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

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.

People always want a scapegoat:  no one wants to take the responsibility for a problem, individual or societal, when they could blame it on someone else.  Michelle Alexander’s discussion of poor whites being pitted against blacks as a form of social control makes sense given this aspect of human nature and how we, as a society, have a tendency to put others down to make ourselves feel better.  In this case, politicians have tossed aside actual problems facing the nation–poverty, a messed up education system, ridiculous levels of hidden discrimination–in favor of a relatively easy appeal to white and, primarily, upper class voters.  Never before have I heard it explained it as such, but the idea of the lower class white population being told that there exists a group even lower than them on the social hierarchy would unfortunately support the mindset of some of my older relatives and residents of the working class neighborhood in which I grew up.  The people in my hometown knew very well the concept of the “welfare queen” and held prejudiced attitudes toward people on welfare–even if they themselves could, or did, benefit from it.  Often I have questioned why two groups with so much in common could come to resent each other so much, but it seems it has served politicians well to cause such indignation:  it distracts everyone from the problems the government isn’t fixing.

Additionally, the mention of coded racist language is extremely relevant to today’s political discourse and individual discussion.  With the emphasis on being politically correct, people care far more about not sounding racist than they do about not being racist.  As much as language may reflect and even help create our reality, simply using the “correct” terminology–and avoiding certain bad words–does not eliminate racism; discriminatory policy covered up by covertly racist language does not counteract the inherent racism.  Just as a mean person can be taught to be polite, a racist can be taught to not sound racist.  Until the country’s lawmakers begin to enact–and appeal–laws based on the morality of “all men are created equal,” rather than for economic gain or quick voter approval, this new era of Jim Crow will continue to subject millions of Americans to damning circumstances at no fault of their own.