Rallying for repression: police terror, “law-and-order” politics, and the decline of Maine’s prisoners’ rights movement

Abstract

This essay analyzes right-wing activism in Maine’s law enforcement community in relation to the state’s prisoners’ rights movement during the early 1970s. Viewing violent political repression as central to the decline of the radical prisoners’ rights organization, Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), I argue that vigilante activity and police attacks on prison activists, including Portland Police Officer Edward Foster’s botched attempt to organize a police “death squad” to assassinate local ex-convicts during the summer of 1974, should be understood as the work of a right-wing social movement in 1970s Maine that included activist prison guards, police officers, law enforcement officials, and their supporters. Although most Maine law enforcement agents would never have publicly condoned politically motivated arrests or vigilantism, the above were united in their embrace of a conservative ideology associated with Nixon-era law-and-order politics. Whether acting legally as grassroots community organizers or extralegally as vigilantes, these activists justified their deeds as necessary remedies to a criminal justice system they perceived as “soft on crime.” This right-wing activism was successful. The destruction of the local prisoners’ rights movement left conservatives and law enforcement agents virtually uncontested in their ability to set the terms of public discussion regarding the role of prisons in Maine and U.S. society. Thus, in Maine and beyond, state and paramilitary violence were central to the rise of law-and-order politics and the prison-industrial complex, and today’s widespread acceptance of mass incarceration as “an inevitable and permanent feature” of America’s social landscape.