Army Grants ‘Moral Waivers' for Recruitment
by Paul Street
This article originally appeared in Znet, as part of Paul Street's "The
Empire and Inequality Report, no. 11."
"Maybe we need more troops with a history of defying
authority on the ground in Iraq."
Reflecting
the difficulties it is experiencing finding young working-class folks willing
to sacrifice lives and limbs in the bloody and criminal occupation of
Iraq, the United States Army has granted an increasing number of so-called
"moral waivers" to enlistees with official criminal backgrounds.
According
to a front page story in last Wednesday's New York Times, the number of
such waivers given to Army recruits expanded 65 percent, from less than 5,000
in 2003 to more than 8,000 in 2006. Most of the waivers are for "serious
misdemeanors" but the number offered for felony convictions has risen from 8 to
11 percent.
‘THOSE
INDIVIDUALS'
According
to University of California professor Aaron Belkin, "more than 125,000 service
members with criminal histories have joined the military in the last three
years." Belkin worries that "you have a sizeable population that has been
incarcerated and is not used to the same cultural norms as everybody else. The
chances that one of those individuals is going to commit an atrocity or disobey
an order is higher."
According
to Beth Asch, an economist at the military-industrial RAND Corporation, the
increasing number of recruits with criminal backgrounds is "something that
should be treated with concern."
This
sentiment is echoed by John D. Hutson, dean and president of the Franklin
Pierce Law Center and former judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. "If
you are recruiting somebody who has demonstrated some sort of antisocial
behavior and then you are putting a gun in their hands," Hutson told Times
reporter Lizette Alvarez, "you have to be awfully careful about what you are
doing."
THE
MARK OF A CRIMINAL RECORD
"It is not
uncommon for young criminal offenders to turn to the military," notes Alvarez
(who should have said "ex-offenders), "because their records typically narrow
their job opportunities."
Indeed,
mass incarceration helps drive its own spectacular expansion in the U.S.
It does this partly by significantly damaging the employment and earnings
prospects of ex-prisoners, most of whom were already severely disadvantaged in
a post-industrial labor market that offers remarkably few opportunities for
lesser skilled male workers of color.
Reflecting
the fact that roughly 80 percent of large- and medium-sized employers now do
criminal background checks on job applicants, the best social scientific
research shows that the chance of securing legitimate employment decreases
significantly with prison time and that the nation's 3 million ex-prisoners
suffer a lifetime "wage penalty" (earnings reduction) of 10 to 30
percent. Ex-prisoners on average experience no real wage increases in
their twenties and thirties, when young men who have never been incarcerated
tend to experience rapid wage-growth. Prison time serves to channel individuals
away from skilled occupations and into job sectors characterized by low wages,
limited job stability, and fewer opportunities for advancement. It disrupts the
career-building process with prior work experience contributing little to
future opportunities. Ex-offenders are left to start back at square one
with respect to gaining a foothold in a particular occupations.The unsurprising
results include the return of most ex-prisoners to prison in a viciously
circular game of inmate recycling that turns millions of inner city residents
into raw materials for the expansion of a mostly rural prison industry (see
Paul Street, "Starve the Racist Prison Beast," Znet, November
8, 2003).
"One in three black males will be sent to state or
federal prison at some point in their lives compared to one in six Latino males
and one in seventeen white males."
Since the
nation's prisoner, felon, ex-prisoner, and ex-felon population is very
disproportionately black, moreover, the nation's veritable explosion of mass
incarceration and criminal-marking has significantly undermined America's
ability to pursue racial justice and act on the cherished goals of equal
opportunity and black equality that were articulated by Martin Luther king, Jr.
and the civil rights movement more than a generation ago. In 2002, 38
years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, just more than 10 percent of
black males between the ages of 25 and 29 were incarcerated in the U.S.,
compared to 1.2 percent of white men and 2.4 Latino men of the same age. Under
existing criminal justice trends reflecting a dramatic increase in racially disparate
mass imprisonment beginning in the middle 1970s, one in three black males will
be sent to state or federal prison at some point in their lives compared to one
in six Latino males and one in seventeen white males. Blacks are 12 percent of
the nation's population but comprise nearly half of the nation's 1.4 million
prisoners and of the nation's 3 million former prisoners. As The
Economist noted in an article titled "The Stigma That Never Fades," an
astonishing one in three black adult males carried the lifelong burden of a
felony record by 2002.
