PDF: Volume 8 Issue 3

Editorial Introduction Criminology’s third war Special issue on terrorism and responses to terrorism Gary LaFree, Special Issue Editor University of Maryland oliticians in the United States have invoked the term “war” to develop national support for an all-out attack on criminal behavior on at least three separate occasions since World PWar II: the wars on crime, drugs, and terrorism. In each case, the word has been used as a metaphor to underscore the conviction that society is involved in a pitched battle and that there is no room for acquiescence or compromise. The implications of the war metaphor or a detailed examination of criminology’s role in these three campaigns is beyond the scope of this short introduction. However, I argue that several important similarities can be found across the three major crime-related political wars of the past century and that there is at least one important difference: Academic criminology was far more engaged in the wars on crime and drugs than it has been in the war on terrorism. Wars on Crime, Drugs, and Terrorism Each of the three wars can be linked directly to presidential politics. Given the United States president’s constitutional responsibility to serve as “commander in chief,” the president is the elected official who is most likely to invoke the war metaphor and be taken seriously. The phrase “war on crime” was actually already in U.S. politics by the early 1930s when Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover sponsored a comic strip of the same name that was syndicated in newspapers across the country (Ruth and Reitz, 2003). But it was Arizona Sena- tor and Presidential Nominee Barry Goldwater who elevated the war-on-crime metaphor to national prominence by making it a key issue in the 1964 presidential election. Goldwater lost the election but forced President-Elect Lyndon Johnson to take the issue seriously. In the fall of 1964, Johnson tried to counter Goldwater’s focus on the microlevel dynamics of crime fighting by arguing that crime was rooted in broad, macrolevel social problems and that warring on poverty really constituted warring on crime (Flamm, 2005). But a year later, Johnson dropped the indirect link to poverty and instead declared a new and direct concern with the victims of crime: “I will not be satisfied until every woman and child in this Nation can walk any street, Direct correspondence to Gary LaFree, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (e-mail: [email protected]). © 2009 American Society of Criminology 431 Criminology & Public Policy • Volume 8 • Issue 3 Editorial Introduction LaFree enjoy any park, drive on any highway, and live in any community at any time of the day or night without fear of being harmed” (Flamm, 2005: 51). When Richard Nixon campaigned during the run-up to the election of 1968, he moved the war on crime even more directly to center stage in presidential politics. At the time of his State of the Union Address in 1970, Nixon declared that “If there is one area where the word ‘war’ is appropriate, it is in the fight against crime” (Huq and Muller, 2008: 218). Although the U.S. war on drugs can be traced as far back as the 1880s when the United States pressed for a treaty with China that included an absolute prohibition on the shipment of opium between the two countries (Eddy, 2003), the modern war on drugs is usually traced to 1971 when President Richard Nixon declared an all-out offensive on drugs—which he re- ferred to as “America’s public enemy number one” (2003: 1). In 1973, the Drug Enforcement Assistance Administration (DEA) was created and charged with enforcing federal drug laws. In 1978, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act was amended to allow for asset forfeiture—which has since been widely used in the war on drugs. The war on drugs received a major boost with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. He responded to perceived drug-related problems by declaring: “The American people want their government to get tough and go on the offensive” (Walker, 1992: 26) and promising that police would attack the drug problem “with more ferocity than ever before” (Donziger, 1996: 115). In 1983, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program (DARE) was founded in Los Angeles and spread quickly to schools across the country. In 1985, First Lady Nancy Reagan launched the widely publicized Just Say No (to drugs) campaign, promoting it through television and radio, popular magazines, bumper stickers, and t-shirts. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 created the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to lead the war on drugs, and William Bennett was appointed as its first director. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law En- forcement Act, which called for mandatory prison sentences of 20 years to life for some drug offenders and the death penalty for those who committed murder in pursuit of illegal drug sales. Since the early 1970s, the United States has spent vast sums of money combating drug use and abuse and has created a far-flung bureaucracy to administer these programs. In addi- tion to agencies like the DEA and ONDCP that were created directly to combat drugs, a host of other agencies—including the departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Justice, Homeland Security (DHS), State, Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Education—received major budget increases for programs tasked with the control of drugs and the treatment or punish- ment of drug offenders. Robinson and Scherlen (2007: 42) estimated that in FY 2005, total federal spending on the drug war amounted to $12.2 billion, with the largest amounts going to HHS, the Department of Justice, and DHS. Fewer than 10 days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush declared war on “terrorism with a global reach” and promised that the war would end only with the eradication of evil (Andreani, 2004: 31). In October 2001, the United States passed the USA Patriot Act, which provides a variety of legal tools to fight terrorism at 432 Criminology & Public Policy Special Issue Homeland Security and Terrorism home and abroad. The war on terrorism rapidly took concrete policy form in the campaign to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan. The invasion was preceded by an ultimatum to the Taliban to hand over terrorists and was at least implicitly sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. After early successes in the Afghan campaign, the Bush administration introduced the doctrine of “preventive war,” which suggests that the United States had the right to resort to force to fight terrorists and their supporters at home and abroad, and strongly pushed the idea that Iraq was the next step in the global war on terrorism (Andreani, 2004). President Bush clearly identified his presidency with the war on terrorism and emphasized this connection in his ultimately successful election over Democratic opponent John Kerry. Despite obvious differences, there are several important similarities between all three of these declared wars on different types of criminal behavior (Caulkins, Kleiman, and Reuter, 2003; LaFree and Dugan, 2004). First, in all three cases, law enforcement is a necessary but not a sufficient solution. Although this argument has probably been the most controversial for the war on terrorism (LaFree and Hendrickson, 2007), it seems fair to conclude that most commentators now imagine at least some role for law enforcement in preventing terrorism and responding to terrorist attacks. Second, in all three cases, much evidence suggests that taking a tough stand and attacking the problem aggressively does not always produce desired results. Third, in the case of terrorism and drugs and to some extent crime, the problem has domestic and transnational aspects. Fourth, in the case of terrorism and drugs and to some extent crime, the problem cuts across various levels of government, agencies, disciplines, and the public and private sectors in complex ways. And finally, in all three areas, the war metaphor has produced substantial and to some extent unanticipated policy difficulties. Thus, Flamm (2005) claimed that, because President Johnson promoted the war-model idea of total victory against crime, he set himself up for certain failure. As former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach explained, “You are meant to win wars, and the War on Crime was in a sense an unwinnable war.” Similar arguments have been voiced in terms of the war metaphor applied to drugs (Robinson and Scherlen, 2007) and terrorism (LaFree and Hendrickson, 2007). However, ordinary street crime, drug distribution and use, and terrorism are also distinct in important ways, including the scope of violations (crimes and drug violations are common, but terrorism is relatively rare); the motivations of participants (terrorists often perceive themselves as altruists; common criminals and drug distributors rarely do); and organizational structure (most common crimes are committed with little organized structure, whereas drug distribution networks and terrorist groups vary greatly in organizational complexity). From a research standpoint, a major difference between these three types of crime is the differential involvement of academic criminology. Although criminology has been involved front and center in the war on crime and drugs, thus far, its connection to the war on terrorism has been modest. It is true that criminologists have been making important contributions to the research literature on terrorism and responses to terrorism for many years. Two past presidents of the American Society of Criminology, Nicholas Kittrie (1978) and Austin Turk (1982, 1984), explicitly built terrorism into their research on Volume 8 • Issue 3 433 Editorial Introduction LaFree political crime in the 1970s and 1980s.

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