Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis.

• Author: Aaron, Craig

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis by Christian Parenti Verso. 290 pages. $25.00.

A battalion of police officers surrounds a house in the "badlands." Decked out in ski masks, camouflage, body armor, and combat boots, they train their submachine guns and grenades on the front door and windows. With lights flashing, a chopper whirring overhead, and German shepherds barking, they wait anxiously for the signal to attack. Is this Robocop? Enemy of the State? Try again: It's a routine night in Fresno, California.

This scene, taken from Christian Parenti's compelling new book, Lockdown America, offers a sneak preview of the emerging American police state. The show of force is standard operating procedure for

Fresno's Violent Crime Suppression Unit, the local SWAT team, which patrols with a vengeance seven nights a week, knocking down doors and collaring "bad guys" at gunpoint. As one cop says, "It's war."

"Paramilitary policing--that is, enforcement using the equipment, training, rhetoric, and group tactics of war--is on the rise nationwide," Parenti writes, with SWAT team units quadrupling between 1980 and 1995. From Albuquerque, New Mexico, to New Britain, Connecticut, police are loading up on military hardware and laying siege to ghettos and border towns.

"If police are soldiers instead of civil servants, and their task is destruction and conquest, then it follows that the civilian community will be the enemy," Parenti warns.

While there has been no shortage of books in recent years on the failures of the American criminal justice system, what separates Parenti's from the others are his gripping descriptions of gang sweeps, border raids, and jailhouse violence. He rides along with SWAT teams and the Border Patrol, providing vivid details of the technological advancement and methodical violence of these operations. His excellent on-the-ground reporting is paired with a radical--but rarely raving--class analysis of the police and prison crisis. He argues that the criminal justice system serves to contain the millions cast into poverty by the insatiable quest for corporate profits.

The build-up began in the late 1960s when--in reaction to the era's social upheaval, particularly the violent inner-city riots-politicians increasingly turned to law-and-order rhetoric and thinly veiled racial scapegoating for votes. This political hype spawned the drug war--"the Trojan horse for deeper federal involvement in policing"--and...