To focus law enforcement efforts on one racial group, while limiting the scrutiny and arrests of another, is theoretically illegal, a violation of the 14^th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. However, subjecting the Black community to differential treatment goes on everyday, despite a constitutional protection.

BY KUSHAZRAEL
Staff Reporter

TheUnited Statesis the prison capital of the world, and Black men in theUnited Statesface a more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and educational statistics.

In her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Professor, Michelle Alexander, argues that many of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement have been undermined by mass incarceration of Blacks in the “War on Drugs.”

She says that, although Jim Crow laws are off the books, now, millions of Blacks arrested for minor crimes remain marginalized and disenfranchised, trapped by a criminal justice system that has branded them felons forever, and has denied them basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens.

“Today there are more African Americans under correctional control – in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began,” said Alexander in her book.

Many people have a distorted image of Black progress, assuming that civil rights struggles are a thing of the past. Today, a new generation of second class citizenship has developed.

And the biggest barrier they face is the ability to get a job after being released from prison.

“A felony conviction severely limits employment opportunities for those who have been incarcerated as well as those who simply have one on their record,” said community activist, Mansfield Frazier.

In the 1960’s, the civil rights movement was the biggest response to decades of Jim Crow laws that limited Black participation as citizens. Policies today have ushered in a new system of mass incarceration that mirrors the second class citizenship of the Jim Crow era. Just as Jim Crow directly targeted Blacks, mass incarceration seems to do the same.

The main culprit of this mass incarceration is none other than the so-called War on Drugs. Alexander also argues that the War on Drugs was part of a republican strategy, known as the Southern Strategy, of using racially coded “get tough” appeals on issues of crime and welfare to appeal to poor working class Whites, particularly in the southern United States. And it worked by having Congress devote millions to the so-called fight against drugs that, basically, has only taken place in inner-city, Black communities.

Blacks are the overwhelming majority arrested for drugs, and are sentenced to longer prison terms than their White counterparts.

Five times as many Whites report using drugs as Blacks, yet Blacks are sent to prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of Whites.

Black people are a minority inAmerica, but make up almost half the prison population, with most of them being convicted of non-violent crimes.

According to the Sentencing Project, from 1980 to 2008 the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people.

Today, there are roughly 1 million Black people incarcerated.

A Black male born in 2001 has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime.

Mass incarceration has also become a powerful economic force and burden on taxpayers. It is estimated that state spending on corrections is around $50 billion and states spend an average two and a half times more for each prisoner than for each public school pupil.

The drug war has never really been focused on kingpins and violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those who make the most arrests, not the agencies that take down the bosses. To make matters worse, forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies keep, for their own use, 80% of the money, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, giving them a direct interest in the drug market.

Mass incarceration is tearing fathers and mothers from children, and leaving millions with economic and political disadvantages by taking away the right to vote (in some states, but not Ohio) and the ability to get a job after prison sentences are served. One-in-nine Blacks, one-in-28 Hispanics and one-in-57 White children have an incarcerated parent.

 “The over incarceration of young Black males, during their peak child bearing years, means that fewer Black babies will be born, which constitutes a legalized form of genocide,” said Frazier.

The toxic mixture of racism, poverty, terrible schools, absent parents, the decline in blue-collar jobs, a subculture that glorifies “swagger” over work and disparities in arrests and sentencing are funneling millions of Black people into dead end and seemingly hopeless lives.

To focus law enforcement efforts on one racial group, while limiting the scrutiny and arrests of another, is theoretically illegal, a violation of the 14^th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. However, subjecting the Black community to differential treatment goes on everyday, despite a constitutional protection. 

Over 40 years ago, Black Panther, George Jackson, wrote in a letter from a California prison, “Black men born in the US and fortunate enough to live past the age of 18 are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliation.”