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

I honestly started to feel more and more frustrated with the blatant disrespect to the Fourth Amendment when it comes to the war on drugs. For a country who prides itself on it’s supposed freedom how could it just as easily violate it’s citizen’s liberties? How could it support people becoming unaware of their rights? How could it not condemn the breaking of standards that this country was built upon? Yet here we are with life sentences for drug possession that is not found anywhere in the world and here we are pretending racial discrimination does not occur.  The court cases went on and on explaining horrible circumstances of prosecution and conviction and even worse barring of future lawsuits. People’s families are torn apart by the current laws, entire lives uprooted, and youth now habituate to a life of constant scrutiny, fear, and discrimination. To have an actual study determining mental health effects on children or young siblings of criminalized people should be a start to show the public how horrible this system of “justice” is. This mass incarceration also develops a culture of fear and distrust with the government and police, the very institutions designed to protect their citizens. This is horribly upsetting to read.

Recently I was talking to an advisor and mentioned that we were reading about mass incarceration and she told me about an artist called Chris Jordon who does digital art that focuses on conveying a message.
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#prison-uniforms-set
The above link shows his art on prison uniforms. What looks as blocks of color is actually prison uniforms lined up to represent the number of incarcerations in 2005. He has a number of other pieces on education, body image, and more.

I remember the first time I had even heard that convicts could not vote anymore: while working the election as a poll worker. Side note of another negative experience while working the election was hearing that the reason Russian translators were not offered, in a fairly heavily populated Russian neighborhood, was because of the current conflict with Russia and once they learned to love America, translators would be provided. This was not an official representative of the Board of Elections but simply a misinformed person who had a position of influence in that context. It baffled me then just as much as now, while reading this passage. I did not realize how institutionalized racism was in the past as mass campaigns began to form relationships between a specific race and drug use. It hurt even more to read how CIA allowed for drugs to be smuggled in, with perfect timing for the Drug War. The worst to read was a city in Texas that attempted to incarcerate 15% of the black population of an entire town on a false testimony. Yet I am sure there are other ways, less publicized and looked in to that are just as horrible and just as jarring to read.

When reading how Native Americans were stigmatized as savages for personal “progress” I could not help but draw a parallel. Were African Americans not similarly stigmatized in the beginning of drug wars and placed in facilities that took away their liberties? This contributed to the author’s point that things have not necessarily changed but just have taken a different form to match the times or to match the goal of “progress.” Progress in the time of colonization involved land and a labor system. Progress after abolishing slavery involved economic stability and white control. They began to pit the lower class poor white people against black people to prevent a uniting situation. All of these facets make me think that more conspiracy theories are true than we would like to believe, especially those that result in one group having more power over another.

It is always a joy to see how economics plays into race, whether it be providing a stable lifestyle away from poverty or reversing power structures but economics was a strong force in defining race and propogating Jim Crow laws, to even our modern day and age. A tool to maintain this order of class, race, and power is mass incarceration among other things. There has been a lot of discussion about revising Food Stamps and other public welfare by Republics and other conservatives, implying that some people do not deserve them. This goes back to the book as in the 1960s it was also an issue of “undeserved” or “deserved” for those same types of welfare programs. What this reading made me realize was just how well and underhandedly history can repeat itself.