Reinventing Collapse

The jails race once showed the Soviets with a decisive lead, thanks to their innovative Gulag program. Under Lenin, and later under Stalin, millions of people were herded into labor camps to provide slave labor for massive construction projects such as the Belomor Canal, which links the Baltic to the North Sea. Over the years, the inmate population was comprised not only of criminals, who were always plentiful, but also of aristocrats associated with the ancient régime who were not fleet enough to emigrate to a new career of driving taxicabs in Berlin, Paris or New York. The inmates also included ethnic minorities such as the Chechens (who found themselves in disfavor after they welcomed the Nazi invaders), soldiers who had surrendered to the enemy instead of dying heroically (surrender was considered a form of desertion), priests and nuns (to rid the country of unscientific “religious superstitions”) and plenty of innocent bystanders, who were swept up by a well-oiled judiciary machine. The arrests often happened in the middle of the night and those arrested simply vanished from society. Their disappearance was studiously ignored and the families of the disappeared were shunned by society. Society was afraid, but since any admission of fear could be misinterpreted as an admission of guilt (of suspecting that the system itself was criminal), even the fear had to remain hidden.

After Stalin’s death, a gradual liberalization took place. Many of those falsely accused and imprisoned were rehabilitated, often posthumously. Thereafter, the ranks of the political prisoners shrank steadily. The appearance of Wikipedia:Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s Wikipedia:The Gulag Archipelago became a watershed event, lifting the veil on a secret parallel universe, with its own language and customs, yet one that was very recognizably Soviet. It could operate in the shadows, but once thrust into the broad light of day it immediately became obvious for what it was: a world-class abomination, on par with the Nazi holocaust.

A popular movement developed, devoted to keeping track of prisoners of conscience and communicating their names to foreign news sources. The resulting external pressure on the Soviet government made it difficult for the judiciary meat grinder to operate normally. The monsters running this system generally did not crave parading their monstrousness before a world audience, and this gradually starved the system of new blood. Near the end, under General Secretary Andropov, there was an attempt to stem the tide by rounding up a few dissidents, who by this time had grown quite bold in their opposition, but it was futile and died along with Andropov when he, as it were, dropped off. And so the Soviet Union gradually fell behind in the jails race. By the time the Soviet Union fell apart, its worst atrocities had started to recede into history. There were no widespread calls for reprisals against those who had committed them, who were by then either retired or dead.

In the end the jails race has been won by the Americans, who are currently holding the world record for the percentage of population held in jail. Here, the judiciary meat grinder relies less on secrecy than on obscurity, gorging itself on the poor and the defenseless, while being careful around the moneyed and the privileged. To mask its naked aggression against its citizens, the United States has traditionally used the fig leafs of constitutional rights and due process. But the ill winds now blowing across the country have wilted this decorative flora, and not a week seems to go by without some new reports of abuses or atrocities.

The American justice system favors the educated, the corporations and the rich, and takes unfair advantage of the uneducated, the private citizen and the poor. It would seem that almost any legal entanglement can be resolved through the judicious application of money, while almost any tussle with the law can result in financial penalties and even imprisonment for those who are forced to rely on public defenders. In essence, any sufficiently complex system of laws is inherently unjust, favoring those few who have the resources to grapple with its extreme complexity. This is clearly the case in the United States where, in civil disputes, those with more money can almost always prevail over those with less, simply by threatening to sue.

Many people believe that a criminal is someone who commits a criminal act. This is not true, at least not in the American system of justice. Here, a criminal is someone who has been accused of committing a criminal act, tried for it and found guilty. Whether or not that person has in fact committed the act is immaterial: witnesses may lie, evidence can be fabricated, juries can be manipulated. On the other hand, a person who has committed a criminal act but has not been tried for it, or has been tried and exonerated, is not a criminal, and for anyone to call him a criminal is libelous.

It therefore follows that, within the American justice system, committing a crime and getting away with it is substantially identical to not committing a crime at all. Wealthy clients have lawyers who are constantly testing and, whenever possible, expanding the bounds of legality. Corporations have entire armies of lawyers and can almost always win against individuals. Furthermore, corporations use their political influence to promote the use of binding arbitration, which favors them, as the way to resolve disputes.

