My pleasure to welcome Tony Platt, who is going to be giving the talk today.
And Tony is currently a distinguished affiliated scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Society at University of California, Berkeley.
He's previously taught at the University of Chicago, at Berkeley and at other California state universities.
He's the author of 12 books, 100 and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of criminal justice,
race, inequality and social justice in American history.
And I've been listening because lots of people have been coming up to Tony since he's been in
the room saying that they read his work and that they although they met him some time ago.
And I have to say, I have one of these stories, too, which is that as as an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia in History,
I set out to do my dissertation on juvenile detention centre.
And of course, one of the books that I read was The Child Saver.
So so it's actually very exciting for me to meet you as well.
And Tony's here today to talk to us about his most recent book,
which is called Beyond These Walls Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation and being here.
I'm glad to be here. Glad to see people who remember meetings with me that I don't remember.
But maybe that maybe the memory will come back.
And I'm glad you started on time in one of the other rooms. I'm staying here.
There's a sign, and it says For visiting fellows and researchers, please make sure that you observe rule number 11.
So I don't know what that rule is, but we all need to observe.
It is nice to each other. Thank you.
So I'm glad to be back in Oxford where I spent three awkward years here from 1960 to 1963,
begrudgingly studying jurisprudence because I didn't know what else to study.
And I'm especially glad that my college roommate is here, Jerry McCarthy, who we have room together out in an a house in Italy.
And he helped me to survive at Oxford in those years as I wavered between scorn and longing.
That's a phrase from Richard Hogg, its famous book, The Uses of Literacy.
You helped me to survive Katrina as a waiver between scorn and longing scorn at the university's inhospitable reception of outsiders.
I was from the North, I was from another country, from Manchester, and also longing to become a member of the club.
That's the longing part. And now here I am, entering the club through the front door.
All right, so it's a big surprise to me. In 1960,
I was a typical 18 year old who did not think ahead and by default fell into
a course in jurisprudence here at Oxford that mostly bored and alienated me.
I'm sure those of you taking courses here come with a lot more consciousness and determination and clarity about what you're doing than I was.
Aside from criminal and international law, I plodded through my studies and I chafed for three years against my tutors.
Reaction Review. That law with a capital L is a defence against anarchy with a capital H.
David Yardley was my tutor for three years. He regarded British legal institutions as the vanguard of a civilisation that would erase
all remnants of what he called jungle law and doing his best to hold back the 1960s.
He supported measures to keep hardened criminals, as he put it, permanently in detention and anticipating the proliferation of today's refugee camps.
He thought that detention communities might be a way to keep the criminalised family
together and that bringing back the stocks might even be cheaper than prisons.
I can send you the documentation and his book is interesting.
He also was begrudgingly against the legalisation or decriminalisation of homosexuality on the grounds that,
quote, it might encourage many homosexuals to seek medical treatment.
So that was my intellectual experience at the university.
Aside from sports, arthouse films at The Phoenix, which still exists.
Right. You know, Bergman got a big, big impact on me.
Aside from that and jazz learning to become a marijuana user and going to ban the bomb demonstrations,
one of my few educational pleasures was going to a lecture by Richard Hoggett,
who was considered to be the founder of British Cultural Studies, who taught me the importance of what later would be known as history from below.
While my tutor was worrying that the eight hour day might temp workers to while away their time off by, quote,
doing harm to others, Richard Hoggart was describing law as an arena of class conflict of us against them, of them, against us.
And from the perspective of working class communities, in his 1957 book,
he briefly reported that the police and criminal courts were part of the vast apparatus of authority which somehow got hold of them,
got hold of working class people, vast apparatus of authority which somehow got hold of them.
In that book, he didn't explain this.
Somehow I moved to the United States in 1963 for what I thought would be a temporary stay for a master's degree in criminology at Berkeley.
And after a postdoc in Chicago, I returned in 1968 to teach criminology back at Berkeley.
It was then that I started to think about the issues in this book that I finally got to write.
Recently, I thought I started thinking about them in the seventies because that was an era of American society when,
in the words of Alice Walker, the writer of the social movements, called us to life and put us to work.
It was a very enlightening time to be an intellectual activist.
And when the movement in universities was powerful enough to attract police informants to our classes in Berkeley School of Criminology.
So when I got my FBI file, I read that I was very anti police, I was a dangerous individual,
and that I was, quote, one of the first people in the United States to wear my hair long.
Curious what you find in your FBI file.
So I started thinking about the issues in this book of this book in the seventies, and I finished it in the gloom of Trump's dystopia.
I like to think that its seed was planted in Hogarth's insight about the class nature of policing,
that this is where I began to grapple with explaining the somehow,
as in the vast apparatus of authority which somehow got hold of them, that Hoggart briefly referenced in his 1957 book.
I know it was Hoggart successor, Stuart Hall, who helped me to fill in the gaps despite Trump's dystopia.
As you can see from the book's cover here, which I pass around, there's a sliver of thin sliver of blue sky on the cover.
You know, we had debates with the publisher about how big that little strip of blue sky should be,
but it's there enough to be, you know, to give a ray of hope. I was recently on a panel at a bookseller in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bay Area,
with a man named Albert Woodfox, who has a new book out, which I strongly recommend called Solitary.
There's been a lot of great memoirs of life in prison that have been written really since the 19th century.
And some of the most famous ones, including Malcolm X's autobiography, Claude Browne's autobiography, period.
Thomas. There are a few stand out ones. But I put this one by Albert Woodfox to be up to that level.
He spent over 40 years, I think it was 42 years. And he knows exactly months and days and hours that he spent in solitary.
23 hours a day in the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana for a crime he never committed,
which was he was set up and charged and convicted of killing a guard in the prison, which he didn't do.
