I’m not surprised by anything I’ve read. This isn’t a research topic for me. This is what my life could become. This is what I’m lucky my life hasn’t become yet.
Did you know that the prosecutor who “failed” to get a conviction of George Zimmerman, named Angela Corey, is actually notorious for sending Florida defendants to the lethal injection table? Since 2009, she has secured 21 death sentences, fourteen of whom were Black men. She also sent Marissa Alexander to prison for twenty years for firing a warning shot at her husband and is now fighting to put her away for forty more. According to news blog The Political Freak Show, “Between 2009 and 2012 (the last year for which statistics were available), Corey’s district was responsible for 32 percent of the death row sentences but just 8 percent of the state’s murders, according to statistics provided to ThinkProgress by the American Civil Liberties Union. Miami-Dade County, for example, saw more than twice as many murders during that period, but that jurisdiction’s district attorney has only put 5 people on death row since 2009.” This supports Michelle Alexander’s claim that prosecutors are actually the most powerful participants in the mass incarceration process. She has the ability to pick and choose when she wants to send to prison. She has the ability to choose when she wants to enforce the law based on her own personal prejudices. When she can control the lives and fates of entire communities, this goes beyond personal prejudice. It becomes institutional.
The “get tough” rhetoric employed by politicians post-Reagan was code language. It’s easy to understand this. By “getting tough” on “drug users”, you target a specifically imagined group of people with certain tactics. These “tough” tactics include brutalization, incarceration, and stigmatization, and these imagined people were “crack whores” and “welfare queens”; in other words, a hypervillainized Black drug user as opposed to the white drug users that were far more common across the United States. Thus, “get tough” is code language. Get tough on Black people. Make sure they stay within the rigidity of your respectability politics. Otherwise, throw them in jail and put them to work. New slaves.
Also, I’d like to comment on the militarization of the police. Alexander describes how SWAT teams performed drug raids by bursting into people’s homes without warning and tearing the place (and sometimes the people) apart. She also describes that the government gave military weapons to the police to use at their discretion. This has taken lives in the past. In 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a water-gel explosive on the home of the MOVE Organization, a Black liberation group that was under scrutiny (and persecution) by law enforcement. Their back-to-nature stance and possession of animals in the home led to complaints from neighbors, which eventually escalated to such a degree that it resulted in an armed shootout with police that concluded in the bombing, which took the lives of sixty people. To this day, only Ramona Africa lives to remember the event. In interviews, Ramona insists that it was not the type of explosive that the police had access to, that the department surely procured it from the military.
I don’t have anything in particular to say about what I read. I know far too much history to be surprised by what I read. I find too much news that proves Michelle Alexander’s arguments to only see them as “arguments”. To me, it’s all fact. Terrifying fact.
