Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade

NCIC connected all fifty-five FBI field offices with ninety-four other law enforcement agencies. It contained 4.9 million total entries and four hundred thousand criminal histories. It was accessed one hundred twenty thousand times daily.⁷⁹ That same year, the Nixon administration merged two smaller federal antidrug offices into the DEA and, as part of this new agency, created one of the first fusion centers, the aforementioned El-Paso Intelligence Center.

      While the direction of US politics remained contested and unclear in the immediate post-Watergate years, the 1980 election and the “Reagan Revolution” finally and decisively resolved the economic and political crises of the 1960s and 1970s in the favor of capital. Although the Carter administration made important moves that helped consolidate the workfare-carceral state (namely the appointment of Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve chairman and the subsequent increase in interest rates to fight inflation, the “Volcker shock”), the Reagan administration made the new political order irreversible in the near term. In 1981, air traffic controllers were striking in support of bold demands, including a thirty-two-hour, four-day work week. Reagan declared the strike a national security risk and ordered air traffic controllers back to work. When the vast majority refused, the president signed an executive order, firing eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers and banning them from federal service.⁸⁰

      The dramatic confrontation signaled the beginning of a new compact with labor. In 1980, no union would agree to a contract with pay freezes or cuts. By 1982, it was common practice, included in nearly half of new contracts. In subsequent years, the Reagan administration oversaw the liberalization of labor law (the legalization of homework and authorization of contingent labor within government), cuts to social services (significant reductions to welfare, urban development action grants, education block grants, among other programs), and massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Reagan’s policies further empowered capital, which increasingly left the United States to exploit labor overseas. Between 1980 and 1985, some 2.3 million manufacturing jobs disappeared for good. The army of surplus populations swelled.⁸¹

      The Reagan administration’s efforts to crush labor and empower capital were necessarily complemented by an acceleration of the drug war and the real beginnings of mass incarceration as a strategy to warehouse growing numbers of surplus workers.⁸² Passed in 1984 with significant Democratic support, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act was the centerpiece of Reagan’s renewed drug war. The most significant federal crime bill since the Johnson administration, the act created preventative pretrial detention for federal defendants, established mandatory minimum sentences, put in place the US Sentencing Commission to formulate harsh sentencing guidelines for federal courts, reinstated the federal death penalty, eliminated federal parole, and expanded the government’s power to seize assets from convicted or accused drug dealers. Passed at the height of the moral panic with the “crack boom,” the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act created the infamous sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. It created stark racial disparities in incarceration. In 1980, black Americans, just 12 percent of the population, accounted for 23 percent of drug arrests. By 1990, there had been no significant demographic changes but now 40 percent of those arrested on drug charges were black. Critics denounced the policy as “apartheid sentencing.” Although the drug war had clear racial bias, it also devoured people of all races. In 1985, about eight hundred thousand people were arrested on drug charges. By 1989, the annual number of drug arrests rose to 1.4 million. The prison population swelled from approximately five hundred thousand to nearly one million.⁸³

      The escalation of the drug war and increasing incarceration rate further consolidated the new workfare regime. Not simply the punitive regulation of surplus populations, Reagan’s drug war also reshaped the institutional structure of the state. In 1981, the Reagan administration replaced the centralized LEAA with a network of crime control boards and committees. Unlike the LEAA, which emphasized uniform application of policies, this new arrangement prioritized structural competitiveness. The idea was to decentralize decision-making, empower local authorities rather than federal policy makers, and, as such, insert a market ethos into the administrative state. Although the Reagan administration disbanded the LEAA, money continued to flow from the federal government and down the administrative hierarchy to state and local law enforcement. Now, the FBI, DEA, and the drug interdiction programs of the Defense Department—respectively enriched with $96 million, $14 million, and $33 million dollar budget increases—took over LEAA’s role as “the grantmaking arm of the national law enforcement program.”⁸⁴