And it took about ten years of activism by lawyers and political organisations and
nonprofits and people helping him to get a new trial and to get an acquittal and to get out.
In this book, Solitary, he writes as follows He says, I'd bear the scars of beatings, loneliness, isolation and persecution.
I'm also marked by every kindness. And in this book, he says, I have hope for humankind.
This is after during the 42 years in solitary.
So if Albert Woodfox can have hope for humankind, I certainly can, too.
So today I want to address three issues. What in the past gives life and vitality to Trump's vision of law and order?
What is new and dangerously different about his vision?
And what are the chances for a revitalisation of the progressive and radical visions of social justice and the United States?
Three big issues, and I'll try to go through them fairly quickly here.
So first of all, what's familiar? Trump's law and order is fierce and uncompromising.
But much of it, I think, and I argue in the book,
is recycled for all that has been said about his mercurial and narcissistic temperament, his impetuosity,
his grandstanding, his wild policy swings, his views about crime, police, prisons, welfare and race are remarkably consistent and longstanding.
In many ways, Trump's version of Law and Order has deep roots and a bipartisan political foundation from the Democrats, as well as the Republicans.
Trump honed his particular version of Law and Order in the 1980s.
His favourite crime expert, to use his words, was the right wing political scientist James Cooper Wilson,
whose 1977 book Thinking about crime influenced hardline policies in the 1980s and Far Beyond.
And his notorious essay on Broken Windows, co-authored with George Kelling and published in The Atlantic in 1982,
legitimated a repressive role for policing in impoverished communities that influence
policing in the United States and in many other countries around the world.
For people not familiar with this policy proposal that became widespread.
Wilson argued that if you allowed sort of petty crimes to go on impoverished communities,
that they would aggravate and become serious crimes and that broken windows,
you know, peeing on the ground, getting drunk and disorderly and so on,
that that needed a police presence, otherwise it would get out of hand and so on.
And that justified an interventionist role for policing in the United States,
sort of trying to legitimate the role of the police in impoverished communities.
They didn't take that position about intervening in middle class communities.
So it became a really a strategy of legitimation of policing, but I think had had wide influence.
Most of the ideas in Trump's 2000 ghostwritten book called America The America We Deserve early on, he's he's he's got political ambitions.
He's writing parents. He's writing books. He's putting out statements and so on.
That book was cribbed from a briefing book co-authored by the right wing Heritage Foundation, which was written for right wing political candidates.
He listed a lot of ideas, also from a man named Edwin Meese.
Ed Meese had been on Trump's transition team.
Before that, he'd been attorney general under Reagan until he went through a scandal and had to resign.
And before that, he was Governor Reagan's right hand hatchet man in California,
where he presided over the beating and arrests of damaged demonstrators around the state.
And he also presided over dismantling Berkeley's School of Criminology, where I and other people were teaching.
And so the wheel turns.
While Trump draws upon old tropes for his ideology, he's always positioned himself, I think, in the extreme right wing of law and order politics.
So, for example, in 1989, there was a major case in New York.
Some of you may be familiar with it.
It's called the Central Park five case, in which five young men, all men of colour, black and Puerto Rican, young man, juveniles,
were charged and prosecuted and convicted of an extraordinary brutal rape on a white woman banker who was
jogging through the park and barely lived and had very little had no memory of what had happened to her.
And the five confessed and were convicted and spent many years in prison before somebody else confessed.
To the crime, and they were all released after several years in prison.
And then the city of New York settled with them for about $41 million for the false arrest and the other time in prison that they'd served.
Trump then wrote an op ed and in one of the New York newspapers saying Settling doesn't mean innocence.
And he basically argued that his contacts in the police department said that they didn't deserve to have been acquitted.
The mugging of his mother in 1991 added personal animus to his political convictions.
He and other members of the family lobbied the judge to make sure that the person that mugged his mother did a lot of time,
and in one of his books, he said, The problem isn't that we have too many people locked up.
The problem is that we don't have enough criminals locked up. So from very, very early on, he's staking out a right wing law and order position.
I wouldn't say he was reading anything because the man is a read,
but he's being influenced by a set of ideas that are in the extreme right of the Republican Party.
And in 2000, when he was actively considering a campaign for national political office, already he praised a man named George Pataki,
who was running for governor of New York for his efforts to restore the death penalty in New York,
New York, and put the death penalty on the moratorium, Pataki said.
And one of his book, one of these books said George Pataki is doing civilisation's heavy lifting.
And I think that's an early sign of the coded language of the kind of right wing white nationalism that is now a staple of his worldview,
this notion of of law and order being at the at the at the centre and under the leadership of establishing by civilisation.
He's talking about a Christian white worldview and he's always, always been partial to fascist ideas.
I'm not one of these people who argues now that the United States is that we now have a fascist regime.
But Trump has always been interested in fascist ideas. So a long, long time ago he was describing the United States as the world's whipping boy,
that's his words, and that the United States had become China's punching bag,
thus launching his attack on China now and and and bringing the world close to a military conflict with China,
which, of course, would be to be no more nice talks in this room if that happens.
His politics of American First, America First, which is a big part of his political slogans,
comes right out of right wing American nationalism that had its heyday during World War One,
when the U.S. had to whip the population into supporting U.S. entry into that war.
And when people that oppose the war were picked up and charged and sent to prison,
the America first was the it was that was the slogan of that of that campaign for war,
his preoccupation with Mexican inferiority, which influences them a great deal today.
And Mexican dangerousness, echoes early 20th century moral panics about Mexicans and marijuana.
It also echoes the 1940s campaign against so-called zoot suit.
Zoot suit, as in California, and also echoes the demonisation by the FBI of Chicano political movements in the 1960.
So there's a great deal of continuity between Trump's law and order agenda and previous administrations,
and there are some significant changes as well. But first, let me go into more detail about what I think are the continuities.
