Gilmore: from Military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism
In the article Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism, the author discuss there are racial, social and political issues that are increasing the jail population rather than moral ones. Since the biggest prison construction in California in 1982, the percentage of inmates in prison rose severely with the highest percentages of African Americans and latinos, and even 7% of women of all races formed part of it. In general this people were the poor class. However she argues that this has a lot to do with globalisation and the increament of economy through prison’s expansions. First, this was created to maintain the social order even though that was not really the issue, other aspects such as unemployment and inflation during the recession were.
One explanation for the growing number of people in jail was the drug epidemic. Primary, the common use of drugs in the late 1970s and 1980s influenced this expansion where people of color were more decimated. Not only drug dealing but also gang violence which go hand and hand connected provoked the imprisonment of several people even though according to the BJS illegal drugs were used by all kinds of people and had actually declined in the mid 1970s. Another factor was unemployment which pushed people to commit property crimes when looking for new sources of income. Furthermore the percentage of people in prison for this reason doubled significantly since 1982 even though property crime had declined and pushed down crime rate as well. The change in new kind of sentences making them longer and adding more punishable behavior were the causes of the growth in prison.
Anti-black racism and profit generating were the major causes of prison explanations the second one tied to the restructuring of the state. In the mid-sixties radical activism began to appear, including all kinds of people. A prominent one was The Black Power Movement since African Americans were the ones facing racism. They fought for equality. However, Los Angeles Watts riots and black or other people protested in the street to condemn economic exploitation, police brutality and social injustice. Different people joined together against Us capitalism and Euro-American racism.
There was not only a social crisis but also a capital disorder or profit crisis, and the population in prison are supposed to fix. The global recession was so detrimental for US, first because the dollar devaluated impeding capitalists the power of buying, it affected everybody specially big corporations and factories that eliminated jobs leaving many people unemployed. There were no strategic plans to employ the state’s capacities and absorb the national surpluses of finance capital, land or labour (179).
