice that were structured by the rise of mass incarceration and now help to keep it intact remain very much in place and are regularly reinforced by the media. Contemporary academic criminology will take years to regenerate the intellectual

diversity it had forty years ago. In the meantime, we face a radical need for students and activists to create their own criminologies to make visible the fundamental nexus between penal policies and social structures of inequality and injustice.

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Western, Bruce and Becky Petit 2010 "Incarceration and Social Inequality." Daedalus, Summer, 8-19.

NOTES

(1.) Seen on a bumper sticker near College and Durant Avenues in Berkeley, California, August 2012.

(2.) The class was greatly enhanced by the regular presence of colleagues Alessandro De Giorgi of San Jose State University, Richard Perry of Berkeley Law, and Dario Melossi of University of Bologna.

(3.) Bureau of Justice Statistics, Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, at http://bjs.gov/ucrdata/ Search/Crime/Crime.cfm.

(4.) Legal elites have played key roles in promoting human rights-based reforms of prisons, beginning with John Howard's campaign against "gaol fever" in the 1790s. See Simon (2014).

(5.) As Tony Platt wrote in a period just before the catastrophe of mass incarceration: "The prevailing ideology which dominates research and theory in criminology is liberalism.... It is liberals who dominate the field--writing the most influential literature, serving as government consultants, staffing local and national commissions, working in think-tanks, and acting as brokers for large agencies and foundations" (Platt 1974).

(6.) Between 1963 and 1973 the rate of violent crimes reported to the police went from 168.2 to 417.2: an increase of 146 percent. The rate of rapes went from 9.4 to 24.5, an increase of 160 percent. The national rate of violent crime would not level off until the early 1980s (and then would begin to ascend again after a brief respite). See Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, at http://bjs.gov/ucrdata/ Search/Crime/State/Run CrimeStatebyState .cjm.

(7.) For the people whose published thoughts we were revisiting, these epic issues offered brilliant stars around which thinking, including criminological thinking, could be arrayed--in some cases to powerful analytic effect. The militarization of policing, for example, underway since 1968, seemed to presage a full-scale, Vietnam-like siege of America's internal colonies (as many then described the "ghettos"), in which case self-defense and revolution would begin to look very similar. That was a highly productive insight (both politically and criminologically) in 1968 or 1974. though not so much today.

(8.) The community colleges generally offer only the first two years of college, leading to an Associate of Art or Science degree and the possibility of transfer to a college or university to complete a Bachelor's degree.

(9.) See Bloom and Martin (2013, 8-9) for recent literature on the Panthers.

(10.) Newton and Seale may have also gotten a sophisticated legal perspective from Donald Warden, a black graduate of Berkeley's prestigious Boalt Hall, School of Law. He founded an all-black study group and apparently involved himself in political debates among Bay Area black students (Bloom and Martin 2013, 22).

(11.) It is hard to imagine that today black communities could be made safer and more empowered by distributing yet more firearms. But even the Panthers' gun focus was a product of their criminological analysis, that is of their recognition of an opportunity to confront the police with a legal and effective deterrent to abuse. What would be the equivalent of that today? Giving 4G smartphones to young men of color to document their interactions with police and those of their friends and letting them use social networking to combat the police--much as the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas now fight each other on Twitter as well as on the ground.

(12.) This is why lawyers were so important to the Panthers' strategy at this stage. They had to survive not only an armed confrontation but also the following legal confrontation with a state capable of seeking their execution or permanent incarceration.

(13.) Compare the Ten Point Program to many of the points made by Skolnick (1969).

(14.) To be sure, the two texts had a relationship in their own time. Griffin referenced the Panthers and in particular Eldridge Cleaver, the Panther whose lionization by the New Left helped propel his prison memoir book. Soul on Ice (Cleaver 1968), to best-seller status. Infamously, Cleaver related in his book on how the racial ideology of rape made him seek to rape white women as an act of political liberation as he gained consciousness; crimes that he notably claimed to practice first on black women. In the book Cleaver denounces this stage of his own political becoming as one that endangered his very humanity. For our purposes I would like to read these texts together in their relationship to the broader transformation of the American political economy that came to an early crisis point in the 1970s.

(15.) The Jim Crow-style policing that the war years introduced into the region would become a persistent source of harassment, injury, and death to African Americans in the Bay Area.

(16.) Historical scholarship on the war years and afterwards seems to have largely failed to detect this--but see Savage (2000) for a discussion of harassment and rape as methods for driving women out of the coal mining industry, another area opened to women by the war labor shortage.

(17.) See note 3 above.

(18.) The January 1969 killings of LA Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins took place on the UCLA campus. The perpetrators were other Nationalists, but historians believe police may have helped provoke the encounter (Bloom and Martin 2013). See also interviews to Ericka Huggins, infra.

Jonathan Simon *

* JONATHAN SIMON (email: [email protected]) is Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarship concerns the role of criminal justice and punishment in modern societies, insurance and other contemporary practices of governing risk, the cultural lives of law, and the intellectual history of law and the social sciences. Simon's books include Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990 (1993), Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007), The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society (2013, coedited with Richard Sparks), and Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of American Prisons (2014).