First, I don't think there's any change in militarised policing in the United States that is routinely indifferent to
human rights in impoverished communities and reduces citizens and residents to objects of fear and loathing.
The police routinely killed three people every day, which maybe doesn't seem like a lot, but it's a thousand a year.
That's 100,000 in a century, and that happens during the everyday practice of policing.
It doesn't happen during the extraordinary moments of state repression in the United States, which actually are not so and not so exceptional.
And the people that get killed by the police on the streets are disproportionately African-American,
Latino, Native American, and also a high percentage are also mentally ill.
So this was true long before Trump. And it's true now. A deep history, for example,
teaches us that the police and sheriffs were deeply implicated as participants and collaborators
in lynching and doing their best to hold back the civil rights movement for decades.
Go back to early descriptions and reports on policing in the late 19th century,
right through to the 1960s, and then a new bout of of police repression in the 1960s.
There isn't a decade that goes by where the police are not at the forefront of trying to repress civil rights struggles, so much so that in 1951,
long before the current round of political protests about policing in the United States in 1951,
the civil rights Congress petitioned the United Nations for relief for what it called, quote.
The genocide against the Negro people. The Congress said once the classic method of lynching was the rope.
Now it's the policeman's bullet. That was 1951 or in the 1960s.
James Forman, who was one of my favourite writers and I think one of the most perceptive writers on issues of crime and race and policing.
His essays, I think, particularly from The New Yorker, are well worth a revisit if you've never read them.
So in the 1960s, he said he hardly knew anybody in Harlem from the most circumspect church member to the
most shiftless adolescent who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence,
injustice or brutality. That's Baldwin in the early sixties.
These are exactly the same issues that Black Lives Matter has been raising in the last decade in the United States.
So one of the things I argue in the book is that there never were never good old days when the friendly
urban police walked local neighbourhoods that they knew personally and made crime reduction a priority.
I don't think there's any evidence that that American policing was ever about that.
So I'm not making a case for some nostalgia to go back to an earlier professionalisation.
I don't think that ever existed. Policing in the United States, I argue, has always been militarised, combative and undemocratic.
Long before SWAT teams, long before the transfer of Iraqi war surplus to the police.
The police always imagined themselves at war at home,
and they were often inspired in the notion of being at war at home by U.S. military ventures around the world.
Michel Foucault somewhere talks about this is the boomerang effect that military ventures abroad are then brought back in a variety of different ways.
So I'll give you two examples.
In the United States, for example, now in Baltimore, the police use surveillance techniques that were developed in the war in Iraq.
Or I think a more important example would be the way in which policing in other countries develops notions
about dangerous populations and who needs to be targeted by military and and counterinsurgency operations.
So if you go back to the United States first military venture,
which was in the Philippines in the 1900s after the war with Spain and the defeat of Spain, the United States then stayed in the Philippines for,
I don't know, ten, 20 years trying to subdue a nationalist movement that wanted independence,
that won independence from Spain, and now they wanted independence from the United States.
So it was there that the United States first developed what they called concentration camps that were influenced by, I think,
by reservations in the United States that brought together political activists and political dissidents and put them in prison like conditions.
And also, there were people working on counterinsurgency in this war in the Philippines who then came back and
were very influential as leadership in the early days of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I don't think the police have ever been effective at reducing social harm either.
How many people here in England rely on the police for advice about how to protect yourself from social harm?
Or call the police when you're in any kind of trouble and witness crimes or whatever?
Please raise your hands. Oh, it's usually one or two people.
So what are they good for? So law enforcement, in my view, and crime control are not what the police do.
Well, and we're told in the United States and you're probably told here as well,
that the best way to reduce our chance of being victimised by crime is to learn techniques of target hardening.
Is that term used here? Yes. Target hardening make ourselves into a harder target.
Okay. And if you can afford it, buy an insurance policy and create a whole defensible space around your home.
Burglar alarms, high tech surveillance systems, bolted doors, guard dogs, razor wire, gated walls.
Depends on what you can afford.
The police even acknowledge their impotence when they advise us to organise neighbourhood watches, look out for suspicious folks.
And if you're a woman, carry a whistle and mace. Take martial arts classes.
Stay off the streets after dark. In other words, take personal responsibility and good luck.
So no wonder that most people do not and have never not and have never reported most crime to the police.
A deep history also teaches us that the federal government and federal agencies from the
federal from the FBI under Edgar Hoover to Homeland Security today in the United States,
constantly send out messages about who is on the dangerousness watch and who are the suspect populations.
So there's often a sense in the United States for particularly amongst political activists dealing with police issues,
that the problems of policing is a local issue and that it's not a national issue.
And therefore, you can it's more easy to organise against.
Undemocratic police practices because it's local.
I think there's a problem with seeing policing as a local problem.
If you look at the history of the United States, we understand that the police get their ideas and marching orders from Washington, D.C.,
from the national government and from national agencies about which populations are criminal genic,
which populations are a threat to national security. So, for example, after World War One, Edgar Hoover, in a public piece that he wrote,
blame the African-American press for promoting what he called defiantly assertive ideas about the Negroes fitness for self-government.
This was after World War One. They're moving too fast. They want democracy too quickly.
A position he took for decades while cutting the FBI.
And some 50 years later, Hoover authorised these agents to send anonymous messages to Martin Luther King to encourage them to commit suicide.
Otherwise, they were going to spread the news that he was having affairs and keeping them from the public.
In the 1960s, an FBI agent proudly reported to his boss in Washington, D.C.,
that every single African-American student at Swarthmore College, a liberal arts college, a private college, was under police surveillance.
So no wonder cops on the local level equate blackness with dangerousness.
So I argue in the book that the problem of police violence is endemic and systemic, national as well as local.
