Jack & Jill Politics

“You Can’t be a black man in America and not have a criminal record…..” Malcolm X

The statement, made by Brother Malcolm more than 50 years ago is more true today than it was then. It is an astounding fact, even given all we know about incarceration rates for Black men in America that U.S. prisons now hold more Black men behind bars than slavery held in chains. I’ll never forget my first visit to a maximum security prison – it was Greenhaven Prison in upstate New York, as part of a delegation that came to speak with about criminal justice issues, including our ongoing efforts to reform the Rockefeller Drug Laws. There are details about the experience that are permanently etched in my memory, fueling my commitment to ending the massive injustice being perpetrated against our people under the guise of public safety.

First, I was surprised at how clean everything was. Rather than being sloppy and dirty as one might expect in an all-male non-military environment, most of the cells I saw were immaculately clean and it didn’t take long for me to understand why. Because of the lack of amenities, including individual sources of electricity – most prisoners use their toilets as a makeshift refrigerator to keep things cold – which provides an incentive to keep it as clean as possible. I was also struck by how young most of the men looked although many had been in prison for more than a decade. Despite their confinement, the men I met at Greenhaven were up-to-date on current events and more politically engaged than a lot of folks on the outside.

Finally, I was totally unprepared for the treatment I received by the men there. I don’t remember ever being treated more respectfully by any group of men than I was treated by the men at Greenhaven Correctional Facility. I realized the men I met and spent time with belonged in our communities – not in our prisons. Their presence back home would not be a significant risk to public safety while their absence represents a real loss to our communities in the form of role models for youth, partners for mothers and respect for the rule of law.

Imagine what Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would say about the conditions in California’s prison system. California has the most prisoners in the nation with some 160,000 people behind bars, more than double the system’s capacity. California’s prisons are so overcrowded that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state must reduce its prison population by more than 45,000 in the next few years. The PBS Newshour has chronicled the state’s effort to comply with the court’s ruling to alleviate prison overcrowding:

How many African-Americans are aware of the slave-like conditions in which black men and women are being held in modern America? Do we understand the ways in which the penal system is being used to replicate conditions we thought ended decades ago? Like Chain Gangs?

And not just for men. The infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County Arizona is proud of his reputation as an “equal opportunity incarcerator” who brought chain gangs to Arizona for the female prisoners under his control. Sheriff Joe manages a county jail, a facility for innocent people detained pending trial or low-level defendants serving sentences of less than one year. Look at the women in the following clip and ask yourself if they fit the description of ‘hardened criminals’ and ‘troublemakers’?

No discussion of prison conditions would be complete without talking about one of the most damaging extra-judicial conditions that prisoners are often subjected to – extrajudicial, because it’s not part of one’s criminal sentence and never could be, but it’s prevalence effectively makes it a condition of confinement in many jurisdictions that as a society we refuse to take seriously – What am I talking about? I’M REFERRING TO PRISON RAPE!!!!

Prison rape is not an issue about which there is societal denial, people acknowledge it happens, yet when it comes to men in prison, rape is treated more or less like a bad joke.

Many corrections officials maintain that prisoner rape is a rare occurrence, but recent research shows otherwise. Those who have delved into the problem have found that a pervasive culture of sexual violence governs many US prisons and jails. Before last year, the federal government had never bothered to estimate the actual number of rapes that occur in prisons. Its data relied on official complaints filed by prisoners, which in recent years have averaged around 800.

Last year, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. These revised Justice Department numbers seem to suggest that prison rape may account for the significant percentage of all rapes that occur in the U.S.

As of 2005, the last time a census was taken, there were 1,821 prisons in the country. Maine had just seven, while Texas had 132. Of these 1,821 prisons, 347 were maximum security. Most countries don’t have “supermax” prison facilities like we have in the US, where the ‘Alcatraz’ model of prison as a remote, nightmare fortress has become increasingly popular with the passage of time. Prisoners in maximum security facilities are more vulnerable to rape, the risk of rape, increases as prisoners lose control over freedom of movement. In minimum security prisons, it’s easier to find protection in a crowd.

U.S. penal institutions are like black holes in our social cosmos – places where complaints are not heard and abuses are not seen. Though important symbols of societal authority, prisons are spaces that lie beyond our system of regular oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, U.S. prisons functions like they are in Guantanomo Bay. The media mostly honors the government’s preference for leaving prisoners in the shadows. The nation’s prisons now contain more inhabitants than any American city save New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And yet there is no “prison correspondent” at any of the nation’s major newspapers. Despite the number of Black men and women behind bars, civil rights and racial justice organizations have been slow to prioritize criminal justice reform as a public policy imperative.

It’s impossible to tell the story of the U.S. penal system absent the history of racism in the U.S. Unfortunately for liberals, this racism story isn’t limited to the South, and hasn’t been driven by conservatives and right-wing Republicans. The history of the prison industrial complex is largely a story about politicians — liberal Republicans and centrist Democrats — supporting “tough on crime” policies for self-preservation and to protect other legislative priorities. The prison crisis is a singularly U.S. creation – law by law, decision by decision, state by state.

The US criminal justice system can’t be reformed — we have to abolish it start all over. Like slavery in the 19th century, and civil rights in the 20th century, abolishing the current criminal justice system in the 21st century can only be accomplished by a popular mass movement as radical and uncompromising as the movement that set up the prison regime in the first place.

The first step is to end the failed “war on drugs”. Will you join the movement to end the drug war? If so, please sign our Petition at SignON.org calling on President Obama to initiate a national dialogue seeking alternatives to the drug war. We can’t afford to lose another generation to the prison industrial complex.

The first step is to end the failed “war on drugs”. Will you join the movement to end the drug war? If so, please sign our Petition at SignON.org calling on President Obama to initiate a national dialogue seeking alternatives to the drug war. We can’t afford to lose another generation to the prison industrial complex.

TODAY IS THE NATIONAL DAY OF SOLIDARITY WITH OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS HELD CAPTIVE IN OUR NATIONS PRISONS!!
OCCUPY4PRISONERS IS STAGING AN ACTION AT SAN QUENTIN PRISON IN CALIFORNIA
PLEASE SHOW YOUR SUPPORT AND PRAY FOR THE SAFETY OF THE PROTESTORS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE RAZORWIRE!!!

PRISONS ARE NOT PLACES FOR PEOPLE!! OCCUPY4PRISONERS!! END THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!!