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‘It Can’t Be a Lie’: The Wire as Breaching Experiment

Joshua Page & Joe Soss University of Minnesota

The Politics of HBOs’ The Wire: Everything is Connected (2015), Eds. Shirin Deylami and Jonathan Havercroft. New York: Routledge, Ch.1, pp. 11-40.

The five seasons of The Wire are widely recognized as a landmark event in the history of media efforts to portray life in America’s poor, racially segregated communities. The show was especially momentous for scholars, such as us, who study urban poverty and the various ways authorities work to manage its problems and populations. Here, finally, was a dramatic depiction of the world we knew through our research and tried to convey in our teaching and public engagement. Here, finally, was a nuanced, humane account of the lives and lived realities—of cops and drug dealers and teachers and addicts and students and parents and more—that intersect and shape one another in the most marginalized neighborhoods of our nation’s cities. Here, finally, was a wildly popular, critically acclaimed, nationally televised cry of dissent from the

“thriving cultural industry of fear of the poor, led by such television programs as ‘America’s

Most Wanted’ and ‘Cops.’”1

More even than most documentaries, The Wire offers a realistic depiction of life inside the “hyperghetto,” a social space defined by stark racial segregation, severely diminished jobs and social services, inadequate schools, rampant poverty, open-air drug markets, widespread housing foreclosures, and pervasive depression and dilapidation.2 From the show’s inception,

1 Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) 131-32.

2 Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).

2 this realism has been a central reason for its appeal to scholars in our field. The Wire portrays in vivid detail, not just the social facts of collective life that we study, but also the daily struggles, failures, and, in some cases, successes of people who live and work in the hyperghetto.

Realism, however, is only part of the attraction. Social scientists have cheered The Wire as well for its ability to dramatize how individuals are shaped, in powerful but far from deterministic ways, by the social and institutional environments they inhabit. In the U.S. today, poverty and related “social problems” are all too frequently understood as products of individuals’ bad choices and moral failings.3 The Wire, as Ammol Chaddha and William Julius

Wilson rightly argue, “effectively undermines such views by showing how decisions people make are profoundly influenced by their environment and social circumstances.”4 Crucially, The

Wire does not depict this dynamic in a way that isolates the poor or suggests they are uniquely susceptible to structural forces. It draws police, politicians, union bosses, and journalists into the same frame, showing how individual agency gets shaped and structured across a broad spectrum of positions in the social field.

Characters in the series are not automatons (or “social dupes,” to borrow from Harold

Garfinkel), unwittingly manipulated by institutional forces. They are thinking and feeling individuals who confront and make real choices, however consciously or unconsciously. Some even choose to buck the tide. Throughout the series, however, viewers are forced to confront the far-reaching ways that institutions and social circumstances condition individuals’ decisions. In an American culture overrun with paeans to rugged individualism, The Wire stands out as a rare

3 Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Joe Soss and Sanford Schram, “A Public Transformed? Welfare Reform as Policy Feedback,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 1 (2007): 111–127.

4 Ammol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson, ‘Way Down in the Hole’: Systemic Urban Inequality and The Wire. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2011): 165.

3 and forceful proclamation of the dictum that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.”5

As it situates individuals in this manner, The Wire shines a particularly bright light on the nature and consequences of public policy. Public policy figures centrally in the show as an exercise of authority thoroughly shaped and suffused by power. Policies are used as tools to enrich and deprive; they are invested with alternative cultural meanings by contending groups.

Perhaps above all, policies are revealed as creative forces that can produce and harden social structures, remake organizations, and redefine the institutional conditions of people’s lives.

The choices we make about public policies have profound consequences for individuals, families, groups, and organizations. Across the series, viewers confront this reality in many guises—perhaps most poignantly in Season 4’s exploration of the education system. Without question, however, the policy at the heart of The Wire is the “War on Drugs.”

When it began in the 1970s, the drug war was a set of pronouncements, targets, goals, and techniques. More than four decades later, the policy has produced durable structures that shape law enforcement operations, community life, and government priorities. The journey over these forty-plus years has exhibited many of the dynamics emphasized by social scientists who adopt “policy-centered” and “policy feedback” approaches to the study of politics.6 Tough new drug policies and related changes in the criminal justice field quickly took on a life of their own,

5 The quotation is from Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Along these lines, David Simon, the creator of The Wire, states: “The Wire is making an argument about what institutions bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even—do to individuals” (cited in Penfold-Mounce, Beer, and Burrows 2011: 154).

6 Joe Soss, Jacob S. Hacker and Suzanne Mettler. Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); Jacob S. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Paul Pierson, “Public Policies as Institutions,” ed. I. Shapiro, S. Skowronek, and D. Galvin, Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State. (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 114-31.

4 setting a number of mutually reinforcing dynamics in motion. Policing and social welfare organizations were assimilated into the new agenda, and forced to adapt their core operations to its priorities. As drug felonies and incarceration rates skyrocketed, states encountered budgetary crises that put intense pressures on other social investments.7 Predictably, the new policies reconfigured interests, mobilizing and empowering organized groups—such as the Corrections

Corporation of America and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA)— with a stake in strengthening draconian drug policies as wellsprings of mass imprisonment.8 At the same time, the drug war branded vast numbers of disadvantaged young men with stigmatizing markers that undercut individual life chances and reconstructed social perceptions of both race and criminality.9 In these and other ways, the War on Drugs set powerful new political dynamics in motion that propelled a spiral of unforeseen and tragic social and economic costs.

In what follows, we suggest that The Wire is usefully understood as a “breaching experiment” in relation to the War on Drugs. In highlighting this concept, we invoke two of its classic usages in modern social science. The first is associated with James Scott’s influential analysis of power and discourse in Domination and the Arts of Resistance.10 Countering the idea that ideological mystification leads subordinates to naturalize and internalize prevailing power

7 Bruce Western and Joshua Geutzkow, “The Political Consequences of Mass Imprisonment,” In Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality, ed. Joe Soss, Jacob S. Hacker, and Suzanne Mettler, (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 228-242.

8 Joshua Page, Joshua.The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

9 Devah Pager, 2009. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Glen Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

10 James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

5 relations, Scott shows how subordinates recognize many aspects of their domination and (outside the “public” earshot of dominants) carry on a “hidden transcript” of resistant communications and actions among themselves. Artistic and other cultural artifacts, Scott argues, sometimes allow these “hidden” discourses to be made public.11 In the most forceful of such instances, “the frontier between the hidden and the public transcripts is decisively breached” through “a public refusal to reproduce hegemonic appearances.”12 Many of the realities depicted in The Wire are well-known to those who live at the bottom of America’s social order. Most Americans, however, live their lives undisturbed by the knowledge that weaves its way through this hidden transcript. Against this backdrop, The Wire functioned as a kind of televisual “breaching experiment” in public discourse—a powerful “public refusal to reproduce hegemonic appearances.”

The second sense in which we use this term is indebted to Harold Garfinkel, who argued that powerful but invisible structures of social life can be revealed by actions that violate accepted social rules, norms, and understandings.13 (For example, we may give no thought to how far one must stand back while waiting for a turn at the water fountain yet become acutely aware of the norm if someone stands “too close” while we are drinking.) Garfinkel argued that social breaches, even if they are contrived rather than “authentic,” can help us recognize and interrogate norms and patterned regularities (or structures) that normally remain implicit in social life. Violations of taken-for-granted norms (i.e., “common sense”) help us see more clearly the impersonal forces that shape our lives.

11 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 136-82.

12 Ibid., 202, 215.

13 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967).

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Transgressions of the drug war, large and small, recur throughout the five seasons of The

Wire. Indeed, the very structure of the show’s first season—with its exposition of parallel dynamics in the Baltimore Police Department and Barksdale drug cartel—ruptures common sense understandings of the two sides of this “war” as moral and organizational opposites.

Incidental scenes throughout the series use minor violations of expectations to reveal how the drug war has become a normative standard for thought and behavior among officials in law enforcement and government. Actors who transgress or question the policy appear deviant and are at times singled out for discipline. Frustrated and alienated in the wake of these events, the frontline agents of the War on Drugs soon return to puncturing its ideological veneer with sarcastic comments and subversive actions.

Breaches of this sort reach their apex in Season 3, with Major Bunny Colvin’s radical subversion of the drug war through the establishment of a “free zone” called “Hamsterdam.”14

The Hamsterdam storyline is an arresting and provocative example of art’s power to present a counter-factual reality that reveals, through contrast, defining features of the prevailing social order. In a sense, though, it is only an outsized version of the show’s broader accomplishment: the use of fictional breaches in a compelling dramatic series to expose the logic of the drug war to viewers as a factual feature of American society—and as a product of human choice that can be questioned.

“Television-as-culture,” John Fiske writes, “is a crucial part of the social dynamics by which the social structure maintains itself” and a “bearer/provoker of meanings and pleasures” that can disrupt and alter these social structures.15 In what follows, we do not speculate on the

14 David Simon, The Wire, Season Three, (2002; Baltimore: HBO).

15 John Fiske, Television Culture. New York, (New York: Routledge, 1987): 1.

7 ways viewing audiences have interpreted The Wire, nor do we advance claims about its actual social and political effects. By bringing The Wire into dialogue with social science, we seek instead to sharpen its character as a breaching experiment—to clarify the hidden realities it brings to public light, specify how they represent a “public refusal to reproduce hegemonic appearances,” and suggest how the show’s fictional transgressions of the drug war help to reveal the logics and consequences of a failed, destructive public policy.

A National Crusade

Drug prohibitions, in one form or another, have been around in the United States since at least the 1800s. Our official commitment to a “War on Drugs,” however, is much more recent, dating back roughly to the early 1970s. The use and distribution of recreational drugs (with the notable exception of alcohol) were illegal in the preceding decades. Yet drug policy in the United

States maintained a balanced posture that combined enforcement and treatment. In the decades after the Second World War, in fact, the federal budget for drug treatment increased at a greater rate than that for law enforcement.16 When Richard Nixon first used the term “war on drugs” in

1971, U.S. public policy included many drug prohibitions yet still focused on treating addiction rather than punishing addicts.17

The hard punitive turn in U.S. drug policy emerged as part of a broader conservative “law and order” agenda. As early as 1964, the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George

Wallace showed (even in defeat) how a focus on moral decline and threats to authority could rally and unite religious, social, and racial conservatives. By the end of the 1960s, a coherent

16 Doris M. Provine, 2011. “Race and Inequality in the War on Drugs.” Annual Review of Law and the Social Sciences 7, (2011): 45.

17 Ibid.

8 new narrative had emerged that identified civil-rights social protest, civil disobedience, urban riots, street crime, and various other “deviant” behaviors in poor neighborhoods as elements of a single problem: the breakdown of social order.18 In 1968, Richard Nixon made law and order the centerpiece of his Southern Strategy for dividing the New Deal coalition and winning over white

Democrats alienated by social protest and civil rights. In 1970, he followed up by declaring war on “the criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives.”19

War-on-crime rhetoric found a receptive audience among white voters who had experienced growing unease as social movements upended racial, gender, and sexual norms and relationships, the economy rapidly changed, and crime increased.20 In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan elevated the war on drugs within this broader framework and deployed mythical images of “drug kingpins” and “welfare queens” as powerful symbols of the idea that hard-working, law-abiding

Americans were being exploited by the lazy and criminal poor. By this time, conservatives had elaborated a rich narrative of “the underclass” that blamed Great Society policies—coddling criminals, rewarding bad choices, and so on—for the urban poor’s irresponsibility, criminality, promiscuity, drug addiction, violence, and welfare dependence.

The new storyline pitting law and order against a pathological underclass reframed complex questions of public policy as clear choices between civilization and anarchy. As this frame became dominant, it restructured political discourse in the United States along a variety of dimensions. The most important for our purposes is suggested by Peter Moskos, who notes that

18 Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy.” Studies in American Political Development 21, (2007).

19 State of the Union Address, January 22, 1970.

20 Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); John Hagan, Who are the Criminals? The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2010); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

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“as long as drug addicts are ‘victims,’ incarceration makes no sense.”21 The new get-tough approaches advocated by Republicans, in a sense, depended on a reconceptualization of drugs, addicts, and dealers. As Doris Marie Provine explains:

The idea of protecting society from drug users would require a reframing of the problem of drug abuse from a socially undesirable, but relatively harmless, phenomenon to a source of serious disorder. This reframing involved replacing medical supervision with criminal controls and revisioning the innocent drug addict as a willful criminal offender.22

Increasingly, drug addicts were cast as rational actors who willfully broke the law and threatened to rip apart the social fabric. A rising chorus of neoconservatives and new paternalists argued that swift punishment of these internal enemies was now a moral duty for the state.23

The drug scare that emerged fit neatly into a long history of moral panics that have combined exaggerated claims of “epidemic” and uncontrollable drug usage with powerful racial anxieties and resentments. In the 1890s, the threat posed by new waves of Chinese immigrants stood at the center of an opium scare that swept the nation and produced a number of new state- level drug prohibitions.24 In the 1910s, Americans were gripped by fears of “Negro cocaine madness,” which allegedly gave black men superhuman strength and made them unstoppable as violent criminals.25 In the 1930s, the “Mexican menace” and images of Latino degeneracy played

21 Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008): 174.

22 Doris M. Provine, “Race and Inequality in the War on Drugs,” Annual Review of Law and the Social Sciences 7, (2011): 43.

23 James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime. (New York: Random House, 1975); James Q. Wilson, “Paternalism, Democracy, and Bureaucracy,” In Lawrence M. Mead, ed. The New Paternalism: Supervisory Approaches to Poverty (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997).

24 James Morone, “Enemies of the People: The Moral Dimensions to Public Health,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 22, no. 4 (1997).

25 David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

10 a central role in the moral panic over “reefer madness.”26

Like these American predecessors, the War on Drugs emerged as a racial project from the outset and became more deeply racialized as it gathered momentum. In the early 1980s, as serious crime was actually declining, Reagan focused national attention on the spread and deleterious effects of crack cocaine—a cheap, powerful drug that was concentrated in low- income African American communities. Aided by the media, the Reagan Administration ignited and fueled moral panic about a crack “epidemic” or, as some called it, a “plague” or “scourge.”27

By the end of the decade, the George H.W. Bush administration had doubled down on the crack scare, going so far as to have Drug Enforcement Administration agents lure a suspected drug dealer to Lafayette Park four days before a primetime national address so that the President could hold up a confiscated baggie as a dramatic illustration of how deeply this threat had advanced into the heart of the nation. “This is crack cocaine,” Bush solemnly told the American people,

“seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House.”28

Addicts were increasingly portrayed as voracious, careless, animalistic, and dangerous.

Degrading images of “crack whores” dehumanized the female addict, as exaggerated portrayals of “crack babies” demonized her selfish destruction of the innocent. Dealers were represented as predatory males, terroristic and incorrigible. Without urgent action, crack (and the violence associated with it) would seep out of the black ghetto and into white suburbia.

26 James Morone, “Enemies of the People: The Moral Dimensions to Public Health. Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 22, no. 4 (1997); David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

27 Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, “The Crack Attack: Politics and Media in the Crack Scare.” In C. Reinarman and H.G. Levine, eds. Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice. Berkeley, (CA: University of California Press, 1997).

28 Michael Isikoff, “Drug Buy Set Up For Bush Speech: DEA Lured Seller to Lafayette Park” Washington Post, September 22, 1989. A1.

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Throughout the 1980s, the federal government took major actions to fight the drug war, which, according to First Lady Nancy Reagan, was a “great, new national crusade.”29 To advance the lofty mission, Reagan radically expanded federal spending on drug enforcement.

Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million. Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million. By contrast, funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and education was dramatically reduced.30

Through increased funding for federal agencies like the FBI and DEA, the U.S. government built the new institutional capacities needed to fight a national—and even international—war on drugs. Through legislation passed by the U.S. Congress, public authorities received new marching orders to begin the war in earnest.

In June 1986, African American basketball star Len Bias died from a drug-related heart attack just two days after getting drafted by the Bolton Celtics. The press incorrectly blamed crack cocaine for Bias’s death, adding fuel to the moral panic around the drug (powder cocaine and alcohol were the real culprits.) Amid the media frenzy that ensued, Congress quickly passed and President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Among other things, this sweeping bipartisan legislation provided two billion dollars for the drug war, mandated military participation in narcotics control, and established the notorious 100:1 sentencing rule, which mandated five-year prison terms for distributing just five ounces of crack and the same punishment for 500 grams of powder cocaine. Because crack was concentrated in African-

American communities while powder cocaine was associated with the white middle and upper

29 Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1996): 234.

30 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. (New York: The Free Press, 2010): 48.

12 class, critics charged that the law was unjust and discriminatory.31

In a signing ceremony, President Reagan celebrated the new law as a landmark reflecting

“the total commitment of the American people and their government to fight the evil of drugs.”32

The Act marked a “major victory in our crusade against drugs—a victory for safer neighborhoods, a victory for the protection of the American family. The American people want their government to get tough and to go on the offensive. And that’s exactly what we intend, with more ferocity than ever before.”33 The President was equally pleased two years later when

Congress passed another major “anti-drug” law, which included the death penalty for “drug kingpins,” civil penalties for drug offenders (e.g., mandatory eviction from public housing and denial of federal student loans), and a host of new mandatory minimum sentences for distribution and simple possession.

As it has passed its own harsh drug laws, the federal government has strongly encouraged—and, at times, required—state and local jurisdictions to take up arms in the drug war. In exchange for joining the national crusade, for example, the feds provide free military equipment, cash grants, and training. The federal government also incentivizes participation in the war through changes to drug forfeiture laws, which allow state and local agencies to keep and use at their discretion much of the money and assets seized in drug raids.34 Refusal to fight the war on the feds’ terms leads to a reduction or elimination of funds and other resources for drug- and even non-drug related projects and agencies.

31 Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Joshua Page, “Why Punishment is Purple,” The Society Pages, Published online September 26, 2012. Available online at http://thesocietypages.org/papers/purple-punishment/.

32 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on Signing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986” (October 27, 1986), available at http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/102786c.htm.

33 Reagan, “Remarks on Signing the Anti-Drug Act.” 34 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 77.

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In many cases, these federal carrots and sticks have merely reinforced policy directions already being embraced by officials in subnational jurisdictions. As with national politicians from both political parties, state legislators and executives understood the benefits of governing through drugs.35 States passed a wave of draconian punitive measures, with New York’s

Rockefeller Laws being perhaps the most notorious. Implemented over a decade before the federal 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the Rockefeller Laws mandated prison terms of fifteen years to life for a person caught distributing two ounces or possessing four ounces of narcotics. As was the case at the federal level, mandatory minimum drug penalties of this sort drove prison populations skyward in many states.36

The War on Drugs can be understood as a set of interlocking priorities, policies, practices, and cultural representations. As it advanced, the war reshaped law enforcement, the penal system, international relations and, perhaps most of all, the social and institutional structures that organize daily life for Americans who live and work in the contemporary hyperghetto. It was against this backdrop, as the new century began, that David Simon and Ed

Burns conceived the idea for a television show that would reveal this new world to the public in an extended, multi-perspectival, almost Dickensian manner.

Policing the Crisis

From season to season, The Wire operates in a cumulative manner, deepening audiences’ perspectives by showing how a single urban reality plays out in complex ways across different

35 Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Joshua Page, “Why Punishment is Purple.” The Society Pages. Published online September 26, 2012. Available online at http://thesocietypages.org/papers/purple-punishment/.

36 Alexander, The New Jim Crow.

14 institutional sites. From start to finish, however, the Baltimore Police Department and the officers of its Special Crimes Unit stand out as the narrative anchor of the series. Because of this sustained attention, the series is particularly insightful in its portrayal of how—culturally, operationally, and organizationally—the War on Drugs has transformed urban policing.

Above all, the prosecution of a war has put policing on a wartime footing, intensifying the forces that have promoted its militarization. From the direct and indirect involvement of the

U.S. military in domestic law enforcement to the deployment of “shock and awe” raids with military-grade weaponry, policing in urban settings has become thoroughly militarized.37 “In barely a decade,” Michelle Alexander writes, “the War on Drugs went from being a political slogan to an actual war…. Paramilitary units (most commonly called Special Weapons and

Tactics, or SWAT, teams) were quickly formed in virtually every major city to fight the drug war… Today, the most common use of SWAT teams is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.”38 The target of the drug war is not addressed today as an adversity or adversary but rather as an enemy that must be vanquished in order to preserve our existence. In pursuit of this goal, as The Wire shows in a variety of subtle ways, urban police units have embraced new military logics, tactics, and symbols. The surveillance scenes echo popular-culture portrayals of intelligence operations in international espionage; the officers are told repeatedly to “mount up,” don the uniforms and equipment of the battalion, and take stash houses and corners by force.

The counterpart to all this military ritual—and the drumbeat of politicians and police

37 Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990); Peter B. Kraska and Victor E. Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” Social Problems 44, no. 1 (1997).

38 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 73.

15 brass promising to “win the battle”—is a more subtle but persistent suggestion that the real mission of the police is more mundane and managerial. In key respects, policing in The Wire fits what Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon call the “new penology,” a penal strategy focused on

“identifying and managing unruly groups. It is concerned with the rationality not of individual behavior or even community organization, but of managerial processes. Its goal is not to eliminate crime but to make it tolerable through systemic coordination.”39 For law enforcement, the goal is to “police the crisis” —to contain and control violence (much of it derived from drug prohibition), decrease the visibility of drug distribution, and limit trouble for political bosses.40

Like contemporary poverty governance more generally, the logic of drug policing does not turn on the eradication of social problems but rather on efforts to “ensure that they do not become disruptive for the broader society.”41

The Wire dramatizes in considerable detail how “managerial” drug policing in places like

Baltimore has been organized around four main activities: surveillance, arrest, buy-and-bust, and clearing corners. To the dismay of officers in the Special Crimes Unit, we find that most of this activity is concentrated on low-level dealers and addicts and that this low-level focus is a direct reflection of superiors’ orders and priorities. In the language of The Wire, law enforcement today is all about “the stats.” Over the past few decades, policing has been transformed through the development of computer programs for tracking and mapping crime, disorder, and related phenomena. The outsized role played by the information system called ComStat in The Wire is emblematic of a new mode of performance-centered poverty governance that has reoriented

39 Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon, “The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and its Implications,” Criminology 30, no. 4 (1992): 455.

40 Stuart Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State, and Law and Order (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).

41 Soss, Fording and Schram, Disciplining the Poor, 1.

16 policing and social welfare operations at the street-level.42 In theory, programs like ComStat help police administrators target “hot spots” and hold command staff and patrol officers accountable for making arrests and decreasing crime and disorder in targeted areas.43 ComStat lies at the heart of a managerial mode of policing that aims to contain and steer the disruptions associated with criminalized activities.

As The Wire shows repeatedly, however, systems like ComStat are tools for monitoring and controlling not just criminals but also frontline police officers. Performance-based information systems have replaced the two-way radio in police departments as the central mechanism for keeping tabs on and disciplining police. The show’s first depiction of ComStat

(Season 3, Episode 1) features Deputy Commissioner of Operations Bill Rawls castigating a subordinate for inefficiency and threatening commanders with demotions for not meeting strict crime quotas.44 Majors leave the meeting stressed out, angry, and eager to make sure they will not have to endure this sort of shaming ritual again. In this episode and others, we find that the actuarial performance logic associated with ComStat pressures police to, first, generate better numbers by punishing lower-level drug workers and, second, create better numbers by “juking” the stats in creative and fraudulent ways. Pressured from headquarters to make the stats, commanders demand that officers increase buy-and-busts and arrests and do whatever it takes to make sure the numbers add up.

