58: The Police State

Introduction: Policing Our Lives, Policing the World: The U.S. Expands Its Role

Megan Shaw Prelinger, Joel Schalit
This issue was originally conceived as a forum to address the myriad manifestations of enforcement activities, backed by threat of force, that surround our everyday lives.

The New Drug Thugs: Old White Guys

Mike Males
The biggest irony of today's prison debate is that while authorities exploited public and lawmakers' fear of youth crime to build more prisons, the people filling new prisons by the hundreds of thousands are middle-aged.

Home of the Brave

Michael A. Pipkin
Imagine a killer "disease" that stalks innocent people, strikes at will with little to no warning or regard for human life, and seeks to silence, debilitate, or destroy anyone attempting to survive it.

The Failure of Counter-Surveillance as Mass Activity

Rick Prelinger
In the physical and human landscape where we live, sparsely settled zones coexist with noisy, crowded spaces.

Involuntary Commitment

Alicia Curtis
In any troubled relationship between the powerful and the less powerful, like the relationship between a repressive totalitarian government and a dissident citizen, or between parents and a gay teenager, or between husband and wife in a patriarchal society, the language and ideas of psychiatry and mental health practice are open to abuse as a form of social control.

Fear Itself: Tanforan and Public Memory

Martha Bridegam
When your country has been attacked by a distant enemy, you want to do something about it. So you look for something to do, even if it's likely to be useless.

Obedience is Freedom: On the Existing American Police State

Scott Schaffer
With 280 million people in the US it would be impossible for one organization or group of agents to ensure that everyone obeyed the rules, so we're taught to police our own actions instead, making it easier to ensure our conformity. Conformity requires obedience, and obedience is the essence of the police state.

When Neo-Fascists Storm Into Government (A Context for Genoa)

Edmund Zimmerman
At the recent G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, proponents of some old-fashioned ideologies were busy refining their enduring methods for dealing with perceived threats to the social order.

How to Read September 11th

Joel Schalit
Bush's careful choice of free market phraseology betrays the extent to which Islam has come to occupy the same zone of threat in American consciousness that communism once did.

Global Pardon: Pax Romana, Pax Americana, and Kol Nidre

Gad Horowitz
On July 13, 1995, U.S. News and World Report announced that the world is entering an "era of collective forgiveness."