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

It blows my mind how profitable incarcerating people has become in the second half of the 20th century. Local law enforcement agencies in the United States are under a system in which there is financial incentive to round up large amounts of people and incarcerate them for gain. The Edward Byrne Memorial state and local law enforcement assistance program fun law enforcement agencies that follow the drug war agenda and forfeiture laws let law enforcement literally take money out of people’s pockets.

There is also the blatant racism in some of these laws that I actually can’t believe something hasn’t been done about them yet. There is a massive difference in the amount of consent and pretext searches that are done on white people and people of color. People of color are being searched at much higher rates. In a state in which officers can search just about anyone they want, is it really all that strange to see their racial biases exposed through their work?

There’s also the controversy with crack cocaine holders who are predominantly black getting longer sentences  than powder cocaine users who are predominantly white. At all levels of the law, minorities of low socioeconomic status have the short end of the stick. Many even have no choice but to plead guilty because it’s the most socioeconomically feasible thing to do even if they are innocent.

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. 

What Michelle Alexander presents in chapters 2 and 3 of her book, The New Jim Crow, is brutally, honestly, hard to stomach. The idea that racism exists is not a foreign or sensational concept, unfortunately. But the idea that the people put in place to create, promote and enforce justice are failing spectacularly by creating a racial “undercaste”, as Alexander puts it, is both infuriating and depressing. And the evidence Alexander continues to present in chapter three only makes the picture bleaker. There are implicit as well as explicit biases, she explains, and the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand. You may think you are not racist, and you may vehemently oppose racism consciously, but you can, at the same time, STILL have implicit racist biases. What can we do?!

I think there are two important concepts here, one easier to start with than the other. The first, easier (yet elementary) concept, is awareness. At the most basic level, we should be trying to bring our unconscious biases into our conscious minds in order to scrutinize them- we should be aware that there is such thing as implicit racism. By reading material like this book, we call attention to the fact that racism, even in the era of colorblindness, is still an issue.

The other important concept, as alluded to in Alexander’s writing, is media. Of course, portrayal in the media is the root of many, many problems. I am by far not the first and will not be the last to suggest this idea. But if the War on Drugs originally gained momentum because of portrayals in the media of black drug users, such portrayals in the media must be stopped and countered in order for the War on Drugs to die.