Pubdate: Sun, 20 Nov 2011
Source: Courier-Journal, The (Louisville, KY)
Copyright: 2011 The Courier-Journal
Contact:  http://www.courier-journal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/97
Author: Mariam Williams
Note: Mariam Williams is a writer who lives in Louisville. More of 
her writing can be found at RedboneAfropuff.com.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)

WAR ON DRUGS RACIST: MASS INCARCERATION AND THE UGLY SPECTER OF A NEW JIM CROW

Last year, I wrote a grant proposal on behalf of three organizations 
seeking a total of about $300,000 from the Bureau of Justice 
Assistance to fund a mentoring program for ex-offenders re-entering 
the community.

BJA was one of two offices administering Second Chance Act Grants, 
funding meant to help nonprofit organizations implement programs that 
would "improve re-entry planning and implementation," the purpose of 
the Second Chance Act of 2007.

After reading Dr. Michelle Alexander's book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass 
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," and hearing her keynote 
address at the Anne Braden Institute's memorial lecture last week, I 
feel like the grant was a sham and a glaring example of the 
government waste we hear is so prevalent.

I feel this way because, according to Dr. Alexander, the executive, 
legislative and judicial branches of government have structured our 
criminal justice system so as to guarantee a vicious cycle of 
imprisonment and recidivism, especially among the people targeted in 
the War on Drugs.

The target is poor people of color.

To paraphrase Dr. Alexander's thesis, mass incarceration has 
relegated millions of black and brown people in America to legalized 
second-class citizenship, creating a caste system that is the moral 
equivalent of Jim Crow. Rather than rely on race to strip away civil 
rights gains, our government and our society in general label people 
of color "criminals" and continue the practices civil rights 
legislation was supposed to abolish, including discrimination in 
employment, education and housing and denial of the rights to vote, 
to serve on juries and to receive governmental assistance.

Keep these four points from Dr. Alexander's book in: 1) The U.S. 
prison population has quintupled since 1970. 2) Mass incarceration is 
a direct result of the War on Drugs. 3) The War on Drugs has been 
waged almost exclusively in communities of color, despite research 
that consistently shows all races use and/or sell illegal drugs at 
equal rates, except among youth.

In that case, black youth are less likely than white youth to use or 
sell illegal drugs. 4) The role of personal responsibility 
notwithstanding, mass incarceration is wrong, its seizure of 
liberties is un-American, and it must end.

Mass incarceration has decimated millions of families and entire 
communities. While that saddens me, the legislative and judicial role 
in the imprisonment explosion angers me. Through grant programs and 
asset allocation legislation, the federal government incentivizes 
local police departments to continue practices that are 99 percent 
ineffective at stopping drug possession, sales, use or crime.

The U.S. Supreme Court has forced citizens to surrender their 4th 
Amendment rights and has made it impossible to file a lawsuit against 
a police department or prosecutor based on racial discrimination. The 
War on Drugs is well-funded and the U.S. Supreme Court has pre-empted 
challenges to its enforcement. The system is so thorough it keeps 
privatized, publicly traded prisons that employ some 700,000 people 
in business.

And to complicate life forever, or to ensure permanent second-class 
status, the government often prevents parolees and ex-offenders from 
obtaining the very stability needed to successfully reintegrate into 
life on the outside.

They do so through legislation that opens all criminals and 
ex-offenders, no matter the nature of their crime, to employment 
discrimination and bars them from many professional licenses and from 
governmental housing, educational funding and even food assistance.

As I read Dr. Alexander's book, I thought of a number of small ways 
to combat the War on Drugs and its effects.

Get the American Civil Liberties Union into classrooms to teach the 
youth targeted in the War on Drugs their rights.

Build mixed income housing so that a war waged on poor people 
directly affects people of all incomes, who won't tolerate invasive 
tactics in their neighborhoods. Invest in the education, 
infrastructure and job training needed in poor communities to 
eliminate the violent crime that the War on Drugs doesn't.