42 Soss, Fording and Schram, Disciplining the Poor, 207-32.

43 David Weisburd, et al., “Reforming to Preserve: Compstat and Strategic Problem Solving in American Policing.” Criminology and Public Policy 2, no. 3 (2003). Urban police departments increasingly target “disorder” (along with crime) because of the belief that signs of disorder (public drinking and drug use, panhandling, rowdy teenagers, loitering, dilapidated and deserted buildings) cause crime—a belief promoted most famously in George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s 1982 essay in Atlantic Monthly, “Broken Windows.” For critiques of the broken window thesis and the concept of “disorder,” see Harcourt (2001) and St. Jean (2007).

44 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 1.

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Simon and Burns’ portrayal of these dynamics closely mirrors the conclusions of recent studies of performance-centered poverty governance. In welfare programs, for example, Soss,

Fording, and Schram find that performance pressures and anxieties have become a pervasive reality for program managers and frontline workers.45 “Strong performance pressures,” they conclude, “function as a form of coercive power that drives and directs action and as a form of productive power that shapes subjective understandings, perceptions, and choices, at the frontlines.”46 Welfare program managers are endlessly pressured to “make their bogey” (meet performance goals), and case managers report that they are monitored and pressured “24/7” to meet their performance quotas. The authors find that these pressures lead, on one side, to higher rates of punitive action directed at the most vulnerable welfare clients and, on the other, to widespread efforts to manipulate performance measures. As one local informant reported to the researchers, “people game the numbers all the time.”47

Studies of policing tell a similar story. Managerial policing provides upper-level administrators with a stronger sense that they have knowledge and control. With the aid of programs like ComStat, they can monitor subordinates and more effectively contain criminal activities. Or if this is too much to achieve, they can, at least, appear to do so. Summarizing their study of seven police department in the United States, James Willis and Stephen Mastrofski conclude:

Compstat features most likely to be adopted were those that were also most likely to help the department appear progressive to its constituents, not those designed to improve performance (in a technical sense). The display of crime statistics and electronic maps at regular Compstat accountability meetings sent a powerful message that the organization was taking crime seriously whether or not these data had a significant influence on the

45 Soss, Fording and Schram, Disciplining the Poor.

46 Ibid., 230.

47 Ibid., 213.

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selection of effective crime prevention strategies.48

Managing crime (or rather performing crime management) in this way tends to frustrate police managers and rank-and-file officers, for it takes away from what they view as “real” (or

“natural”) police work—i.e., preventing and solving serious crime through relationship building, information gathering, and labor-intensive investigations.

The Wire reveals how the new managerial logic of policing prevents officers from engaging in “real police work.”49 The activities of the Special Crimes Unit show viewers that intensive, careful police work still happens and clarify why it matters. As Burns and Simon make clear, however, politicians and police officials (with rare exceptions) do not encourage it. Thus, the Special Crimes Unit is routinely handicapped; it lacks equipment and manpower; it cannot protect witnesses; and whenever it makes connections between the drug trade and business and political elites, the bosses shut them down. The failure of city, state, and federal authorities to support engaged and effective police work is a running theme in the show, adding to the officers’ angst and disillusionment. Leading characters routinely question their purpose as officers, as seen in a conversation over beers between McNulty and Kima:50

KIMA: You know what the hardest part about being a police is? MCNULTY: (sarcastically) Yeah. Explaining to your wife why she has to take antibiotics for your kidney infection. KIMA: I was gonna say making the job actually matter. MCNULTY: That too.

War Torn Communities

48 James Willis and Stephen Mastrofski, “Compstat and the New Penology: A Paradigm Shift in Policing?” The British Journal of Criminology 52, no. 1 (2012): 86.

49 The Wire, Season 4, which focuses on the Baltimore school system, reinforces this message by showing how a performance-centered regime of standardized testing undercuts “real” teaching and learning in the classroom.

50 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 6.

19

The War on Drugs ostensibly seeks to stop the distribution and use of illegal drugs across the nation. Yet it has always been clear that the brunt of the fighting occurs in the hyperghetto and that young African-Americans involved in open-air drug markets are the primary targets in the conflict. Although whites and blacks use drugs at similar rates, blacks are arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for drug-related crimes far more than their white counterparts.

Analyzing data for Seattle in 2006, for example, Katherine Beckett shows that blacks had a drug arrest rate over 13 times higher than for whites and an arrest-for-distribution rate twenty- one times higher than the rate for whites.51 The main reasons for these disparity were the spatial focus of policing on neighborhoods with large black populations and the drug-specific focus of policing on crack cocaine. Based on his research as an officer in Baltimore, Moskos draws similar conclusions about the disproportionate targeting of poor African Americans and links these dynamics to the performance pressures discussed in the preceding section:

As it stands, buyers and sellers of illegal drugs are simple cannon fodder for cops and prisons. Need an arrest to satisfy your sergeant? Hit a corner. ‘It’s like shooting fish in a barrel,’ one officer said. ‘You’ll never run out of people to arrest here.’ But in this barrel, it should be noted, almost all the fish are black. It’s not that cops go out wanting to arrest black people. But cops who make a lot of arrests do so in black neighborhoods. It’s easy when drug laws criminalize so many.52

Echoing social science research, David Simon says, “It’s not a war on drugs, it’s a war against the poor, it’s a war on the underclass.” Similarly, Ed Burns remarks, “It’s not a war on drugs, it’s a war on the blacks. It started as war on the blacks and it’s now spread to Hispanics and poor whites. It was designed to take that energy that was coming out of the civil rights movement and

51 Katherine Beckett, Race and Drug Law Enforcement in Seattle. Report commissioned by the Racial Disparity Project and the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project, 2008.

52 Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008): 181.

20 destroy it.”53

The Wire clarifies how the drug war has structured people’s daily lives and worldviews in the hyperghetto. Numerous incidents allow viewers to see clearly how the drug war undercuts trust in police-community relations by fostering “us vs. them” mentalities. Because of authorities’ focus on surveillance and arrest, community members (including those who are not in the drug game) tend to view the police as a repressive foreign presence rather than a local asset, and thus adopt a stance of “legal cynicism.”54 Thus, despite their desperate needs for the kinds of protections and services effective policing might provide, residents actively resist cooperating with state actors and become reluctant to participate in civil society more generally.55 On this topic, Moskos remarks:

When police have an almost arbitrary power of arrest over the majority of the populace, police and their moral perspective become an occupying force at odds with the community. This is why those most in need of police services—those most victimized by drugs and violent crime—are most likely to be antipolice. Our drug laws create this paradox.56

Oppositional attitudes of this sort are apparent throughout The Wire. In the fourth episode of Season 4, for example, we observe Prez (a veteran of the Special Crimes Unit who has now become a teacher) telling his students that police officers do good things and work with the community in important ways. A female student in the class replies, with no objection from her peers, that police never come around her community except to “whale on people.” The student’s

53 Quoted in Sebastian Walker, “Baltimore: Anatomy of an American City,” Al Jazeera (documentary, 2012).

54 Robert Sampson and Dawn Jeglum Bartusch, “Legal Cynicism and (Subcultural?) Tolerance of Deviance: The Neighborhood Context of Racial Differences,” Law & Society Review 32, no. 4 (1998).

55 Vesla M. Weaver, Vesla and Amy Lerman, “Political Consequences of the Carceral State,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 4 (2010).

56 Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008): 181.

21 assessment harkens back to an earlier episode (Season 3, Episode 2) in which officers Herc and

Carver rough up the young street dealer Poot (without probable cause) in a lawless effort to get information.57 As they depart, the phrase “fuck the police” rings out from neighborhood residents. In the same episode, when Bodie, Poot, and Puddin’ run into these officers at the movies, Bodie states the oppositional nature of game openly and mockingly, telling his girlfriend that these men harass them every day, but almost always fail to find their stash.

Alongside this theme of enmity in police-community relations, The Wire also shines a light on the destructive dynamics set in motion by mass incarceration under the War on Drugs.

Although they make up about 13% of the general population, blacks constitute 34% of drug arrests and 53% of persons sentenced to prison for drug crimes in the United States.58 In 2003, blacks accounted for 28% of Maryland’s population, but 68% of drug arrests and 90% of people incarcerated for drug offenses. That same year, half of all young African American men in

Baltimore were under criminal justice control. Of those released from Maryland prisons in 2001,

77% were African American and 70% of the total released population returned to Baltimore.59

High levels of incarceration combine with the rapid rates of cycling between prisons and poor neighborhoods to further destabilize impoverished, racially segregated communities.

