The more guns are out there, the greater the possibility you, an ordinary citizen, might be on the wrong side of one, a certain line of thinking goes. And so the more it makes sense to be armed yourself. Indeed, after every major mass shooting event, just as sure as the cameras flock to the scene and a national debate about gun violence briefly reemerges, gun sales spike. It turns out that wall-to-wall coverage of people being brutally killed by a gun is the best of all advertisements for gun sales.
A few days after twenty people were murdered in the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, I visited a local gun shop run by a former local cop named Mike Wirz. The phone was literally ringing off the hook. “Normally the business increases after things of this nature,” he told me between calls. While this particular mass shooting was the closest to home, it wasn’t the first high-profile mass murder that had happened in the six years since he retired from San Bernardino sheriff’s department and opened his gun shop. The pattern was, he told me, pretty darn consistent. “You see people calling who have never owned a gun in their entire life trying to find out how to purchase a gun, when they can pick it up, when they get one, where they can get training for firearms.”
“What is that about?” I asked him.
“Just fear in general.”
IV
It is more than “fear in general” that maintains the Colony. It is, in fact, a very specific type of fear: white fear.
Despite the fact nonwhite people are disproportionately the victims of crime, the criminal justice system as a whole is disproportionately built on the emotional foundation of white fear. But then, that isn’t surprising. American history is the story of white fear, of the constant violent impulses it produces and the management and ordering of those impulses. White fear keeps the citizens of the Nation wary of the Colony, and fuels their desire to keep it separate.
In fact, I don’t think you can really understand why the Colony was built, how America created the largest prison system in the world, without reckoning with the potency of white fear and its deployment. And to illustrate just how pervasive and powerful it is, it’s worth taking a little time to play a bit of mass incarceration whodunit.
All things being equal, we’d expect more crime to lead to more people in prison, and indeed, in key periods over the last forty years, the rising levels of crime led to large increases in the prison population. But that is far from the whole story.
Scholars of prisons often talk about the “punishment rate,” which is the number of inmates per one thousand reported crimes. It is a useful measure, because it captures how punitive the society is relative to how dangerous it is. Between 1960 and 1980, as the crime rate spiked and the existing system processed the increase, the punishment rate actually fell dramatically. That is, we locked up a relatively small percentage of people compared to the overall number of crimes committed. But starting in 1980, the punishment rate skyrocketed. And then, crucially, even as crime began to fall and then fell sharply in the mid-1990s, the incarceration rate continued to rise. Why did this happen?
Perhaps the most politically fashionable answer at this moment is the War on Drugs. And for good reason: its launch marked a major surge in aggressive, militarized policing. Beginning in the late 1960s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, the federal government expanded its efforts to combat the sale and consumption of illegal drugs. When President Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, more than two hundred drug laws were brought under one statute. In 1973 Nixon created, through an executive order, the Drug Enforcement Administration to enforce the CSA, which would grow from a budget of $75 million and 1,470 agents to a budget of over $2 billion and 5,000 agents. The Reagan administration would later launch an expensive and expansive propaganda effort to curtail drug use under the slogan “Just Say No.” Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, established a White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The number of people in state and federal prisons serving drug sentences increased nearly 1,270 percent, from 24,000 inmates in 1980 to 304,500 in 2014. Years later Nixon aide John Ehrlichman seemed to offer up a smoking gun when he told a reporter:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
The federal War on Drugs went hand in hand with a similar push at the local level. In cities across the country, police departments shifted resources toward drug enforcement. In 1980 the percentage of drug arrests as a proportion of all arrests in Baltimore was 8 percent. In 2003 it went to 39 percent. In Chicago it rose from 5 percent to 28 percent. In New York it grew from 5 percent to 14 percent.
This unprecedented shift in policy has been rife with obvious, violent, and absurd contradictions. There’s strong evidence that white and black people use marijuana at identical rates, and yet black people are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, and in some states, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, they are up to eight times as likely to be arrested.
These glaring disparities and racial injustices have rightly focused tremendous energy on ending drug prohibition, a movement that has had striking political success in the last decade. But the War on Drugs accounts for only about 20 percent of the increase in incarceration.