Mass Incarceration And The ‘Overfederalization’ Of Crime

America’s mass incarceration is the bastard child of many. Among them: racism, the War on Drugs (itself a racist business), the evisceration of the Constitution through ideological interpretive strategies, prosecutorial misconduct, police brutality, and so on. Yet other culprits may be found elsewhere, in other precincts of the legal and political infrastructure of the nation.

In ‘The Balance of Power Between The Federal Government and the States’ (in: Alan Brinkley, Nelson W. Polsby, Kathleen M. Sullivan eds., New Federalist Papers: Essays in Defense of the Constitution, , WW. Norton, New York, 1997), Kathleen M. Sullivan writes:

[T]here may be reason for the courts to draw outer limits to federal power when the structural, political, and cultural safeguards of federalism break down and the federal government encroaches needlessly upon areas traditionally and sensibly regulated by the states. The worst example in our recent politics is the overfederalization of crime. The Constitution names only three crimes: counterfeiting coins or securities, piracy on the high seas, and treason. But Congress has created more than three thousand federal crimes under the power to regulate interstate commerce. There are many crimes that should be federal, such as bombing federal buildings or sending explosives through the mail. But should it also be a federal crime to grow marijuana at home or to hijack a car around the corner? Federal crimes have proliferated not because it is good crime policy but because it is good politics: as Chief Justice Rehnquist has observed, “the political combination of creating a federal offense and attaching a mandatory minimum sentence has become a veritable siren song for Congress,” loud enough to drown out any careful consideration of the comparative advantages of state and federal crime control.

Shifting crime control from the states to the federal government in purely local cases diverts the work of federal investigators, prosecutors, and judges from areas of greater federal need. It also fills federal prisons with non-violent and first-time offenders who occupy space that could better be used for violent, career criminals whose operations cross state lines. There is no reason why the new federal crimes may not be handled by the states, as they have been traditionally, unless they involve multistate enterprises or intrastate enterprises so vast as to overwhelm the resources of state authorities.

The federalization of a particular crime acts as a ‘promotion’ of sorts: it elevates the perceived undesirability and dangerousness of the crime; it thus clears the way for harsher sentencing. As Rehnquist’s remark above suggests, the legal system’s response to a particular crime may be viewed as qualitatively and quantitatively inferior till the time it federalizes it and adds a harsh minimum sentence; only such a combination will assuage the retributivist impulse that so seems to animate the punishment policies of our penal system. Moreover, the current state of affairs lends itself to a situation where a conservatively inclined Supreme Court could, under the guise of tilting this balance of power back to the states, strike down progressive legislation. As Martin Garbus noted in Courting Disaster: The Supreme Court and the Unmaking of American Law (Henry Holt, New York, 2002, pp. 128-130) the Supreme Court struck down, precisely as part of an ideological anti-federalist strategy, in United States vs. Lopez, “the first United States Supreme Court case since the New Deal to set limits to Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution“, an act of Congress criminalizing possession of a handgun at school.

The Supreme Court’s Commerce clause rulings helped unite the nation, but as the history of mass incarceration shows, it has helped create a nation within a nation too, one locked up and discriminated against for life.