Schraderwith a generation of U.S. police reformers who had watched corrupt
political machines in U.S. cities be dismantled. Police reformers thus
demanded that police answer primarily to their own professional
guidelines, free from political interference. In this way, the negative
model of the authoritarian state was misleading: it may have prevented
centralized dictatorial rule, but it left police power largely insulated.
And so Cold War U.S. empire abroad found its replica in the War
on Crime at home: to break the political syzygy of an authoritarian
state apparatus in Sacramento or Saigon, in Wichita or Tokyo, police
needed to be technically adept, flush with cash, and insulated from
political machinations.
This cohered in the mid-1960s as rioting in U.S. cities and towns
caught police underprepared, and officers beat and killed participants
and bystanders alike. High-ranking officials in Washington, D.C., and
many state capitals turned to the reform experts most familiar with riot
control and street protest: public safety advisors. The 1968 anticrime
bill thus followed a familiar Cold War model: it funded new federally
coordinated riot-control training programs—training that mimicked
what the Office of Public Safety urged overseas—and it authorized the
purchase of huge supplies of tear gas as well as other technical instru-
ments, from radios to helicopters to tanks.
A revised approach to riot control was but one result of the War on
Crime. With a bureaucratic frame of mind that had its closest analog
in the military-industrial complex, the “prison-industrial complex” was
born out of its zeal for spending on the penal sector. Strategic plan-
ning of the best way to utilize those resources fell second. Moreover,
by leaning so heavily on Cold War rationales, elected officials and
law enforcement leaders started treating criminals as interchangeable
with political subversives, thus eschewing rehabilitation efforts, as
Micol Seigel has argued. If criminal propensity was similar to the