This article, the first in a
four-part series, previously appeared in Znet. Modern prisoners occupy the lowest rungs on
the social class ladder, and they always have. The modern prison system (along with local
jails) is a collection of ghettos or poorhouses reserved primarily
for the unskilled, the uneducated, and the powerless. In increasing
numbers this system is being reserved for racial minorities, especially
blacks, which is why we are calling it the New American Apartheid. This
is the same segment of American society that has experienced some
of the most drastic reductions in income and they have been targeted
for their involvement in drugs and the subsequent violence that
extends from the lack of legitimate means of goal attainment.
An argument could certainly be made that blacks,
especially males, are superfluous and expendable in American
society (that is, they
are not direct contributors to corporate profits). With constant
corporate downsizing and deindustrialization during the past couple
of decades came the elimination of millions of jobs that previously
helped minorities to get out of poverty. Specific social control
apparatuses have been deemed necessary to control human frustrations
in the aftermath of diminished opportunities. The criminal justice
system has been selected as the primary apparatus to apply social
control mechanisms on the unskilled, the uneducated, the powerless
and ethnic minorities.
While residential segregation continues unabated,
policies that reek of apartheid have risen alongside of it. It
is apparent that the
criminal justice system has been engaged in a systematic attack
on blacks and that going to jail or prison has become a common
event in the lives of millions of racial minorities. The modern
penal system accommodates the “new American apartheid.”
The most recent imprisonment data reaffirm
this. At the end of
2002, blacks constituted 45.1 percent of the total prison population
(with an incarceration rate more than seven times greater than
whites); Latinos constituted 18 percent and whites only 34 percent. In
other words, racial minorities made up two-thirds of the entire
prison population. This is in direct contrast to the 1930s, when
whites were overwhelmingly the numerical majority of all prisoners,
constituting around 70 percent of the prison population.
Racial differences are also evident in jail incarceration rates.
Blacks have consistently been found in jail at a rate of at least
five times greater than whites during the past couple of decades.
In 2002, the jail incarceration
rate for blacks was 740 per 100,000 persons, compared to only
147 for whites and 256 for Latinos.
It is obvious from the examination of arrest
and prison data that the groups being targeted by the criminal
justice system are disproportionately
drawn from the most marginalized populations. Blacks, particularly
males, are especially vulnerable. For example, in 1995, according
the Sentencing
Project in Washington, D.C., about one-third of all black males
between the ages of 20 and 29 were, on any given day, either in
jail, prison, on probation or on parole, a percentage that was
up from 25 percent 1990. In some cities these percentages were
even higher, such as Washington, D.C., where the figure was about
60 percent. For comparison purposes, data from the early 1990s
revealed that black males were far more likely to be in prison
or jail than in college! In California, in the early 1990s, blacks
were imprisoned at a rate of 1,951 per 100,000, compared to only
215 for whites. (More recent figures are not available for this
age group, but see the discussion about lifetime chances of going
to prison, in Part II of this series.)
Recent studies further elaborate on the negative
impact of crime control policies on the black population. For example a study
by sociologist Bruce Western and his colleagues examined the relationship
between imprisonment (both jail and prison) and education and employment. Between
1980 and 1999, the percentage of white males from 18 to 65 going
to prison or jail increased by less than one percent (from 0.4
to 1.0); for black men the percentage went up by 4.4 percent (from
3.1 to 7.5%). For young adult males (ages 22-30), the percentage
in jail or prison went up by .9 percent for whites (from .7 to
1.6%), but increased by 6.2 percent for blacks (from 5.5 to 11.7%).
When considering young adult males who dropped out of high school,
the percentage going to prison or jail went from 3.1 to 10.3 among
whites (up 7.2%), but went from 14 to 41.2 percent among blacks
(an increase of 27.2%). In other words, a little over four out
of every ten black high school dropouts ended up in jail or prison. (The
reasons are many, but one is that many young blacks and Latinos
are introduced to the juvenile justice system via detention at
an early age. More about this in Part III of this series.)
Moreover, among men born between 1965 and 1969,
22.3 percent of all black men but only 3.2 of all white men had
prison records
by 1999. Among high school dropouts, these percentages increased
to 12.6 and 32.1 respectively. Among those with either a high
school diploma or a GED, only 4.3 percent of white men and 23.5
percent of black men ended up in prison. For those who had at
least some college, these percentages dropped substantially: only
1.1 percent of white males and 8.6 percent of black males had prison
records by 1999. While education has an obvious impact, the black-white
differences remain high.
This same study also found that when tabulating
the official unemployment figures, the government fails to include
prisoners (curiously,
the census bureau adds prisoners to many small towns around the
country and the poverty status of such prisoners are added to the
overall poverty rate for these same towns, resulting in qualifying
for additional federal funding). Western’s study also compared
the employment situation for those in and those not in prison. Not
surprisingly, when they included the imprisoned population the
numbers changed dramatically for black males. For instance, in
1999, one-third of the black male population was unemployed (compared
to 16% of the white males). Among high school dropouts between
22 and 30, these percentages changed dramatically: an astounding
70 percent of black males were unemployed (counting those in prison
or jail), compared to 27 percent of white males.