That was true long before Trump, and it's true now.
There's also nothing new today about the astonishing cruelties that characterise day to day life in jails and prisons,
including widespread use of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation, sometimes for decades.
Like Albert Woodfox, the author of Solitary. There are many people that I personally met who've done five, ten, 15, 20, 30 years in solitary.
I know one person who did more than that. The UN standards on Human Rights and prisons argue that put out that anything more than
14 days in a solitary confinement puts you at risk for mental harm and health issues.
So we also have in the United States has about 2.2 million people incarcerated every day.
And of those, 200,000 are lifers. That is, they have no chance of getting out for the whole of their life.
And I think most places in in Europe, in the West put limits on.
I know you have lifers, right. But it's very, very limited. 200,000 out of 2.2 million.
It's a sizeable number of people. It's good news, for example, that in California, the new incoming governor of California,
Gavin Newsom, has just put a moratorium on the death penalty.
And that will last as long as he's governor for four years unless the legislature makes it permanent.
But he did dismantle the death cell where they do the executions.
He ordered that totally dismantled. So there's a good chance that that's going to happen.
But there were eight. There's 840 people on death row in San Quentin.
They were waiting, execution. And now that they're for life.
So now the larger issue is what does it mean to have people really have death sentences by being in prison all their lives?
So on a daily basis in the United States, as close to 7 million people are in jail, in prison or on probation or parole.
One in every 28 children now has an incarcerated parent whose families built as much as $25 for a 15 minute in-state call.
And 30% of the world's incarcerated women are now in the United States.
You know, the data and the argument about the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world,
I don't think the evidence is persuasive about whether the United States has a higher incarceration rate rate than China or Russia.
I think sometimes it's a hyperbolic rhetoric about that.
But nevertheless, the United States does have a higher incarceration rate than, for example, Turkmenistan, you know,
a Central American, Central Asian country that, according to Human Rights Watch, is having one of the world's most repressive regimes.
So this rate of imprisonment, this level of imprisonment was true before Trump.
It's true now. It takes close to 5 million workers in the United States to do the job of policing and guarding.
We really don't know the costs of what I try to figure out the costs,
and there's an appendix in the book about that, but not easy to try to figure it out.
Those numbers by themselves don't mean anything, but I think the numbers I'm going to give you now are more meaningful.
The United States has more criminal justice employees than teachers.
The United States has more guards than doctors. Police outnumber social workers by 5 to 1.
So that's more important, I think, than the numbers or actually the costs. It just shows you the the political social priorities of the country.
And in 1980, the United States invested three times more in welfare and food stamps than it did on.
Policing and prisons. And by 1996, this is before Trump becomes president.
That had been reversed. That 3 to 1 ratio had been reversed.
And if you wonder what happened to the promise of a decent welfare state that the United States has never had, this is where I think it went.
This is true before Trump. I think it's true now. So what do we get for this extraordinary investment of people, money and resources?
We don't get crime control and we certainly don't get justice.
A more accurate term for the criminal justice system might be the criminal injustice, chaos.
The so-called criminal justice system certainly has nothing to do with justice.
It's injustices, I think operate both internally and externally.
And a lot is written and said and known about the internal injustices, less so about the external one.
Internally, it means that if you have money and resources in the United States and you get arrested for the most part,
you can get out on bail and if you wait trial out of jail waiting for your trial and you have enough money for good lawyers,
your chances of getting an acquittal or having a jury trial, which is very rare,
is much more likely than the overwhelming majority of people who go through the criminal justice system.
And are there something like 60% of people who are arrested and do time in jail have not even been convicted.
They don't have money to get out on bail. When you look at the occupations that work in the criminal and criminal justice agencies,
about 95% of people work on the side of prosecution prosecutors, police, private police, guards and so on.
And only 5% in any kind of nominal sense work on the other side, which would be defence lawyers, probation officers, parole officers.
So justice serves best those who can afford the best lawyers while the poor get overwhelmed.
Public defenders, for example,
there's a recent report out of Louisiana that says that a public defender who works there has a caseload of 194 felony cases.
So for those lawyers in the room here, you probably know that if you had a caseload of 3000 new cases to work on that that would be a lot of work.
More importantly, injustice works externally, and it works this way.
Baggy pants and a barbecue in the front yard can get you jail time if you live in a place like Ferguson, Missouri.
While laundering profits for a mexican cartel that was implicated in thousands and thousands of
murders gets you a fine equivalent to four weeks of profits if you are the global bank HSBC.
And you might remember James Comey, the FBI director who got fired famously by Trump,
who spent all his life moving between the attorney general's office and prosecutor jobs and then the FBI and so on,
and wrote a rather self-serving memoir in which he left out that important time,
that important time in his career when he worked in the private sector.
And one of the things he did in the private sector was to help HSBC recover its reputation for that from this case.
Similarly, buying selling drugs on the street can get you a lot of time.
And if Trump has his way, according to a recent speech he gave, it can get you the death penalty,
but it only gets you probation if you're the executives of Purdue Pharma,
the company that triggered the opioid crisis by misinforming doctors and patients about
the dangers of a drug that contributes to the death of about 145 people every day.
And that company, Purdue Pharma.
It's very much in the news now because through the Sackler Foundation, it's giving money everywhere, a lot of places in London.
Right. And all these all these art museums and universities and now trying to figure out what
to do with this blood soaked money that they got from the really the Purdue Pharma,
which channelled the money through the foundation.
So the person who helped Purdue Pharma with its public relations crisis was Rudy Giuliani, Trump's current rather creepy mouthpiece.
It's so rare to see a rich or famous person incarcerated in the United States that when it happens, it receives massive media attention.
So if the American criminal justice system doesn't control crime and doesn't dispense justice, then what does it do?