Children lose parents; parents lose kids; spouses lose partners; and families lose income.60

Although these personal and social costs are well-known in the hyperghetto, they are largely

57 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 2.

58 Sentencing Project, Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System: Testimony of Marc Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project. Prepared for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security (October 29, 2009).

59 Vincent Shiraldi and Jason Ziedenberg, Race and Incarceration in Maryland. (Washington DC: Justice Policy Institute, 2003).

60 Christopher Muller and Christopher Wildeman, “Punishment and Inequality,” In The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society, edited by Jonathan Simon and Richard Sparks, (New York: SAGE Publications, 2012).

22 invisible to more advantaged Americans. The Wire works in a variety of ways to breach this boundary for its viewing audiences. In the father-son relationship between Wee-Bey and

Namond Brice, for example, we see the personal and psychological toll that can be exacted even when a man who has committed terrible acts of violence is lost to his family. To be sure, families and communities can benefit when an individual prone to violent behavior is removed, at least temporarily, from their midst.61 The vast majority of people locked away through the drug war, however, are not violent offenders: they are low-level dealers and addicts, not shot-callers or murderers.

When such people return from prison, they are marked by criminal records that seriously limit their prospects for leaving the drug game and establishing stable lives. Convicted felons are ineligible for public housing for five years; more incredibly, individuals arrested but not convicted can (and often are) denied housing assistance. Housing restrictions, along with criminal-record restrictions on cash assistance and Food Stamps, contribute greatly to the large percentage of ex-prisoners who are homeless.62 Drug offenders with criminal records also face major barriers to employment because felons must report their judicial status to potential employers, who use this information to disqualify them.63 Across the American states, people with felony records are barred from a staggering array of community roles, including whole categories of employment and the performance of civic duties such as voting and serving on

61 Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Muller and Wildeman, “Punishment and Inequality.”

62 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 145; Teresa Gowan, “The Nexus: Homelessness and Incarceration in Two American Cities,” Ethnography 3, no. 4 (2002).

63 Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

23 juries.64 In all, a host of “laws, rules, and regulations operate to discriminate against ex-offenders and effectively prevent their reintegration into mainstream society and economy. These restrictions amount to a form of ‘civic death’ and send the unequivocal message that ‘they’ are no longer part of ‘us.’”65

Among television shows, The Wire stands out for its willingness to deal seriously with prisoner reintegration and the debilitating mark of a criminal record. The popular character

Dennis “Cutty” Wise serves as the primary narrative vehicle in this regard. At the beginning of the third season, Cutty, now in his 40s, returns to the streets after serving fourteen years for crimes committed as a “soldier” in the Barksdale crew.66 He immediately faces hardship.

Because of his criminal record and lack of marketable job skills and experiences, Cutty has very limited employment options. Like many ex-convicts, he turns to day labor, finding low-wage work with a landscaping crew that he finds difficult and degrading.67 Depressed and lacking other options, Cutty reluctantly goes back to working as a soldier for Barksdale. Where his efforts to succeed legitimately only produced fatigue, drudgery, and depression, Cutty’s illegal

“job” provides money, status, and excitement. As Season 3 continues, the wanton violence and disrespect for life grate on his conscience, however, leading him to give up his position, even without any viable alternatives visible on the horizon.

With encouragement from The Deacon, Cutty decides to open a boxing gym for local youth. As a poor ex-convict, though, he lacks capital, cannot get bank loans, and finds that he

64 Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen. Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006).

65 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 139.

66 The Wire, Season Three.

67 Gretchen Purser, “‘Still Doin’ Time: Clamoring for Work in the Day Labor Industry.” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 15, no. 3 (2012).

24 must turn again to his only connection with resources: Barksdale. A former competitive boxer himself, Barksdale backs his old soldier. A determined Cutty opens the gym and lures a handful of youngsters off the streets and into the gym. In coaching the kids, he begins to develop a meaningful, stable life. Yet, he still has to mow lawns to make ends meet. Season 4 shows Cutty doing well. His gym is blossoming and he is advancing in his landscaping work—so much so that he has an opportunity to lead his own crew, but does not take it because does not want to take time away from the gym. Even though he is no longer involved in crime and is an asset to the local community, he still has the mark of the criminal record—which deepens and elaborates the stigma of being a black man living in the “inner city.”68

Thus, when Cutty goes to the hospital after being shot while trying to coax a youngster,

Michael Lee, out of the drug game, a black female nurse assumes he is a gangster and speaks to him derisively.69 It is only after Bunny Colvin corrects the nurse, that she is able to see Cutty in a different light. In fact, the two end up dating. Here we see the power of the stigma associated with drug criminals—an upstanding woman disdains Cutty when she thinks he is part of the drug game, but dates him when the stigma is removed. The Wire makes an important point: nearly all black men in certain parts of the city are stigmatized by a drug policy that marks them all as criminals—or likely criminals—and this stigma works powerfully to close doorways to relationships, paths to economic advancement, and opportunities to build a more stable life.

Because of his criminal record, Cutty cannot fully participate in civil society. In a moving scene, Cutty expresses shame and anger at not having the right to vote.70 While he is talking to a youngster on the street, a man tries to hand him a flyer supporting Mayor Royce. Cutty says

68 Glen Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values.

69 The Wire, Season 4, Episode 13. 70 The Wire, Season 4, Episode 6.

25 flatly, “No thank you, man. I can’t vote.” The guy replies, “Conviction? Felony?” In this part of town, where so many have criminal records, the guy does not even consider other possibilities for Cutty’s disenfranchisement. Frustrated by his exclusion from electoral politics (and the guy’s persistence), Cutty forcefully exclaims, “Move on man.” For ex-cons like Cutty, disenfranchisement intensifies feelings that they are social outcasts.

In these and other ways, The Wire shows how the drug war functions both to create and reproduce dynamics of social marginalization. The War on Drugs, we see, destabilizes and undermines the very communities its proponents insist they want to save. Community members, social scientists, and activists have understood this social fact for years, as have many officials in charge of executing the drug war on the ground. As a former police officer, Ed Burns was able to infuse The Wire with a ground-level perspective on the perverse consequences of the drug war.

His voice is echoed in U.S. politics today by people such Stanford “Neill” Franklin, a former high-ranking officer in Baltimore and current executive director of Law Enforcement Against

Prohibition. These former police officers, however, differ from police on the job in a crucial respect: the latter would risk their jobs if they openly criticized and refused to fight what is clearly an unwinnable war. Not so in the fictional world of The Wire, where Major Bunny Colvin refuses go along with the status quo and, cajoling his reluctant co-workers, upends conventional drug war policing and thinking.

The Big Breach

In dramatizing the futility of the drug war, the creators of The Wire could have portrayed police officers as gung-ho supporters or unknowing dupes. Instead, they presented viewers with a nuanced portrayal of the ambivalence that is frequently expressed by street-level authorities

26 who carry out the work of disciplining the poor.71 Cops grumble about the compulsive drive to clear corners, conduct “hand-to-hands,” and get the numbers right. In the Special Crimes Unit,

Freamon, Kima, and McNulty routinely complain that the war being waged on street level drug use and distribution diverts attention and resources from busting the shot-callers (and their enablers in corporate suites, city hall, and the state house) who are really responsible for

“dropping bodies.” In numerous instances, we see police officers carrying out the work of the drug war while questioning, criticizing, and mocking it as a way to address community problems.

Several storylines go further by depicting active resistance by police officers and the disciplinary actions meted out to them in response. We learn in Season 1, for example, that

Freamon refused to follow the drug-war script at one point earlier in his career and, as a result, was relegated to the Pawnshop Unit for thirteen years and four months. Because of McNulty’s repeated ploys to force the department to target major drug dealers and homicides (and his penchant for going over and around his bosses), Deputy Director of Operations Rawls literally throws McNulty out to sea, where the detective patrols the waters as part of the marine unit.

