More Black Men Now in Prison System than Were Slaves

[cory777]

Source: LA Progressive

“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation.

Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Interest ran so high beforehand that the organizers had to move the event to a location that could accommodate the eager attendees. That evening, more than 200 people braved the pouring rain and inevitable traffic jams to crowd into the library’s main room, with dozens more shuffled into an overflow room, and even more latecomers turned away altogether. Alexander and her topic had struck a nerve.

Growing crime rates over the past 30 years don’t explain the skyrocketing numbers of black — and increasingly brown — men caught in America’s prison system, according to Alexander, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun after attending Stanford Law. “In fact, crime rates have fluctuated over the years and are now at historical lows.”

“Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” she said, even though studies have shown that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or above blacks. In some black inner-city communities, four of five black youth can expect to be caught up in the criminal justice system during their lifetimes.

Read more: http://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-the-justice-system/black-men-prison-system/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+laprogressive+%28The+LA+Progressive%29&utm_content=Twitter

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[cliffordu]

1. K&R.

[TheDebbieDee]

2. We have "For-Profit " prisons and a two-tier justice system..........

Everytime another stupid law is passed that makes criminals out of most Americans, the law is never enforced fairly or evenly........it's usually only enforced against those who cannot afford to grease palms and pay the best lawyers.

ETA: K&R!

[JonLP24]

3. k&r

[ananda]

4. They ARE slaves.

And disenfranchised.

Rather convenient both for Reeps and prison privateers.

[Common Sense Party]

11. Slaves had no choice. They were made slaves completely against their will and wishes.

I'd venture to guess that many (if not most) prisoners--black, white, any colour you like--made some decision or choice that landed them behind bars.

We can pretend otherwise, but it's just pretending.

In that sense, I don't see this comparison as relevant.

[EFerrari]

12. Right. They chose to be born black in the United States

where black drivers get stopped 9 times more frequently than white drivers.

[Common Sense Party]

15. They are in prison because they were driving while black?

Even the white guys?

Are you actually saying that the vast majority of prisoners are completely innocent of any crime?

Yes, we have a crappy legal system and there are a few innocent people who are in jail. But the vast majority committed crimes, therefore they were incarcerated.

[EFerrari]

16. Wrong. Black men, especially, have much more unnecessary police contact

and that translates into prison time.

Our justice system is racist. The numbers speak for themselves.

[JonLP24]

18. Yes

I think Wise makes an excellent point here
http://www.timwise.org/2009/05/hey-dude-wheres-my-privilege-race-and-lawbreaking-in-black-and-white/

Also if anyone wants to learn more, click on the "Criminal Justice System" tag to the right as he was written dozens of articles on this topic.

[ThomCat]

30. Our criminal justice system has quickly and suddenly

increased the number of people who are locked up in prisons by over 400% in less than 20 years. Do you really believe that more than 4x as many people are committing crimes as used to? And do you really believe that people in the African American communities are out there committing crimes at an epidemic rate?

The much more likely explanation, and one that critics have been pointing to for years, is that our law enforcement system has been changing for years

From one that searches for criminals
To one that creates criminals by criminalizing people.

If you have spent any time at all studying criminal justice you know how easy that is to do.

1. You pass laws that make it a crime to stand on street corners, and then you enforce that only in minority neighborhoods where there isn't anyplace else to go.

2. You do aggressive stop and search of minority people in minority neighborhoods, searching for any minor or trivial violation. Things that would get warnings, or ignored in white neighborhoods. And you prosecute harshly, using heavy double standards.

3. You say that any gesture looks like a threatening gesture and arrest people for making gang gestures. Then, regardless of what they do, you claim that they fought back and resisted arrest. That's a guaranteed conviction because juries will always believe the cops and there is No Possible defense against such charges.

4. In poor and minority neighborhoods you can also classify normal products as criminal items. Paint becomes proof that you intended to vandalize instead of proof that you were remodeling your apartment. A screwdriver or any tool becomes a weapon, instead of a common legal tool that's legal to own and possess, even if you have a reason to have it. Duct tape can be proof that you're a gang member. Any of a long, long list of products can land you in jail. How can you ever possibly know what hardware, cleaning products, or tools you aren't ever allowed to buy or carry home from the store?

