Oliver Crime & Repression 10/30/2007 2 Repression and Crime Control: Why Social Movements Scholars Should Pay Attention to Mass Incarceration as a Form of Repression

The disciplinary insurgency that created the academic field of social movement studies distinguished dissent from crime. This dichotomy has led the field to ignore the relation between the repression of dissent and the control of “ordinary ” crime. There was massive repression in the wake of the Black riots of the 1960s that did not abate when the riots abated. The acceleration of the mass incarceration of African Americans in the US after 1980 suggests the possibility that crime control and especially the drug war have had the consequence of repressing dissent among the poor. Social movement scholars have failed to recognize this as repression because of the theoretical turn that built too strong a conceptual wall between crime and dissent. Revisiting this dichotomy is essential for understanding repression today. Black people in the United States are incarcerated at astronomical rates, but social movements scholars have ignored these trends in their theorizing about repression and in their analyses of the decline of the Black movement. This peculiar blindness has arisen because of the disciplinary boundaries created in the 1970s in the academic insurgency that created the field of “collective behavior and social movements. ” This paper documents the massive repression o