Thanks to
its racially disparate labor market consequences, the "prison-industrial-
complex" has become a significant form of racially regressive state
intervention in the US labor market.
This is an
important but relatively unknown aspect of the domestic societal racism and
socioeconomic regression that help fuel Empire and Inequality at home and
abroad (see Paul Street, "Empire Abroad, Prisons At Home: Dark Connections,"
Znet, March
27, 2002).
‘ANTISOCIAL
BEHAVIOR': THE POWER ‘ELITE'S' ‘MORAL WAIVER'
Don't get
me wrong. I'm a longstanding critic of hiring and other forms of
discrimination against people with criminal records and criminal
histories. I've written repeatedly and at length about the racially and
socioeconomically disparate and regressive nature of mass incarceration and
felony marking.
At the same
time, I do not think you need a criminal record or prison history to exhibit
relevant "antisocial behavior" or to be at risk of committing atrocities and
breaking laws. The most significant transgressions against social and
ecological health ("antisocial behavior") are routinely committed by people who
are generally protected from criminal marking by privileges of class and race -
the directors of the nation's powerful and inherently
socio-pathological corporations, who are legally required to privilege bottom-line
investor interests (profit) above and beyond the common good of the broader
society and polity.
I also
observe that the biggest and most relevant atrocities are ordered and thus most
significantly committed by the generally felony-free power "elite."
Important examples include Dick Cheney and George W. Bush's decisions to launch
the monumentally criminal occupation of Iraq - an open violation of
international rules forbidding wars of aggression - and to conduct this
invasion and their larger so-called "war on terror" without regard to standard
international prohibitions of torture and the killing and maiming of
civilians. These are great transgressions that far exceed and create the
essential context for war crimes committed by on-the-ground GIs with or without
"criminal backgrounds." GIs are in Iraq to do wrong in the first place only
because of the broader atrocity ordered by Cheney and Bush, with predictably
(in fact widely predicted) terrible consequences for Iraqi civilians and U.S.
soldiers.
"The biggest and most relevant atrocities are ordered and
thus most significantly committed by the generally felony-free power ‘elite.'"
As good
middle-class Americans fret over the criminal backgrounds of their baby-sitters
and gardeners, they might want to reflect on the need to rescind the "moral
waiver" granted to top national economic and political authorities.
‘EXCEPT
WHEN IT COMES TO HIMSELF'
Still, I
wonder if Alvarez, Belkin, Asch and Hutson would like to apply their concern
about handing military power to people with criminal backgrounds to the fact
that Bush "was arrested in 1972 for possessing cocaine." As journalist
Mark Hatfield noted in the afterword to his 2001 book Fortunate Son: George
W. Bush and the Making of an American President, Bush's father (a U.S.
Congressman in 1972) "worked out an agreement with the [presiding] judge, a
fellow Republican and elected official, to allow George W. to perform community
service at Project P.U.L.L. in exchange for having the entire record regarding
the incident expunged." As one former Yale classmate and close friend of Bush
told Hatfield, "George W. was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1972 but
due to his father's connections, the entire record was expunged by a state
judge whom the elder Bush helped get elected."
"Bush II committed a technical crime that would have saddled him
with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record."
The story
was verified by another top Bush source who added the following in 1999:
"You know
what makes me sick about all this shit? It's Bush's hypocrisy. Cocaine
use is illegal, but as Governor of Texas, he's toughened penalties for people
convicted of selling or possessing less than a gram of coke (a crime previously
punished by probation), Ok'd the housing of 16-year-olds in adult correctional
facilities and slashed funding for inmate substance-abuse programs. Texas
currently spends over $1.45 million a day incarcerating young people on drug
offenses...I've known George for several years and he has never accepted youth
and irresponsibility as legitimate excuses for illegal behavior - except
when it comes to himself."
Exactly.
