|
|
|
The
mass incarceration of African Americans is historically comparable
only to the treatment
of Gypsies in Eastern Europe. Gypsies were also enslaved until
the mid-19th century, and are generally not considered by most
ethnic Hungarians and Romanians to be true citizens of these
nations. Europeans lie and obfuscate about the “complexities” and “intractability” of
the Gypsy “problem,” which stubbornly persisted through generations
of command-economy and Soviet dominance in the East, and under
dictatorships and democracies on the Iberian peninsula. Few
Europeans will admit that the problem is that Hungarians and
Romanians
have always hated and persecuted Gypsies, and still do. Spain
exploits and co-opts Gypsy culture, but values the actual people
less than other citizens. The logic of hate leads to predictable
results, as we wrote in ’s
inaugural issue, April
5, 2002:
“Hungary's
beleaguered Gypsies, or Roma, constitute 5% of the population
but account for around 60% of the nation's male prison inmates.
The penal system of Romania, home to the world's largest concentration
of Gypsies, appears to have been designed mainly for the purpose
of keeping the Roma out of circulation. In Spain, the descendants
of the women who bequeathed Flamenco dancing to humanity represent
just 1.5% of the population, yet comprise 25% of female prisoners.”
In
the United States, mass incarceration of Blacks is national
policy. This is an
obvious and provable fact – otherwise there would not be such
uniformity of practice throughout this vast country. The disparity-creating
process begins with the intake system, which instructs police
to observe, stop and interrogate Black people with far greater
frequency and intensity than whites. Those whites unfortunate
enough to brush up against the criminal justice system intake
machinery, are disproportionately spit back out without being
charged with an offense. The pool Blackens, as police attach
more severe and numerous crimes to the Black “offenders” in
custody. Prosecutors further cull wayward whites from the herd
through lenient application of statutes, and by pursuing less
harsh penalties for the charges brought. Judges lend their
hands to the racial distillation process, using whatever discretion
they are allowed to favor whites in sentencing and conditions
of confinement.
Click
to view entire cartoon
Inexorably,
and with near-identical effects at every stage of the process
and across
regions, the U.S. criminal justice system reveals its essential
racist character. We can prove that the system is racist through
the uniformity of results, and that it is intended to be racist
by the relentless duplication of the process over time and
geography. Ernest M. Drucker, in his contribution to the National
Urban League’s 2003 State of Black America compilation, used
New York as an example of what is, in fact, the national pattern:
In
New York State, despite the lack of any evidence of significantly
higher rates of illicit drug use for blacks and Hispanics,
drug-related incarcerations of young black and Hispanic males
is 40 and 30 times the rate, respectively, of young white males.
Since the so-called Rockefeller drug laws took effect in 1973,
the rate of drug incarcerations in New York increased from
8 percent of the prison population to more than 30 percent.
Ninety percent of that group are male; 78 percent are New York
City residents; 94 percent are black and Hispanic (although
blacks and Hispanics are just 12 percent of the total state
population); and 70 percent of them come from just six New
York City neighborhoods.
If these results were
the product of mistaken theories, the society that demanded
such an approach to drug use would have taken corrective action.
After 31 years, white society clearly approves of the results:
massively disproportionate Black and Latino incarceration.
Euphemisms
for savagery
The
semi-learned like to say that draconian drug laws are a “cultural reaction” to
the “excesses” of the Sixties. This too is a euphemism and
diversion, as is proven by the statistics and by white political
behavior in the face of the facts of incarceration. The real “culture
shock” of the decade was the sight of Blacks standing up as
men and women – not the irritating sideshow of white kids getting
intoxicated. (Otherwise, the prisons would have been filled
with white youth, in order to teach them a “cultural” lesson.)
Mass incarceration was the national response to the Civil Rights
and Black Power Movements, a white societal reaction to Black
intrusions onto white “space.” The incarceration frenzy shows
no signs of letting up.
America
is as deeply racist a society as exists on Earth. The statistics
prove it.
The national character is reflected in the incarceration rate,
which puts the United States in an uncivilized class of its
own. Two-thirds of America’s prison inmates are Black or Latino,
a disparity that, by itself, accounts for the nation’s ranking
among warden-states. Paul Street explored the phenomenon in
his November
20 article, “Starve the Racist Prison Beast.”
In
the second year of the new millennium, 40 of every 100,000
people in Italy were imprisoned. The incarceration rate in
Sweden was 60 per 100,000. France: 90 per 100,000. England:
125. South Africa: 400 per 100,000. Russia, with the second
highest rate in the world: 675. The United States led the world
with 690 per 100,000. Incredibly enough, the nation that proclaims
itself the homeland and headquarters of world freedom comprises
5 percent of the world's population but houses more than 25
percent of the world's prisoners.
Americans
are quick to point to the Siberian prison colonies of the
old Soviet
Union – the “Gulag” – as evidence of a truly evil system. Yet
African Americans are far more likely to be sent to some rural
Hell in the U.S. prison archipelago, than was the average Soviet
citizen to be dispatched to Siberia. Close to one in three
young Black men will spend time in the Gulag – literally, the
worst imprisonment odds in the world. One out of every eight
prisoners on the planet is African American, although African
Americans make up about one-half of one percent of humanity.
Such heights of racist
barbarity are not reached by accident.
Fear, or hate?
When
all else fails, apologists for the national policy of mass
Black incarceration
invoke the excuse of white “fear” – an amazing, ahistorical
leap. Rather than address the logic of hatred, which puts the
onus on the hater, “fear” serves as a device that deflects
responsibility from the evildoer. Did whites establish and
perpetuate slavery because of fear of Africans? Did southern
whites fight a war to keep their slaves out of fear of Black
proximity? If they feared Blacks, why did slave masters and
their neighbors take the slaves with them in the western expansion?
When did this irrational, deep-seated, absolution-giving fear
break out like cholera among whites?
If
whites are so consumed with fear of Blacks, why aren’t they dropping dead in droves
from stress – as do so many African Americans? Who’s stressing
who?
Hatred,
on the other hand, is abundantly evident. American whites
have repeatedly
erupted in paroxysms of hate-fueled violence whenever Blacks
have attempted to assert their full humanity: in the crushing
of Reconstruction; the massive white urban violence that met
new Black migrants to northern cities; and most recently, the
methodical, mass incarceration of Blacks across the width and
breadth of the nation in the aftermath of the Sixties – a sustained,
three decades-long act of violence against the entire Black
community.
The
tenth anniversary of California’s three-strikes
law came and went uneventfully, this month. 50,000 life-sentences
later, there is no evidence that the measure has “worked” – unless
the purpose was to incarcerate as many non-whites as possible
for as long as possible, in which case, the American Gulag
is working just fine.
|
|
|
|
|
|