2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

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. 

Whenever I try to discuss how the American prison system is modern legalized slavery, people’s eyes glaze over or they try to change the topic. I ask them to look closely at the thirteenth amendment. When they watch the film Lincoln and the Speaker of the House reads aloud the bill that the senate would soon elect to ratify, I ask them to pay close attention to a certain set of words in that document. Those words are “except as punishment for a crime”. These words, in my opinion, are the first true offense that damned a future generation to a pick up where their ancestors left off: slavery.

See, mass incarceration isn’t just the revival of Jim Crow. It’s the revival of chattel slavery. The cops round up young men of color on the streets through human rights violations like Stop & Frisk in order to put more bodies in private prisons. Eerily reminiscent of the slave ships carrying piles of human beings across the ocean to auction them off to private plantations, no? Once in prison (for terms longer than their crime should require), they are introduced to an environment of danger, disdain, fear, isolation, and vitriol, during which they’re made to work. There is a culture of violence on all sides, from both guards and fellow inmates. There are strict systems of respect and heirarchy in prison that turn correctional officers into villainous sentries rather than guards, and in many cases, prisons are divided by racial lines and one must be relegated to a gang in order to survive. This lifestyle continues outside of prison, where the slave has now become a Black man in the Jim Crow south and cannot find a job. Forced to sell drugs to feed himself and his family, he will soon find himself back on the plantation—I mean, in prison. Yeah, that’s what I meant.

I don’t think it’s enough to say that mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow. On the outside, sure, there is no question that life after prison is equivalent to that of life under the thumb of the Jim Crow south. However, I hope in future chapters the book goes into detail about life in prison, because I think it’s important to realize that prison is how white supremacy has kept slavery alive. Prison keeps Black people working. It keeps Black people off the streets. It keeps them away from the rest of society, and it keeps them quiet. For many, it keeps them scared enough that they’ll do everything in their life by the book and fall right intro the trap of respectability politics. We’re trained not to see it – from cop shows to stories to the news to what we’re taught when we’re children, jail is a place where the bad guys go. But not everyone in jail is a bad guy. The real bad guy was the one who declared a war on drugs two years before drugs were even a problem. And let’s not forget the people who thought a bad actor in a dumb hat was a good choice for a president.

Oh, and let’s not get me started on the death penalty. For that topic, I invite whoever’s interested to read this letter by Ray Jasper, a Texas death row inmate who’s scheduled to be executed thirteen days from today.

Michelle Alexander quotes Du Bois on page 28, who writes “The [Black Codes] spoke for themselves…no open-minded student can read them without being convinced they mean nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.” He is absolutely right – and the same can be said of mass incarceration. At the time the Black codes were used to fill prisons by rounding up “vagrants” (those who didn’t have suitable jobs at the time of yearly inspection) and incarcerating them. There is no moral or legal basis for such an act – it is purely for control, and the whites of the time admit this. The whites today that support legislation like Stop & Frisk that create a pipeline to prison will not admit to wanting to control Blacks and Latinos, but then, I am forced to ask them—if it’s really the drugs or the guns you want off the streets, why not pass or support legislation that will create an environment where drugs or guns can’t possibly be sold, one in which there is no demand for them? If you feel that the only solution to the “drug problem” is to sentence the people selling them, then it’s not the drugs you want out of sight and out of mind, it’s the people. That sounds a lot like institutional racism to me.

On June 10^th, 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted by a Florida jury for the murder of the unarmed Trayvon Martin. He defended his position using the rhetoric of “Stand Your Ground”, a statute in Florida (and many other states that I will never go to) that claims that you are fatally wound an aggressor in self-defense with a gun. On February 15^th, 2014, Michael Dunn was found guilty on three counts of attempted murder against Black children. He was found not guilty for the one child, Jordan Davis, that he actually did kill. He was drunk at the time, and all evidence suggests that Davis was unarmed and that the other kids were driving away. He defended his position with Stand Your Ground. In March of 2012, Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison after firing a warning shot in the direction of her advancing husband. Her conviction has been overturned and she is getting a retrial, where she is now at risk of getting 60 years in prison. What’s the difference between Alexander and the other two men? Her race, and arguably her gender as well.

The title “criminal justice system” is only two-thirds true. While it is clearly a system and it is most definitely criminal, it is anything but just. Stop & Frisk targets new people of color to fill our booming private prison industry. Stand Your Ground ensures that white people perfect the art of killing people of color and that they do it often; inversely, it ensures that people of color are put in our prisons as quickly and as long as humanly possible. When discussing his plans to bring a permanent end to Stop & Frisk in New York, Mayor de Blasio says “You cannot break the law to enforce the law.” This is true of Stop & Frisk, but it’s unfortunately more complicated than that, because the system we’re dealing with now has been the law longer than anything else has in this country. Alfre Woodard, in a panel discussing the film 12 Years A Slave, said that “We were a slave economy longer than we were anything else”. And we still are.