The Road to Trump Was Paved With Mass Incarceration

When you create a police state, you end up with a police state

Image by Xamreb, CC

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“How did we get to this horrible place?” is a question a lot of people are trying to answer right now. Most of the focus is on trying to figure out what exactly went wrong in the 2024 election. There’s also a good bit of analysis of the longer term trajectory of the Republican party.

It’s also worth thinking about factors outside of electoral politics, though. And one of those factors, per Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver’s Arresting Citizenship, might be the criminal justice system.

Lerman and Weaver published their book in 2014, so it doesn’t directly address Trump or Trumpism. It does, however, make the case that the expanding carceral system—or as they call it, the carceral state,” is profoundly undemocratic.” More they argue that while the main people who suffer from the authoritarianism of the carceral state are the disproportionately poor and disproportionately Black people caught in its clutches—the “custodial citizens”—, they also point out that “the offense to democratic citizenship and equality affects us all.” And they offer a prescient warning: “custodial citizens are the canary in the mine, showing us that conditions in the polity are not well.”

I think I’d go further, though. The existence of custodial citizens doesn’t just show that our democracy is weak. The custodial state actively created conditions that weaken democracy.

There are three mechanisms through which mass incarceration and mass policing has hollowed out our polity.

First, the carceral state actively disenfranchises large numbers of people who have an interest in voting against fascism.

Second, the carceral state empowers political actors and institutions who have an interest in supporting fascism.

Finally, the carceral state normalizes fascism, strengthening the constituency for authoritarianism and making people comfortable with unfreedom.

I’ll take each in turn.

The carceral state and disenfranchisement

Lerman and Weaver’s book is primarily concerned with the ways in which the carceral state disenfranchises large numbers of people in Black and poor communities. This disenfranchisement is in part by statue; in many states, people convicted of felonies are robbed of their right to vote. But Lerman and Weaver argue that the effects of the carceral state on democratic participation is not confined to these legal measures.

Let’s start with those legal measures though. In 2022, 48 states had some bans on voting by people with felony convictions; this affected some 4.4 million people. That number has been declining. But the level of disenfranchisement is still substantial, not least because it’s concentrated among Black people—who have of course been historically disenfranchised—and because it’s concentrate in certain states.

In Alabama and Tennessee, for example, 1 in every 13 adults is disenfranchised because of felony convictions. In Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia, 1 in 10 Black adults cannot vote because of felony convictions.

These numbers are compounded, according to Lerman and Weaver, by the fact that people who come into contact with the criminal justice system tend to become intensely alienated from politics.

As Lerman and Weaver point out, the criminal justice system is very undemocratic.. In marginalized and heavily policed communities, police conduct regular stops of young men for any reason (they are wearing a t-shirt, they are with a group of Black people, they are in an interracial group, they are walking in a high crime area), and there is little recourse. Prosecutors and police have immunity from virtually all accountability. Speaking out against abuses can invite retaliation (police have even been known to retaliate against members of civilian oversite boards).

People’s main interaction with government is through contact with law enforcement, and law enforcement makes it clear, in every contact, that, as one of their interviewees said, the primary job of government was “keeping [people] in line.”

When people’s chief experience of government is police, they understandably begin to see themselves as living in a police state. They do not feel that their voices matter. In many cases, they are in fact afraid to come to the attention of government. Even if they can vote, they may not, because they do not want to make themselves visible or make them targets. They do not want to call their representatives, or participate in civic organizations or political campaigns because they think it will do no good, or because they are actively afraid (as people might be in another authoritarian state, like, say, Russia.)

The table below from the Arresting Citizenship uses empirical data from two different surveys to track how contacts with the criminal justice system affects political participation. Note that just being arrested—ie, before conviction or any possible felon disenfranchisement—causes voting rates to plummet. Even just being questioned can drop voting participation measurably.

Our massive investment in criminal incarceration and policing—some $295 billion—is, then, also a massive investment in undermining democracy. The criminal justice system we have created is sweepingly undemocratic and authoritarian. People who come in contact with it cease to believe in and participate in democracy. Since the most policed people are also often the most marginalized, their alienation ultimately benefits the powerful and wealthy, who no longer need to listen to their voices or take their perspectives even minimally into account.

The carceral state empowers fascist institutions

The same money which goes to terrorize and silence marginalized people is given directly to their silencers—which means police, prison guards, and a law enforcement infrastructure designed for “keeping people in line.”

