INCARCERATION NATION

by Linn Washington, Jr.

Mass Black incarceration is a kind of “punitive backlash” against the gains of the Sixties, and only a "a major social movement" can challenge it. Nowhere
on the planet is mass imprisonment more entrenched than in the United
States. "The U.S. imprisons more than South Africa did under apartheid.”
At every stage of the criminal justice system, Blacks are selected for
harsher treatment. "In major urban areas almost one-half of black men
have criminal records.”

Incarceration Nation

by Linn Washington, Jr.

This article originally appeared in ThisCantBeHappening.

"Blacks leaders allowed this incarceration to happen by doing too little to challenge this repression.”

Herman Garner doesn't dispute the drug charge that slammed him in prison for nine years.

Garner does dispute the
damning circumstance that doing the time for his crime still leaves him
penalized despite his having ended his sentence in the penal system.

Garner carries the "former felon" stain.

That status slams employment doors shut in his face despite his having a MBA Degree and two years of law school.

"I've applied for jobs at
thousands of places in person and on the internet, but I'm unable to
get a job," said Garner, a Cleveland, Ohio resident who recently
published a book about his prison/life experiences titled Wavering
Between Extremes.

Recently Garner joined
hundreds of people attending a day-long conference at Princeton
University entitled "Imprisonment Of A Race," that featured
presentations by scholars and experts on the devastating, multi-faceted
impact of mass incarceration across America.

The U.S. imprisons more
people per capita than any country on earth, accounting for 25 percent
of the world's prisoners, despite having just five percent of the
world's population.

America currently holds
over two million in prisons with double that number under supervision of
parole and probation, according to federal government figures.

Mass incarceration
consumes over $50-billion annually across America – money far better
spent on creating jobs and improving education.

Under federal law persons
with drug convictions like Garner are permanently barred from receiving
financial aid for education, food stamps, welfare and publicly funded
housing.

But only drug convictions
trigger these exclusions under federal law. Violent bank robbers,
white-collar criminals like Wall Street scam artists who steal billions,
and even murderers who've done their time do not face the post-release
deprivations slapped on those with drug convictions on their records,
including those imprisoned for simple possession, and not major drug
sales.

"Academics see this topic
of mass incarceration as numbers, but for millions it is their daily
lives," said Princeton conference panelist Dr. Khalilah Brown-Dean of
Yale University.

Exclusions mandated by
federal laws compound the legal deprivations of rights found in the laws
of most states, such as barring ex-felons from jobs and even stripping
ex-felons of their right to vote.

“America currently holds over two million in prisons with double that number under supervision of parole and probation.”

"Mass incarceration
raises questions of protecting and preserving democracy," Dr. Brown-Dean
said, citing the estimated five-million-plus Americans barred from
voting by such felony disenfranchisement laws.

Many of those felony
disenfranchisement laws date from measures enacted in the late 1800s
which were devised specifically to bar blacks from voting, as a way to
preserve America's apartheid.

During the 2000
presidential election Republican officials in Florida fraudulently
manipulated that state's anti-felon voting law to bar tens of thousands
of blacks from voting. For example, many people with common names like
John Smith who shared their name with a felon were also barred from
voting, despite having clear records.

Yet George W. Bush won by
Florida – the state where his brother Jeb served as Governor – by 537
votes. That victory in the state where George W.'s brother Jeb served as
governor sent him to the White House.

Policies creating
barriers to things like education and employment make it "increasingly
difficult" for persons recently released from prison to "remain
crime-free" according to a report released earlier this year by the
Smart on Crime Coalition.

More than 60 percent of the two-million-plus people in American prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.

"The U.S. imprisons more
than South Africa did under apartheid. A nation that promotes democracy
has a racial caste in its prisons. We must break that caste system,"
said the special guest speaker at the "Imprisonment" conference,
Pennsylvania Death Row Journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who telephoned from
prison.

Racism is written all over the economically/socially debilitating practices embedded in mass incarceration.

A recent University of
Wisconsin study found that 17 percent of white ex-con job seekers
received interviews, compared to only five percent of black ex-con job
seekers – a race-based disparity that is additionally devastating for
people of color like Garner.

“Republican
officials in Florida fraudulently manipulated that state's anti-felon
voting law to bar tens of thousands of blacks from voting.”

Ohio State University Law
Professor Michelle Alexander, the featured speaker at that Princeton
conference streamed live on the internet, said a major reason why
imprisonment rates soared during the past four decades despite decreases
in crime rates is anti-crime policies craftily manipulated by
conservative Republican officials for political purposes.

