FORWARD (SECOND EDITION)

On September 11^th, 2001, our country (and citizens from at least 80 other countries) was attacked by terrorists who flew our own airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and who would have flown another plane into a target in Washington D.C. – either the White House or the U.S. Capitol according to most sources – if not thwarted by passengers and flight attendants.  Since this day, the people and government of the United States of America have been obsessed with terrorism.

Terrorism generally refers to the use of violence to instill fear in order to achieve some political purpose.  For example, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary provides this definition of terrorism: “the systematic use of terror (a state of intense fear) especially as a means of coercion ... violence (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands.”

America’s obsession with terrorism might lead you to believe that crime has taken a back seat in terms of importance.  To a degree, this is true.  Public opinion polls, for example, show that since September 11^th, fear of and concerns about terrorism have been much higher than at any time in modern history.   Fear of and concerns about ordinary street crimes (even violent crimes such as school shootings and child abductions) have plummeted.

However, most forms of terrorism, if not, all are also crimes.  You probably got a sense of that by reading the preceding definition of terrorism.  Indeed, many criminologists would probably argue that the attacks of September 11^th ought to be counted as homicides (murders).  The approximately 3,000 people who died that day would be roughly one-fifth of the 15,980 people who were murdered by “ordinary” means in 2001.  The U.S. government decided that the thousands of victims killed by terrorism on September 11^th would not be officially called homicide victims and thus, their deaths were not included in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which is a measure of all crimes known to the police.

Yet, our responses to terrorist attacks, were very similar to our responses to ordinary murders. They have been remarkably similar to American criminal justice processes of police, courts, and corrections.  For example, like the police do with alleged criminals, we investigated who committed the attacks, tried to learn how they organized and successfully carried out their plans, who funded them, who supported them and encouraged them, and even (to a much lessor degree) tried to understand their motivations.  Although the attackers themselves were dead, we launched military action against the country that was said to have harbored the attackers and allowed terrorist training camps to be run on its soil (Afghanistan).  As a result, like the courts do with alleged criminals, we detained thousands of individuals who were suspected of having “links to” or “connections to” or being “affiliated with” individual terrorists, terrorist groups, organizations that in some way support terrorism, and/or countries that support and encourage terrorism.  Many of these individuals are still being detained as “enemy combatants” (rather than “prisoners of war”) – in Cuba no less – so that they are not entitled to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war (POW)s.  Some have even been tried or waived their trials in favor of guilty pleas, and are now being housed in correctional facilities.

So, the terrorist attacks of September 11^th have great significance for an examination of crime.  And America’s response to these attacks, including a war on Iraq that the United States initiated in violation of international law, has great import for understanding where we are as a nation and where we are headed.  Now, in addition to our “war on crime” and our “war on drugs” we also have a “war on terrorism.”  Each is just a part of the larger American war on anything and everything perceived as harmful to American interests.

Throughout this book, I examine America’s war mentality and discuss how it is relevant to the main thesis of this text.  I show, for example, that the anti-terrorism laws in the United States have swung the pendulum farther toward a crime control model of criminal justice by eroding the Constitutional protections that Americans enjoy in order to make it easier for police, courts, and corrections to investigate, arrest, detain, convict, and punish terrorists.  Additionally, I illustrate how media coverage of September 11^th (and America’s subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) likely create fear in Americans so that they are more likely to support tougher methods of crime fighting, even if it means given up some of their own freedoms.  Americans are also less likely to even question their own government and its actions, which inevitably can lead to the types of abuses of official power (such as corruption and wrongful conviction) and erosions of Constitutional protections that I documented in the first edition of this book and I discuss in this second edition.