By Barbara J. Miner
"More African
American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved
in 1850, before the Civil War began."
— Michelle Alexander, author of The New
Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
The Derek Williams homicide is no longer front-page news. But that
doesn’t mean that all-important issues have disappeared about the role of the
police and our criminal justice system in communities of color.
Those concerns need to be discussed, even as the federal investigations continue of Williams’ death
and possible patterns of civil rights violations.
The police serve an undeniable and all-important function: to serve the
community and to protect citizens from crime. But it would be naïve to ignore
problems in our criminal justice system that beset not just Milwaukee but urban
areas across the country.
What does it mean that more African American men are in prison or jail,
on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War?
Has our criminal justice system, particularly in urban areas, become a
sophisticated form of control rather than protection? To what extent might our
criminal justice system contribute to, rather than ameliorate, neighborhood
dysfunction in poor communities of color?
These are uncomfortable and disturbing realities, and go far beyond the
behavior of any single police office or police chief, or indeed of any one
city. They involve much deeper and broader policy decisions at the federal,
state and local level.
A national discussion is needed, but one that also reaches into every
neighborhood of every city. Including Milwaukee.
JIM CROW AND MASS INCARCERATION
If you haven’t done so already, I encourage
you to read Michelle Alexander’s book: The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness. Whether you agree with her or not, her
perspective cannot be ignored.
As Alexander notes in her introduction:
What has
changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure
of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of
colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly,
as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we
don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label
people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly
left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in
nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African
Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination —
employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote,
denial of educational opportunity, denial of foot stamps and other public
benefits, and exclusion from jury service — are suddenly legal. As a criminal,
you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man
living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in
America; we have merely redesigned it.
Among other things, Alexander’s book dissects the repercussions of the
painfully misnamed War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s — a war that fueled a
rise in imprisonment unmatched in human history. By the 21st Century, it became
impossible to ignore that the War on Drugs had also morphed into a war on urban
communities of color.
By 2005, the United States held roughly 25 percent of the world’s
inmates, with an incarceration rate that dwarfed all other country. As
Alexander notes in her book, most of the drug users and dealers in the United
States are white. Yet roughly two-thirds of those imprisoned for drug offenses
have been Black or Latino.
A year ago, former President Jimmy Carter called for an end to the
global drug war. In a New York Times opinion,
he noted that just before he left office in 1980, there 500,000 people
incarcerated in America. “At the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3
million,” he wrote.
Milwaukee has not been immune to these national realities, and has
become a leader in Black incarceration. In 2005, for instance, Wisconsin had
the second highest rate of Black incarceration in the country, fueled by
Milwaukee statistics. The rate was more than ten times the rate for whites.
The rise of mass incarceration has significantly impacted Milwaukee’s
most-impoverished families and neighborhoods. A 2009 report from the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute notes that most of the
jailed adults in Milwaukee County are in their 20s and 30s — prime working years.
African American males particularly affected.
“The absence of many males of prime workforce age and the numbers of men
incarcerated and released from state correctional facilities each year have
tremendous impact on the earnings and stability of families,” the report states.
The non-profit, non-partisan Sentencing Project notes that changes in
sentencing law and policy, not increases in crime rates, explain most of the
increase in the prison population in recent decades.
The realities of our criminal justice system “raises a moral problem
that we cannot avoid,” argues Glenn C. Loury, a professor of social sciences at
Brown University, in his book Race, Incarceration, and American Values.
“…We ought to ask ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we
Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow
citizens — even those who break our laws?”
Regardless of what happens in the Derek Williams
case, such questions won’t go away
— — —
This blog is cross-posted at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Purple Wisconsin project.
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