What are policemen and prisons for?

In 2012 a colleague collected me from the Miami airport Hilton for a tour of college campuses to promote my textbook, Gateways to Art. As we walked to his car, we noticed a large number of police vehicles in the parking lot, all marked as police dog vans. My colleague, David, commented that he had loved working with police dogs. Until recently, he had been a drugs cop in Chicago. A transition from police officer to book salesman is quite unusual, so, as we drove around Miami and Palm Beach, we talked about his law enforcement career.

David told me that he resigned from the police force because he concluded that anti-drug policing was essentially corrupt. When his force was ready for a big bust, they would notify a local TV station, so that they were filmed for maximum publicity value to secure continued support from politicians and the public. Apparently, the police force earned a share of the value of each bust, which enabled them to buy more arms, helicopters etc. In short, if the drugs business disappeared the police business would suffer.

Earlier this week a friend sent me a brief article by a Mexican historian and commentator Héctor Aguilar Camín. The text referred to a forthcoming study of human rights abuses committed by the Mexican police. The writer argues that the US government, as part of the “War on Drugs”, established programmes to train Mexican police officers. Increasingly, the federal government, supported by police unions, has provided funding to equip American officers with quasi-military capabilities (and quasi-military mindsets). The training programmes for Mexican officers, apparently, were based on the same assumptions.

I don’t think it would be reasonable to blame US training methods for the many problems of Mexican policing, but this report reminded me of a book that my son Chris gave me a few years ago, by a remarkably fearless journalist, Anabel Hernández. The argument of her book is that until the mid-1980s the trade in drugs to the US market was run by Colombian cartels, for whom the Mexican crime gangs were humble intermediaries. In 1985, the Reagan administration wanted to arm insurgent groups (the so-called Contras) in Nicaragua in order to depose the revolutionary Sandinista government. The problem was that the US government was legally prohibited from spending federal funds for this purpose. The solution was to sell arms covertly to the Khomeini government in Iran, and to use the proceeds to buy arms for the Contras.

There remained one difficulty to overcome: transport. The Mexican drug gangs were the solution, since they had planes used to transport Colombian drugs that could be repurposed to ship arms to Nicaragua without any apparent US involvement. In return, the Americans told the Mexicans, they could bring back from Nicaragua whatever they liked. And, of course, they liked drugs and their enormous profit margins. Thus began the rise of the Mexican drug cartels.

Then, of course, the Mexican cartels used their profits to arm themselves. A friend told me a story of an exchange of views during an election campaign in New Jersey in 1982. A proposed ban of assault weapons in the state was a much-debated issue at that time. My friend was asked whether he supported the ban, to which he replied “Of course”. “Why of course?”. My friend responded that military weapons should not be in the hands of the public. The other man stated his view that the constitutional freedom to bear arms had automatically expanded in scope as new kinds of armaments were developed. When my friend asked if, therefore, he would advocate the freedom to bear tactical nuclear weapons, the man replied “Of course”. Now, it is not easy to acquire firearms legally in Mexico, but it is very simple indeed for American suppliers of firearms to sell them to drug cartel representatives who can then smuggle them into Mexico. As a result, the cartels now outgun not just the police but the Mexican army. When I lived in Mexico in the 1970s police officers were armed with revolvers. The only time I saw more potent weapons was in the hands of a bank security guard, or of soldiers searching buses for suspected guerrillas in the mountains. Today, a common sight is a pickup truck in the back of which stand behind shields police officers equipped like soldiers. Indeed, the federal police was recently brought under the command of the army.

The illegal trade in arms from the USA to Mexico is no secret. From 2006-2011, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in Arizona carried out a sting operation to crack down on such sales. The idea was to trace the firearms along the distribution channels to senior cartel figures. Unfortunately, the ATF lost track of the guns. Some were used to murder a US Border Patrol Officer, others were eventually seized by the Mexican army. Some simply disappeared into the hands of Mexican criminals. So, when Mr Trump vows to defend the freedom to bear arms, he is also vowing to continue to arm the very Mexican criminals from whom claims to protect Americans.

Add a good dose of corruption in most Mexican police forces, and you have a potent recipe for police abuse of human rights. In a society with a theoretical, but, in practice, very weak rule of law, the police can usually act with impunity. While in the USA and the UK protests have been at a national level and have focused on racial injustice in policing, in Mexico protests have been directed at local abuses.

For example, on 4 May a young bricklayer, Giovanni López, was arrested by police officers in Guadalajara for reasons that remain unclear. His family searched for him in various police stations without success, and the next day discovered that his dead body was in a city hospital. He died from cranial trauma and had several other wounds, including a gunshot to his leg. On 9 June, Alexander, a 16-year old American citizen visiting family in a small town in the state of Oaxaca, was shot dead by municipal police officers while riding his motorbike after buying soft drinks from a petrol station. In both cases, police officers have been arrested, but past incidents suggest that punishment may or may not ensue.

In sum, those directly responsible for the abuses that Mexicans suffer are individual police officers, but punishing “bad apples” alone will not solve the problem. An end to impunity would be a major step towards reform, but the forces that have shaped Mexican policing are far broader, and extend beyond the country’s borders. The bad apple theory does not fully explain police abuses, any more than it does in the USA.  

Oppression and cruelty is not confined to the policing element of the US justice system. I recall a visit to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. I met a photography professor who told me about his project photographing prisoners in the nearby Bolivar County Regional Correction Facility. He told me that the prison had provided quite a good education programme for its prisoners. However, a Republican politician had worked out that the per capita amount spent educating the prisoners exceeded the per capita sum spent to educate children in the state’s schools. One response would have been to increase the school budget, but the Republican gentleman preferred a much more law and order solution: abolish the prison’s education programme.

California’s higher education system has a justifiably excellent reputation. A professor once told me that there was a time when spending on the state’s universities exceeded the spend on prisons. However, a variety of law-and-order initiatives expanded the prison population to the point that spending on prisons exceeded the budget of state universities. In recent years, the state has introduced initiatives that have reduced the number of incarcerated prisoners somewhat. Nevertheless, in 2019-2020 the prison budget was $13.3 billion, while the state university system budgeted $7.3 billion. The political and business interests that drove the expansion of the prison population have been far more powerful than the educational lobby. California’s prisons have been run by private companies. In 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill to end the involvement of private companies in prisons by 2028. Perhaps reducing prisoner numbers and ending private management of prisons will be beneficial, but results will take time.

A relentless focus on eliminating racism (a problem that will not be quickly fixed) and abusive behaviour is essential, but whether reform will include the wider interests and forces that determine how the USA is policed is another matter. Similar forces operate in the UK. One of our friends was employed in a prison to educate school-age prisoners. Her job was difficult because prisoners were often moved for administrative reasons, which disrupted their education. A private company, Capita, won the contract to manage the prison and told our friend that her role and salary would be reduced to that of a teaching assistant. She left and the prison lost an excellent teacher.