Freamon’s and McNulty’s respective refusals are not just, as the characters suggest, efforts to do “real police work” or be “natural police.” They are deviations from drug war policing that express deep dissatisfaction with the status quo and threaten it by potentially encouraging others officials to do the same.72 Yet these acts of refusal do not actually function in the show or for viewers as what Harold Garfinkel calls a “breaching experiment.”73 Although the acts in question

71 Soss, Fording and Schram. Disciplining the Poor, 199-204.

72 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, The New Class War, New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

73 Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology.

27 might elicit puzzlement and resentment about the individuals (i.e., Freamon and McNulty), they do not upend the actual practice of the drug war in a way that would “produce and sustain bewilderment, consternation, and confusion” about the underlying organization of activities.

They do not “produce reflections through which the strangeness of an obstinately familiar world can be detected.”74

The Wire’s big breach occurs in Season 3. Through the first three and a half seasons, we encounter abundant evidence that the War on Drugs is a disaster, yet police administrators are relentless in pushing their subordinates to fight it. Officers who do not produce “the numbers” needed to suggest they are winning the war (or at least making some progress) face ridicule in

ComStat meetings and possible demotion. One such subordinate, Major Bunny Colvin, decides that enough is enough: he no longer can fight this war, at least not on his bosses’ terms.

Colvin’s decision clearly is a long time in the making. Two events in Season 3, however, push him to the point of no return. In the first, the Major pulls up to a corner in the Western

District.75 To his surprise, a young boy approaches the car and asks him if he wants to buy a

“spider bag.” Colvin does not say anything; he just stares at the kid. It is not hard for the viewer to guess at his thoughts: forget the party line, the drug war is not a deterrent, hell, a kid just tried to sell drugs to the district’s top cop, and locking up this kid will not benefit anybody.

It is illuminating to interpret this scene through the lens provided by “new institutionalist” theories of organizations and social action. According to this perspective, actors in organizations typically make decisions and respond to events by following a “logic of appropriateness.” In

74 Breaching experiments always lead to confusion and at least some ire about the breacher, for he or she purposefully makes people feel uneasy (out of their element). However, effective breaches also force onlookers to reflect on the “strangeness of an obstinately familiar world” (Garfinkel 1967: 38). They push social actors to go beyond questioning the breacher and inquire about the underlying norms and assumptions that guide practice.

75 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 1.

28 essence, they ask: “What kind of situation is this? What kind of person am I? What does a person such as I do in a situation such as this.”76 In Major Colvin’s paralyzed, anguished response to the young corner boy, we see a classic case of what happens when a person cannot fathom what is appropriate – or more specifically in this case, sees a fundamental opposition between what is appropriate for Colvin as an officer and what is appropriate for Colvin as a moral being. “What I am supposed to do at this moment is just plain crazy,” Colvin seems to think to himself.

The second event occurs during an undercover drug deal, when a corner boy shoots one of

Colvin’s officers, and leads to more profound break with the status quo.77 The Major is distraught, not only at this particular shooting, but at the glaring fact that officers are routinely putting their lives on the line to bust street-level youngsters for selling small amounts of drugs.

Fed up with the insanity, Colvin suspends all “hand-to-hand” drug deals for cops in the Western

District. In a pivotal scene of the second episode of Season 3, Colvin explains his decision to the troops:

COLVIN: As of this tour, all hand-to-hand undercover buys of CDS are suspended in the Western District.

(Cops mumble in surprise, and one says, ‘You’re kidding.’)

COLVIN: Somewheres back in the dawn of time this District had itself a civic dilemma of epic proportion. The city council had just passed a law that forbid alcoholic consumption in public places. On the streets and on the corners. But the corner is, and it was, and it always will be the poor man’s lounge. It’s where a man wants to be on a hot summer’s night. It’s cheaper than a bar… Catch a nice breeze, you watch the girls go by. But the law’s the law and the Western cops rollin’ by, what were they gonna do? If they arrested every dude out there for tipping back a High Life there’d be no other time for any other kind of police work. And if they looked the other way, they’d open themselves to all kinds of flaunting, all kinds of disrespect.

(Colvin pulls a bottle of High Life out of a wrinkled brown paper bag.)

COLVIN: Now, this is before my time when it happened but somewheres back in the 50s or 60s, there

76 James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, "The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life", American Political Science Review, 78 (1984): 734-749; James G. March, A Primer on Decision Making (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).

77 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 2.

29

was a small moment of goddamn genius by some nameless smokehound who comes out the cut-rate one day and on his way to the corner he slips that just-bought pint of Elderberry into a paper bag.

(Colvin puts the bottle back into the bag.)

COLVIN: A great moment of civic compromise. That small wrinkled-ass paper bag allowed the corner boys to have their drink in peace and gave us permission to go and do police work. The kind of police work that’s actually worth the effort, that’s worth actually taking a bullet for. Dozerman, he got shot last night trying to buy three vials. Three!

(The Major holds up vials, and pulls the bottle of beer out of the bag.)

COLVIN: There’s never been a paper bag for drugs.

(Colvin dramatically drops vials into bag)

COLVIN: Until now.

In telling his officers to ignore drug dealing and usage (as long as it is not flaunted),

Colvin begins the big breach. Cops such as Herc (a perennial drug warrior) are shaken out of their element. No longer can they rely on the narrow logic of appropriateness that normally guides them through their hours on the job. In the final scene of Season 3, Episode 2, Herc and

Carver roll past a corner occupied by Bodie Broadus and other dealers.78 Herc is eager to move in and frustrated by Colvin’s insistence that cops stop using a central tactic of the drug war.

Vexed and angry, he exclaims: “If we’re not doing hand to hands, then what the fuck? And the shit with the bag. What the fuck is that?” What Herc does not know is that “the shit with the bag” is the start of something much bigger—a bold breaching experiment that will rupture the logic of the drug war and shake policing common sense in the city of Baltimore.

Exacerbating the incidents on the street, which pushed Colvin to end undercover hand-to- hands, events in police headquarters ultimately lead him to take far more drastic actions. During a ComStat meeting, Rawls and Burrell berate Colvin and other high-ranking officers for not sufficiently reducing crime stats in their districts. The ritual of scorn at these regular meetings is

78 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 2.

30 usually just an opportunity for the brass to raise the pressure on Colvin and his colleagues. As a small group of majors and lieutenants leave this meeting, however, they ask each other how they plan to get their numbers down. Walking into an elevator, a fellow officer puts the question to

Colvin. The Major faces the camera and says with a sardonic smile, “I thought I might legalize drugs.” The others chuckle at what can only be a joke.79

But Colvin is not joking. He figures that the only way his officers can do “real police work” and bring rates of serious crime down is if he can pull them out of the drug war. The only way to do that, he decides, is to suspend drug-law enforcement in particular zones of West

Baltimore. Taking into consideration that he will have thirty years of service in a few months, and therefore can retire as a major, Colvin decides he can move forward with the grand experiment. Seeking to push all street-level drug dealing into three “free zones,” Colvin instructs his officers to move dealers and addicts to the area by force if necessary. As long as drugs are dealt and used in the free zones, the cops are to leave the dealers and users be. In essence, Colvin directs his officers to legalize drugs in select parts of the district.

Predictably, this “strategic plan” shocks the troops. Under the logic of the drug war, it seems nothing short of a public admission of defeat—a declaration to the drug dealers that they have won. Sergeant Carver asks Colvin, “How we going to look them in the eye?” Another, unnamed cop, says, “They’ll shit all over us. Tell their kids to shit all over us.”80 Under the drug war, arrest and incarceration have become the sticks that police use to gain obedience and respect. Embedded in a culture of “zero tolerance,” where cops are expected to develop a stomach for strong-arm tactics, the officers find it almost impossible to conceive of legalization

79 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 3.

80 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 3.

31 as anything other than an emasculating defeat. By implementing his plan, Colvin breaches the core assumptions that underlie the War on Drugs. His actions are bewildering to the officers but also raise a powerful question that has long been suppressed: are there better ways than punitive prohibition to deal with street-level drugs?

