If you have been reading my columns for any length of time, you will know that I have some preoccupation with the prison industrial complex. I am particularly incensed by its impact on communities of color, especially African-American communities. Some who have been paying attention over the last couple of decades know that prisoners and former prisoners now constitute a new underclass.
Michelle Alexander has summed up the systemic incarceration of black people, and it’s not pretty. Alexander, a litigator and law professor, has dubbed the phenomenon as the New Jim Crow. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander brilliantly lays out how the dramatic increase in the U.S. prison system is directly linked to an intentional social and political policy with its roots in racism.
In India’s caste system, one is born into the Untouchables, the lowest class in India, and locked there forever. In the developing caste system in the U.S., one could say the same about black ex-offenders for whom the road to bars and chains was laid out at birth. Over 40 per cent of the prison population is African-American, and we are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. More than half of the black men in most American cities are under the control of that system.
The financial, social, political and emotional toll can hardly be tallied, but we capture a number of stats that paint the picture for our families and our communities. The disproportionate school push-out rate is part of the assembly line that takes young people on to jails and prisons. The high unemployment rate among young, black males is directly linked to incarceration rates and can negatively affect even those young men who haven’t been in prison. Their group is targeted by the unfair drugs laws, unfair sentencing laws, an unfair court system and on and on.
On the political side, the caste system continues. For example, the 45th Senatorial District of New York, aka Little Siberia, could not have the minimum population required for a district were it not for the 13 prisons located there. The Center for Law and Justice found that in some of the counties in upstate New York, imprisoned black folks outnumbered the “free” black folks. The fact that prisoners can be counted in the Census but can’t vote – shades of slavery – only add to their further exploitation as political fodder.
The mass incarceration of a people is a civil rights issue and will need the kind of movement this country saw during the 1950s and 1960s. It’s about providing human needs and dismantling a system that is unsustainable. It is a human rights issue – an issue to be taken on by all freedom-loving, fair-minded citizens.