Prison Becoming The Norm For Black Males example essay topic

Is Prison Becoming the Norm for Black Males? In the last two decades the population of black male inmates grew three times as fast as the number of black men enrolled in higher education. Authored by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, the study showed that in 2000 there were 791,000 men in jail or prison and 603,000 enrolled in colleges or universities. In 1980, the study noted, those numbers were 143,000 and 463,700 respectively. Although comparisons of the two categories are not symmetrical, students comprise a narrower age range than prison inmates. The difference in numbers over two decades reveals the corrosive effect of our incarceration epidemic on the health of the African American community.

One could argue that African Americans as a result of they " re historically subordinate and oppressed position, have encompassed a unique sub-cultural position within American society. In America, the status affixed to race as a defining feature suggests a degree of inter-correctness among black people who have inhabited varying subordinate subcultures with respect to the pervasive white mainstream. A specific African-American subculture that has played a significant role in the American cultural landscape through its intensified position of racial subordination in black prisoners. This subculture has historically ranged from the enchained position of slaves to more contemporary manifestos of political prisoners. The black prison experience is suggested by George Jackson to be " a microcosm of the larger society", as the prison denotes a clearly defined place in which hierarchy based upon racial classification typically characteristic of the outside world exist inside a closed spatial arena (Bowker, 1977). In the decades following the Civil War, Frederick Douglass spoke out repeatedly against say rocketing rates of incarceration for ex-slaves.

Although he believed that time would reverse the blackness is ideologically linked to criminality in ways more insidious and complex than Douglass could have imagined. In a country less than 13 percent blacks, one half of the prison population is African American. Black prisons were at the forefront of social criticism in issues of race and class. Emerging in the 1950's were the Black Muslims and the visionary Malcolm X. Malcolm's transformation at Norfolk prison resulted in a constricting white American society. These foundations paved the way for the black power and militance of the black prison subculture of the 1960's and 70's.

Prisoners such as Eldridge, Cleaver and George Jackson fostered the liberation ideology and the development of a black consciousness and revealed radical critiques of the American social order. Anthologies from various West and East cost prisons, including Soledad, Folsom, Attica, and Norfolk also reflected the burgeoning consciousness and militance of the black inmate through works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays (Berkman, 1979). "Who were the militants?" Van Deburg places militants prisoners within the black power movement. Black political and social activists within prisons were important because they provided an in depth criticism of the American criminal Justice system.

The court system, wardens and conditions of the prisoners such as George Jackson, Bobby Seale and the Folsom Cadre produced acclaimed documents critical of the penal system. "Cellblocks or Classrooms". The funding of Higher Education and corrections and its impact on African American men makes perfectly clearly the society's investment priority's producer commensurate results. During the 1980's and 1990's state spending on higher education. Between 1980 and 2000, corrections share of state and local spending grew by 104 percent while higher educations share of state and local spending declined by 21 percent African Americans comprises about half of that total. One third of young black men are under some form of penal surveillance.

Speaking before a packed auditorium in mid November, scholar and activist Angela Davis argued that rising black incarceration rates can be understood only in the context of a hundred-year-old link between crime and race and class and oppression. Immediately following the civil war, Black codes created a list of crimes punishable only when committed by black people. Mississippi made it a crime for African Americans to be unemployed or drunk, or to have run away, neglected children, or handled money carelessly. The convict lease system farmed black and a few white prisoners out to work in factories, mines, and fields that built the New south. Through a gaping loophole in the 13th Amendment, politicians replaced slavery with a penal system designed to control black labor. Fredrick Douglass claimed that many white criminals escaped punishment by blacking their faces during a robbery or a murder.

Police always found an innocent black man to blame for the crime since, as Douglass pointed out, all Negroes look alike. Douglass claim sounds like a case about a year ago in which a white Boston man claimed a black man had killed his wife and children. A black man suspect was discovered and found guilty by a jury before the white man's brother came forward with the truth: the white man had killed his own family. Davis pointed out that crime has not increased since the 1970's, and that the vast majority of prisoners are serving sentences for nonviolent, often self-destructive crimes. Still, we have more young black men in prison than we do in college. The culture of incarceration has transcended prison walls, transforming the free world into a shadow of the penitentiary.

Schools have become fortified, particularly school for children who are expected to end up in prison. Prison supplies, construction, and services have become growth industries, and the morality of using prison labor is rarely any longer questioned. (Davis, 1971). We need a movement, Davis declared, on the scale of the Civil Rights Movement or the anti-lynching campaigns, to dismantle this prison industrial complex that has captured our nation. Why don't we connect, she asked, the struggle to defend affirmative action to a moratorium on prison construction? The same walls of ras icm those keep people of color in prison, after all, also keep us out of college.

