The Empire and Inequality Report, no. 11

Source: ZNet
Author(s): Paul Street
Date: February 17, 2007

Reflecting the difficulties it is experiencing finding young working-class folks willing to sacrifice lives and limbs in the bloody and criminal occupation of Iraq, the United States Army has granted an increasing number of so-called “moral waivers” to enlistees with official criminal backgrounds.

According to a front page story in last Wednesday’s New York Times, the number of such waivers given to Army recruits expanded 65 percent, from less than 5,000 in 2003 to more than 8,000 in 2006. Most of the waivers are for “serious misdemeanors” but the number offered for felony convictions has risen from 8 to 11 percent (1).

“THOSE INDIVIDUALS”

According to University of California professor Aaron Belkin, “more than 125,000 service members with criminal histories have joined the military in the last three years.” Belkin worries that “you have a sizeable population that has been incarcerated and is not used to the same cultural norms as everybody else. The chances that one of those individuals is going to commit an atrocity or disobey an order is higher” (2).

According to Beth Asch, an economist at the military-industrial RAND Corporation, the increasing number of recruits with criminal backgrounds is “something that should be treated with concern.”

This sentiment is echoed by John D. Hutson, dean and president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center and former judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. “If you are recruiting somebody who has demonstrated some sort of antisocial behavior and then you are putting a gun in their hands,” Hutson told Times reporter Lizette Alvarez, “you have to be awfully careful about what you are doing.”

THE MARK OF A CRIMINAL RECORD

“It is not uncommon for young criminal offenders to turn to the military,” notes Alvarez (who should have said “ex-offenders), “because their records typically narrow their job opportunities” (3).

Indeed, mass incarceration helps drive its own spectacular expansion in the U.S. It does partly this by significantly damaging the employment and earnings prospects of ex-prisoners, most of whom were already severely disadvantaged in a post-industrial labor market that offers remarkably few opportunities for lesser skilled male workers of color.

Reflecting the fact that roughly 80 percent of large- and medium-sized employers now do criminal background checks on job applicants (4), the best social scientific research shows that the chance of securing legitimate employment decreases significantly with prison time and that the nation’s 3 million ex-prisoners suffer a lifetime “wage penalty” (earnings reduction) of 10 to 30 percent. Ex-prisoners on average experience no real wage increases in their twenties and thirties, when young men who have never been incarcerated tend to experience rapid wage-growth. Prison time serves to channel individuals away from skilled occupations and into job sectors characterized by low wages, limited job stability, and fewer opportunities for advancement. It disrupts the career-building process with prior work experience contributing little to future opportunities. Ex-offenders are left to start back at square one with respect to gaining a foothold in a particular occupations(5).The unsurprising results include the return of most ex-prisoners to prison in a viciously circular game of inmate recycling that turns millions of inner city residents into raw materials for the expansion of a mostly rural prison industry (6).

Since the nation’s prisoner, felon, ex-prisoner, and ex-felon population is very disproportionately black, moreover, the nation’s veritable explosion of mass incarceration and criminal-marking has significantly undermined America’s ability to pursue racial justice and act on the cherished goals of equal opportunity and black equality that were articulated by Martin Luther king, Jr. and the civil rights movement more than a generation ago. In 2002, 38 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, just more than 10 percent of black males between the ages of 25 and 29 were incarcerated in the U.S., compared to 1.2 percent of white men and 2.4 Latino men of the same age. Under existing criminal justice trends reflecting a dramatic increase in racially disparate mass imprisonment beginning in the middle 1970s, one in three black males will be sent to state or federal prison at some point in their lives compared to one in six Latino males and one in seventeen white males. Blacks are 12 percent of the nation’s population but comprise nearly half of the nation’s 1.4 million prisoners and of the nation’s 3 million former prisoners. As The Economist noted in an article titled “The Stigma That Never Fades,” an astonishing one in three black adult males carried the lifelong burden of a felony record by 2002 (7).

Thanks to its racially disparate labor market consequences, the “prison-industrial- complex” has become a significant form of racially regressive state intervention in the US labor market(8).