Initial responses to the radical new plan are unsurprising. Western District officers do not support it but follow orders and implement it. Dealers and addicts predictably fear a set-up and refuse to relocate to the free zones. Social actors on both sides of the drug war have internalized the rules of the familiar game. Responding to an order to move, one of Marlo Stanfield’s dealers says to Herc and Carver: “Look, we grind and ya’ll try to stop it. That’s how we do. Why you gotta go and fuck with program? With all due respect.”81 After a few days of police harassment

(and a fair amount of brutality), the dealers move to the free zones—which, in a nod to tolerant drug laws in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, become known as “Hamsterdam.”

And then the unthinkable happens. Colvin’s experiment produces quick, positive results.

Crime and violence in the Western District declines, street dealing (outside Hamsterdam) abates, and residents who are not involved in the drug game express relief. Yet the creators of The Wire are careful not to serve up a utopian fantasy of legalization. There’s a concentrated mix of social problems in the free zones: Addicts give oral sex to dealers for drugs, boys fight, and people shoot up and nod off in unsanitary vacant buildings (veritable petri dishes for disease). In a meeting in Colvin’s office, The Deacon (Colvin’s unofficial, and sometimes unwanted, spiritual adviser) urges the major to reduce the suffering inside the free zones.82 The Major reacts defensively:

COLVIN: Look, I’m just trying to make my district livable. I write off a few blocks in a few places, but I

81 Ibid.

82 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 8.

32

save the rest. DEACON: No offense, but you’re like the blind man and the elephant. It’s a lot bigger than what you have your hand on; you just can’t see it. COLVIN: See what? DEACON: A great village of pain and you’re the mayor. Where’s your drinking water? Where’s your toilets, your heat, your electricity? Where’s the needle truck, the condom distribution, the drug treatment intake? Half these people are dying on their feet. And the other half’s gonna catch what’s killing them. COLVIN: Look, they ain’t no worse off than when they was all over the map. Now they just in one place is all. DEACON: And that place is hell. COLVIN: Look, I’m a police. So I can lock a man up or I can move his ass off the corner. Now you want anything more than that, you’re in the wrong shop.

[The Deacon responds with a subtle headshake; he clearly is not finished pressing the major.]

Unsatisfied with Colvin’s response, The Deacon convenes a meeting with Colvin and local academics. Together, they plan to decrease suffering within the “village of pain.” Before long,

Hamsterdam has its needle truck, condom distribution, drug treatment intake, and other means of reducing harm. Although the free zones remain places of significant pain (for intense drug addiction is painful), they become more habitable and addicts are treated as humans (rather than

“animals,” as Herc refers to them). Without government approval and assistance (or, perhaps, a major infusion of funds from ultra-wealthy benefactors), it is difficult to imagine that Colvin and the public health workers could do much more to make Hamsterdam less harmful.

In this manner, Colvin’s decriminalization of drugs within the free zones gives rise to a second breach of prevailing norms: addicts and street-level dealers are suddenly being treated with dignity rather than as semi-human criminals who must suffer harsh punishment. This second breach, much like the first, provokes dismay from several outspoken cops (most notably,

Herc and Anthony) who disapprove of the respectful, supportive treatment being afforded to the denizens of Hamsterdam. After years of fighting a war against those “in the game,” the officers find it difficult to adapt to a new regime where they are expected to understand their former foes and treat them as worthy and fully human. The officers are troubled, ambivalent, and unsure how

33 to resolve the psychological tension. Indeed, it is this very tension that The Wire’s breaching experiment seeks to evoke among viewers.

Eventually, the tension becomes overwhelming for a few officers, and Herc sets in motion a process that will destroy Hamsterdam. The final straw for Herc occurs when his former partner,

Carver, requests his help in moving a dead body. Carver fears that the murder wil undermine

Colvin’s main argument for his experiment: that the free zones reduce violent crime. Herc disobeys the sergeant’s order and tips off the local newspaper to Hamsterdam.83 When a reporter tours the free zones, Colvin gets the scribe to hold off on writing a story for a week, claiming that the experiment is really an attempt to make a major bust (which would be compromised if the reporter broke the story).

Not wanting the police brass to learn of the free zones from the press, Colvin explains to

Burrell and Rawls during the next ComStat meeting that Hamsterdam is the reason for the double-digit drop in serious crime within the Western District.84 As fitting a major breach of accepted practice, Colvin’s superiors react with shock and anger. A stupefied Rawls blurts out,

“He’s legalized drugs!” Colvin rebuts, “Actually, I elected to ignore them.” Then the Deputy delivers the key line of the scene: “You lost your mind. He’s lost his fucking mind.” In a subsequent scene, Colvin meets with the brass in Burrell’s office. With a sinister chuckle, Rawls continues where he left off in the ComStat meeting:

Bunny, you cocksucker. I gotta give it to you. A brilliant idea. Insane and illegal, but stone-fucking brilliant, nonetheless. After all my putting my foot of people’s asses to decrease the numbers, he comes in and in one stroke gets a fucking 14% decrease. Fucking shame it’s gonna end our careers, but, uh, but still.85

Rawls response is a telling illustration of the status-quo mentality in two senses. Confronted with

83 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 9.

84 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 10.

85 Ibid.

34 a massive demonstration that crime can be reduced through a more accommodationist approach to drugs, Rawls ignores the larger implications and seems impressed by it mainly as a clever way to “juke the numbers.” At the same time, Rawls’s reaction is to suggest that Colvin has “lost his mind” and must be “insane” because he did the unspeakable: he breached what everyone knows is common sense (and the law) regarding the proper application of policing to street-level drug dealing and use. He must be crazy, a crazy quasi-criminal.

Colvin’s actions also infuriate the bosses because they breach accepted norms about chain-of-command and disregarded the political ramifications of his actions. Needless to say,

Colvin kept Hamsterdam a secret from his superiors, for he knew that they would stop him from implementing the strategy. What is more, the Major knowingly acted in ways that could only end in political crisis. As The Wire details in all five seasons, contemporary police administrators are very careful not to set political fires, for City Hall controls their occupational futures. In other words, management tends to be risk adverse. It is not surprising then that Burrell, Rawls, and other top cops worry foremost that Colvin’s actions will “end our careers”—rather than focus on the actions’ effects on crime, community-police relations, and other non-career related matters.

For his radical breaches, Colvin is stigmatized as rogue and off-kilter. He is also punished.

His boss, Burrell, makes him retire as a lieutenant rather than major, significantly reducing his pension. The Commissioner also torpedoes Colvin’s post-retirement employment at Johns

Hopkins University. We find out in Season 4 that instead of working as head of security at the prestigious college, Colvin is forced to take a job as a glorified security guard at a hotel—where he enjoys little authority or respect. Although he suffers these indignities, Colvin does not regret the grand experiment in upending the War on Drugs.

As Colvin acknowledges, Hamsterdam was not pretty (dire poverty and drug addiction

35 never are). However, the tactic rendered concrete benefits. Crime and victimization declined throughout the Western District. Addicts had access to harm reduction services. Members of the community felt safer, gained respect for law enforcement, and felt less imprisoned in their own neighborhoods. Cops were doing “real” police work (i.e., preventing and investigating serious felonies, like murders) rather than clearing corners and conducting dangerous buy-and-busts.

Moreover, police had the time and inclination to forge relationships with community members— the heart of so-called community policing. With serious crime down (and less serious crime moved to the free zones), residents and law enforcement could focus on quality-of-life issues and foster “collective efficacy,” a “link of cohesion and trust with shared expectations for intervening in support of neighborhood social control.”86 In short, Hamsterdam did not lead to chaos.

Instead, it began to produce conditions that social scientists associate with reductions of crime and social suffering.

Hamsterdam was also beneficial in a second way: it forced characters in the show and viewers on the couch to imagine an alternative reality. As an effective breaching experiment,

Colvin’s plan exposes the underlying assumptions of the drug war and pushes viewers to ask questions about matters that typically go unquestioned. Why, it virtually forces us to ask, does the war on drugs continue given its problematic outcomes and the potential benefits of ending it?

The transformative potential of such questions is illustrated in the series through the character of Ellis Carver. During the first two seasons, Carver is a macho drug warrior like Herc.

