How "Criminal Justice Reform" Can Deceive Us

The Body Camera and Beyond

Below is the final excerpt of my article The Body Camera: The Language of our Dreams, from the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation. Today’s snippet is perhaps the most important broader point: how do powerful institutions use “reform” to manipulate us? By asking answering this question, we can develop a better sense of what kinds of reforms (big and small) to support and when.

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No offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behavior. Murder kills only the individual—and, after all, what is an individual . . . We can make a new one with the greatest ease—as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at society itself.

            - Aldous Huxley^[1]

The presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition of underdevelopment. Any diagnosis of underdevelopment in Africa will reveal not just low per capita income and protein deficiencies, but also the gentlemen who dance in Abidjan, Accra, and Kinshasa when music is played in Paris, London, and New York.

            - Walter Rodney^[2]

The conversation about body cameras in the news media since 2014 fabricates a police bureaucracy interested in becoming less violent and less secretive. This is not just distraction, it is deception. What makes it deceptive? It misleads people about the true causes of most police violence and the true goals of the punishment bureaucracy while convincing people of good will to support the wrong solutions presented to the wrong problems. A statement by a politician calling for body cameras is perceived as a laudable call for change rather than a cynical attempt to increase profit and control.

This deception requires that politicians and bureaucrats frame any proposed solution as “progressive” and supported by independent-seeming “experts” and other validators with ostensible credibility, and not simply as coming from the bad actors themselves. And it is for this reason that the family members of a victim of police homicide will be asked by politicians and media producers to speak in any and every public forum if they demand more expenditures for police body cameras or training as a response to their loved one’s killing. The same applies to other people with marginalized identities who are so often featured in campaign stump speeches or cherry-picked for news reports. On the contrary, a victim’s family who calls for disarming police or reducing the police budget to fund local libraries where kids like their loved one can gather for afterschool programs and health screenings will be largely ignored.

The selective curation of true facts in service of misleading assertions is the essence of the best propaganda.^[3] Few would have trusted that body cameras were the solution to police violence if the only groups advocating for them were the people who sold them and the police who wanted them.

In his seminal study of propaganda, Jacques Ellul explained that some element of truth is a crucial component of successful domestic propaganda in both liberal democracies and authoritarian societies. Propaganda relies on at least some true facts or on facts that are difficult for a population to disprove through their own observations. In most circumstances, propaganda that denies easily verifiable facts will not be successful. But effective propaganda focuses on interpretations of facts—for example, describing the intentions of leaders. One of the key elements of the discourse on body cameras is the pervasive theme that they are being genuinely offered to fix police violence.

Government officials who portray their calls for body cameras as arising from a genuine desire for change exploit two common propaganda strategies. First, they peddle a core deception about the intentions of our institutions: that the punishment bureaucracy’s main goals are safety, equality, democratic control, and overall human flourishing. Second, they evade questions regarding who created and promoted body cameras, how selling the technology benefits those interested, and the real reasons why the cameras were developed.

Basing calls for reform on a deception about the function of the institution in need of reform is a propaganda tactic used to address a wide range of systemic injustices. It is actually a counterinsurgency tactic borrowed from colonial pacification techniques. A key strategy used by colonial invaders and profiteers was to secure the endorsement of a small group of local, native allies or to trade on the reputation of international missionaries and non-profit groups to assure well-meaning people that they had the best intentions, and that the things that were happening that were inconsistent with their ostensible intentions were being observed, regulated, and reformed by people who cared.^[4] Peter Gelderloos has explained this feedback loop between colonial violence and the way that local and international validators with credibility determine for the public which forms of reform or resistance seem acceptable or out of bounds:

Not so many people would trust Stratfor, Shell Oil, or the US military’s Africa Command telling us that Ijaw and Ogoni people fighting for their homelands are evil terrorists who deserve to be shot down. It is the very NGOs who evince a concern for human rights that are crucial to this counterinsurgency operation . . . ^[5]

