given the historical relationship between unemployment and incarceration, one would have expected rates of the latter during the Great Depression to climb higher than they did...conversely, one would not have expected the rates to skyrocket in the period referred to above given comparatively moderate unemployment at the time...
during the 1930s, the more money spent on relief, the lower the incarceration rates...in the 1970s, a major reorganization and expansion of criminal justice took place - federal spending increased 2/3rds, research & development centers/programs were established to service a growing 'industry', technical developments created for warfare/space program were applied to problems of domestic 'order', police were reorganized along 'military-corporate' lines emphasizing weapons/communications/information systems, specialization, and 'command and control' managerial techniques... money has poured into a system that focuses on working-class crime and has created model of 'justice' that combines militarized policing, security systems, and punitive prisons...
signaling new heights in the sophistication of repression, this development pointed to the profound realignment that would occur in US politics...to continue to cede this terrain to capital and the right smacks of the pragmatism that C. Wright Mills called 'crackpot realism'...Michael Hoover