Bigger and More Dangerous Than the New Jim Crowby Alan Gilbert
"Though formally a democracy, the United States is also the biggest (racist) police state in the world."
As I have written about here and here, Michelle Alexander has a striking book, The New Jim Crow, which identifies how many poor people, black, Latino and white, are involved with the prison system and has spoken widely with high school students, in law schools and churches about what the problem is and how to fight it. This year at the American Political Science Association, the magnitude of the problem was beginning to draw the attention of many political scientists. Note also that the issue of mass incarceration is beginning to surface among serious conservatives and libertarians (see the Economist's review of Ernest Drucker's A Plague of Prisons and Scott Horton’s post on Bernard Harcourt).
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From 300,000 prisoners in all American prisons in the early 1970s, Alexander shows, there are now 2.3 million. This eightfold increase has been triggered by the so-called war on drugs, enforced especially heavily in black communities (lots of people banished into the prison system never to get out for victimless crimes) and by the “tough on crime,” lengthy sentences advocated by Republicans and some Democrats and now mandated by law. As Alexander emphasizes, these sentences are not just for a particular crime – do your time and be made whole, a full citizen again. Instead, drug felons, particularly black ones, are often denied the right to vote afterwards. They are not able, with a jail record, to get jobs in the outside world (they have to survive through family and personal connections). They cannot live in public housing and are subject to fear and discrimination by private landlords. They are continually supervised in the parole system and thus, much more likely to be returned to jail if for example, depressed, they miss a meeting.
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The danger of political isolation in naming this, however, is, as the critics point out, real. This gigantic police system is sometimes called a "prison-industrial complex" except that this misses the broader aspect of probation, of corporate media stigmatization of blacks as "likely criminals," and the like. Like the war complex (the military-industrial-congressional-think tank/academic-corporate media-intelligence-foreign militaries with large scale American aid and so forth complex), this police state complex is far broader, more institutionalized, more subject to a private profit motive (police often appropriate the money and estates from drug confiscations, prisons are increasingly privatized, and the like) and thus harder to change despite its grotesquely irrational, cruel and wasteful aspects than people usually imagine. Further, as we saw in the case of Abu Ghraib where Sergeant Charles Graner had learned torture techniques practicing on blacks in Florida prisons even before he got orders from Donald Rumsfeld (and Bush and Cheney) to practice them on Iraqi prisoners, there is a mutual interplay between prisons abroad and prisons at home (see my Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy? for a broader analysis of this dynamic). To undo this complex, movements from below, for instance, to legalize marijuana and repeal the rigid federal sentences and three strikes and your out state laws (California), are needed. We need apt words to gather a movement. Both Cathy Cohen and Desmond King, who rightly admire and have learned from Alexander's book, have raised a deep question about whether the new Jim Crow is the right term.
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http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/bigger-and-more-dangerous-new-jim-crowIncarceration Nationby Linn Washington, Jr.
Mass Black incarceration is a kind of "punitive backlash" against the gains of the Sixties, and only a "a major social movement" can challenge it. Nowhere on the planet is mass imprisonment more entrenched than in the United States. "The U.S. imprisons more than South Africa did under apartheid." At every stage of the criminal justice system, Blacks are selected for harsher treatment. "In major urban areas almost one-half of black men have criminal records."
The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country on earth, accounting for 25 percent of the world's prisoners, despite having just five percent of the world's population. America currently holds over two million in prisons with double that number under supervision of parole and probation, according to federal government figures. Mass incarceration consumes over $50-billion annually across America – money far better spent on creating jobs and improving education.Under federal law persons with drug convictions like Garner are permanently barred from receiving financial aid for education, food stamps, welfare and publicly funded housing.
But only drug convictions trigger these exclusions under federal law. Violent bank robbers, white-collar criminals like Wall Street scam artists who steal billions, and even murderers who've done their time do not face the post-release deprivations slapped on those with drug convictions on their records, including those imprisoned for simple possession, and not major drug sales.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/incarceration-nationTime For A Political Response to the Crisis of Mass Incarceration: Join the Campaign To End Mass IncarcerationBruce A. Dixon
* Because the U.S., with 4.5 % of the world's population, has 25% of the planet's prisoners. We are the world's first prison state.
* Because African Americans, who are one eighth the nation's population, are almost half it's 2.3 million prisoners, and because Latinos, also an eighth of the U.S., are more than a quarter of the locked down.
* Because prisons do not make us safer. Incarceration rates DO NOT match rates of crime or drug use. Whites, blacks and Latinos have nearly identical rates of drug use, but the "war on drugs" is almost exclusively prosecuted in nonwhite and poor neighborhoods. Local police funding is often tied to drug arrests, and nonwhites are universally charged with more serious crimes, convicted more frequently, and sentenced more harshly than whites.
* Because former prisoners are viciously and almost universally discriminated against in housing, employment, health care and the right to vote for the rest of their lives.
* Because if Dr. King were alive today, he too would oppose the prison state the U.S. has become.
We've been writing for years, in Black Agenda Report, and before this, in Black Commentator about how the heinous impact of our nation's policy of mass incarceration is, whether our supposed leaders recognize it or not, the number one problem of Black America. Fully thirty percent of black males between 18 and 30 are locked away. In the depressed inner-city areas of Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Milwaukee, and a dozen other places, more than eighty percent of black males have a prison record by the age of thirty.
Along with many others, we've identified the crisis of mass incarceration as stemming not from poor education, or broken families, not from disproportionate crime and drug use, not from fading morals or a supposed culture of poverty and violence. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander and many others have demonstrated, mass incarceration is a bipartisan political policy, conceived and implemented from the Reagan administration onward, first to build a political coalition on white racism, and afterward to sustain corporate profits, political careers, and socially useful myths.
Like many of you, we've waited in vain for black civic, media, religious and political leaders, our black elite, to come up with a political response to the nation's social policy of mass black incarceration. It's not coming. This kind of fundamental change will not be brought about by the professional political “pragmatists” whose vision is always limited to what they can get through a state legislature, a regulatory board, or the Congress this session.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/time-political-response-crisis-mass-incarceration-join-campaign-end-mass-incarcerationhttp://www.endmassincarceration.org/
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