This is an important but relatively unknown aspect of the domestic societal racism and socioeconomic regression that help fuel Empire and Inequality at home and abroad (9).

“ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR”: THE POWER "ELITE’S" “MORAL WAIVER”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a longstanding critic of hiring and other forms of discrimination against people with criminal records and criminal histories. I’ve written repeatedly and at length about the racially and socioeconomically disparate and regressive nature of mass incarceration and felony marking (10).

At the same time, I do not think you need a criminal record or prison history to exhibit relevant “antisocial behavior” or to be at risk of committing atrocities and breaking laws. The most significant transgressions against social and ecological health (“antisocial behavior”) are routinely committed by people who are generally protected from criminal marking by privileges of class and race – the directors of the nation’s powerful and inherently socio-pathological corporations, who are legally required to privilege bottom-line investor interests (profit) above and beyond the common good of the broader society and polity (11).

I also observe that the biggest and most relevant atrocities are ordered and this most significantly committed by the generally felony-free power “elite.” Important examples include Dick Cheney and George W. Bush’s decisions to launch the monumentally criminal occupation of Iraq – an open violation of international rules forbidding wars of aggression – and to conduct this invasion and their larger so-called “war on terror” without regard to standard international prohibitions of torture and the killing and maiming of civilians. These are great transgressions that far exceed and create the essential context for war crimes committed by on-the- ground GIs with or without “criminal backgrounds.” GIs are in Iraq to do wrong in the first place only because of the broader atrocity ordered by Cheney and Bush, with predictably (in fact widely predicted) terrible consequences for Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers.

As good middle-class Americans fret over the criminal backgrounds of their baby-sitters and gardeners, they might want to reflect on the need to rescind the “moral waiver” granted to top national economic and political authorities.

“EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO HIMSELF”

Still, I wonder if Alvarez, Belkin, Asch and Hutson would like to apply their concern about handing military power to people with criminal backgrounds to the fact that Bush “was arrested in 1972 for possessing cocaine.” As journalist Mark Hatfield noted in the afterword to his 2001 book Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President, Bush’s father (a U.S. Congressman in 1972) “worked out an agreement with the [presiding] judge, a fellow Republican and elected official, to allow George W. to perform community service at Project P.U.L.L. in exchange for having the entire record regarding the incident expunged.” As one former Yale classmate and close friend of Bush told Hatfield, “George W. was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1972 but due to his father’s connections, the entire record was expunged by a state judge whom the elder Bush helped get elected” (12)

The story was verified by another top Bush source who added the following in 1999:

“You know what makes me sick about all this shit? It’s Bush’s hypocrisy. Cocaine use is illegal, but as Governor of Texas, he’s toughened penalties for people convicted of selling or possessing less than a gram of coke (a crime previously punished by probation), Ok’d the housing of 16-year-olds in adult correctional facilities and slashed funding for inmate substance-abuse programs. Texas currently spend over $1.45 million a day incarcerating young people on drug offenses…I’ve known George for several years and he has never accepted youth and irresponsibility as legitimate excuses for illegal behavior – except when it comes to himself” (13)

Exactly. Whatever one thinks about the criminalization of narcotics (I’m opposed), Bush II committed a technical crime that would have saddled him with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record (and perhaps a prison history) if he had not been a Fortunate Son of the white ruling-class. To make matters worse, he used the political career granted to him by elevated family connections to toughen drug laws and expand racially disparate and drug related youth and mass incarceration, helping feed the spectacular expansion of the U.S. prison-industrial complex.

THEFT AS “LIBERATION”

For what it’s worth, the historically erased 1972 coke bust wasn’t the first time that Daddy Bush’s connections spared Dubya from the indignities and disabilities of a criminal background. “In 1966 while serving as fraternity president [at Yale],” Hatfield reported, “Junior had his first brush with the law, involving the theft of a holiday decoration so he could hang it on the door of his frat house. ‘We evidently made a lot of noise,’ George said, recalling how the police responded to the theft scene, ‘because the local gendarmes came and said, “What are you doing.” I said, “We are liberating a Christmas tree wreath. Don’t you understand the Delta Kappa Epsilon house is short of a Christmas wreath?” They didn’t understand.’ The police,” Hatfield noted, “booked him on a misdemeanor but later dropped it after the intervention of one of his father’s friends” (14).

