You cannot commit a crime and then cry foul because someone else didn't get caught and prosecuted for the same crime.
What's being lost in this discussion about Mass Incarceration is the fact that people are exposing themselves to the criminal justice machine by making the poor choices. I can speak to this from personal experience. I was sentenced to 15 years in Federal Prison for drug related crimes under the mandatory drug sentences.
Since the book, The New Jim Crow, the buzz word in the criminal justice world had has been "Mass Incarceration", which has morphed into the Stop Mass Incarceration movement. Granted the 2.3 million people languishing in United States Penal System is startling number but 95% are not there because they were innocently rounded up and mass incarcerated. I find that black intellectuals are using race a s way to explain why so many black men and women are in prison, when more often then not, it all boils down to poor choices. There's a segment of the black populace who have bought in the self-destructive mindset that accepts prison as a norm. What is sending the majority of blacks to prison is a mindset. Once a person buys in this mindset and finds themselves caught up in the system he/she cannot urn around and cry foul because his/white counter parts are not being punished in the same way he/she has been. The simple truth is a large amount of black are mentally incarcerated, which makes it much more easier for them to find themselves physically incarcerated.
If a black person and a white person take a test and both cheat, and the test administrator who is white catches the black person cheating and turns a blind eye to the white person, can the black person turn around and say, oh it's not fair because the white person got away with cheating? No!! He should have never been cheating in the first place.
Citing "Jim Crow" as the reason so many blacks are in prison should not be a rallying cry to exempt people from the fact they did something wrong. And once you leave yourself open and exposed to the disparities in which exists within the criminal justice system between blacks and white you cannot cry foul.
In this instance the Stop Mass Incarceration movement that has taken shape has only done one thing and that's spark conversation about criminal justice in this country, but it should used to exonerate those who commuted offenses.
Randy Kearse, author of Changin' Your Game Plan: How I used incarceration as a stepping stone for SUCCESS [link:http://www.randykearse.net |www.randykearse.net
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