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. 

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.

To continue the apparent theme of quoting famous rappers in our reading responses, this week’s reading of The New Jim Crow is essentially summarized in Jay-Z’s ‘04 single, 99 Problems. Though many of the lyrics would most likely not be deemed appropriate for a Macaulay blog post, in his second verse Jay-Z describes an incident that occurred nearly 10 years earlier, back when he was a notorious drug dealer. After being pulled over to the side of the road with “raw,” or cocaine, in his trunk, he is asked, quite condescendingly by the approaching police officer, “Son do you know why I’m stopping you for?”

Jay-Z, clearly possessing the “chutzpah and/or stupidity to tell a police officer to get lost” (the same trait that Professor Tracey Maclin argued most of us do not have), responds, accurately of course, “Cause I’m young and I’m black and my hat’s real low. Do I look like a mind-reader sir, I don’t know.” Fairly, Jay-Z is calling out the police officer for racially profiling a young black male and using the pretext of a traffic violation to accost and harass him, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment that was, in fact, endorsed by the Supreme Court Decision Ohio v. Robinette. Jay-Z emphasizes the arbitrary nature of such a blatant infringement of his constitutional rights with the response of the “fictional,” police officer: “Well you was doing 55 in a 54. License and registration and step out of the car. Are you carrying a weapon on you? I know a lot of you are.”

Jay-Z, being well versed in historical and influential Supreme Court decisions, proves himself a “reasonable person,” (as determined by the U.S. Justices in Florida v. Bostick) by refusing to give his consent to be frisked, and otherwise violated. “I ain’t stepping out of s**t, all my paper’s legit”

The officer, not one to be denied, pushes further for consent, “Well, do you mind if I look around the car a little bit.”

 Jay-Z, still quite aware of his Fourth Amendment rights, boldly retorts, “Well, my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in the back. And I know my rights, so you gon’ need a warrant for that.”

The officer, likely intimidated by the young and apparently intelligent black man in front of him, replies, frustrated, “Well we’ll see how smart you are when the K9 come,” reflecting the Supreme Court ruling that “walking a drug-sniffing dog around someone’s vehicle does not constitute a “search,” and therefore does not trigger Fourth Amendment scrutiny.”

Luckily for him, Jay-Z got away that day, and if his careers as a rapper, business mogul and sports agent do not work out, he would seemingly be able to fend for himself as a lawyer. His song sort of represents the difficulty in assessing the necessity of the War on Drugs, demonstrating both the racial prejudice inherent in much of police action and the fact that these “unreasonable and discriminatory stops and searches” are sometimes correct, however rarely that may be.