The struggle against the use of sweatshop labor in south east Asia or the Caribbean should connect us to a struggle against prison labor at home. Our defense of welfare should lead us to question the imprisonment of the homeless or those physically or mentally unable to work. When Davis began fighting to free political prisoners in the late 1960's, she and other activists thought incarceration rates had reached critical levels. They could not have imagined the levels we face today, and still this subject is rarely discussed in leftist circles. (Davis, 1971) The one case that rises these questions are that of Mumia Abu Jamal. Too heavily invested in his personality, however, this campaign has spent more time arguing over Jamal's innocence than it has devoted to exposing the obvious racism of the death penalty and the penal system in general.

As much as we need to defend men and women on a death row, we will ultimately fail without drawing their cases into a broader movement for racial and economic justice. Imprisonment has become the response of first resort too far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category "crime" and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with then are relegated to cages. Prisons thus perform a feat of magic.

Or rather the people who continually vote in new prison bonds and tacitly assent to a proliferating network of prisons and jails have been tricked into believing in the magic of imprisonment. But prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and racially marginalized community has literally become big business. When prisons disappear human beings in order to convey the illusion of solving social problems, penal infrastructures must be created to accommodate a rapidly swelling population of caged people. Goods and services must be provided to keep imprisoned populations alive.

Sometimes these populations must be kept busy and at other times particularly in repressive super maximum prisons and in INS detention centers they must be deprived of virtually all meaningful activity. Vast numbers of handcuffed and shackled people are moved across state borders as they are transferred from one state prison to another. (Franklin, 1982). All this works, which used to be the primary province of government, is now also performed by private corporations, whose link to government in the field of what is euphemistically called "corrections" resonate dangerously with the military-industrial complex. The dividends that accrue from investment in the punishment industry, like those that accrue from investment in weapons production, only amount to social destruction. Taking into account, the structural similarities and profitability of business-government linkages in the realms of military production punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a prison industrial complex.

Almost two million people are currently locked up in the immense network of U.S. prisons and Jails. More than 70 percent of the imprisoned population are people of color. It is rarely acknowledged that the fastest growing groups of prisoners are black women and that Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita. Approximately five million people including those on probation and parole are directly under the surveillance of the criminal justice system. As prisons take up more and more space on the social landscape, other government programs that have previously sought to respond to socially need such as Temporary Assistance to needy Families are being squeezed out of existence. The deterioration of public education, including prioritizing discipline and security over learning in public schools located in poor communities, is directly related to the prison " solution".

As prisons proliferate in U.S. society, private capital has become enmeshed in the punishment industry. And precisely because of their profit potential, prisons are becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy. If the notion of punishment as a source of potentially stupendous profits is disturbing itself, then the strategic dependence on racist structures and ideologies to render mass punishment palatable and profitable is even more troubling (Franklin, 1982). Prison privatization is the most obvious instance of capital's current movement toward the prison industry. While government run prisons are often in gross violation of international human rights standards, private prisons are even are often in gross violation of international human rights standards, private prisons are even less accountable.

In March of this year, the Correction Corporation of America (CCA), the largest U.S. private prison company, claimed 59,944 beds in 68 facilities under contract or development in the U.S. But private prison companies are only the most visible component of the increasing corporati zation of punishment. Government contracts to build prisons have bolstered the constriction industry. The architectural community has identified prison design as a major new niche. Technology developed for the military by companies like Westinghouse's are being marketed for use in law enforcement and punishment (Franklin, 1982).

Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have learned that prison labor power can be as profitable as third world labor power exploited by U.S. based global corporations. Both relegate formerly unionized workers to joblessness and many even wind up in prison. Some of the companies that use prison labor are IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing. But it is not only the hi-tech industries that reap the profits of prison labor.

Nordstrom's department stores sell jeans that are marketed as "Prison Blues", as well as T-shirts and jackets made in Oregon prisons. The advertising slogan for these clothes is " made on the inside to be worn on the outside". Maryland prisoners inspect glass bottles and jars used by Revlon and Pierre Cardin, and schools throughout the world buy graduation caps and gowns made by South Carolina prisoners. 'The law in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in streets and to steal bread".