Also like Herc, he is initially very skeptical of the Hamsterdam strategy. Over time, however, he gradually comes to see wisdom in the plan, even going so far as to illegally move a murder victim to protect it. By Season 4, Daniels notes that “Ellis has come a long way,” and viewers are

86 Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods— Does It Lead to Crime?” National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice (February, 2001): 2.

36 given numerous opportunities to see how he has become a more trusted, humane, and effective officer.87 Through Carver, viewers are shown that we can question the core assumptions of the drug war and that, if we do so, we just might be the better for it.

Because of Hamsterdam’s potential to upset the status quo and produce political crisis, city officials destroy it. After the media descends on the free zones, Commissioner Burrell and

Deputy of Operations Rawls orchestrate a massive raid on Hamsterdam. As the quasi-military siege begins, Rawls smiles like a proud father and Herc exclaims, “About fuckin’ time.”88 The raid loudly and clearly announces the War on Drugs is back on in the Western District.

The city’s martial response to Hamsterdam shows that Colvin’s breach was effective. As

Emile Durkheim argued, criminal punishment is a passionate, vengeful response to violations of collective values, beliefs, and sentiments.89 Penal sanctions, then, function to reinforce the dominant moral order. For the police brass, Hamsterdam violated long-held, largely unquestioned norms about fighting drugs. The experiment at least temporarily upended these norms, shaking common sense. To end the questioning and potential for rebellion, the city (with a big push from the Feds) had to end the breach, punish the breacher, and restore the status quo.

The razing of Hamsterdam and punishment of Colvin serve as warnings for other cops who may consider resisting the drug war. They also demonstrate how deeply institutionalized the drug war has become in roughly forty years. In brief, if Hamsterdam did not threaten the order of things, the vicious response would not have occurred.

In the final scene of Season 3, Colvin surveys what is left of Hamsterdam: a mound of

87 The Wire, Season 4, Episode 6.

88 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 12.

89 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, (New York: Free Press, 1933).

37 debris.90 Bubbles ambles up with his shopping cart. Gazing at the wreckage, the two men (who have never met) have a brief, but deeply insightful exchange:

BUBBLES: That’s something, huh? Looks like they took a big eraser and rubbed across it. COLVIN: Yeah. BUBBLES: Yeah, but before, a dope fiend come down here, cop a little something, Ain’t nary a soul hassle him. Hoppers and police, they just let him be. COLVIN: Was a good thing, huh? BUBBLES: I, I’m just saying. (Pause) You probably don’t know, but it’s rough out there, baby. Cops be back banging on you, hoppers be messin’ with you. COLVIN: Yeah, thank you.

As the raid of Hamsterdam and this exchange makes clear, the status quo is firmly reestablished in the Western District. Although city officials and police have erased physical evidence of the free zones, they have not—and cannot—eliminate people’s memory of the experiment, of the possibility for a different future. Moreover, they cannot change the fact that residents, cops, politicians, and other community members were exposed to the lies at the heart of the War on Drugs: that fighting the war makes people safer, decreases drug use, and enhances quality of life for all. Because it messed with people’s minds (and at least temporarily decreased suffering), Hamsterdam “was a good thing.”

Conclusion

One of the most striking scenes in The Wire occurs in the fourth episode of Season 3.

During a meeting of community members and police officers, a deeply frustrated woman asks

Major Colvin how his department plans to curb the drug trade and violence associated with it.

The Major pauses, breathes deeply, and responds: “Well, I’m not sure… but whatever it is, it can’t be a lie.” Drugs and violence stand at the center of the hard work that Colvin and his fellow officers do every day. Yet when he is asked, he does not describe what the police have been

90 The Wire, Season 3, Episode 12.

38 doing up to now or might start doing instead. The specific solutions are unclear, he seems to say, but our first steps must be to stop basing our actions on lies and lying about our actions.

The Wire exposes a complex of lies about drug policy that remains central to American public life today. In this sense, it is the opposite of the “good guys vs. bad guys” stories that typically surround the drug war in news and entertainment. The moral exhortations that urge us to fight harder are exposed by The Wire as the immoral deceits that they are. Amid a celebratory rhetoric of slow-but-steady success, Simon and Burns make clear that our “national crusade” is not achieving its goals, enhancing the social good, improving life for people in our most disadvantaged communities. Characters like Colvin, McNulty, and Freamon upend the deceit that cops and others at the frontlines enthusiastically support the drug war—just as Hamsterdam topples the conventional view that we have no alternative to this punitive mode of poverty governance. The Wire calls on us all to ask what should be done to alleviate social suffering in places like the Western District of Baltimore, and demands that, whatever our answer, it cannot be a lie.

The complex realities of the drug war are, of course, more likely to be familiar to people whose daily lives are directly entwined with it. They are the stuff of experience. For larger numbers of Americans, however, the realities of the drug war are much harder to discern. They are glimpsed in partial ways through the distorting lenses of sensational news coverage, staged reality shows, and credit-claiming political rhetoric. They are shrouded in discourses that deploy moralism and fatalism to deflect criticism and resistance. Public officials, pundits, and other authorities routinely assert that, while we have not won the war and may not soon, any effort to scale it back would lead to chaos within and, perhaps more importantly, beyond the hyperghetto.

39

This “common sense” view and the paucity of challenges to it produce a “public transcript” of the drug war that is “in close conformity with how the dominant group would wish to have things appear.”91 The Wire breaches this public façade by bringing to the surface a variety of “hidden transcripts”—discourses that normally take place “offstage,” among the marginalized targets of state power and subordinate street-level workers who carry out our drug policies. What emerges over the course of the series is not a singular “truth” of the matter but rather a variety of alternatives to the official story of the drug war. From the fully articulated critique of Major Colvin’s “brown bag” speech to McNulty’s subversive ploys and sarcastic comments, viewers hear, see, and vicariously experience an alternative and far less comforting reality of the drug war.

As it brings these suppressed alternative discourses to the surface, The Wire also lays bare the “common sense” of the drug war—not just through its bold breaching experiment in

Season 3, but also through a steady flow of more minor violations that prick the consciousness of the viewer. By violating norms and expectations, forcing us “out of our element” and making us uncomfortable, effective breaching experiments help us see the impersonal mental and social structures that shape our reality.92 Throughout its five seasons, The Wire pushes viewers to recognize that the drug war rests on a set of problematic assumptions and assertions, which, over the last forty-plus years, have become naturalized and taken-for-granted.

Social science is often contrasted with the arts through a crude opposition of fact and fiction. One is coolly rational, the other passionately creative. One is about being faithful to

91 Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 4.

92 Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology.

40 reality, the other an act of imagination. These and other misleading contrasts suggest that the two endeavors are mutually exclusive and, in fact, share little in common.

By contrast, we are more struck by the commonalities between our scholarship and the project pursued by David Simon and Ed Burns. As critical social scientists, we pursue many objectives, but none is more important than seeking to clarify how the organization of social life produces and sustains inequality and injustice. Like some of the best ethnographies of urban life and criminal justice, The Wire presents a full-bodied narrative that foregrounds the experiences and worldviews of those who are generally objects (rather than subjects) in public discourse and policy debates. Like many of the best empirical works in our field, The Wire is compelling because of its fidelity to the complex realities it seeks to portray. And like some of the most successful works of critical theory, it peels away layers of mystification, not to impose a substitute truth, but to unsettle and enlarge the public conversation. By presenting a powerful critique of contemporary practice in dramatic form, The Wire expands the space for political discourse and the possibilities for political action.

Although fictional projects like The Wire share characteristics with social science research (especially ethnographic inquiry), they tend to reach (and possibly affect) far more people than scholarly studies. Moreover, as fiction they are uniquely situated to suggest alternative universes—to not only ask how, where, when, and why but also what if? Fiction writers and television and movie producers can play a critical role in politics by violating the common-sense expectations of viewers and presenting them with provocative (and perhaps even plausible) alternatives to present conventions. Like some of the best social scientists, they can present us with portrayals of reality that push us to question our beliefs and values. They can help us recognize that it is in our power to make things better if, like Major Colvin, we refuse to

41 continue accepting the lies, telling the lies, and acting on the lies that perpetuate social inequality and suffering.

42

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