If every police officer in Ferguson were African-American, it probably wouldn’t change much of anything.

Apart from a brief shining moment directly following Emancipation, when former slaves began to gain a political foothold in the country, the postbellum history of race in America, from Jim Crow to George Zimmerman, has been about pre-criminalizing African-Americans, painting them as a class of predators not to be trusted. It’s never been about keeping the peace but about maintaining the power.

There are racist police officers, of course, but even a race-blind force in every U.S. town and city wouldn’t have made things fair because fair was never on the docket. An example: Studies have shown that white and black Americans smoke marijuana at similar levels yet the latter are arrested three times more often. That enters a large group of people into a system they never should have been a part of. In this way, we endeavor to create a criminal class.

The Broken Windows Theory allowed for petty offenses (or alleged ones) to be amplified into breaches of great importance–these measures will stop violent crime!–with the police reimagined as hectoring (if heavily armed) meter maids, the citizens serving as beleaguered piggy banks. Add in profiling and you have an endlessly harassed race of people, and sooner or later these confrontations lead to tragedy.

The micromanaging of civil life has turned us all into potential suspects and African-Americans into arrests waiting to happen. The difference between a stroll and a perp walk has never been narrower.

The opening of David Graeber’s Gawker essay “Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life“:

The Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department has scandalized the nation, and justly so. But the department’s institutional racism, while shocking, isn’t the report’s most striking revelation.

More damning is this: in a major American city, the criminal justice system perceives a large part of that city’s population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson’s citizens had outstanding warrants.

Many will try to write off this pattern of economic exploitation as some kind of strange anomaly. In fact, it’s anything but. What the racism of Ferguson’s criminal justice system produced is simply a nightmarish caricature of something that is beginning to happen on every level of American life; something which is beginning to transform our most basic sense of who we are, and how we—or most of us, anyway—relate to the central institutions of our society, in ways that are genuinely disastrous.

The DOJ’s report has made us all familiar with the details: the constant pressure on police to issue as many citations as possible for minor infractions (such as parking or seat-belt violations) and the equal pressure on the courts to make the fines as high as possible; the arcane court rules apparently designed to be almost impossible to follow (the court’s own web page contained incorrect information); the way citizens who had never been found guilty—indeed, never even been accused—of an actual crime were rounded up, jailed, threatened with “indefinite” incarceration in fetid cells, risking disease and serious injury, until their destitute families could assemble hundreds if not thousands of dollars in fines, fees, and penalties to pay their jailers.

As a result of such practices, over three quarters of the population had warrants out for the arrest at any given time. The entire population was criminalized.•