The 1966 incident was quite minor, but it carries a certain haunting feel in light of subsequent events. It would not be the last time that Bush would confuse theft with “liberation.”

"DON'T KILL ME:" BUSH’S GUBERNATORIAL RECORD

Of course, one doesn’t have to focus only on technically illegal activity in Bush’s reckless youth to suggest that tens of millions of Americans might have wanted to look a bit more deeply into Bush II’s background (and that of his creepy family) before voting for him in 2000 and 2004. Dubya’s tendency towards “antisocial behavior” from the top down is evident in his Texas gubernatorial record, which included a pro-concealed handgun bill, an especially punitive model of public-assistance elimination (“welfare reform”), a strong and self-interested predilection for corporate welfare, a distinctive hostility to labor and environmental concerns, and a special, record-setting taste for incarcerating and executing the state’s disproportionately black and Latino poor (15).

In September of 1999, Bush revealed something of his true character when he mocked what the evangelical Christian Karla Fay Tucker said when asked, just before her execution, “what would you say to Governor Bush?” : “ ‘ Please don’t kill me’” (16). Bush sneered as he derisively repeated Tucker’s dying comment. Tucker was electrocuted on Bush’s controversial order, over the (admittedly hypocritical) protest of Pat Robertson. By this time, Bush was well into his alleged conversion to evangelical Christianity

By the time of his 2004 re-“election” (17), of course, Bush had committed numerous impeachable offenses. He had brazenly violated international law and guaranteed himself an honored in the War Criminals’ Hall of Fame.

It’s nice that many of his former supporters have turned against him – Bush’s popularity numbers have fallen towards the 1974 Nixon zone. But it’s a little late, under the rules of the U.S electoral system, for U.S. citizens to be waking up to Bush’s vile nature. Barring impeachment and removal from office, which he richly deserves – the legal case is very strong (18) – boy king George still has nearly two more years to wreak havoc. The consequences could be truly disastrous at home and abroad. A little more Bush background checking might have been useful.

WANTED: SOLDIERS WILLING TO DISOBEY CRIMINAL ORDERS

Considering the inherently illegal and terrorist nature of the administration’s war on Iraq , finally, one has to wonder about professor Belkin’s concern that soldiers with criminal records might “disobey orders” and “commit atrocities.” Maybe we need more troops with a history of defying authority on the ground in Iraq . Some orders need to be disobeyed. There is legal as well moral basis for U.S. soldiers refusing to participate in the sort of illegal and atrocious actions they have been commanded to execute within and beyond Iraq .

Veteran radical historian, journalist, and activist Paul Street () is an anti-centrist political commentator located in Iowa City, IA, U.S. Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) and The Empire and Inequality Report.* Street’s next book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007).

Notes

1. Lizette Alvarez, “Army Giving More Waivers in Recruiting,” New York Times, 14 February 2007, A1. Alvarez defines a felony to mean an offense carrying at least one year of prison time.

2. Alvarez, “Army Giving More Waivers,” A20.

3. Alvarez, A20.

4. Adam Liptak, “Expunged Criminal Records Live to Tell Tales,” New York Times, 17 October, 2006, p. A1.

5. Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, “Incarceration And Racial Inequality In Men’s Employment,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 54 (October, 2000): 3-16; Bruce Western, Jeffrey Kling, and David Weiman, “The Labor Market Consequences of Incarceration,” Crime and Delinquency, 47 (July 2001): 410-27; Bruce Western, “The Impact of Incarceration on Earnings,” paper delivered at the 2000 annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (London); Devah Pager, “Criminal Careers: the Consequences of Incarceration for Occupational Attainment,” paper delivered at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, 2001.

