Schrader
techniques of repression could easily be reverse-engineered. Many of
these aid-recipient countries—from Uruguay to the Philippines—went
on to practice harsh forms of policing while paramilitary death squads
emerged in others, such as Guatemala. The U.S. image of Soviet re-
pression was mirrored in U.S. client states.
to understand how these public safety advisors then advanced punitive
modernization and the carceral state at home, we must return again to
- At the very moment the National Security Act took effect, another
crucial document in the history of U.S. law enforcement emerged. The
President’s Committee on Civil Rights had been investigating how law
enforcement could safeguard civil rights, especially black civil rights, in
the United States. The committee’s report to President Harry Truman,
To Secure These Rights, advocated for what Mary Dudziak has labeled
“cold war civil rights.” It was necessary to ameliorate racial inequality, this
argument went, because the Soviet Union frequently invoked lynching
and racial abuses to highlight U.S. hypocrisy.
Although the committee was unflinching in its assessment of how
the fundamental civil right to the safety of one’s person had been vio-
lated frequently (Japanese, Mexicans, and African Americans, as well
as members of minority religions, suffered the most), it also understood
these problems of racial injustice to be the effect of white extrajudicial
violence and “arbitrary” individual actions by cops, particularly in the
South. Its solutions were thus focused on strengthening law enforcement
and assuring its adherence to due process and administrative fairness.
Similar to Kennan, the committee (and the generation of reformers
it influenced) believed it was possible to use the tools of policing and
prisons fairly, unlike in the Soviet Union.