Having a criminal record, especially a prison
record, has always been a barrier to seeking re-entry into society. In recent years
it has become even worse, with many new laws passed in the past
decade resulting in, among other negative impacts, the denial of
public housing, welfare benefits, and the ability to obtain an
education. Such laws impact millions, for according to recent
estimates; about 13 million Americans are either serving time for
a felony conviction or have been convicted of a felony sometime
in the past. Moreover, a total of about 47 millions (one-fourth
of the adult population) have some kind of criminal record on file
with a federal or state criminal justice agency.
Criminologist Jeremy Travis likens this to
a form of “internal
exile,” the domestic equivalent to those convicts exiled to the
American colonies (and Australia too) during the 17th and 18th
centuries. However, in these two cases they faced few barriers
to participating in colonial life once they had served their sentence. This
has become, in Travis’ words, a form of “social exclusion.” Such
exclusions have further put a distance between “them” and “us” and,
moreover, Travis notes that:
“The principal new form of social exclusion has been to deny offenders
the benefits of the welfare state. And the principal new player
in this new drama has been the United States Congress. In an era
of welfare reform, when Congress dismantled the six-decades-old
entitlement to a safety net for the poor, the poor with criminal
histories were thought less deserving than others…there was little
hesitation in using federal benefits to enhance punishments or
federal funds to encourage new criminal sanctions by the states.”
The ex-offenders that feel the heaviest brunt
of this exclusion are racial minorities. Another criminologist,
Todd Clear, has pointed out that in many urban, poverty-stricken
neighborhoods
as many as one-fourth of the adult male residents are either in
prison or in jail at some time during the year.
Part of the methods of controlling the surplus
population is through legislation, which defines what a “crime” is and, moreover, through
sentencing structures, defines what crimes are “serious.” Many
sentencing structures have a built-in class and racial bias. This
is especially the case with drug laws, which have always targeted
mainly the drugs used by minorities and the poor throughout history.
The New American Apartheid
Apartheid is a policy that produces systematic
racial segregation or discrimination and is usually associated
with pre-Mandela South
Africa. The word apartheid was introduced to the world by South
Africa in 1948. This term stems from the Dutch Aapart (which has
the same English connotation), and "heid" (which translates
as hood). The term was adopted to soften the image of the harsh
racial segregation polices practiced by the South African government. World
attention had focused on South Africa's segregation practices,
and it was thought that through the substitution of the word apartheid
for segregation, world attention would be diverted from their discriminatory
practices. Soon after the adoption of that term, however, the
world realized that nothing had actually changed in respect to
the treatment of blacks in South Africa.
There seems to be a pattern of contradictions
by the United States concerning what is professed to be policy
direction and what is
actually supported by the U.S. government. America has always
been a country that professes to place high value on children. However,
in 1989, the United States refused to support United Nations General
Assembly Resolution 44/25, which was a product of the Convention
on the Rights of the Child. This resolution was for the adoption
of basic rights of children, such as the right to life. As further
evidence that the United States tends to differentiate between
its public posture and its global voting record, the United States
claims to be in favor of policing international criminals. Yet
America refused to ratify the United Nations’ recent attempt to
create an International Criminal Court in Rome. In fact, prior
to the call for votes, the United States requested a non-recorded
vote on the matter of adopting the Statute establishing an International
Criminal Court. More specifically, speaking to the issue of apartheid,
in 1973, the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment
of the Crime of Apartheid debated the issue of apartheid as a crime
against humanity, and therefore argued that apartheid should be
treated as a crime against humanity, an international crime. To
date, the United States has not yet ratified this resolution.
American apartheid is alive and well, as racial
segregation remains a common characteristic of virtually every
of American city. Central
cities now contain 80 percent of the urban non-white population,
and one-third of the black urban population resides in the nation's
ten largest central cities. There have been symbolic attempts to
reduce racial segregation in American cities. We use the term “symbolic” because
these attempts have often been either politicized and skewed to
serve the interests of the elite or these attempts have been grossly
under-funded to insure their failure.
To illustrate, the Housing Acts of 1949, 1954,
and 1965, provided federal funding to local authorities to acquire
slum property and
begin redevelopment of that property. In order to qualify for
federal funds, local governments had to insure that affordable
living accommodation would be provided for displaced families living
in the redevelopment zones. The process used was commonly known
as urban renewal, and sometimes referred to as “negro removal.” The
solution was high-density public housing. Today, these public
housing projects are often referred to as the “projects.” Raising
slum areas and the construction of public housing often resulted
in an overall reduction in living accommodations. In a study of
black youth gangs in Detroit, it was noted that for that city there
was a net loss of 31,500 homes between 1980 and 1987. Today, many
blacks find themselves once again involved in a "negro removal" program – but
rather than removed from one inner city slum area to a more high-density
slum area, they find themselves removed from the inner cities entirely,
and compartmentalized in America's prison industry.
Most of the racial differences noted above,
and also the dramatic rise in overall incarceration rates, can
be explained by the “war
on drugs,” which was escalated during the mid-1980s, just about
the time that the prison population started its rapid rise. Part
II explores this topic.
Click
here to read Part 2 of this series.
Click here to
read Part 3 of this series.
Click here to
read Part 4 of this series.
Randall G. Shelden and
William B. Brown are Professors of Criminal Justice at the
University of Nevada-Las
Vegas and Western Oregon University respectively. They have
written several books on crime and criminal justice. This essay
is part of a forthcoming book on the prison industrial complex.
Shelden may be contacted via his web site: http://www.sheldensays.com. A
more detailed version of this series, including references and
footnotes, can be found on this web site. |