This issue of Social Justice examines the widening net of incarceration, immigration policing, and drug and crime enforcement as well as the role of an increasingly authoritarian national security state in a globalized 21st-century economy. The phenomenon is transnational in scope, though the contributions here focus mainly on developments in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is the fruition of a conservative program, initiated in the Reagan and Thatcher years, and continues under George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s New Labour. Central to it are lowering the cost of labor, regressive tax cuts, reductions in environmental regulations (especially in the U.S.), gutting affirmative action and welfare benefits, and greatly expanding the military and the criminal justice system. Each country has pushed the world to accept unilateralist, preemptive militarism, most notably with the Bush-Blair intervention in Iraq. Each has been engaged in a prison-building binge, such that the U.S. now has the highest rate of incarceration of any modern democracy and England has become the prison capital of Western Europe. Articles in this issue speak to an integrated system of global workforce management and governance that is increasingly based on restricting civil, political, and human rights.
The issue is 280 pages long.
ISSN: 1043-1578. Published quarterly by Social Justice, P.O. Box 40601, San Francisco, CA 94140. SocialJust@aol.com.
