TheMillerCircle.org

I have commented previously about the leviathan that awaits us because of our over-burdened, over-crowded, racially-divided and excessively costly prison system. Now the mounting disaster, nearly thirty years in the making, is beginning to unfold like a giant, silent Tsunami, with the promise of becoming another of our worst nightmares in the very near future. The state of California, whose prison population grew through the triple whammy of new drug laws, “zero tolerance” and the “three-strike rule” (third time felony conviction gets you 25 years) now spends about 10% ($ 10.8 billion) of its annual budget on prisons. The California prison system is so expensive that to maintain it, deep cuts in education and social services have been required. You could argue that what was once the best public higher education system in the country has been destroyed by the silent costs of the California state prison system. Now with the economic plight of California, those costs are not quite so silent. But as bad as things are financially, with California leading the way, you rarely see or hear news about this growing problem by listening to the mainstream media. It is not yet on the national radar screen.

Michelle Alexander has penetrated the origins and nature of our prison system in a new book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Ms Alexander’s summary of her book is the subject of a recent TomDispatch article. Her thesis is quite simple: by creating new repressive laws, include racially biased drug laws, we have moved from slavery, to the post-Civil War Jim Crow era through the Civil Rights movement into the new era of using our penal system as an effective tool of racism through mass incarceration of blacks.  In less than 3 decades we have moved from a prison population of about 300,000 to one that now includes more than 2 million inmates. In short, the idea of a “post-racial America” is pure mythology.  As a country, we remain as racist as ever, but execute our racial bias in ways that have yet to appear on our own radar screen. But that is all about to change.    Here are just a few excerpts from her summary that are notable and shocking, but largely unknown to most Americans:

• *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.

Alexander attributes most of the dramatic increase in incarceration rates as the result of our “war on drugs.” She states,  “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.”

In some states, the African-American incarceration rates constitute 80-90 percent of the prison population. If we as Americans do not begin to re-balance the aberration in social philosophy that led to our current system of  high rates of incarceration, inequitably and inexcusably targeted towards blacks, where will we put the next wave of Bernie Madoffs? Aren’t the Bernie Madoffs the real criminals in America today? Do you think that robbing people of their entire life savings is not more violent than robbing the cash register? Think too of the families of those incarcerated. Many of them have children. What can we expect of children raised in poverty with a single parent without opportunities for education and living in neighborhoods where unemployment is permanently high with drug laws that selectively punish those in black communities? Have we set the stage for an exponential rise in black crime and incarceration? Is another round of prisons in store for America? Author Alexander suggests that the incarceration rates of blacks in America constitutes the most vicious, but hidden form of racism that America has yet to invent.  Can the expense of incarcerating a prisoner ($50,000/year), compared to the cost of educating him ($12,000/year), be justified when you consider that our drug laws and penal system applied to the black community look more like a form of entrapment?

The California prison system is so overcrowded that prisoners have successfully sued the state because of their exposure to life-threatening health conditions and violations of prisoner’s constitutional rights.  How will we solve the addiction we have to incarceration in the future? More prisons coupled with further reductions in our own system of education and the social safety net to pay for them?

We all know that many of the evils we face today, both economically and socially, can be traced to Ronald Reagan and the modern iteration of Republicanism. Again from Michele Alexander, “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.” To make the drug problem increasingly focused on the black communities, law enforcement is rewarded for the number of arrests they make, not for helping reduce the use of drugs in neighborhoods. Once the Reagan successes took off, the Democrats had to prove that they were not soft on crime; the incarceration rates grew more under Clinton than any other President in history. Almost nothing in government is what it seems at first glance. The American incarceration rates are justified because they help control violent crimes? According to Alexander, “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.“  Our zero tolerance policy was developed for its application to the black community. Our drug laws punish blacks far more than whites and not because of the relative drug usage–it happens to be that the law is applied in black communities.  Now we have the largest population of prisoners of any country in the world and prison overcrowding in places like California has become a new form of our inhumanity towards our fellow citizens. According to Alexander,  1/4 of blacks are below the poverty line today, about the same percentage that were in that category in the 1960s. She points out that the gateway to the modern American black caste system can be found at the entrance to our prisons. Can we overcome the new Jim Crow in America? Have we made this new form of racism so popular in America, that prisons are like the Defense budget–untouchable? It would certainly seem so. What will it take for America to join the other modern civilizations of the world and address crime without biasing our solutions toward racism?

RFM