So this is a big part of the book. The injustices of the U.S. criminal justice system are longstanding and by
no means unique to the Trump administration or even his recent predecessors.
There hasn't been a time, for example, in American history when there wasn't taken for granted institutionalised racism
and class repression that confirms the widespread prejudice that people of colour,
immigrants and the poor are the most criminal, the most dangerous and the most deserving of ostracism and distrust.
A few examples.
Probably the best known example is what happened in in the South after the defeat of reconstruction in from the 1970s on 1879, I'm sorry,
when millions of former slaves who had been freed during during the Civil War were criminalised by what we call the black codes.
And the black codes basically said that any any person on the streets who didn't have a job or a permanent place of lodging could be arrested.
And that affected hundreds of thousands and possibly thousands, millions of African-Americans who were in the South.
This was long before the Great Migration to the north. Long before people flee.
Long before the big campaigns of lynching that start taking place.
And then there were two systems by which they were criminalised.
One is that they were passed through the courts and then leased out to private operations,
ranches, mines, agricultural operations that had used slave labour.
And then after that was reformed and changed.
They were then they were they worked for the state on the convict lease system or the chain gang system in which they went out and built roads and
built the infrastructure of the South and played a very important role in the economic reconstruction of the South after the defeat of reconstruction.
So that that's, you know, that's the best known example. And so when people today sort of hyperbolically talk in the United States about the
United States has never had as much racist racism in the criminal justice system,
it's you know, it's more racist now than ever before. People have either a very short memory or don't know that history.
I mean, they're you're talking about and there's good studies of this people on convict systems or on chain
gangs that they had death rates of up to 20 or 25 and sometimes 30% of the of the prisoners.
And these systems died on the in the job and the criminalised work.
So, yes, they weren't in a prison because the South had very few prisons actually until the early 20th century.
But before that, people were just in a sense, the prison was sent out into the into the workplace.
What's less known is that in the West, the same the same process took place.
You could call it the red codes that native peoples, indigenous peoples who'd gone through [INAUDIBLE] to survive the genocide on the West Coast were
then treated in the same way people could be rounded up and criminalised and then often sold.
Children were sold all over the state as a labour force.
Men were less likely to be captured and sold.
They were more likely to be killed on site,
and women were then ended up in domestic service and also ended up being raped in households throughout the state.
The children and grandchildren of that surviving population were sent to the Indian boarding schools.
You're probably familiar with the big campaigns going on in Canada about restoration and and and repayment and apologies and so on.
In the United States, we've never really had that.
But the Indian boarding schools, I think, are an important part of the early prison history of the United States.
They tend to get separated out from prison history. But the reservation on the boarding school, in my mind, was a cultural institution.
And the criminalisation of free African-Americans and the roundup and criminalisation
of Native Americans recalls what happened here in England between 1688 and 1820,
when the rising capitalist class criminalised all kinds of new offences against property, creating one of the most vicious criminal codes in Europe.
It's what Thompson called a plain enough case of class robbery.
He had a really great way with words. And back in the United States, in the wake of the gold rush,
Mexicans were lynched at a rate comparable to the rate of lynching of African Americans, something that's not widely known.
While Chinese immigrants were herded into ghettos and sent to, many of them were sent to San Quentin as, quote, dope scenes.
So today, if you walked into San Quentin, probably the best known major prison in California and you looked around,
you would immediately notice the black prisoners, the brown prisoners.
There would be a disproportionate number of the people that you would see there.
But if you'd gone into San Quentin in the 1880s and looked around, you'd have seen Chinese prisoners.
Maybe one in five or one in four. In the 1900s it was the Philippines, as I said, with the US military rounding up without trial,
hundreds of thousands of Filipinos holding them in concentration camps.
And this is where they first tested the effectiveness of waterboarding is torture.
I have a picture in the book never been published before of the US military using waterboarding for the first time.
So it's practised a long time before the Iraq war.
In the 1920s it was Mexicans who were targeted again as dolphins during World War Two.
Of course, you many people know that 120,000 persons, persons of Japanese descent were imprisoned without trial for crimes they did not commit.
And after 911, in the name of fighting terrorism, the US government rounded up and registered thousands of Muslim men in the United States,
despite the fact that about three quarters of all violent acts and killings done for political reasons,
committed by white right wing extremists who are not required to register.
And from Obama to Trump, the government has detained and deported millions.
And long before African-Americans were singled out for, quote, mass incarceration,
a term that I'm not particularly favourable to, though I understand its political uses.
Long before they were singled out for mass incarceration and the prison boom in the 1980s,
they were already a majority of prisoners in several states.
And when Donald Trump conjures up images of wolf attacks to describe young men of colour as he's done,
he draws upon the long tradition of biological eugenics.
Indeed it is, as James Baldwin says, a long tale to tell.
To sum up, Trump's ideas and policies about crime and the carceral state have a deep bipartisan pedigree.
But to make sense, I think of this long history of punishment through policing and an imprisonment in the name of criminal justice.
I think it requires a wide lens as well as a deep history.
I'm not sure that population control is the best term to define what the criminal justice system does.
But I think it's closer to what the criminal justice system in the United States does.
It's more accurate than criminal justice system. Population control, I think, captures is closer to what actually goes on.
So Albert Woodfox didn't what the guy that did more than 40 years in solitary and then go to prison in Louisiana.
He writes in his book, he says, We were there in solitary, not because of what we did.
We were there because of who we were. I think this insight has broader implications.
It is not only a long tale to tell of urban police, jails and prisons.
They have played and continue to play a critical role in maintaining inequality and continue to
play a critical role in trying to enforce injustice in the United States and on public order.
But police and prisons, I argue in the book, are part of what Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice,
and a remarkable dissent in the case a few years ago called the carceral state to get to be precise about it.
