A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

black citizens, leaders, clergy, activists, and politicians in predominantly black neighborhoods recognized a crisis, and yes, they were demanding solutions. But the solutions they were demanding were full spectrum—more police and more jobs—while the solutions they got were entirely punitive.

black people asked for social investment and got SWAT teams, asked for full employment and got gang units, asked for protection and got “stop and frisk.”

White fear absorbed and appropriated black fear.

Thanks to what scholars call “selective hearing,” black fear, combined with white political power, produced a state committed to managing and punishing black and brown subje...

“When we are waiting for our clients to arrive from the county jail in the morning, the deputies, the district attorneys, and the judges refer to our clients as ‘bodies,’ ” Oakland public defender Seth Morris once told me. “ ‘Are the bodies here yet? We have files but no bodies.’ I once asked a deputy to call my client a human being, and I was laughed at.”

When it comes to the ultimate punishment, death, the system makes clear which lives it values: the best predictor of whether someone gets the death penalty is race—not of the perpetrator but of the victim.

White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end.

Through our shared cultural inheritance, Americans convert white fear into policy.

Because white fear is a constant, because it persists even when specific threats have subsided, it functions as a one-way ratchet in constructing the architecture of the Colony. It can build prisons but not knock them down.

In these venues, the political problems that seediness caused and the policy solutions it demanded had nothing to do with the actual people and populations who were causing it: people in need of clothing, housing, drug treatment, and mental health services. They themselves were the problem, and the solution was to do something with them rather than do anything for them.

But American racial history—the nation’s most enduring and violently loaded conflict—lurked even in the municipal disputes of my youth, as the virus of racism infected neighborhood politics and bloomed in tabloid headlines.

Stability is one of the things that, in the minds of those within the Nation, define it, compared to the transience of the Colony.

Here we see one of the earliest articulations of the theoretical distinction between the Colony and the Nation.

It was poor and mostly black. Kelling and Wilson were arguing, unapologetically, that in these precincts of the Colony, order should matter more than law.

“Rights” were something enjoyed by decent folk.

They suggested that police could help a community maintain order, but that the standards for order must come from the community itself.

In this sense, the “broken windows” approach began as a call for what liberals today approvingly call “community policing”—the “community” and the police collaborating to identify problems and protect citizens.

The problem with “community policing,” then and now, is that so often the cops being called to enforce community norms are not part of the community.

The goal of this system is not to figure out if the person in question committed a crime but to sort city residents according to their obedience and orderliness.

This system of order maintenance, in which unruly citizens are marked and sorted, in which seediness is kept at bay, so that the Nation can stay pristine and inviting, confers tremendous benefits, wealth, and comfort on some and widespread harassment and misery on others.

You can’t help but notice that the official real estate listing calls Marcus Garvey Park by its original, decidedly less black-separatist name, Mount Morris Park.

The signature achievement of the reign of order is that a person can live in the Nation and never know what hardship may befall the Colony.

All the while, deep poverty, routine lethal violence, and epidemic levels of trauma persist in the Colony. There citizens find themselves pushed further toward the geographical margins, squeezed both by the punishing arithmetic of poverty and by the ceaseless surveillance of a police force tasked with corralling that poverty and keeping order in places the Nation has not yet annexed.

Because people of color, particularly poor black city residents, were the most common victims of crime, and because they were the greatest beneficiaries of crime’s decline, the argument goes, all of the increased enforcement was actually on their behalf.

THE DROP IN CRIME in the United States from 1992 through today is one of the most stunning statistical and sociological mysteries of our time.

But the best research seems to indicate that while the initial increase in incarceration did have an effect on crime reduction in the 1980s, the two million more put behind bars thereafter did nothing to further reduce crime. And the states that have moved most swiftly to reduce prison populations haven’t seen a crime bump.

America is a wrathful land. Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers. We like to heap marks of shame upon them, to watch them groan and writhe beneath their sins, as far back as the scarlet letter and the stocks. We like, in short, to punish.

And we are, of course, the only rich democracy that hands out the ultimate punishment: death.

Part of what sets Europe apart in this respect is the degree to which its criminal justice system operates free from democratic input. The United States is more or less the only advanced democracy that elects its prosecutors.

in looking at the development of the continental system versus the U.S. system, he comes to a surprising and compelling conclusion: that it is the strong anti-aristocratic strain in the American legal tradition that has made our punishment system so remorseless and harsh.

the system of punishment that developed found equality in a race to the bottom: everyone got punished harshly as an expression of a core belief that no man stands above another.

In Europe, as it democratized over time, the move was to push everyone into the category once reserved for the nobles: the sphere of humane treatment was widened until it included everyone.