6. Paul Street, “Color Bind: Prisons and the New American Racism, “in Tera Herivel and Paul Wright eds., Prison Nation: the Warehousing of America’s Poor (London: Routledge, 2002), 30-40; Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2002), available online at www.cul-chicago.org, click on “Research Reports Available Online;” Street, “Reverse Reparations? Race, Place, and the Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration,” in Tera Herivel and Paul Wright, eds., Profiteers of Prison (New York, NY: Seven Stories, 2007); Street, “Race, Place, and the Perils of Prisonomics,” Z Magazine, volume 18 (July/August, 2005); Street, “‘Our Brothers Keeper’: The Thoroughly Dismal Science of Prison Economics,” Opportunity (July 2002): 48-52; Street, “Starve the Racist Prison Beast, ZNet Magazine (November

8, 2003), available online at www.zmag.org/ content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID= 43&ItemID=4471, reprinted by Black Commentator, Issue 65 (November 20, 2003), available online at www.blackcommentator.com

7. “The Stigma That Never Fades,” The Economist (August 10, 2002); Marc Mauer, The Race to Incarcerate (New York, NY: New Press, 1999); Erick Eckholm, “Plight Deepens for Black Males, Studies Warn,” New York Times, 20 March 20016, A1; Paul Street The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League. 2002), pp. 4-8; Travis, But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry (2005), p.164.

8. Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, “How Unregulated is the US Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution,” American Journal of Sociology, 104 (January 1999): 1030-1060; Western and Pettit, “Incarceration and Racial Inequality;” Pager, “Criminal Careers.” According to Western, the American penal system has itself become a significant form of racially regressive state intervention in the US labor market. He recently concluded that “the penal system has a pervasive influence on the life chances of disadvantaged minorities. Although typically the preserve of criminology,” Western observes, “incarceration appears to shape aspects of inequality that are of traditional interest to stratification researchers. It seems likely that status attainment, school-to-work transitions, and family structure are all influenced, perhaps even routinely, by the penal system in the current period of high incarceration. From this perspective, the usual list of institutional influences on social stratification – schools, the families, and social policy – should be expanded to consider the coercive redistribution of life chances through incarceration.”

9. See Paul Street , “Empire Abroad, Prisons At Home: Dark Connections,” Z Magazine (January 2003): 41-46

10. Street, “Color Bind;” Street, The Vicious Circle; Street, “Reverse Reparations?;” Street, “Race, Place, and the Perils of Prisonomics;” Street, “‘Our Brothers Keeper’;” Street, “Starve the Racist Prison Beast;”

11. Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Penguin Canada , 2004). See Paul Street , ““Boeing Behavior: The Biggest Scandal of Corporate America is What Happens on its Best Behavior,” ZNet Magazine (July 23, 2002), read at www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10 &ItemID=2135. Corporate pathology imposes a large number of great and interrelated costs on society: rampant pollution and ecological crisis, chronic overwork, widespread economic insecurity, endemic political corruption, devastating disinvestment and job loss, the crippling atrophy of positive government social functions, the mass misinformation, diversion and consumer addiction of the populace, radical upward distribution of wealth and power, mass obesity, the collapse of local independent business sectors, an addictive societal attachment to militarism and war, mass over-reliance on pharmaceuticals and processed foods and commodities and corporate services in general, etc.

12. Mark Hatfield, Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President ( New York : Soft Skull Press, 2002), pp. 306-318.

13. Hatfield, Fortunate Son, p. 318

14. Hatfield, pp. 33-34.

15. Hatfield, pp. 143-268; Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Shrub: the Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush ( New York , NY : Vintage, 2000). On Bush’s fascinating and incredibly vile family background, loaded with hyper-aristocratic and military-industrial connections, see Stephen Lendeman, “The End of the Bush Dynasty,” ZNet Magazine, December 5, 2006, read at www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11552

16. Marc Crispin Miller, The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder ( New York , NY : W.W. Norton, 2002), p, 121.

17. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?,” June 1, 2006, available online at http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/61/20209.

18. Elizabeth De La Vega, The United States v, George W. Bush et al. ( New York , NY : Seven Stories, 2006).