But I think the most effective way to stop mass incarceration in the 
near future is to page Dr. Paul and Dr. Paul. That is, cut mass 
incarceration's monetary supply and raise awareness about the 
government's unchecked power in the War on Drugs.

Kentucky's own junior U.S. Senator, Dr. Rand Paul, and his father, 
Dr. Ron Paul, R-Texas, both claim to want a smaller, less intrusive 
government. (The elder Dr. Paul wants to legalize marijuana, an 
obvious necessity to ending the War on Drugs.) If that's true, they 
have to oppose tax dollars funding a practice that is rendering 
millions of people unemployable and labeling them useless at a time 
when America can't afford to forfeit anyone's potential.

The people unwilling to consider raising taxes on the "One Percent" 
to balance the budget should consider not rewarding law enforcement 
for using expensive and largely ineffective tactics in the War on 
Drugs. Representatives who fear large government erodes freedom 
should be appalled at warrantless car sweeps and at mandatory 
sentencing. And instead of giving away millions of dollars each year 
to different organizations to do what Congress and the US Supreme 
Court have made it impossible to do, why not just eliminate the laws 
that bar ex-offenders from fully participating in the economy?

Given the state of the economy and record-low approval ratings of 
Congress and the President, declaring the War on Drugs a national 
economic catastrophe and a failure of big government might be the 
best approach to ending it.

According to Alexander, however, this is not enough.

She asserts that to keep Jim Crow from reincarnating again, we must 
acknowledge the racial motives behind mass incarceration and have a 
national conversation about race.

Mass incarceration, she explains, is driven by race, not by crime 
rates. President Ronald Reagan declared the War on Drugs before crack 
cocaine appeared in poor communities of color.

He made the face of drug use and of crime a black one, and he did it 
to appeal to poor and working class whites who feared they had lost 
irrecoverable ground in the years following the Civil Rights 
Movement. He preferred securing their votes over securing poor 
communities of color by financing an economic and educational revival 
in areas that manufacturing had abandoned.

I don't dispute Alexander's declaration that talking about race is 
necessary for preventing another Jim Crow system.

As she makes clear in her book, her point has already been proven at 
least twice. Convict leasing, a form of free labor initiated after 
the Civil War, replaced slavery.

The War on Drugs and the removal of civil rights from ex-offenders 
has many of the same effects Jim Crow had on "free" blacks from the 
early 1900s to the signing of the Civil Rights Act. There is no 
reason to believe that the powerful class won't again use progress 
towards racial equality to make poor and working class whites feel 
slighted and then invent new policies to retract those gains and give 
the class of whites for whom they possibly have equal disdain a false 
sense of security.

The question, for me, then becomes: How do you have a conversation 
with people who aren't in the room?

You see, there were a number of students who chose not to hear the 
lecture, and I'm not referring to the thousands of students who 
attend the school but couldn't possibly fit in an auditorium that 
holds 500. The entire student body couldn't fit in the Yum Center, 
either. I'm talking about the students who left before the lecture 
began. When it was clear that about 20 people who wanted to attend 
would not be able to because there weren't enough seats, two 
professors announced that they would still give their students credit 
for attending the lecture if they left then and gave up their seats 
for people who wanted to be there.

The professors gave their students a choice, and once they knew that 
in their absence they would still receive their incentive for going, 
the students chose not to stay and listen to an honest lecture about 
racialized injustice.

Even in our institutions of higher learning, a place where free 
thinking is encouraged-and, I must note, a place that gets 
increasingly inaccessible for poor and working class people every 
semester-the people we expect to lead us in the future can ignore 
these stark realities.

Perhaps the solution is to incentivize a national conversation. To 
engage poor and working class whites who, Alexander notes, have been 
disenfranchised, and to avoid preaching to the choir, I believe the 
best chance for this movement is to frame it, initially, as an 
economic necessity.

To compete globally with countries that have billions of people, we 
must equip as many people as possible in the U.S. for productive 
citizenship. Is the promise of restoring our world super-power status 
enough to talk about race in America today? Depending on people to 
care just because there's a problem affecting other human beings 
isn't enough to end this injustice.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom