commondreams | In Gaza, we see yet another example of the law’s injustice. At least
250 Palestinians were arrested during Israel’s ground operation in Gaza,
many of whom were charged with “belonging to an illegal
organization”—which, according to the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights,
generally refers to Palestinian political parties, especially but not
only Hamas. Others are undergoing interrogation and have been denied
access to a lawyer.
At least 15 of those arrested and later released were held under the
“Unlawful Combatants Law.” Providing even less protection than
administrative detention orders, this law allows the detention of Gazans
for an unlimited period of time without charge or trial, in violation
of international human rights norms. Enacted by the Israeli Knesset in
2002, the Unlawful Combatants Law embodies some of the many practices
shared between Israel and the United States, which codified its own
legal definition of “unlawful combatants” who could be indefinitely
detained under the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The death and destruction inflicted on the Palestinian people in recent weeks, part of what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has referred to as Israel’s policy of “incremental genocide,” is one reminder that incarceration and more overt forms of violence are not mutually exclusive.
The Israeli government also employs a variety of other tools to
repress and dispossess the Palestinian population. These include forced evictions, land grabs and other forms of ethnic cleansing, the denial of the right of return of Palestinian refugees, significant monetary and military support for settlements, and apartheid policies
and practices—including the “community-shattering” separation wall and
the system of checkpoints and permits restricting the free movement of
Palestinians.
Mass Incarceration in the Land of the Free
On the other side of the globe, the burgeoning U.S. prison population now comprises a quarter of all the prisoners in the world.
Close to 70 percent of all people in U.S. incarceration, moreover, are people of color. As Adam Gopnik observed in The New Yorker,
“there are more black men in the grip of the [U.S.] criminal-justice
system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery” on
the eve of the civil war.
Over the past three decades, the U.S. prison population has
quadrupled. This is in large part a result of the “war on drugs.” Since
the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was passed, incarceration for nonviolent
offenses dramatically increased—disproportionately impacting poor black
people. “Relegated to a second-class status”
by their experience with prison, notes legal scholar Michelle
Alexander, an inordinate number of black men have once again become
“disenfranchised,” losing the right to vote, to serve on juries, and to
be free of legal discrimination in regards to employment, education, and
access to public services.
This exponential increase in incarceration has accompanied the
unprecedented rise in the detention of undocumented immigrants as well
as the growth of the prison-industrial complex,
demonstrating the salience of the political economy of incarceration.
These developments are rooted in the socio-economic changes of the
post-industrial era and the retrenchment of social safety net programs
that occurred in the United States from the 1980s forward, paralleled by
the spread of the neoliberal economic paradigm to the Global South. As the scholar and social justice activist Angela Davis has highlighted,
prisons were central to the government’s strategy of addressing the
structural violence “produced by the deindustrialization, lack of jobs,”
and “lack of education” that has characterized this era, impacting poor
people of color in particular.
