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No guns or drugs were ever found in the house. The elder Sepulveda did not have an arrest record. Yet 11-year-old Alberto paid the price of the ill-informed raid with his life. 

In “Waging a War on Immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” sociologist Timothy J. Dunn recounts the shooting death of goat-herding teenager Esequiel Hernandez by a U.S. Marine in Redford, Texas. The Marine who killed Hernandez was a member of Joint Task Force 6 (JTF-6), a special unit that now coordinates nearly all military support for law enforcement/anti-drug efforts in the U.S. 

JTF-6, which works extensively with the U.S. Border Patrol, carried out 3,300 missions from 1990- 1997, reports Dunn. But with no requirement for regular reporting of its activities, the operations of this secretive task force remained largely unknown and out of the spotlight until the 1997 shooting. 

Then a 4-member team of Marines on a special operations mission for the Border Patrol noticed Hernandez tending to his goats and carrying a single-shot .22 caliber rifle to ward off attacks from animal predators. 

The Marines, dressed in full camouflage, and moving stealthily through the surrounding brush, got into a firefight of unclear origin. By all accounts, Hernandez didn’t know who was shooting at him. The soldier who fatally wounded Hernandez was subsequently interviewed and quoted as saying that he believed he had taken down a “bad guy.” The team of Marines, it was later revealed, administered no medical aid to the dying boy and made no effort to call for medical assistance. 

The soldiers, as Dunn notes, had “little preparation for civilian contact, which they were supposed to avoid on the clandestine surveillance mission.” 

What this scenario exemplifies is the incremental erosion of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which was signed into law after a host of Reconstruction Era abuses of the civilian population because of collusion between local law enforcement and military personnel. The Posse Comitatus Act that clearly demarcated the differing roles of these armed segments of society, first began to be whittled away by the Reagan administration. 

In his essay, “The Thick Green Line,”Colonel Charles J. Dunlap goes on to explain that the dismantling of the Act was justified by the perceived need for a reunification of the domestic functions of the military, local law enforcement, and the criminal justice system as a whole. “[T]he end result of almost two decades of statutory change and billions of dollars in budgetary expenditures,” writes Dunlap, “is the entrenchment of both regular and part-time military personnel in a variety of counter- drug efforts, including Joint Task Force 6.” 

The central role of American “hypermasculinity” in perpetuating a militaristic mode of social control is also key to understanding the union of the military and the criminal justice system, explains Kraska in his essay, “Playing War: Masculinity, Militarism and Their Real-World Consequences.” 

Kraska, who embarked on a two-year ethnography of rural police officers and military soldiers working in collaboration on SWAT teams, presents a harrowing description of his time spent observing an ad hoc training session of cops and soldiers. “[T]he group armed itself with shotguns and several boxes of odd-looking shotgun ammunition,” Kraska recounts. “One of the officers fired a round into a junked clothes dryer. The explosion was unbelievably loud, despite ear protection; simultaneously, a large flash was visible in the dwindling daylight. The men also experimented with other ‘special event’ shells, including a ‘shredder round,’ which cuts the locking mechanism out of doors. After witnessing its effect on a metal file cabinet, a younger officer said jokingly that he might load up with these shells on his next crack raid.” 

But by using words like “jokingly” to describe the actions and words of these officers, Kraska seems to underestimate the degree to which the training session is far from a joke for the officers and soldiers engaged in it. 

In perhaps his only omission of perception in this otherwise engaging essay, Kraska could have done better to dig deeper into the psyches of the men whose lives—personal and professional—are devoted to the twin purposes of gunplay and gun-focused law enforcement. 

But such omissions aside, Kraska leaves the training session with a firmer grasp of the troubling societal implications of the paramilitary exercise he’s been allowed to witness. 

The book’s female contributor, sociologist Susan L. Caulfield, in her essay, “Militarism, Feminism and Criminal Justice,” argues for feminist analysis in the context of a militarized criminal justice system. “How, then, is an examination of feminism and militarism relevant to those who work within criminology and criminal justice?,” asks Caulfield. “The relevance can be found at many levels, including theory building, law enforcement practices, courtroom dynamics, law creation, [and] sentencing practices.” 

One aspect of the criminal justice system sorely in need of feminist analysis and criticism is that of correctional boot camps which, says Caulfield, exist to provide a form of “shock incarceration.” 

“Given that in the military, to fail at a task often leads to being labeled ‘woman’ or ‘little girl,’ boot camps, by promoting military ideology, reject both women and what are labeled as female characteristics,” she writes. 

Caulfield and her fellow contributors to Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System are not off the mark. Clearly, the future integrity and democracy of our society depends on our commitment to understand and challenge the militaristic model, which now governs an increasing portion of American existence. 

Silja J.A. Talvi is a Seattle-based freelance journalist. She is a regular contributor to publications ranging from the Christian Science Monitor to In These Times, and is co-editor of LiP Magazine.