Schrader
in the end, U.S. police came to see extreme lawfulness—of which they
were the sole arbiter—as the rejoinder to Soviet repressiveness, and a
vastly inflated penal system as the bureaucratic shield against subver-
sives on U.S. streets. Yet, seeing where it has gotten us—and what we
have sacrificed in the process—it is hard not to compare our current
system to “organs of suppression.” The prison-industrial complex of the
present is marked by aggressive and technologically advanced policing,
brutal conditions of incarceration, civic exclusion, and fiscal penalties
that extends far beyond time served. It has metastasized despite crime
declining in the same period. Just as key analysts of the impasse between
the Eastern bloc and the United States found that repression seemed
to persist for its own sake behind the Iron Curtain, Americans might
question the purpose of the contemporary criminal justice system at home.
What made the early Cold War vision of Americanism distinct from
that of totalitarianism was that the Soviet police answered directly to
political leaders, whereas in the United States police had, by midcentury,
mostly thrown off the shackles of the political machine that dictated
their terms of employment. This independence remains important for
democracy. But as crime continues to decline and appropriations for
police continue to grow, the question of democratic control over the
instruments of public safety becomes urgent, for public safety appears
now to be the instrument for the control of democracy. Law enforcement
leaders have become, as Kennan claimed they were in Russia, “masters
of those whom they were designed to serve.”