Plus ça change, plus le même chose.

This is a linked set of 3 studies looking at "tough" policies implemented in the 1970s, aimed at drugs, welfare, and incarceration. In all 3 cases, politicians based their decision on morality--not on the needs of the people affected, but on the perceptions of them by other people. Government defined who was deserving, and of what.

The arguments used then are identical to those used now, and the public falls for them again. ( )

In Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann writes, “When confronted with a series of political challenges and economic upheavals that crested in the 1970s, broad coalitions of policymakers repudiated the declared commitment to rehabilitating marginalized populations, particularly those living in racially segregated, deindustrializing urban cores. In its place, an increasingly dominant group of policymakers championed ‘getting tough’: an emphasis on strategies of punishment, surveillance, coercion, sanctions, quarantine, or containment linked with limitations on rights, freedom, and access to economic opportunity and state benefits. These policies actively degraded the social, economic, and political status of already stigmatized categories of Americans” (pg. 2). She continues, “Tough policy won out because its proponents offered solutions to vexing governing problems that were culturally resonant, politically salable, and feasible within the configuration of state institutions and civic culture” (pg. 5). Kohler-Hausmann argues, “Tough politics helped shape common sense about American citizenship and the state” (pg. 12).

Kohler-Hausmann writes of increasing media attention to drug use, “Commentators attributed the era’s crime rates to surging heroin use and claimed that addicts transformed once welcoming neighborhoods into dangerous, forbidding spaces. Simultaneously, many were alarmed that heroin no longer seemed confined to poor communities of color” (pg. 30). She continues, “The architects of New York’s drug policy were engaged in a (largely futile) effort to sort the various participants in the drug economy into distinct categories: between victims and perpetrators, addicts and pushers, or the redeemable and incorrigible” (pg. 33-34). In unpacking the terms, she writes, “‘Pusher’ referred to someone who sold drugs at the street level and was typically imagined to be an African American or Latino man. There was considerable slippage between this term and ‘addict,’ since many habitual users, particularly with little income, sold and traded drugs to sustain their habit” (pg. 34). Kohler-Hausmann continues, “The fervor over drug use cannot be teased apart from the anxiety produced by the mass social movements of the time… Politicians’ claims that drugs unraveled the country’s social fabric were politically resonant in part because they helped give meaning to the turmoil throughout society. Drugs, therefore, were inextricably tangled up with anxiety about young people’s political rebellion” (pg. 61). Turning to treatment models using methadone, Kohler-Hausmann writes, “Although methadone treatment showed some promise of reducing crime rates, the visible, salient presence of addicts in neighborhoods all over New York exacerbated hostility toward heroin users and government treatment efforts” (pg. 73). This, coupled with racist policies, doomed a large-scale treatment model. Kohler-Hausmann writes, “The treatment programs floundered against limitations of political will, state capacity, and internal tensions as much as the stubborn persistence of drug use and crime” (pg. 78).

Looking at the crackdown, Kohler-Hausmann writes, “Rockefeller’s ‘tough’ proposal was an attempt to resolve the problems that had arisen from the caustic interaction between the state’s ambitious political promises to control drugs and crime and the political, programmatic, and institutional complications of doing so through individualized treatment programs” (pg. 80). She continues, “New York State, after leading the nation in drug-treatment programs, largely retreated from the field, leaving private and nonprofit programs to offer addiction services with more limited government support. Decreases in funding and the repudiation of therapeutic objectives did not imply the complete disappearance of drug treatment on the ground. Courts continued to intertwine mandated treatment with penal sanctions in their regulation of those convicted of drug crimes” (pg. 113).

Discussing the change in the 1970s criminal justice system, Kohler-Hausmann writes, “Similar to the logic undergirding tough welfare and drug policy, the need for tough sentencing rested upon and reified intertwined claims of state and individual failure. It was predicated upon the idea that most criminals were governable only through punishment and incapacitation and state effort to rehabilitate them were futile and counterproductive. This vision of incorrigible deviants rested upon, mobilized, and reinstated older caricatures of violent, uncontrollable African American men” (pg. 210). She continues, “The calls for tough crime-control strategies by elites developed dialogically with discourse among the general populace frustrated with expanding the rights of prisoners and criminal suspects. Instead of pursing convicts’ integration, lawmakers forwarded legislation that degraded their civil status by making punishment more severe and intensifying prisoners’ rhetorical, physical, and legal segregation from ‘good’ citizens” (pg. 250). Kohler-Hausmann summarizes critiques of therapeutic sentencing policy, writing, “The sentiment that the state no longer served the right people was particularly resonant in an era marked by government interventions on behalf of women, people of color, and other traditionally marginalized groups… In this language, people asserted rights to state resources and protections by virtue of their position as taxpaying, law-abiding, productive workers. Positioning claims to full citizenship protections in this way negated the entitlement of other groups” (pg. 255).

Kohler-Hausmann’s work will largely appeal to social historians and those focused on the policy changes of the 1970s that defined our current political climate. Well-researched with ample statistics, she carefully parses the legal debates and how various groups weighed in, balancing traditional authorities and those they sought to denigrate in order to craft a fuller narrative. ( )