The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

[Scientific Playa]

cliffs, article makes the case on the blatant destruction of the family unit and crazy incarceration sentences and rates.... too much to paste


The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system, it's time to reclaim his original intent.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• October 2015 Issue

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

 

[Fox]

Excerpts from article

Antebellum Virginia had 73 crimes that could garner the death penalty for slaves—and only one for whites.

In this climate of white repression and paralyzed black leadership, the federal government launched, in 1914, its first war on drugs, passing the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine. The reasoning was unoriginal. “The use of cocaine by unfortunate women generally and by negroes in certain parts of the country is simply appalling,” the American Pharmaceutical Association’s Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit had concluded in 1902. The New York Times published an article by a physician saying that the South was threatened by “cocaine-crazed negroes,” to whom the drug had awarded expert marksmanship and an immunity to bullets “large enough to ‘kill any game in America.’ ”

According to H. R. Haldeman, another Nixon aide, the president believed that when it came to welfare, the “whole problem [was] really the blacks.” Of course, the civil-rights movement had made it unacceptable to say this directly. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. But there was no need to devise new systems from scratch: When Nixon proclaimed drugs “public enemy No. 1,” or declared “war against the criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives,” he didn’t need to name the threat. A centuries-long legacy of equating blacks with criminals and moral degenerates did the work for him.

Deindustrialization had presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration “widened the income gap between white and black Americans,” writes Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan, “because the infrastructure of the carceral state was located disproportionately in all-white rural communities.” Some 600,000 inmates are released from America’s prisons each year, more than the entire population of America’s prisons in 1970—enough people, according to Pager, to “fill every one of the fast-food job openings created annually nearly five times over.”

When the Justice Department investigated the Ferguson police department in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, it found a police force that disproportionately ticketed and arrested blacks and viewed them “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” This was not because the police department was uniquely evil—it was because Ferguson was looking to make money. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the report concluded.

For black people, escaping poverty does not mean escaping a poor neighborhood. And blacks are much more likely than all other groups to fall into compounded deprivation later in life , even if they managed to avoid it when they were young.

“It’s not just being poor; it’s discrimination in the housing market, it’s subprime loans, it’s drug addiction—and then all of that following you over time,” Sampson told me recently. “We try to split things out and say, ‘Well, you can be poor but still have these other characteristics and qualities.’ It’s the myth of the American Dream that with initiative and industriousness, an individual can always escape impoverished circumstances. But what the data show is that you have these multiple assaults on life chances that make transcending those circumstances difficult and at times nearly impossible.”

Hard hitting article a MUST read for everybody.

 

[Osmosis]

@Pifferry @HankHill

 

[the cac mamba]

shyt is appalling

these governors signing these deals with private prisons for keeping jails filled to certain capacities, should be fukkin executed themselves