5. If all else fails, a cop can simply drop a single pill or marijuana seed anyplace near you, or in your car, or in your apartment, and get a conviction against you. Or, while stopping you for a "random" search for no reason at all the cop could claim you acted nervous or "suspicious" and tried to run, even if that isn't true, and claim that when they tried to arrest you, you fought, even if that isn't true. Unless you have a video tape proving they lied, you're going to jail.

It's incredibly easy to criminalize innocent people. Especially when the idea has become pervasive that "it's okay to create some reason to arrest them, because they're all guilty of something anyway."

That's what racism causes in the context of criminal justice. That's what it means when prisons become a huge cash industry and need bodies to remain profitable.

Anyone who really thinks that only guilty people go to jail is horribly naive, and has no real experience with the vast and persistent historical experience Minority people have with the criminal justice system.

[TheDebbieDee]

37. I can't speak for EFerrari, but I would say that these laws

are enforced unequally between the races.

For example, if it was a federal crime to spit on the sidewalk I promise you that there would be more "brown" people convicted and sentenced to prison for it than "non-brown" people.

And as for there being few innocent people in jail, I would counter that there are non-violent offenders in prison who would be better off pulling probation. These people are being sentenced to prison because of a two-tier justice system in which monied offenders can frequently buy their way out of prison sentences.

[midnight]

17. I'm sure it was a Sophie's choice for most of these folks.. And because Wisconsin

is one of those states with both race incarceration inequities and a broken legal system that is now playing out for the country to see-we are witnessing a sophisticated version of slavery. It has been tolerated because the black people were getting the brunt of this mistreatment... Now that it is spreading ever so close to whites via their job rights... they might wake up in time to turn this around for everyone...

I can only imagine if the laws were equally enforced, that this country would not have spent a large pile of our treasury bailing out the criminals who's ponzi scheme is destroying this country, but instead putting them in jail.... They, after all, definitely had a choice...

[Skratchez]

21. You can pretend to have a point to.

Lots of people end up in prison without having done anything wrong.

Slaves could have run too. Of course they'd have been killed or hobbled.

If the fact that modern day prisoners are forced to pick cotton is lost on you, probably just don't post.

[wickerwoman]

22. What about the two judges who took kickbacks

from the for-profit prison system to give harsh jail-time for minor (non)offenses (such as a girl who got 3 months for mocking her principal on myspace). One of the judges sentenced more than 5,000 first time offenders to unusually harsh jail time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

Tell me this doesn't happen a hell of a lot more often than is reported.

Combine that with the massive prison industry, where prisoners make office furniture, etc. for .14 an hour creating massive profits for some of these quasi-private institutions with no real oversight and you have a system which incentivizes long, harsh penalties for the people least equipped to fight the system and something very, very close to slavery.

[Ignis]

43. The guilty are guilty because they're guilty, eh?

Here's data that runs counter to your assumption:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/

[bluesmail]

5. DebbieDee is right, when there's money to get w/o barely lifting a finger

aka for profit, there's few incentives to stop the practice.

[bluedigger]

6. That's a pretty sensationalist way to look at it.

Given that the black population has increased in that time by a factor of 10, one could make the equally meaningless argument that black incarceration rates have dropped from nearly 90% to around 10%. Neither argument addresses the systemic disempowerment practiced - they're just shocking numbers. :shrug:

[Igel]

7. I've noticed a trend recently.

Rather than reason and elucidate, it's enough just to draw the audience's attention. It's not considered a problem if the means used is some sort of hackneyed comparison or some unrelated information that the listener thinks is related. It doesn't even have to be accurate, as long as the audience draws the conclusion the speaker wants.

I've seen it in schools. In political speeches. In newscasts--not just Fox. I've seen it in some fairly prominent MSM sources.

I'm tempted to propose as a hunch that it comes from "feeling" and not "thinking". Shocking or surprising the audience into feeling in synch with you becomes a surrogate for actually explaining one's logic and the validity of the conslusion, the relevance of the information, or the process by which you analyse data to reach a conclusion.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that there really wasn't an argument made. Just an observation with time for the audience to "feel" that this is relevant, important, and make the necessary spurious connections to justify the feelings.