She said the police, and I'm quoting her now, treat countless people as though they are not members of a democracy,
but subjects of the carceral state just waiting to be catalogued.
It's a very brilliant dissent, but also she makes it a very personal dissent,
talking about her own attitudes and relationship, about the history of racism.
So the term that I use in the book is Castle State. A number of other people are beginning to use this term as well.
It's not my invention as a way to try to get away from the limits of using the term criminal justice system.
And the Castle State, when you look at its history, I think is prolific and promiscuous in its scope and its operations.
And here we find that the courts,
the work of the Castle State is carried out by a wide variety of agencies and organisations beyond the police and prisons.
Consider the following examples. So it was the military,
National Guard and private security forces that repressed the labour movement and
tried to stop workers from joining unions in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The earliest model for the professionalisation of policing in the United States came from the private companies,
and they were basically hired by businesses to go after the labour movement.
When professionalisation of policing begins in the late 19th and early 20th century.
One model,
one important model for that professionalisation of policing the private other private police operations that really work is vigilante operations,
you know, like taking out a Pinkertons, which still exists.
It has another name now and Burns and it was US officials in the military in the Philippines in the 1900s who tortured civilian prisoners.
And it was teachers during World War One who collaborated with the government in enforcing what was now the required Pledge
of Allegiance that schoolchildren had to get up every morning and pledge their allegiance to the United States of America.
This is one of the early examples of the nationalist movement successes in the United States,
and it was also a way of trying to stop people from expressing opposition to World War One or to have.
The United States joined World War One. So at one religious organisation that was would not allow their kids to say the pledge was the Jehovah's
Witnesses who their religious beliefs has a religion that's taking a priority over civil government.
So they told their children not to pledge allegiance. As a result, teachers and schools forced those children out of the schools.
And many Jehovah's Witnesses, I don't know the exact number, but were then prosecuted and sent to prison for telling their kids to do that.
In the 20th century it was social workers, professional organisations and middle class reformers who led the child saving movement.
Thank you for your plug. Before, who led the child saving movement from the Progressive Era to the 1960s that resulted prior to World War Two in the
trial and the conviction really without trial and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of children of immigrants.
And after World War Two targeted predominantly kids of families of colour, black kids in particular, who ended up filling the filling?
The reformatory is that reformatory that operated very much like prisons, even though they were justified as being benevolent and saving children.
And it was public health work and social workers and government agencies that led campaigns during World War One to incarcerate without trial.
Some 30,000 women accused of sexual independence and infecting troops with venereal
disease while the men got treatment and entertainment and in the in the war camps.
And it was the same agencies that in the name of eugenics,
led the campaigns to sterilise without consent some 60,000 mostly white working class women before World War Two and after World War Two.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe more women of colour, women, mostly women of colour,
Puerto Rican, Native American and African-American for the most part.
And it was local, state and federal government agencies that implemented the purging of gay men from government jobs in the 1950s,
with one in three man reporting and studies that were done in the early sixties.
One in three gay men reporting incidents of repression, harassment, imprisonment,
which is comparable to the experience today of young African American men with the police.
And again, it was social workers during the Clinton administration who enforced the purging of 3
million impoverished families from public welfare and subject to then and to this day,
subjected women on welfare to surveillance practices and daily humiliations,
treating them in the same way that police and jails treat poor young men as inherently criminal and not to be trusted.
And it was national security agencies of agencies that since 911 have made Muslims into suspects and made
Mexicans into criminals and deportees and local governments that have legislated so-called civility codes,
you know, clearing people off the streets, that transformed beggars on the homeless into criminals.
So I argue that the causal state involves a whole set of institutions that plays a critical role in preserving
and reproducing inequality and enforcing injustices in a society of enormous wealth and extraordinary quality.
You can take to Paris, you can try to reduce that inequality and injustice,
or you can beef up a muscular system of social control to keep things as they are in the United States.
They've consistently taken the second choice.
So these examples confirm that the causal state is routinely mobilised against whole populations on the basis of who they are,
not on what they did or do. It operates as though the United States has a fixed quota of exclusion and
repression that it must meet in order to maintain a sense of national identity.
So that's the continuity. So what's new? There's also, I think, some significant, dangerous and ominous new developments in the United States.
I don't think of Trumpism. Trump's version of law and order is not limited to the United States, as we well know.
And I don't think it's simply a reversion to the past, some kind of nostalgic return to a previous era of the United States.
And I certainly don't think it to be a revival of 1930s fascism.
A lot of people in the United States have not studied 1930s fascism,
and I think use that language of equating Trump's interest in fascism and spouting of fascist ideas as though we were living in that kind of system.
Not that it couldn't happen, but it's I think it's a really premature way of assessing what's happening.
But what I do think is what is happening is that Trump's exercise of power is much more ruthless and direct,
much less preoccupied with issues of legitimation and winning hearts and minds, or serving as a model of freedom and democracy.
From the Lyndon Johnson pregnancy, the pregnancy, the presidency.
From the Lyndon Johnson presidency to Barack Obama, Republicans and Democrats alike.
There's been a great deal of. The occupation about the use of the criminal justice system as not just an instrument of force,
but also as an instrument of legitimation in the gramscian sense of that.
And they've constantly tried out different gambits for trying to make the police more accepted in communities in which they work,
to make them more professional, to make them more likeable.
So in the 1950s, I think the priority was like getting testing the police to try to weed out authoritarian personalities.
That was the way that it was tried to be done then and then it was increasing levels of education, of recruiting cops,
of colour, recruiting women cops, putting the cops through multicultural training in the United States.
The latest fad is getting the police to recognise their unconscious racism.
I don't know if that's become something here in the U.K. And again, James Baldwin, I think,
is brilliant on this and brilliant on the police, because he says, you know, there's no way that you can humanistic police the ghetto.