-Anatole France. A central part of the mythology of the criminal justice system in the United States is that everyone is treated equally, regardless of his or her race or class. The concept that no one is above the law is a noble one. Like many good ideas, reality usually lags far behind the rhetoric. Recent years have seen a growing criticism of the criminal justice system on the premise that the system itself is racist. Proponents of this position support their argument by pointing to statistics that show that black men make up 6 percent of the national population but almost half of the nation's prison population.

This is taken as prima facie evidence that the system is inherently racist, at least in its outcome. No one, it seems is willing to discuss the role that class plays in determining who does and does not go to prison. If the law prohibits rich and poor alike from stealing bread, and both steal bread, how come only the poor go to prison for doing so? The proponents of the institutional racism theory do not claim that rich black and Latinos are being herded into prison and jail in vast numbers, because they are not.

White prisoners tend to share one thing with their black and Hispanic compatriots: poverty. Most prisoners report incomes less than 8,000 a year in the year prior to coming to prison. A majority were unemployed at the time of their arrest. Tellingly, in a society that measures everything, no government statistics are kept on pre-incarceration earnings and employment histories.

Few researches seem interested in proving the obvious. Refusing to address the role that class plays in the criminal justice system, and politics in general, makes it all but impossible to address to root causes of two million people behind bars in the US. Race and racism do play a factor, but indirectly. To the extent that blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor compared to overall society.

They are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Few studies have examined the correlation between race and class. One of the few that did, (Cited in the Elliott Currie's Crime and Punishment in America: Why the Solutions to America's Most Stubborn Crisis Have not Worked and What Will), looked at the crime, arrest and incarceration rates in a poor black neighborhood and a poor white neighborhood in Ohio. The not -so-surprising conclusion was that it is poor, regardless of race, who bare the brunt of the "war on crime", which sounds better than a "war on the poor". (Van Deburg, 1992) The unspoken reality is that in America today there exist two systems of criminal justice. One for the wealthy, which includes kid-glove investigations, lack luster prosecutions, drug treatment, light sentences and easy, if any, prison time.

The other, for the poor, is one of paramilitary policing, aggressive prosecution, harsh mandatory sentences, and hard time. Wealth, and the political connections inherent to wealth, is the determining factor in deciding which system one gets. This is most obvious when wealthy hip-hop artists and athletes, many of them black, are charged with serious crimes. Class trumps race every time, even if the wealth is newly found. It has been said that America has the best criminal justice system that money can buy. For the most part, the obvious corruption of third world banana republics, with cash exchanging hands for not guilty verdicts, is not present in the American justice system.

Instead, we have the class-biased judge or prosecutor, who is the legal equivalent of going to the casino where the odds inherently favor the house and are unlikely to change (Franklin, 1982)... A compilation of articles by African-American authors, theorists, and political activists on the black prison experience of the 1960's. Especially insightful is a section by Angela Davis, who underscores particular black prisoners who were unjustly imprisoned on the basis of their political beliefs. In this sense she defines the meaning of the political prisoner. Also, Davis and others describe the prison experience as a part of the overall struggle of liberation for black people. The authors describe the criminal justice response as a call for the radicalization of black prisoners.

The Shocking Black Female / Male Enrollment Percentages at HBC Us: 20003 Howard University (DC) - Females (65%), Males (35%) Florida A&M University (FL) - Females (56%), Males (44%) Clark Atlanta University (GA) - Females (71%), Males (29%) Fisk University (TN) - Females (70%), Males (30%) Tuskegee University (AL) - Females (58%), Males (48%) Xavier University (LA) - Females (73%), Males (27%) Dillard university (LA) - Females (77%), Males (23%) Bethune C. Cookman (FL) - Females (58%), Males (42%) Fort Valley State U. (GA) - Females (56%), Males (44%) Morris C. Brown (GA) - Female (57%), Males (43%) At a City University of New York college (M edgar Evers College) Where the black enrollment is 87%, it's Females (78%) and males (22%). At the University of the District of Columbia, where the black enrollment is 76%, it's Females (62%) and Males (38%). The BE founder believes the projected black female / Male numbers are probably going to get much worse in the years to come.

Bibliography

Berkman, Ronald Opening the Gates: The Rise of the Prisoners' Movement. Lexington Books: Lexington, Mass, 1979.
Bowker, Lee H. Prisoner Subcultures. Lexington Books: Lexington Mass, 1977.
Davis, Angela, et al. If They Come in the Morning Voices of Resistance. The Third Press: New York, 1971.
Franklin, H. Bruce. Prison Literature in America. Lawrence Hill & Company, Westport Conn, 1982.
Van Deburg, William L. The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975.
University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992.