Evil Empire 65dedication to a cause that marked political radicalism, rehabilitative
efforts were pointless.
In 1969 two special investigations concluded that prisons were
already ineffective at rehabilitation. New York researchers declared
prisons to be hotbeds of radicalism, “more fertile breeding grounds for
crime than the streets.” Federal research findings, endorsed by James V.
Bennett, the retired Federal Bureau of Prisons director, were less caustic
but corroborated fears of increasing crime due to the failings of prisons.
Bennett was a lifelong reformer; earlier in his career, he had advocated for
flexibility in sentencing, educational programs for prisoners, and other
hallmarks of rehabilitation. But he and his staff also worked closely with
the public safety program, advising prisons in Guatemala and Thailand,
and he had spent a few years in occupied Germany learning how to
dismantle an authoritarian system. Though Bennett continued to push
for educational programs, the final recommendation of his investigation
was to dedicate greater resources to incarceration, expand the number
of guards, and upgrade the training they received.
The War on Crime was a creature of federalism. Federal appro-
priations for upgrading police, courts, and prisons came embroidered
with a commitment that no usurpation of local authority or discretion
would result. Policing remained decentralized. Even when police killed
unarmed people during unrest, causing public complaint, police were
protected; outrage could be an orchestrated communist plot, the thinking
went, intended to take control over law enforcement by undermining its
autonomy. In this way, the reform effort preserved the petty despotism
of the nightstick and localized tyranny of the police chief that was at
the root of the racial crisis. By insulating police from federal oversight
or control, while also affording them increased resources, particularly
for capital-intensive repressive technologies, the War on Crime allowed
the underlying structure of Jim Crow policing to persist.