Whatever one thinks about the criminalization of narcotics (I'm opposed), Bush
II committed a technical crime that would have saddled him with the crippling
lifelong mark of a felony record (and perhaps a prison history) if he had not
been a Fortunate Son of the white ruling-class. To make matters worse, he
used the political career granted to him by elevated family connections to
toughen drug laws and expand racially disparate and drug related youth and mass
incarceration, helping feed the spectacular expansion of the U.S.
prison-industrial complex.
THEFT
AS ‘LIBERATION'
For what
it's worth, the historically erased 1972 coke bust wasn't the first time that
Daddy Bush's connections spared Dubya from the indignities and disabilities of
a criminal background. "In 1966 while serving as fraternity president [at
Yale]," Hatfield reported, "Junior had his first brush with the law, involving
the theft of a holiday decoration so he could hang it on the door of his frat
house. ‘We evidently made a lot of noise,' George said, recalling how the
police responded to the theft scene, ‘because the local gendarmes came and
said, "What are you doing." I said, "We are liberating a Christmas tree
wreath. Don't you understand the Delta Kappa Epsilon house is short of a
Christmas wreath?" They didn't understand.' The police," Hatfield noted,
"booked him on a misdemeanor but later dropped it after the intervention of one
of his father's friends."
The 1966
incident was quite minor, but it carries a certain haunting feel in light of
subsequent events. It would not be the last time that Bush would confuse theft
with "liberation."
‘DON'T
KILL ME:' BUSH'S GUBERNATORIAL RECORD
Of course,
one doesn't have to focus only on technically illegal activity in Bush's
reckless youth to suggest that tens of millions of Americans might have wanted
to look a bit more deeply into Bush II's background (and that of his creepy
family) before voting for him in 2000 and 2004. Dubya's tendency towards
"antisocial behavior" from the top down is evident in his Texas gubernatorial
record, which included a pro-concealed handgun bill, an especially punitive
model of public-assistance elimination ("welfare reform"), a strong and
self-interested predilection for corporate welfare, a distinctive hostility to
labor and environmental concerns, and a special, record-setting taste for
incarcerating and executing the state's disproportionately black and Latino
poor (see Stephen Lendeman, "The End of the Bush Dynasty," ZNet Magazine,
December 5,
2006).
In
September of 1999, Bush revealed something of his true character when he mocked
what the evangelical Christian Karla Fay Tucker said when asked, just before
her execution, "what would you say to Governor Bush?" : ‘Please don't kill
me'." Bush sneered as he derisively repeated Tucker's dying comment.
Tucker was electrocuted on Bush's controversial order, over the (admittedly
hypocritical) protest of Pat Robertson. By this time, Bush was well into his
alleged conversion to evangelical Christianity
By the time
of his 2004 re-"election,"
of course, Bush had committed numerous impeachable offenses. He had
brazenly violated international law and guaranteed himself an honored place in
the War Criminals' Hall of Fame.
It's nice
that many of his former supporters have turned against him - Bush's popularity
numbers have fallen towards the 1974 Nixon zone. But it's a little late,
under the rules of the U.S electoral system, for U.S. citizens to be waking up
to Bush's vile nature. Barring impeachment and removal from office, which he
richly deserves - the legal case is very strong - boy king George still has
nearly two more years to wreak havoc. The consequences could be truly
disastrous at home and abroad. A little more Bush background checking
might have been useful.
WANTED:
SOLDIERS WILLING TO DISOBEY CRIMINAL ORDERS
Considering
the inherently illegal and terrorist nature of the administration's war on Iraq,
finally, one has to wonder about professor Belkin's concern that soldiers with
criminal records might "disobey orders" and "commit atrocities." Maybe we need
more troops with a history of defying authority on the ground in Iraq. Some
orders need to be disobeyed. There is legal as well moral basis for U.S.
soldiers refusing to participate in the sort of illegal and atrocious actions
they have been commanded to execute within and beyond Iraq .
Veteran radical historian,
journalist, and activist Paul Street ([email protected]) is an
anti-centrist political commentator located in Iowa City, IA, U.S. Street is
the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in
the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still
Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) and The
Empire and Inequality Report.* Street's next book is Racial
Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New
York, 2007).