Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
in some states quite dramatically. Yet there has not been a clear return to the rehabilitative ethos of “penal-welfarism” that defined the criminal legal system for much of the twentieth century.9 Instead, contemporary changes center on a series of “alternatives” to incarceration that are not true alternatives but rather supplements to imprisonment. The recent round of reforms has reduced the incarceration of “non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual offenders” by expanding—and often privatizing—prisoner reentry and community supervision, establishing specialized courts that defer prosecution pending successful completion of court-supervised programs or simply reducing sentences to a year or less and shifting the burden of incarceration down to county jails.10
As prison populations continue to contract, mass supervision becomes both more visible and important. The result, however, is not a simple and straightforward substitution of incarceration for community supervision. Indeed, the use of probation and parole has not increased in every state with decreasing prison populations.11 The intelligence capacities of state and local law enforcement, however, have expanded across the country. Today, there are DHS-recognized fusion centers in every state of the Union as well as Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rico; Guam; and the US Virgin Islands. The National Network of Fusion Centers, moreover, is just the newest addition in a series of police intelligence centers and other information-sharing arrangements that date back to the early 1970s. In this context, mass supervision, an outgrowth and extension of mass incarceration, helps maintain the stark—and starkly racialized—inequalities that characterize the United States. Through intensive surveillance, intelligence gathering, and policing, fusion centers help transform entire communities into open-air prisons. Although this concern is absent in the literature on fusion centers, this reality confronted me in stark fashion the first time I entered the ROIC.
• • •
One of the first interviews I conducted at the ROIC was with an officer who managed the fusion center’s computer systems while also overseeing the intelligence analysts working on violent crime. He was portly, jovial, and a bit eccentric. While many of his coworkers kept Spartan cubicles, his was decorated with posters and knickknacks, including a High Times magazine–style centerfold of a lush marijuana plant—I did not comment on that adornment—and a parody “Greetings from Camden” postcard, which mocked the city’s economic decline and outsized crime rate. During our interview, he showed me large social network analyses of drug networks. These sprawling link charts mapped out a web of relations: lines of authority in the distribution network extending outward to the kinship and friendship relationships and property (businesses, automobiles, guns) of the individuals in the chart. He was going back and forth between two charts, one that concerned a Camden-based network and another in nearby Bridgeton. While explaining how analysts made these charts and what value these intelligence products provided for investigators, he got them mixed up.
“I think that’s the Camden one,” I said.
“Oh yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t really matter, though. Look at them. They’re all the same element.” I looked at the black and brown faces on the charts and then back to him. I must have given him an expression of shock or dismay because he immediately started backpedaling. He laughed awkwardly. “After seventeen years on this job, you see a lot and you get cynical. It all starts to look the same. A lot of the cities here have serious problems, and Camden’s the worst.”12
The detective sergeant was right. Camden does have serious problems, and while these problems are more pronounced than most cities, they are not uncommon. Camden’s decline is an extreme example of larger processes: the deindustrialization of the United States, the rollback of the welfare state, and the increasing use of the criminal legal system to contain complex social problems. It took half a century for the industrial center that Walt Whitman once called the “city invincible” to become a poster—or parody postcard?—child of intractable urban decay. In the mid-twentieth century, Camden was home to 365 different industries that employed fifty-one thousand people—industries such as shipbuilding (the once famous Camden Shipyards of New York Shipbuilding), electronics manufacturing (RCA Victor), and food processing (Campbell Soup Company, which is still headquartered in the city but only employs a fifth of its former workforce of fifty-six hundred).13 By the early 1980s, the city had lost nearly thirty-two thousand jobs, including twenty-eight thousand seven hundred in manufacturing.14 Population collapse accompanied the economic woes, with a 40 percent decrease from its 1950 peak of one hundred twenty-five thousand. As the population declined, its complexion darkened. By the 2010 census, this beleaguered city of seventy-seven thousand was 48 percent black and 47 percent Hispanic. Over a third of residents lived below the poverty line. The median household income was a mere $26,000—compared to over $50,000 nationally and $71,000 in New Jersey.15
As the legal economy abandoned Camden, the drug trade filled the vacuum. In 2012, there were an estimated 175 open-air drug markets, or one drug market for every 440 residents.16 Of course, these markets did not supply the locals. “The suburbanites are generally the lifeblood to our open air drug market problem,” Camden’s police chief told a reporter.17 Several police officers I interviewed claimed the heroin trade in the Northeast US begins in Camden. “Camden has some of the purest heroin in the country,” one administrator told me. “That means we’re likely at the starting point, or one of the starting points for the heroin trade.” He went on: “It’s unbelievable who you’ll see. I’ve seen enough professionals in BMWs in the worst parts of Camden looking for heroin that I wouldn’t be surprised to see my own grandmother show up.”18 The Camden-based drug trade brings in an estimated $250 million yearly and, according to the same trooper, an individual “drug set” or a distribution team can easily make $20,000 in a day moving narcotics.19 This clandestine and criminalized trade is necessarily regulated by violence. In 2012, the crime rate topped out at 2,566 violent crimes for every 100,000 people, the highest in the country and 560 percent higher than the national average.20
New Jersey responded to Camden’s problems with market-based reforms in all policy areas, including policing. In recent decades, the city’s tax base collapsed under the combined pressures of deindustrialization and white flight. In 2002, New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey (D, 2002–2004) signed the Municipal Recovery and Economic Recovery Act, which eliminated t he authority of Camden’s mayor and city council in exchange for $150 million in city rehabilitation projects. Camden County added $50 million and assumed control of the city’s parks, 911 emergency call system, and sewage. Governor Jon Corzine (D, 2006–2010) extended the government takeover until 2010. At the time, it was the largest municipal takeover in US history.21 The city manager envisioned a recovery based on public-private partnerships, including more development in the city’s downtown waterfront: Campbell’s Field, a minor league ballpark; Susquehanna Bank Center, a concert venue; and some luxury housing with views of Philadelphia. The New Jersey State Aquarium, the centerpiece of an earlier urban renewal project, was expanded, renovated, and privatized. Now called the Adventure Aquarium, the state funded the project to the tune of $25 million.22
The state takeover failed. In 2010, the state restored municipal government in Camden, but the city still lacked the tax base to fund basic services. In the 2013 fiscal year, the city had an operating budget of $151 million, but collected just $39 million in taxes.23 The median income and crime rates had not changed significantly. The state committed public resources for private development, but the expected private investment did not follow. The takeover and redevelopment created a small middle-class enclave between Rutgers-Camden and the waterfront, but redevelopment was weakly felt elsewhere in the city. Five million dollars in public funds did go to The Camden Home Improvement Program, which provided money to remodel and restore homes anywhere in the city, but this investment was far less than the $24 million demanded during protests organized by the Camden Churches Organized for People in 2005. Two hundred homes were remodeled, and five hundred more remained on the waiting list when the program’s budget ran out.24 As Howard Gillette, the chief chronicler of the city’s travails, explains, “Recovery came to mean, as it has elsewhere in the county, an investment in physical structures over a commitment to people in need.”25
Upon assuming office, New