TWO MILLION and counting. That's how many people are incarcerated in America's prisons and jails according to the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group that promotes alternatives to confinement. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the population behind bars.
quote from : Published on Wednesday, April 12, 2000 in the St Louis Post-Dispatch War On Drugs Unfairly Targets African-Americans by Charles A. Shaw
In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
And so enters the war on drugs :
The drug war has been brutal -- complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods -- but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. 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.
Above Quotes from: " How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste" By Michelle Alexander March 10, 2010 "Tomdispatch" via AlterNet.org
and from Human Rights Watch:
Race and Incarceration in the United States Human Rights Watch Press Backgrounder February 27, 2002
Incarceration of Blacks
· In twelve states, between 10 and 15 percent of adult black men are incarcerated.
· In ten states, between 5 and 10 percent of black adults are incarcerated.
· In twelve states, black men are incarcerated at rates between twelve and sixteen times greater than those of white men.
· In fifteen states, black women are incarcerated at rates between ten and thirty-five times greater than those of white women.
· In six states, black youth under age eighteen are incarcerated in adult facilities at rates between twelve and twenty-five times greater than those of white youth.
Incarceration of Hispanics
· In nine states, between 4 and nearly 8 percent of adult Latino men are incarcerated.
· In twelve states, between 2 and 4 percent of Hispanic adults (men and women) are incarcerated.
· In ten states, Latino men are incarcerated at rates between five and nine times greater than those of white men.
· In eight states, Latina women are incarcerated rates that are between four and seven times greater than those of white women.
· In four states, Hispanic youth under age eighteen are incarcerated in adult facilities at rates between seven and seventeen times greater than those of white youth.
Another inconvenient Truth about Race in America
The New Jim Crow : The Drug Wars & Incarceration of African-Americans
President Obama Could give a blanket pardon to thousands of prisoners unjustly being held in US prisons and end the unproductive War on Drugs. And end draconian laws such as "Three Strikes' and laws discriminating against "Felons". In other words regarding laws which disenfranchise felons after being released from prison. Once an individual has done their time they should have all of their rights as a citizen of the US reinstated.
Is this the third rail no one dares touch.
Experts and social scientists have been for decades documenting the unfairness of the American judiciary, penal system , and policing of African-Americans and other minorities and yet the laws haven't changed for the better .
Even though America has a black president blacks and other people of color are still being discriminated against by these draconian 19th century style laws.
As we saw in the previous post for the most part Black and Hispanic Americans are no better off overall today than they were in the 1960s. That is why Martin Luther King Jr. became involved in his war on poverty because a disproportionate number of blacks were poor compared to white Americans.
Michael Jackson - They Don't Care About Us (Official Prison Version)
Michelle Alexander has written a great expose about the relationship between racism and the War on Drugs and the intended Or Unintended consequences on the African-Americans as individuals and on the community . If the motive wasn't racist it has turned out that way . In other words a minority is hit disproportionately by the way in which laws are written or put into practice. The authorities in response to this charge would have to prove that the law was necessary and that it was applied in a fair and even handed manner . Otherwise the law could justifiably be deemed discriminatory.
This could occur in the case of one plaintiff or a class action suit which would be something to see.
" How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste" By Michelle Alexander March 10, 2010 "Tomdispatch" via AlterNet.org
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.
* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
*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.
Excuses for the Lockdown
There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys
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 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.
The drug war has been brutal -- complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods -- but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. 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.
...President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
...Facing Facts
But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.
The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.
The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s -- the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war -- nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.
In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time -- a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.
... Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that’s with affirmative action!
When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure -- the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.
This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.
Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). The former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU in Northern California, she also served as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, she holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. To listen to a TomCast audio interview in which Alexander explains how she came to realize that this country was bringing Jim Crow into the Age of Obama, click here.
also see:
Published on Wednesday, April 12, 2000 in the St Louis Post-Dispatch War On Drugs Unfairly Targets African-Americans by Charles A. Shaw
TWO MILLION and counting. That's how many people are incarcerated in America's prisons and jails according to the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group that promotes alternatives to confinement. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the population behind bars.
Even though crime rates have steadily dropped over the past 20 years, our rate of incarceration has mushroomed. Nonviolent offenders accounted for 77 percent of the growth intake in our state and federal prisons between 1978 and 1996. The primary reason for such increase is the "war on drugs" along with the mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines that more severely punish those involved with crack cocaine.
Since 1998, America's prisons and jails incarcerated more than 1 million nonviolent offenders. About half of these inmates are behind bars for drug offenses that involved possession or low-level dealing. Even though African-Americans are only 13 percent of the general population, half the prison population is African-American.
During the height of the war on drugs, from 1986 to 1991, the number of white drug offenders in state prisons increased by 110 percent. The number of black drug offenders grew by 465 percent. African-Americans account for about 14 percent of the nation's drug users, yet they make up 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of those convicted for drug possession, and 74 percent of those sentenced to serve time.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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