At least that’s according to ‘The Root.’ Again refusing to accept any responsibility for their own actions, blacks continue to call “mass incarceration” a conspiracy against them. One that reaps huge monetary rewards for those involved.
Locking Up Black People Is Big Business
Last week, I got to participate in American Injustice: A BET Town Hall. It’s a series of live conversations with leaders from Cory Booker to Kamala Harris about how we got into this crisis of mass incarceration.
It’ll air this Sunday. If there’s one thing I want people to take away from it, it’s that locking up Black people is big business.
Since the 1980s our prison population has more than quadrupled. Crime, of course, has not quadrupled. It’s been at historic lows.
It’s still very early in the morning here and my coffee hasn’t fully kicked in yet, but how does that statement make a lick of sense? Does it mean that we are locking up people without a trial and conviction? That’s what he seems to be implying. No, it means that there are people already in prison with lengthy sentences. Regardless if crime is at historic lows, it still exists. So new criminals get sent to prison which adds to the criminals already there, and the population increases. That’s pretty simple math. I might also point out that the population of the United states in 1980 was 227.22 million and now it’s around 329.10 million, so there’s about 102 million more potential criminals to add to the pool.
We now lock up 2.2 million people, more than any other country in the world. A disproportionate number are people of color with Black people incarcerated at 5 times the rate of white people.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it’s because blacks commit more crimes than whites, right? I’m sorry, but contrary to your beliefs, police don’t just go around randomly arresting people because of their skin color, and judges and juries do not randomly convict defendants based on that criteria either. Want an example? If they did, how was O.J. Simpson found not guilty when he was guilty as sin?
Further, that “disproportionate” number is narrowing.
Pew research stated that, “At the end of 2016, federal and state prisons in the United States held about 486,900 inmates who were black and 439,800 who were white – a difference of 47,100, according to BJS. In 2009, by comparison, there were 584,800 blacks and 490,000 whites – a difference of 94,800.”
Women—mostly mothers who are the primary breadwinners in their families—are the fastest growing population behinds bars.
Which plays such an enormous part in why so many blacks go to jail . . . fathers are absent. Often, there is no nuclear family. A guy screws a woman, she gets pregnant, and he’s outta there. But again, who’s to blame for these women going to jail? Maybe mom should spend less time walking the streets, smoking crack, or shoplifting, and concentrate more on raising their children right. It’s hard, but not impossible for a single mother to raise a child. But staying out of a jail makes it so much easier! So don’t break the law.
We are tearing apart families, destroying futures, and wasting human potential on a mind-blowing scale. This does not happen accidentally. The truth is there’s a whole system of businesses and people that profit from taking away people’s freedom.
Yes, YOU are creating all that destruction and waste. It didn’t happen accidentally. It’s YOUR fault. There is no conspiracy against you.
Building and staffing prisons is big business, especially in towns full of closed factories reeling from a loss of manufacturing jobs that’ve gone overseas or been made obsolete by technology. It’s an easy answer for politicians under pressure to create jobs.
The bail industry is made of modern-day loan sharks preying off poor people and people of color. DA’s set bail far out of step with the charges or people’s ability to pay—so they either go into debt or pay the highest price—their freedom.
If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
We know all too well the story of Sandra Bland, who was hauled in under the pretext of a traffic stop, couldn’t pay her way out, and hung herself in a jail in Waller County, Texas. Or Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old falsely accused of stealing a backpack, who spent 3 years in jail, most of it in solitary confinement, before taking his life.
Sandra bland wasn’t jailed because of a traffic stop. The Texas Department of Public safety “stated that Bland was arrested because she kicked [officer] Encinia. She was charged with assaulting a public servant.”
As for Browder, we’ll never really know if he was guilty or not. The case was only dismissed because the key witness, Roberto Bautista, had returned to Mexico and could not testify against him. As for his suicide, you can speculate all you want to, but it occurred two years after his release so we’ll never really know why that happened either.
Money bail is a trap. It leads to pre-trial detention, which ruins lives. In our research we found if you borrow $1,000 for bail, you’re likely to pay a private bondsman $6,000—even if you show up to court or your charges are dismissed. Black people get higher bail for identical crimes. And the average felony carries $10,0000 bail, so do the math and you’ll see what working class people are up against before they can even hire a lawyer or have their day in court.
The amount of bail is decide based on the likelihood of whether or not the individual in question will return for their trial or commit more crimes if freed. So look at the crime statistics again and tell me who is more likely to commit another offense if released?
All of this creates huge incentives for people to take plea bargains, whether or not they’re guilty, no matter how flimsy the evidence against them.
Meanwhile, prosecutors build lucrative careers acting “tough on crime.” They lock up people who’ve been pressured to take deals, pulling them out of their jobs and families, which has a ripple effect in their communities, undermining public safety.
These are the issues Color Of Change works on every day through campaigns to end money bail, demand accountability for police violence and flip the script on prosecutors, where we’ve helped reform-minded candidates rise in a dozen cities from Ferguson to Philadelphia, Orlando, and Chicago.
It’s daunting work, but not all the stories are tragic. Ebony Thomas spent three days in an Atlanta jail after she was arrested for an unpaid ticket, missing sticker, and light out on her car. Her family thought she’d been hurt, or worse. But a year later, she stood with us as part of Mama’s Day Bailout and helped raise the money to send 147 women home on Mother’s Day.
Again, that was her own fault. That’s what happens when you don’t pay tickets. A warrant is issued and you get arrested.
We’ve led campaigns to shame prisons for forcing incarcerated people to do dangerous, backbreaking work, like fighting forest fires in California for as little as $1/hour. Our work led to the first law in the country to make phone calls from jail free. We’ve gone after the worst offenders, like California’s largest bail agency Aladdin, now under fire for corruption and keeping bail premiums high.
No one forces those prisoners to fight fires. It’s a voluntary program and many prefer that option to jail. I wrote an article about this very thing last November at Fleeting Freedom. Oh, and based on all the photographs I found while researching that article, most of those firefighters are not black.
Profiteering in the prison industry should come as no surprise. But it does surprise people.
Our criminal justice system is a labyrinth of unfair, racist, counterproductive laws that’ve been built up over four decades. And the only way we’ll undo them is by coming together to have brutally honest conversations about what’s going on behind closed doors.
With 1.4 million members behind us, we are building power to transform the system. That means building political power, showing up en masse at town halls and in voting booths to set new standards for prosecutors and hold those in office accountable from Dallas to Detroit.
It means changing the narratives we see everyday on TV, on the news where data shows Black people are portrayed as criminals in far greater percentages than they actually commit crimes—and on popular crime shows. It means teaming up with influential artists like John Legend and Common to show how money bail, probation and parole, and pre-trial detention have become another form of incarceration for millions.
Ok, so now it’s the fault of TV? Give me a break. If you need to blame some form of media, why don’t you blame the rappers who glorify criminality in almost all of their “songs?”
It’s time to break down where injustice hides and show people what we can do about it. Because there is so much we can do, together.
Mass incarceration is big business. If we want justice, we just have to follow the money.
And so he blathers on and on about how they can change this evil corrupt system, when all they have to prevent all this is change their own behavior.
