There is an unmistakable neoliberal inflection in zero tolerance. Our assumption, which theoretically ought to hold, is that both acts and responses to acts, when grounded in color-blind law, by definition rise above racism. A law that specifies how much of a park bench an individual can occupy does not specify the race of either the individual sitting or the individual applying the cuffs.
What such laws fail to grasp is the rent-seeking opportunity created by systemic violence. By constraining individuals born to one set of parents in one neighborhood more than another, I effectively drive down their market value while at the same time making their incarceration more likely; which, in turn, constrains them further; and so on. But again no race-based criteria are required.
The conceit that individuals are free to throw off their constraints whenever they like through a simple decision to comply ignores the cumulative effect both of constraints applied and of rents earned. As I drive down an individual’s value, I earn efficiencies (rents) in their devaluation. Call these efficiencies “freedoms.” I earn these freedoms not through compliance, however; I earn them through the constraints under which other economic actors are forced to perform. I run the 100M with 10kg weights strapped to my competitors’ ankles. Now, however, I am permitted by law to strap another 10kg weight somewhere to their bodies whenever they lose. The effects are cumulative. And, note, not once have I mentioned race. My criteria are color-blind.
The neoliberal inflection of zero tolerance comes precisely from its assertion that its principles are neutral, without valence. Did the rent-seeking opportunity not exist in the first place, this claim might hold up to closer scrutiny. But, to continue our analogy, I enter the race already with all of my opponents wearing weights about their ankles. Moreover, arising out of past rent-seeking opportunities, my opponents have all been aggregated in specific geographical areas that are petri dishes of rent-seeking, where the economic value of individuals has been driven down so far and where the constraints everywhere — from education, to health, to security, to freedom of movement — are so odious as to constitute tons of weights around the ankles of each. And since neoliberalism counts this a “level playing field” it counts any public social intervention onto this field an unwelcomed limitation of freedom: a distortion.
Economic science habitually overlooks the actual composition of this playing field. This fall when I teach Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, I shall have to supplement the standard canon — which knows nothing of this systemic violence — with research setting it in relief.