Harsh anti-crimes
policies of the 1970s and 1980s were largely a "punitive backlash" to
advances of the Civil Rights Movement, said Alexander, author of the
hugely popular 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age
of Colorblindness.

Pennsylvania's prison
population, for example, soared from 8,243 in 1980 to 51,487 in 2010,
while the California prison population leapt during the same period from
23,264 to over 170,000.

Incarceration costs are particularly obscene when compared to college costs.

A report released in
January 2011 by Pennsylvania's auditor general that noted the Keystone
State now spends $32,059 annually to imprison one person…a cost that
exceeds the annual $20,074 tuition for the MBA degree program at Penn
State University.

A report released in
January 2010 by a UCLA professor noted that the Golden State spends over
$48,000 annually to imprison one person, more than four times the
tuition cost of UCLA for a California resident. Back in 1980, California
spent more of its state budget on higher education than on prisons, but
that had reversed by 2010, with more of that state's budget going for
prisons than for higher education.

America's corrosive War
on Drugs – a "war" that basically ignores drug kingpins – has devastated
black families, author/professor Alexander said.

"A black child today is
less likely to be raised in a two-parent household than during slavery,"
she said. "In major urban areas almost one-half of black men have
criminal records. Thus they face a lifetime of legalized
discrimination," encompassing exclusions from employment and access to
financial assistance required to secure a viable quality of life.

Africa-Americans are 13
percent of America's population and 14 percent of the nation's drug
users but are 37 percent of persons arrested for drugs and 56 percent of
the inmates in state prisons for drug offenses, noted the 2009
congressional testimony of Marc Mauer, executive director of the
Sentencing Project and a conference panelist.

Both ex-felon Herman
Garner and Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton's Center for African
American Studies, which hosted the conference, expressed similar views
on the impacts of mass incarceration.

"A black child today is less likely to be raised in a two-parent household than during slavery."

Dr. Glaude said mass
incarceration is a "moral crisis with political and social consequences
for America's future," during his remarks opening the conference.

Garner, in an interview, described the US prison system as the "biggest problem" in the American black community.

While politicians pushing
punitive policies help drive mass incarceration, its budget- busting
persistence implicates the blind-eye of society, said one conference
panelist, history professor Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the new director
of the fabled Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New
York City.

"Middle-class whites and
blacks in the U.S. are a new kind of 'Silent Majority' regarding mass
incarceration," Dr. Muhammad charged. "This 'Silent Majority' supports
unjust policies of increased law enforcement and incarceration as the
only way to address crime," ignoring proven alternative approaches like
"jobs, education and ending societal inequities."

Famed Princeton Professor
Dr. Cornell West criticized both the black middle class and black
leadership for inaction on mass incarceration.

"The new black middle
class and black leadership are not attuned to the suffering in poor
black communities," West said during the conference's Keynote
Conversation between him and Professor Alexander.

"We need more middle-class people with genuine respect for the poor. This is more than serving as role model mentors," he said.

Author Alexander said ending the "mind-boggling scale" of mass incarceration requires "a major social movement."

“Middle-class whites and blacks in the U.S. are a new kind of 'Silent Majority' regarding mass incarceration."

One attendee at the
Princeton conference, Daryl Brooks, an activist in Trenton, NJ who
operates the popular "Today's News N.J." blog, backs Alexander's
suggestion.

"To fix this problem we
need mass boycotts. America only understands money and violence. We need
to shutdown businesses like during the 60s," said Brooks, who spent
three-years in prison for a conviction he says was false and aimed at
crushing his activism.

"Blacks leaders allowed this incarceration to happen by doing too little to challenge this repression," he said.

The Obama Administration
is doing too little to address mass incarceration and its impacts, many
of the Princeton panelists and conference attendees agreed.

These critics blast the
Obama Administration for what they called its tepid approaches to the
torturous scourge of 240 sexual assaults daily in state and federal
prisons, charging it with foot-dragging on the Prison Rape Elimination
Act which was approved by Congress during the administration of George
W. Bush.

While Obama fulfilled a
campaign pledge to address the sentencing disparity penalizing powder
cocaine more harshly than crack cocaine (a drug derived from powder
cocaine), Obama's proclivity for bipartisan consensus has resulted in
legislation that lower but did not eliminate the disparity.

That legislation did not
apply retroactively, thus failing to mitigate stiff ten-year-plus crack
cocaine sentences that have already left many blacks and Hispanics
languishing in federal prisons.

"Obama and [US Attorney
General Eric] Holder have no courage when it comes to the
prison-industrial complex," said Dr. Cornell West.

Linn
Washington, Jr. is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new
independent, collectively-owned, journalist-run, reader-supported
(hopefully!) online alternative newspaper.