The U.S. is by no means unique in jailing or executing innocents and in neglecting to punish the guilty. But while in other countries such injustices can be put down to corruption, oppression or other problems with the justice system, in the U.S. they are designed into the justice system itself. This state of affairs makes it hopelessly naive for anyone to confuse legality with morality, ethics or justice. You should always behave in a legal manner, but this will not necessarily save you from going to jail. In what manner you choose to behave legally is between you and your conscience, God or lawyer, if you happen to have one, and may or may not have anything to do with obeying laws. Legality is a property of the justice system, while justice is an ancient virtue. This distinction is lost on very few people: most people possess a sense of justice and, separate from it, an understanding of what is legal and what they can get away with.

The U.S. legal system, as it stands, offers a fine luxury model, but its budget model is manifestly unsafe. It is good for those who can afford it and bad for those who cannot. In recent years, appalling numbers of those awaiting execution have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing. This amounts to an attempted murder rate high enough to condemn the entire criminal justice system that is responsible for it and, at the very least, ban everyone involved in it from further public service. But nothing of the sort is likely to happen, since most of the victims are poor and are therefore of no consequence to the larger system.

As ever-increasing numbers of people find themselves lapsing into poverty, they will also find that they cannot pay what it takes to secure a good legal outcome for themselves. They will start to see the system not as one of justice but as a tool of oppression, and will learn to avoid it rather than look to it for help. As oppression becomes the norm, at some point the pretense to be serving justice will be dispensed with in favor of a much simpler, efficient, streamlined system of social control, perhaps one based on martial law. To some extent, this shift has already occurred. America now has secret jails, indefinite detention, secret tribunals, Soviet-style show trials, torture of prisoners, family detention for those who happen to cross U.S.-controlled territory without the proper papers, and psychiatric imprisonment for both adults and children, where they are subjected to regimens of experimental anti-psychotic drugs.

Those who bemoan the out-of-control American criminal justice system would like to find ways to make it more effective. But perhaps the real problem is that it is too effective, and needs to become much less so. It is obvious that the jails race serves the purposes of the law enforcement class, providing them with employment, status and ample funds. But it bears pointing out that it serves the interests of the criminal class even better. The prison system offers many services to criminals: it allows them to congregate, network and hold seminars on the finer points of criminal technique and new ways to commit bigger and better crimes without getting caught. Furthermore, it gives criminals a periodic sabbatical, making room for two million more criminals than the victim population could otherwise sustain, ensuring that whenever there arises a fruit ful opportunity to commit a crime, an ample supply of well-rested and highly trained specialists is available to make use of it.

The rationale for imprisoning over two million people in the United States, the world’s highest rate of incarceration, is that it deters crime. Sociologists slice and dice crime statistics looking for a correlation between increased rates of incarceration and decreased crime rates. The best they seem to be able to find is a correlation of about 0.25 between an increased rate of incarceration and a decrease in the crime rate. That is, the measurable effect of incarceration levels on crime levels is not significant enough to state that an increase in the former causes a decrease in the latter. More evidence would be needed to declare that the mass incarceration program is in any sense functional. It is sometimes possible to find a stronger correlation between, say, rain dances and rainfall amounts.

While the criminal justice system seems like an effective way to promote crime, it may be even more effective in serving the atavistic desire of the population to see punishment doled out, which in more barbaric times brought crowds to gaze up at the sacrificial altar atop a pyramid, or the scaffold, the stake or the guillotine, and which even today brings a strange glint to the eye of American elected leaders when the subject of capital punishment comes up during political debates. It is in the nature of powerless people to vicariously enjoy the exercise of arbitrary power by others.

Whereas the Nazis had to tattoo identification numbers on their concentration camp victims, Americans now have access to more modern technology, such as implantable radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, biometric and face recognition systems, satellite surveillance, ubiquitous surveillance cameras and globally networked databases. These can theoretically enable the United States to turn much of the planet into a single large Gulag, or at least to overextend itself and collapse while trying.

When this system finally collapses (as they all do), its surviving victims, who have no experience of anything better, will likely perpetuate this culture of abuse at an ever lower and more miserable level. At this point, there is really very little to be done about the American culture of crime, except suffer from it, reaping what has already been sown. The long-term effect of perpetuating an unequal and unjust social order, amplified by a program of mass imprisonment, is to create a vast society of victims.

Dmitry Orlov. Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. ^{Next Excerpt. © 2008 Dmitry Orlov.}