I mean, once you decide to segregate populations, treat them as inferior and dangerous and send the cops in,
asking them to be nice and likeable is totally contradicts, contradicts what they're there to do.
And none of these things worked. But that's but it wasn't for lack of trying.
So Obama set up taskforces and commissions to try to figure out ways of doing that.
He tried to reduce the amount of military equipment that went to police departments.
He had the police to start wearing cameras,
which became a nice little contract for one of the I think it was maybe the Taser company that got the camera contracts and so on.
And so there's been a real long time preoccupation with that.
But Trump has made a break with that, and I think that's a significant break.
He's now seeking a military budget of $750 billion, which is more than the spending of the next seven countries combined.
At home, we've seen ruthless tax cuts and gutting of environmental regulations.
There's a toughness and resolve in putting the logic of law and order into practice that we haven't seen in a long time.
And as David Bromwich writing I think in the London Review of Books recently noted,
he said Trump's narcissism and recklessness are wholly compatible with the cunning that we tend to underestimate.
So let me now give a few brief examples of how the new hard line is taking form.
So when Trump came to power, it was very difficult for him to be tougher on immigration than Obama.
Obama tried to do a deal. He was always trying to do deals.
He had, you know, a belief that you could sort of negotiate a deal between the centre and the right, all of which failed.
But the deal around immigration went like this,
that if Congress would pass legislation giving a path to citizenship for the 800,000 plus people who came to the United States as children,
undocumented with their parents, grandparents and family members, and it wasn't like a soft path to citizenship.
You know,
it would actually weed out a lot of people because you have to either have a job or be in the military or be in a university and not have a record.
I mean, if you're impoverished in the United States and been living there a long time, it's pretty hard not to have a record.
So it wasn't like this was like, you know, grant amnesty and give them citizenship overnight and they had to prove that, etc., etc.
And in exchange for that, Obama said, we'll be very tough on the border.
We'll be very tough on cracking down on people who are here as immigrants have committed crimes.
And so Obama then detained in prison and deported more people than every previous president combined.
I mean, he really he really got tough setting up courts on the border so you could speed up the processing of people if they
got across the border and either send them to prison or send them back across the border if they tried a second time,
then they went to prison in the United States to federal prisons.
So I think the wall the symbolism of the wall that Trump has emphasised is partly his way of trying to find some symbolic,
cultural way of promoting a policy that's tougher than Obama.
It's been very difficult for him to find that.
But the one place also where we're now beginning to see an increase in in arrests and detentions and deportations,
where the numbers are beginning to go up to be comparable with what happened under Obama.
But more significantly,
what's taking place is research and reports are coming in that a lot of a lot of people are internalising the causal state by limiting where they go.
So we see a reduction in the number of families and people of Mexican origin, for example, going to church on Sunday.
We see people limiting the family occasions and celebrations that they go to.
We see people going to hospitals only if there's a major emergency and dropping off the person that has the
illness or the severe illness and then leaving that person in the hospital as opposed to staying with the person,
which they usually do. So in a sense, you could see the you know, the cultural imagination is now affected a lot of people.
It's estimated that something like 80% of all agricultural workers in California, for example, are undocumented.
So that's that's one change.
The second change change is that that through the Department of Justice, through his attorney generals and through, in particular,
the work of Vice President Pence, we see a lot of tough measures quickly going into place around criminal justice issues or control issues.
For those of you who've wished for the impeachment and removal of Trump, you might want to be careful about what you wish for.
If we had President Pence in power, you would have a much more disciplined, white, right wing, evangelical, Christian,
anti-feminist, anti-gay, people hating president who has been that throughout his political career when he was in Congress.
I don't know if you know this, but when he was in Congress,
he he actually petitioned for a bill that had gone through that would have denied birth control through doctors or through pharmacies to women,
except to married women, that women who weren't married would not have been able to get birth control.
I mean, that sort of gives you a sense of where its politics are.
So he's been really the he's been the hands on practice man in a couple of areas that are really important.
For example, there is some talk about prison reform, and I'll come to that in a minute.
But there's no talk of police reform.
I mean, you can do a, you know, a Google search for police reform from the White House or Congress and so on, which was very big under Obama.
Obama put a lot of energy into that, failed to put a lot of political energy into it.
That's disappeared. Ideas of reforming the police.
And in fact, Trump has been going to police conventions and giving them a green light for roughing up people.
Or, as he puts it, you don't have to be nice to people when you arrest them.
Also, Trump undid Obama's executive order, which reduced the amount of military hardware that can go to police.
And then in the judicial level, we see now a stacking of the Supreme Court in the in the federal appellate courts that we've
not seen since the Nixon administration and will no doubt exceed what Nixon was able to do.
There's a massive stacking of federal appellate courts and below that of not just conservative jurists, but right wing conservative jurists.
And they're going to take one more appointment of the Supreme Court to swing the Supreme Court for ten, 20 years.
So the other thing that Pence is very involved in and which people tend to not pay enough attention to,
the we're paying attention now because of what's happening in Alabama is that there's a lot of activism,
right wing activism going on at the state level. So we see many legislatures are passing anti-abortion bills.
The most severe one was passed this week in Alabama,
where 25 white male Republican members of the Senate of Alabama made abortion the sign of a foetal heartbeat,
a crime with the doctors who perform abortions going to prison and not excluding women who have been raped or subject to incest.
It's the most extreme version we've seen right now.
But since 2010, at the state level, there've been about 420 anti-abortion pieces of legislation passed,
and they're preparing the groundwork to go up to the Supreme Court to challenge Roe versus Wade.
Roe versus Wade is very limited as well. It doesn't give women automatically the right to abortion.
It gives women the right to abortion if their doctors agree with the decision.