These countries are the scene of a leveling-up egalitarianism—an egalitarianism whose aim is to raise every member of society up in social status.” The United States, which never had a separate, formal aristocratic form of justice and punishment, one embedded in deference to the perpetrator’s core humanity, has, instead, been subject to the opposite push:

Where nineteenth-century continental Europeans slowly began to generalize high-status treatment, nineteenth-century Americans moved strongly to abolish high-status treatment.

The last several decades have seen a concerted movement on behalf of victims to carve out a larger role in the criminal justice system, instituting victim impact statements, for instance. In many ways this has been salutary, as the trauma of violence for victims and survivors is profound and long-lasting, and the criminal justice system, to this day, still fails to adequately support them.

a crime discourse that focuses on the evil of the acts has ruinous political consequences, especially for any attempt to create a system that values the humanity of the people who commit crimes.

Any criminal justice system imposes costs not just on the perpetrators of crime but on their friends, family, and loved ones. Those costs are particularly acute for children who suffer trauma from absent parental figures.

In a social context in which voters and the state understand criminals to disproportionately come from certain areas and segments of society, the vast majority of people can safely ignore those costs, because they are borne by those out of view. A politician can say “get tough on crime,” and the majority of voters won’t worry that it’s their neighbor’s kid who’s going to grow up without a father because he’s doing ten years. Crime in America is associated with the lower classes, the ghetto, the others, the Colony.

what would the politics of crime look like in a place where people worried not only about victimization but also about the costs of overly punitive policing and prosecution? What kind of justice system would exist in a setting in which each member of society were actually valued as a full human with tremendous potential, even if he or she committed a crime, or hurt someone, or broke the community’s norms and were held accountable? What would it look like to have a system where, behind the veil of ignorance, every member had an equal chance to end up as perpetrator or victim? What would a criminal justice syste...

The modern American bourgeoisie has its own institutionalized version of the Rumspringa, which suspends the highly routinized and proscribed behavioral rules of affluent American life so that young adults can purge the wildness from their systems before becoming orderly, boring, and high-achieving professionals.

sexism and dismissal of the importance of victimization . . . infects the criminal justice system, and see the way that overreaction in the criminal justice system cannot be the model. Calls for mandatory minimums in the campus context are misguided . . . because of what it means for the ways we think about the possibilities of redemption for all humans. It doesn’t mean people don’t do bad things. It means people do bad things and can change and can become better.

That, says Gaynes, is more or less all we really do offer crime victims. Not healing, or restitution, or accountability—just punishment for the offender. Because as all we know, the American justice system is about wrath and punishment. All we can conceive of with the system we have is maybe, if everything works, to wrench the privileged down into the pit, to lay low the citizens of the Nation and make them crawl beneath the yoke of the Colony.

This instinct to level down—Circulate the mugshot! Censure the judge! Get tough on crime for privileged white boys!—rather than level up is a core feature of American justice. We readily accept punitiveness as the given, as the way we as a democratic polity express ourselves. Our temptation is to seek equality through uniform application of the state’s punishing power.

Naomi Murakawa details in The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,

The ratio of the incarceration rates for black people to white people in Louisiana is 4 to 1. In Mississippi it’s 3 to 1. In Wisconsin it’s 12 to 1; in New Jersey 12.2 to 1.

Stop judging, and give them the tools they need to get better. Think of any other context where this is the guiding ethos of our crime policy. Imagine a person commits a crime, perhaps even a violent crime, against you. Is this person a human being? A neighbor, a fellow citizen? What do we as a society owe that person? Could he be someone you know and love in the throes of addiction? Or is he a member of a group you’ll never encounter again? What dignity is due the perpetrator and the potential perpetrator? Do you and the perpetrator belong to the same country? This is the question before us. The question we’ve answered wrongly for too long.

Subtly but unmistakably we have moved the object of our concern from crime to criminals, from acts to essences. It is the criminal, the bad guy, the irredeemable thug, around whom we craft our policy. We must keep him at bay. He is not a man who committed a bad act. He is not a full soul who did something horrible. He is the crime. He is a criminal. He is a subject of the Colony. Citizens can be full human beings; citizens can get second chances; citizens can be forgiven. Subjects are unforgivable.

what would it mean if the Nation and the Colony were joined, if the borders erased, and the humanity—the full, outrageous, maddening humanity—of every single human citizen were recognized and embodied in our society? Or even just to start, in our policing?

much of the cause of our current state of affairs lies in our tasking police with preserving order rather than with ensuring safety. Order is a slippery thing: it’s in the eyes of the beholder and the judgments of the powerful. Safety is clearer: it’s freedom from violence and intrusion.

when politicians talk about crime and law and order, they are not making policy arguments about how best to preserve public safety, but rather conjuring an image of the world that is a ceaseless battle between Our People (White People) and Those Who Would Seek to Take What’s Ours (immigrant gangs, black criminals, various dark marauders). That the language of crime is really the language of white fear, which is an engine of American politics, a propulsive force constantly seeking an outlet.