Pubdate: Wed, 17 May 2006
Source: St.  Augustine Record ( FL )
Copyright: 2006 The St.  Augustine Record
Contact:  http://www.staugustine.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/771
Author: Leonard Pitts Jr., Syndicated Columnist

AMERICANS USING BOOT CAMPS, PRISONS TO CONTROL BLACK KIDS

So now we know how Martin Lee Anderson died.

We can forget the original autopsy report filed by Charles Siebert, a 
doctor so inept he wasn't technically a doctor ( he had allowed his 
license to lapse ) when he issued the report.  A doctor so inept he 
once described a person he autopsied as having "unremarkable" 
testes.  The person was a woman, so if she had testes at all, it 
would seem quite remarkable, indeed.

Siebert claimed that after being hit, manhandled and choked by guards 
Jan.  5 at a so-called boot camp in Panama City, Fla., the 
14-year-old Anderson died of sickle cell trait, a genetic blood 
disorder carried by 1 in 12 Americans of African heritage.  That 
finding has been roundly hooted by real doctors, who say it is 
unlikely in the extreme the condition could lead to death.

Friday before last, a new autopsy told a different 
story.  Dr.  Vernard Adams, Tampa's chief medical examiner, found 
that the child died because guards covered his mouth and forced him 
to inhale ammonia.

Just so you know, Martin Lee Anderson was an A and B student, good at 
math.  He wound up in the boot camp after he took his grandmother's 
car for a joy ride.

In other words, hardly the second coming of Al Capone.

As it happens, news of how he died came almost simultaneously with 
news of another appalling mistreatment of children in 
detention.  According to a report from an advocacy group, the 
Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, over 100 teenagers were left 
locked in a flooded prison in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  They 
had to scramble to the top bunks to avoid drowning.  They went up to 
five days with nothing to eat or drink.  Some drank flood water.  A 
large number had not been convicted of any crime.

And, the vast majority were, like Anderson, black.  Indeed, while New 
Orleans was about 67 percent black, the report says the prison was 
well over 95 percent black.  No surprise.  Human Rights Watch reports 
that black people are more than eight times as likely to wind up 
behind bars as whites.

It is telling how mutely we absorb that fact.  Some see in it only 
proof of the ravaging effects of poverty and miseducation, others 
support for the idiot claim that criminality is a native defect of 
African peoples.  You seldom hear anyone suggest that it is this way 
because we the people want it this way, that in our silence, we give 
tacit approval to this means of controlling a population whose mere 
existence we have historically found threatening and inconvenient.

In the James Crow years, the institutions of government and society 
could hardly have been more brazen in pursuit of that goal.  White 
teachers told black students they should aspire to no goal higher 
than to work as janitors and cooks.  White cops turned black suspects 
over to lynch mobs.

It could never happen that way in this enlightened era, of 
course.  And yet, it happens in other ways.  A 2002 report by the 
Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says black kids are 
labeled as emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded and shipped off 
to special education classes at rates of up to four times those of white kids.

A 2000 study co-sponsored by the Justice Department tells us that, of 
people who've never done time in juvenile facilities, a black drug 
defendant is 48 times more likely to be jailed than a white one with 
the same record.

The means have changed, but the end -- repression, control -- remains 
the same and we steer black kids like cars until they reach it.

Granted, there may have been some white kids in that fetid, flooded 
prison.  There were certainly some in that brutal boot camp.  Yet, 
it's no accident African-American children are always so well 
represented in those lousy places, not happenstance that they are so 
readily found among society's discards.

So our concern for them now feels ...  well, let's call it 
belated.  And self-deluding.

Those children were right where we wanted them to be.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman