"I do not believe that repression alone builds a better society"

[Wetzelbill]

Interesting camapaign commercial from 1968 called "Law and Order Democrat." Prescient, I think. One of the most disturbing things to me is how high our incarceration rate has become while at the same time the gap between rich and poor has led us into another Gilded Age.

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1968/law-and-order-democrat

[EFerrari]

1. Didn't "law and order" used to be code for keeping black people down?

[Wetzelbill]

4. I think he's contrasting

his version of the term with Nixon's version of it. Meaning that yes it was a code word for Nixon, but for him he specifically speaks against repression and addresses the poverty issue in that clip. So he's saying law and order to a Dem means something different than just incarceration and repression.

[get the red out]

2. Probably related

My best guess is that the more hopeless a person feels the more desperate they become, add the "war on drugs" to the picture and people looking for an escape and we end up with prison world. And it is the same whether rural southern and midwestern towns or inner cities. Pure class warfare.

[Hannah Bell]

3. it's more than related.

The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the "era of colorblindness" there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have "moved beyond" race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

•There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

•As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

•If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades -- they are currently are at historical lows -- but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

http://www.truthout.org/the-new-jim-crow-how-war-drugs-gave-birth-a-permanent-american-undercaste57462

[Wetzelbill]

6. Great post

thanks!

[Wetzelbill]

5. yes definitely

Right on the money.