These concepts, therefore, are not unique to the U.S. punishment bureaucracy. As James Ferguson has shown in one of the seminal academic studies of the issue, decades of discourse about “reforming” the bureaucracy of international development follows a similar pattern.^[6] Observers acknowledge the continuous failures of international government and non-profit aid to end poverty, make the world meaningfully more equal, or prevent ecological catastrophe. But it is essential to the interests who benefit from the global system of extraction—and concomitant militarization of borders to protect the beneficiaries of that extraction (i.e., the upper classes in Western countries and a small coterie of their local agents in the Global South)—that people engaged in “development” be seen as meaningfully and even rigorously working to fix the problems of poor countries at all times.^[7]

Through this process, the complex and inevitable pursuit of global profit extraction becomes depoliticized. Such a problem becomes merely “technical,” one that can be overcome with smarter bureaucratic reforms, more data analysts, more organizational consultants, and more conferences with more panels in more (Western owned) hotels as opposed to basic problems with global power relationships. As Ferguson explains through analogy to the punishment bureaucracy:

In “development,” as in criminology, the “problems” and calls for reform are necessary to the functioning of the machine. Pointing out errors and suggesting improvements is an integral part of the process of justifying and legitimating “Development” interventions. Such an activity may indeed have some beneficial or mitigating effects, but it does not change the fundamental character of those interventions.^[8]

As Ferguson suggests, all of these operations are at their most effective when any particular “reform” could have some “beneficial or mitigating effects.”^[9] For example, throughout the 20^th century, many well-meaning people have been seduced by promises of better educational programs, more nutritious food, and more expensive medical care in prisons. To borrow Professor Ferguson’s phrase, who could object to these reforms? In the same way, it is undeniable that body cameras do, at least in rare circumstances, offer the public a potential way of documenting police violence. We would know something more about what happened to Michael Brown if the police officer who shot him was wearing a camera. The truth of this observation makes body cameras as a proposed reform seductive, and it provides a way for well-meaning experts to promote them in good conscience without violating their own professional norms and private morality.

This is the seduction of “reforms” that increase the power of bureaucracy. But it is only by realizing that we are being deliberately asked to provide the wrong answers to the wrong questions that we can escape its cycle. Who could object to better medical care in prison? Perhaps someone who understands that this medical care could be provided outside prison at lower cost with better results—and that there would be less need for it given that prison is so unhealthy that it reduces the life expectancy of a person by two years for every year they are confined.^[10] There are more people dying more deaths and more people per capita exposed to more horrific conditions in U.S. prisons than when Eugene Debs and many others urgently sounded the alarm about prison conditions 100 years ago.^[11] Who could object to better food in prisons? Perhaps someone who understands that a confined person may prefer to eat virtually any meal while sitting around their mother’s dining room table with everyone who loves them in the world. Who could object to Darren Wilson wearing a body camera? Perhaps someone who would prefer a world in which an armed government bureaucrat whose department is funded on ticket revenue from Black people is not patrolling Canfield Drive at noon on August 9, 2014, to a world in which we have a video showing the moment when that government bureaucrat shot and killed an 18-year-old Black child.

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^[1] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 168 (HarperCollins Pub., 1998).

^[2] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 33 (2018).

^[3] See generally Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1973) (studying the features of the most effective government and corporate propaganda and concluding that the most effective propaganda will be based on true facts).

^[4] Peter Gelderloos, The Solutions are Already Here 38-87 (2022).

^[5] Id. at 86.

^[6] Ferguson, supra note 242, at 279-88.

^[7] See generally id.

^[8] Id. at 285.

^[9] Id.

^[10] Emily Widra, Incarceration Shortens Life Expectancy, Prison Pol’y Initiative (June 26, 2017, 2:48 PM), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/06/26/life_expectancy/ [https://perma.cc/L9LD-2P8P].

^[11] See generally Eugene Debs, Walls and Bars (1927) (describing the author’s experience in prison and arguing for prison abolition rather than reformation).