[news] The New Plantation

Tue Jul 13 18:27:20 PDT 2004

http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2004/07/27860.php

The New Plantation

    I am not a black man. But these days, I can't imagine a riskier 
thing to be. Keep reading. This isn't about to become a competition of 
ranking oppressions, or an indictment of white people everywhere. People 
have it hard in this country, period. Poor people, Indian Nations, 
immigrants, and women of all backgrounds. It's a long list, and it's a 
damn shame. It is, in fact, an embarrassment of suffering in a nation 
with an embarrassment of riches.

The New Plantation
By Silja J.A. Talvi, Gadflyer
Posted on July 9, 2004, Printed on July 13, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/19182/

I am not a black man.

But these days, I can't imagine a riskier thing to be.

Keep reading. This isn't about to become a competition of ranking 
oppressions, or an indictment of white people everywhere. People have it 
hard in this country, period. Poor people, Indian Nations, immigrants, 
and women of all backgrounds. It's a long list, and it's a damn shame. 
It is, in fact, an embarrassment of suffering in a nation with an 
embarrassment of riches.

But speaking in purely statistical terms, this isn't a good time to be a 
low-income African American in the U.S. (when was it ever, you may 
rightly ask?), but especially if you're one of the nearly 900,000 
African Americans sitting behind bars at this very moment.

Already, the U.S. Justice Department itself projects that 32% of 
African-American men born in 2001 will spend time in prison. That's one 
in three black men, folks. One in three.

And nearly every month, I come across another shocking new study, 
another class action lawsuit, or a straight-ahead government report that 
confirms another escalation in what amounts to a national phenomenon of 
mass incarceration. Nearly every month, I'm left staring at another 
staggering finding about the disproportionate impact of imprisonment on 
people whose skin tones largely range from brown to black. And every 
month, I'm left wondering what to do with the information at my 
fingertips. What new twist, what new angle on the facts will finally 
push the issue to the forefront?

And, more to the point, who cares?

Last month, a team of highly respected sociologists, Becky Pettit of the 
University of Washington and Bruce Western of Princeton University, 
published a new report in the American Sociological Review. The study, 
"Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in 
U.S. Incarceration," reported that African American men are more likely 
to end up in prison than to earn a bachelor's degree or even serve in 
the military.

Pettit and Western, who have tackled related topics for many years now, 
sounded another alarm that should have made front-page news: Fully 60 
percent of African-American male high-school dropouts born between 1965 
and 1969 had been incarcerated by the time they reached their early 30s.

Could the link between ethnicity, income, education and incarceration in 
the U.S. be any clearer?

Fifty years ago, the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision 
resulted in the (gradual and hardly complete) desegregation of schools. 
The Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project set out to find out how 
much things had changed since then, where African Americans in the 
prison system were concerned.

Here's what they found. In 1954, there were 98,000 African Americans in 
prison or jail. By 1974, that number had crept up to 153,500. By 1994, 
it had grown fourfold to 635,000. And in 2002, it had risen to a record 
high of 884,500.

What's going on here? No one's denying that crimes are being committed. 
But the real, underlying questions are how we define criminal behavior; 
how we decide to punish that behavior; and why, in the face of declining 
crime rates, are prison numbers - especially for people of color - 
climbing year by year?

Take California's ten-year anniversary of the "Three Strikes and You're 
Out" law earlier this year. The law was supposed to take care of the 
"worst of the worst," but it has been bad news all the way around. Men 
and women have gotten life sentences for shoplifting, for repeat petty 
offenses, and out of the very nature of their persistent and untreated 
drug habits. By the end of 2003, it had cost the cash-strapped state 
about $8.1 billion in incarceration costs.

When the Justice Policy Institute decided to take an even closer look at 
the situation in a March 2004 report, Still Striking Out, they found 
something that made my head reel. The African American incarceration 
rate for Three Strikes was no less than 12 times higherthan that of 
European Americans.

This is the kind of thing we need to be looking at. We need to look so 
hard into this that we actually figure out that there's a serious 
problem at hand. That we're playing with people's lives, breaking apart 
families (did you know that there are at least 1.5 million kids out 
there with parents in prison?), and, in essence, guaranteeing 
intergenerational cycles of crime and imprisonment. There's nothing like 
serious family instability to guarantee a kid's likelihood of ending up 
in trouble. Anyone who works in the "system" will tell you that, 
regardless of where they stand on the issue of prison expansion.

But by their own admission, many of the editors I work with say that 
while the over-incarceration of African Americans is something they 
genuinely care about, they're having to push these kinds of "social 
issues" to the backburner. After all, we've got body bags coming back 
from Iraq, a November election to see if Bush can actually win (not 
steal) the presidency, and a budgetary deficit that has entered the 
realm of the surreal. All true, I know.

But while we wait to see how the elections shake out, another few 
thousand African-American men get thrown behind bars. Another few 
thousand get released with a few dollars and a whole heap of shame, 
anger and alienation trailing behind them (if you're still under the 
impression that prison generally rehabilitates the people who get 
sentenced, I'd encourage you to spend just an hour talking with a former 
prisoner about what they really "learned" under lock-and-key).

There's an inherent challenge in writing about these realities. People 
assume that I'm a bleeding-heart liberal who romanticizes the plight of 
prisoners. As someone who has sat face-to-face with child molesters, 
murderers and rapists - and as someone who has been victimized herself - 
I can tell you that is not the case. The thing is that I can see people 
as more than the nature of their crime, which is what gives me the 
ability to do this work in the first place.

But why, people frequently ask about my work, do you focus on people of 
color in prison so much? White people go to prison too, you know!

And these people are right about one thing: European Americans do go to 
prison. In many states, they're actually still the majority of people in 
prison. The fact is that many European-American men and women are 
unjustly imprisoned and harshly sentenced, and suffer degradations and 
cruelties that most Americans would be shocked to learn about (if only 
the mainstream press paid as much attention to them as to Abu Ghraib). 
Consequently, I write about them with as much passion as I write about 
anyone else who suffers an injustice in the criminal justice system, 
whether that's an European-American prison guard, a Native American 
chaplain, or a gay prisoner sold into sexual slavery.

For me, it's a question of numbers and probability. And when the 
probability of a black man going to prison looks the way it looks right 
now, it's something that I'm more than likely to pay a hell of a lot of 
attention to, regardless of what news magazines or newspapers are 
interested in printing.

This is a crisis, people. An absolute crisis on a national scale that 
deserves every bit as much attention as the war we're fighting overseas. 
Because this is a war, of sorts, of our own. It's a drug war; a war on 
crime gone awry; a twisted war on poverty that targets the poor for 
their choice to survive by the means that they have at their disposal. 
We don't need to make excuses. We don't need to look the other way when 
real crimes are committed. We don't need to romanticize the plight of 
prisoners to get it through our heads that the prison industrial complex 
has absolutely spiraled out of control.

We're blind if we don't see what all of this is adding up to: Prisons 
are the new plantation.

And this is a kind of bondage we've never seen before, with 
repercussions we're only beginning to grasp.
© 2004 Independent Media Institute.

http://www.alternet.org/story/19182/ 
<http://%20http://www.alternet.org/story/19182/>
<http://%20http://www.alternet.org/story/19182/>

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