Haves lock up have-nots
Prisons unmask U.S. racism
By Monica Moorehead
In just a few words, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the world-renowned
death-row political prisoner, describes the impact of U.S.
prisons on human beings better than whole volumes of books. In
"Live from Death Row" Abu-Jamal wrote:
"A dark, repressive trend in the business field known as
'corrections' is sweeping the United States, and it bodes ill
both for the captives and for the communities from which they
were captured. America is revealing a visage stark with
harshness. Nowhere is that face more contorted than in the dark
netherworld of prison, where humans are transformed into
nonpersons, numbered beings cribbed into boxes of unlife, where
the very soul is under destructive onslaught."
The vast majority of people in the United States still hold
the misguided view that incarceration is a means to bring about
social rehabilitation. In a few individual cases, that may be
true. But these are exceptions to the general rule.
Racist, anti-poor institutions
Prisons are social institutions that arise within a class
society that is divided into rich and poor, haves and
have-nots, colonized and colonizers.
When the vast majority are the have-nots, the wealthy depend
on the prisons to help establish and maintain law and social
order. This means the rich are allowed to get richer at the
expense of the poor getting poorer. An added dimension of
incarceration is the privatization of prisons, which has
generated billions of dollars in profits for Wall Street
firms.
There are close to 2.1 million people incarcerated in the
U.S. and no end in sight to this tragic new form of human
slavery. The U.S. has 25 percent of the world's incarcerated
population. At least a quarter of them did not even commit a
violent act. They are either awaiting sentencing or doing time
for drug offenses.
Sentencing practices for drug offenses help to expose the
systematically racist nature of U.S. prisons. According to a
1999 Sentencing Project report, the proportion of African
American drug arrests rose from 25 percent in 1980 to 37
percent in 1995. African Americans make up only 13 percent of
U.S. drug users, but account for 37 percent of those arrested
on drug offenses, 55 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent
of those sent to prison.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, there are close to
3,500 Black male inmates for every 100,000 Black males in the
total population, compared to 417 white male prisoners for
every 100,000 white males. On any day, 30 percent of Black men
aged 20-29 are in jail or prison or on probation or parole.
These sentencing practices amount to the racist criminalization
of an entire people.
And then there's the death penalty.
Millionaires need not apply
Studies have repeatedly shown that the death penalty is not
a deterrent to violent crime. But the U.S. criminal-justice
system still chooses to project the myth of deterrence.
The Death Penalty Information Center reports that of the
nearly 3,800 people who languish on death row, 43 percent are
Black. This means the Black proportion of the death row
population is triple the Black proportion of the general
population.
In 2000, 40 percent of the 85 people executed were African
American. If this isn't a racist, genocidal policy, then what
is?
To quote Abu-Jamal, "Millionaires need not apply for death
row."
Whenever the death penalty is carried out against any person
of color or poor person, it strengthens the repressive machine
of the capitalist state. Any execution helps to give
credibility to a bankrupt, barbaric political and economic
system that puts profits before meeting the needs of the
people.
Out of the depths of prison despair many revolutionaries
have arisen, from George Jackson to Malcolm X. Their heirs
include Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the
Puerto Rican prisoners of war, Sundiata Acoli, the MOVE 9, the
Angola 3, the Cuban 5, Rabih Haddad, Mutulu Shakur and
countless others. Their only "crime" was to openly oppose
racism, capitalist oppression and exploitation.
These revolutionaries understand that the prisons are the
crime, not the poor and oppressed.
To be against the war means to link the struggle against
imperialist wars abroad with the struggle against repression at
home--including the prisons. The enemy is one in the same.
Reprinted from the April 25, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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