The Vietnam War and the Militarization of US Prisons

This paper explores how tactical innovations developed to quell uprisings in U.S. military prisons during the Vietnam War were later widely adopted across the American correctional field, contributing to the militarization of American prisons. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military operated a sprawling and complex correctional system that spanned the globe. By December 1969, the Army alone had nearly 10,000 prisoners confined to facilities in the U.S. as well as in Japan, Germany, South Vietnam, and other overseas locations. The Navy and Marine Corps held more than 5,000 prisoners by 1970, confined to 45 separate facilities worldwide. As many as three-quarters of these prisoners were confined for leaving their units without authorization—voting against the war with their feet. Behind bars, many of these dissidents continued to revolt against military authorities through violent and nonviolent means of protest. The increasing unrest spawned tactical innovations in riot control and the use of force that streamlined the military’s capacity to repress dissent in prisons. Throughout the Vietnam War period, military prison officials promoted themselves as being on the cutting edge of American penology, presenting papers at conferences and publishing articles in the leading trade journals. Beginning in the early 1970s, when some of the military’s most experienced jailers left the armed forces to take positions overseeing large state and county correctional systems, they encouraged the adoption of riot-suppression technology developed during their time in the military prison system. The paper argues that the pervasiveness of militarized riot squads and “cell extractions”—violent maneuvers that have been the source of countless lawsuits over the years —in contemporary U.S. prisons are tangible legacies of the Vietnam War and illustrate what Stuart Schrader calls the “entanglement of the national security state and the carceral state.”