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Are they Burning the Village to "Save" It?
The U.S. Constitution once counted Black slaves as worth three-fifths of Whites. Today, Black per capita income is three-fifths of Whites. That's an economic measure of enduring racism.
One out of three Black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail, on probation or on parole on any given day. The prison-swelling trend is escalating with policies like "three strikes and you're out" on an increasingly unlevel "playing field."
Our government would rather spend $25,000 a year to keep someone in prison than on education, community development, addiction treatment, and employment programs to keep them out. Blacks made up 50 percent of state and federal prisoners.
The soaring Black incarceration has wreaked monumental damage on Black families and communities. It insures that more children are raised in impoverished single-female led homes.
They will likely attend segregated, crumbling public schools.
It permanently bars many Black men from voting because of laws that severely restrict, if not outright bar, ex-felons from voting. The voting ban diminishes the political power of the Black communities.
The high Black imprisonment rate also drastically increases health risks and costs in Black communities, since many prisoners are released with chronic medical afflictions, particularly HIV/AIDS. Why are prisons and jails so disproportionately Black?
The habitual reasons given for criminalizing practically an entire generation of young Blacks is that they are poor, crime- prone, and lack family values. The more embarrassing and disgraceful reason is the racially biased drug sentencing laws.
It is impossible to understand why so many people of color, particularly Blacks, have a record--and why so many more will get a record--without understanding the racially biased "war on drugs."
More than twice as many people are arrested for drug possession as for trafficking. Three out of four drug users are White, but Blacks are much more likely to be arrested for drug offenses and receive longer sentences. . Almost 90 percent of people sentenced to state prison for drug possession were Black.
Though far more Whites use and deal drugs including crack cocaine than Blacks, the overwhelming majority of those prosecuted in federal courts for drug possession and sale (mostly small amounts of crack cocaine) and given stiff mandatory sentences are African American.
They are also more likely to receive longer sentences in state prisons for drug-related crimes than Whites.
Contrary to stereotype,the typical cocaine user is white, male, a high school graduate employed full time and living in a small metropolitan area or suburb," to quote former drug czar William Bennett.
"Although it is clear that whites sell most of the nation's cocaine and account for 80 percent of its consumers," "it is blacks and other minorities who continue to fill up America's courtrooms and jails, largely because...they are the easiest people to arrest."
The scapegoating of Blacks for America's crime and drug problem began in the 1980s. The assault by Republican conservatives on job, income, and social service programs, a crumbling educational system and industrial shrinkage dumped more Blacks on the streets with no where to go.
Because Blacks are disproportionately unemployed and impoverished. Some chose guns, gangs, crime and drugs. The big cuts in welfare, social services, and skills training programs during the past decade dumped even more young black males, and females on the streets
. Much of the media instantly turned the drug problem into a Black problem and played it up big in news stories and features. Even as crime and prison rates dipped, the media continues to feed the public a bloated diet of crime sensationalist news.
Many Americans scared stiff of the crime and drug crisis continue to give their blessing to drug sweeps, random vehicle checks, marginally legal searches and seizures, evictions from housing projects and apartments.
br> When it comes to law enforcement practices in the ghettos and barrios, the denial of civil liberties protections, due process and privacy make a mockery of the criminal justice system to many Blacks. "Drug trafficking has been elevated above almost every serious crime except murder," including kidnapping, assault, arson, and firearms. Most drug offenders are nonviolent, and many are low-level offenders with no prior criminal records.
The war on drugs has, in many places, been fought mainly against blacks...Tens of thousands of arrests-----mostly in the inner-city-----resulted from dragnets with paramilitary names. Operation Pressure Point in New York City. Operation Thunderbolt in Memphis. Operation Hammer in Los Angeles...'We don't have whites on corners selling drugs...They're in houses and offices,'
'We're locking up kids who are scrambling for crumbs, not the people who make big money."
Racist self-fulfilling prophecy is evident in the use of racial characteristics in drug suspect profiles. The current drug war, is not only "a rearguard action against full equality for racial minorities," but an instrument for "whipping young people back into line."
Now it's time for public officials to take the next step. They must fight hard to do away with the mandatory drug sentencing laws, restore sentencing discretion to judges, target high level dealers for prosecution, and end drug profiling and random stops of Black motorists.
Lawmakers are increasing time penalties while destroying education, treatment, training, and other effective programs inside and outside of prison. Crack sentencing is a modern equivalent of the Black Codes which reinforced post-slavery discrimination.
From the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1890, Blacks were over 95 percent of the inmate populations in most southern state penal systems, and Black state convicts were leased out to work in plantations, mines, factories, and railroads.
A century later, Blacks are a large and growing share of the prison population; chain gangs are back in Alabama and Arizona; private for-profit prisons are a growth industry; and prison labor is booming. As Reese Erlich explained in Covert Action Quarterly, the cheap labor of American prisoners is used to stitch jeans, assemble circuit boards, and process data. Presidential candidate Senator Phil Gramm called for prison labor to pay half the cost of the federal prison system in a 1995 speech to the National Rifle Association.
The slowdown in America's imprisonment craze is welcome. But if that slowdown does not extend to Blacks, the next report from the Justice Department will likely show even more of those being jammed into America's prison cells are African Americans.
In this new millienium it is mandatory we as a PEOPLE have to do something about this growing challenge or we will be right back where we were during slavery !!!!
If you think this situation doesnt affect you, it already has.....look at who is in power now.