And if there are abortion clinics available that you can go to and it can afford to go to,
and that's not available in many parts of the United States. So five more minutes.
Okay. So prison reform, maybe we'll come back to the last thing that I'd emphasise then about the one thing I
said about prison reform is being co-opted and taken over by the libertarian right.
And if you want to talk about that, we can come back and discuss it.
The final thing that I think is important to look at in terms of Trump administration that is provided political space,
encouragement to neofascist groups. So there's often been relationships in the United States between government and an extreme right wing groups.
We saw it during World War One, during the the nationalist movement to go to war.
We saw it, for example, in the 1950s in the Los Angeles Police Department,
when a thousand or more police officers belonged to the right wing John Birch Society and did so openly.
But in the last 10 to 20 years of of political government in the United States, that relationship has been covert.
It's not been publicly recognised and encouraged. So under Trump, it's become much more respectable to be a white nationalist,
to be homophobic, to be patriarchal, to express hatred of Muslims and so on.
And that's been facilitated by an important.
Part of Trump's political coalition, which is the leadership of police, sheriffs, border patrol organisations,
jail organisations and so on, where the leadership there and the extreme right wing of politics.
Rank and file cops and sheriffs are all over the political spectrum.
They're conservative, but we're talking about right wing ideologues at the leadership level.
So having said all that, I'll conclude with what's to be done.
Okay. Oh, my time is up. I'm sorry. So fascist ideas and tendencies are always present, even inside democracies, as we've learned from Paul Gilroy.
But I think it's premature to call the current moment fascism. I call the current moment one of authoritarian disorder.
I think there are so many cracks in the system and there are many fissures and many openings for doing all kinds of political work.
The causal state is by no means a coordinated system.
It functions, in my mind, more like something out of Kafka than out of George Orwell.
So I think one of the things that we have to do in this current moment,
and this is what I've been trying to do in the book as a as a way for the activist movement to hopefully to use it,
is to do what Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights activist, called bring this thing out into the light.
That is look coldly and clearly what's going on and what we're up against.
And I think this is a very difficult, challenging time.
And for those of us who work in the United States or in England as intellectuals,
I think there's some very hard, challenging intellectual work to be done.
It's not clear, you know, exactly how things are unfolding that's unfolding very quickly.
And I think the challenges for serious intellectual work are major, but it's sort of a core to what we need to do in this times.
And for those of us who work in criminology, sociology, law and society and related fields in the United States,
we need to both understand the complicity of our discipline in building and legitimating the causal state and in challenging its current,
current wilful myopia, lack of morality and timidity.
Maybe we'll have some argument about that,
but I'm sort of shocked by how the most of what goes on in the name of criminology continues in the face of like this moral,
political, cultural, political crisis that we're facing for activists today.
And there are many of us, I think we need to join efforts to alleviate human misery and provide services that are not provided by the government.
We need to join efforts to implement important reforms in the coastal state and some examples from the
US that have been around for a long time that would make a difference if they went into practice.
Our restoration of voting rights to the formerly incarcerated.
Elimination of cash bail. Civilian review of police.
Restorative justice. Policies that are now a big thing here.
And drastic reduction of the prison population to bring this in line with the United Nations and human rights standards.
All of those ideas are, you know, sensible proposals that would make a significant difference.
And that being on the left being thought of as ideas for a long, long time.
But we're a long, long way from seeing them become a possibility in the United States.
In addition to that, we're engaged in the work of defence and resistance that is trying to stop things getting worse,
not just improve things, but trying to stop things getting worse, such as efforts to reverse Roe versus Wade, to expand incarceration via technology,
to give the cops more firepower and greater impunity, to build new jails, which is a big thing going on right now.
So all of these efforts are important and should be supported.
At the same time, we should note they're not the same as substantial changes that challenge structures of inequality and injustice.
And we can't blame only the coastal state and now the Trump administration for our problems.
Splintering and divisions within our movements also profoundly weakens us.
We too often find that we too often fail to find unity on the basis of what James Baldwin called the sorrow of the disconnected.
Our challenge, I think, is to rebuild a social and political movement that will bridge the enormous divide
between all the different activist movements currently in the United States.
And I don't think we should give up on big ideas and structural reforms that would substantially make a difference in people's everyday lives
and substantially alter relations of power and create new centres of democratic power such as democratising and demilitarising policing.
Or asking the question What are the police good for?
There's a whole beginning of a movement in the United States to think about taking away a lot of the things that the police do
and putting that that work into communities and other agencies or to develop a humanistic welfare system that we've never had.
And we never know when a spark will later would light a fire and energise a movement.
Let's remember that it was protests against the police killing in a small place like Ferguson that led to
the Black Lives Matter movement becoming a national movement that compelled a meeting with the president.
And it was a high school protest. For gun reform in Florida.
That prompted a former Supreme Court justice in The New York Times, no less, to call for the abolition of the Second Amendment.
And finally,
I think we need to learn from the right's effectiveness in promoting a dystopian vision of the future that anchors and propels law and order policies.
We need a comparable progressive vision. We keep saying this in this moment of resistance and defence, in this era of a long and unstable interregnum.
To articulate a vision of social justice might seem like pie in the sky and a waste of energy.
But I think to get support for progressive policies, however modest, would require widespread endorsement.
And this will only happen if we speak to people's anxieties and aspirations without a movement and long term vision that engages people good policies.
Whether I think it will take an unprecedented project of coalition building,
a revitalised imagination and reckoning with a historical legacy that bleeds into the
present to make the criminalised human again and to end the tragedy of the punitive state.
Beyond these walls. Walls that contain millions of our brothers and sisters.
Walls that divide us. Walls that partition our ideas.
And walls that cut us off from the past. Sweet freedom still faintly calls.
Thank you.