From 1977 to 2021, state and local police budgets, adjusting for inflation, increased from $47 billion to $135 billion, a jump of189 percent. This boom was driven in large part by post Civil Rights politics and backlash; protestors were portrayed as lawbreakers (initially by LBJ, according to Elizabeth Hinton), and the solution was more and harsher policing, boosted by federal attention and grants.

That boom became to some degree self-sustaining and self-increasing. Once you have created a massive infrastructure for authoritarianism, you have also created a large number of people who have an interest in protecting and expanding that authoritarian infrastructure. When you empower police, police end up with a lot of power.

Much of that power today is expressed through police unions.

Adam Serwer has made the case against police unions—and for seeing them as important in Trump’s rise. He notes that a white racist police union riot against New York mayor David Dinkin was a key milestone in Republican Rudy Giuliani’s campaign. And he explains that Trump adopted the union’s vision of “law and order”.

That vision is one that people on the ground in heavily policed neighborhoods would recognize

every target of police misconduct is a criminal who had it coming, and anyone who objects to such conduct is probably a criminal too and, by implication, a legitimate target of state violence. Due process is a privilege reserved for the righteous—that is, police who might lose their jobs, not the citizens who lose their lives in a chance encounter with law enforcement.

Police unions, which coalesced in the 60s and 70s, have mounted effective political campaigns against basically any kind of oversight or accountability. Police union contracts typically call for disciplinary violations to be erased quickly, sometimes in only six months.One survey found that police killings of civilian increase noticeably after unionization; crime rates don’t go down.

Police unions regularly run ad campaigns against politicians who try to organize any sort of limit on their authority. New York state corrections officers just recently went on an illegal strike, successfully rolling back limits on solitary confinement intended to limit the cruel practice, which human rights organizations consider a form of torture.

The carceral state, then, takes power away from marginalized people who might have an interest in voting against fascism. And it hands that power to agents of the carceral state, who are flush with cash and even more flush with what might be called authoritarian legitimacy.

Politicians have spent decades denouncing (Black and brown) criminals and portraying police as the thin blue line between civilization and anarchy. Police in turn can leverage those decades of fascist propaganda against any politician who tries to reign them in—as well as against marginalized people who might try to register any democratic protest.

To make police central to the state is to create a police state. That is in many respects what the US has done.

Do it to someone else the American way

The carceral state has disenfranchised marginalized people and hyper-franchised the gendarmes. Though it’s harder to quantify, I think it has affected the politics, the expectations, and the democratic experiences of the public more broadly as well.

Again, over the last decades the US has spent billions of dollars and lots of energy explaining to itself that there is a class of people who deserve no rights, and another class who must be freed of all accountability to deal with the first class. This isn’t really new in the US; it’s just that, in the past, the people who deserved no rights were explicitly Black, and those who had to be freed from all accountability in dealing with Black people were whites.

As Lerman and Weaver note, justifications for the carceral system are no longer made on purely racist grounds. Instead, racist outcomes are justified through a narrative of personal responsibility. People who commit criminal acts (or who are suspected of criminal acts, or who live in areas where criminal acts are perpetrated) have removed themselves from the democratic polity. They are dangerous, which is why we need police to be released from all democratic restraint in dealing with them. This is not racial hierarchy, supposedly; it is justice.

What that means is that Americans broadly have acclimatized themselves to the idea that our democracy functions by stripping rights from those who “deserve it.” Massive disproportions of power, and huge lacunae of accountability, are not just an unfortunate but worthy trade off. They are viewed as the bedrock of our Constitution. Freedom isn’t everyone being free; it’s just being sure you’re on the right side of the gulag wall.

You see this logic repeated in interviews with those who voted for Trump and suddenly and unexpectedly have found themselves on the business end of the bars. As USA Today reports about one Trump voter whose fiancée was seized by ICE, “He saw her as a funny, caring, hard-working woman who came legally, not one of the ‘illegals’ who the president he supported promised to deport.”

Some people, those people, over there, the bad ones, don’t deserve rights; some people, over there, the bad ones, need to be harassed, imprisoned, tortured, disappeared away with no recourse, so that our democracy stays strong.

But when people can be harassed, imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared with no recourse, you don’t have a strong democracy. You don’t have a democracy at all. The United States has spent the last half century or so creating the infrastructure and ideology of a police state. It threw more and more people in, until there was hardly anyone outside. And then, in the last election, it voted to close the gates.

All our energy right now is in getting those gates open again. If we manage that, though, we might seriously consider tearing down the walls.