1 'It Can't Be a Lie': the Wire As Breaching Experiment Joshua

1 ‘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

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