[Psephos]

19. That's a really good post. n/t

[WatsonT]

38. More people will die in 2012 than died in 1900!

What are we doing about this terrifying new trend that threatens *your* children!

[demwing]

8. Misleading

According to official estimates, there are also more African-Americans today who are NOT in jail, than the total population of the United States in 1850, free people and slaves combined.

I'm not trying to minimize the injustice, just hoping to add some perspective to a highly incendiary topic. Thee kind of comparisons are not always as straight forward as they may seem.

[jwirr]

9. It would be interesting to see stats on each state showing the percentage

of the population in prison in this instance. My sister and I had a young friend who was in prison twice. We both wrote to him - sent him gifts, including books on anger management. We also worked with him to make some decisions about his responsibility to his son and girl friend and getting some kind of work that would keep him out of jail. To my knowledge he is doing better but it is not because anyone in the system helped him. He lived in Delaware.

[yurbud]

10. Maybe that's why Haley Barbour thinks it's time for him to run for president

[grahamhgreen]

13. Haley Barbour vs Uppity Black Man AIEEEEEEEEE! that's his angle...

[grahamhgreen]

14. awful.

[tishaLA]

20. Princeton had a great conference this week, "Imprisonment of a Race"

in their Center for African American Studies. http://www.princeton.edu/africanamericanstudies/events/imprisonment/

It was invaluable.

[alp227]

23. I read her book "The New Jim Crow" - fascinating and mind-opening.

check out her Nation magazine article promoting her book too.

[udbcrzy2]

24. I live in Missouri and we have more white than black in prison n/t

[Fumesucker]

29. Eh, your population is 5 million whites out of a total of under 6 million..

http://www.fedstats.gov/qf/states/29000.html

The fact that Missouri has more whites than blacks in prison is hardly reason to celebrate equality in incarceration..

[udbcrzy2]

42. Just stating the facts... n/t

[Manifestor_of_Light]

25. Angela Davis writes about the Prison-Industrial Complex.

Cheap labor for big corporations.

[Hannah Bell]

26. kr

[Hannah Bell]

27. And the criminal justice system isn't the only one that effectively "chains"

minorities and the poor.

All the systems that are supposedly there to "help" or "protect" have aspects of the same monitoring & shackling.

[Starry Messenger]

28. k&r

[intaglio]

31. USA, 502 in every 100,000 in prison

That's in 2009, source Bureau of Justice

Other sources say it's worse - 715 per 100,000 Source: Nationmaster.com who get their figures from the International Centre for Prison Studies A part of Kings College, London.

And if you include those on probation, on parole, in jail or just plain ordinary prison then the BoJ number (for 2009) is 7.2 million people out of 305 million.

[Enthusiast]

32. K&R

Don't tell me, "This is the greatest country in the world." because that is total bullshit.

[malaise]

33. How many are in private prisons?

Racism is still good business

[RegieRocker]

34. Most people don't give a damn, that is why it will continue

and the reason for the sorry ass state of this country.

[hack89]

35. Shall we also compare the number of black millionaires?

I don't think it is that simple.

[LatteLibertine]

36. Sad to say

the prison industrial complex is indeed big business.

[felix_numinous]

39. IN 2009 only 7.9% of all prisoners were jailed for violent offenses,

the rest are in for non violent crimes, mostly as a result of the drug war. African Americans make up 12% of the population but nearly 40% of prison population--as of 2009 data.

I had wished President Obama was more pro active on this issue, but the prison industrial complex has become a cash cow:

http://justwondrin.blogspot.com/2011/02/usa-swaps-outsourcing-offshore-with.html

The innocent are in jail, the guilty are running this country into the ground.

edited because there's a strange thing at the bottom of the wikileaks 'incarceration in the US' page

[Brewman_Jax]

40. Another reason we can't have a social safety net

there's always money to throw "those people" behind bars, but there's no money for education because some of the money might go to "those people". It's a sad society that allows money for bombs and prison bars, but none for bread and books--and bread and books are cheaper.

[Blue Owl]

41. Privatized PrisonMASTERS

The undercurrent of racism is raging.