Mass Incarceration USA: How a Broken System Perpetuates Itself

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/06-3



“Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.”
— chorus of an 1828 minstrel song

“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.”
— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Yeah, it’s called mass incarceration. Our jails are filled with black and brown men and women. The number of inmates, primarily people of color, has soared sevenfold in the last three decades, according to Alexander, from 300,000 to more than 2 million, the largest number, by far, in the developed world. Many millions more are on probation or parole. And no matter what their crime, the inmates never get their citizenship back. The stigma of being an ex-felon brands someone for life as a second-class human being.

But even before the ex-felon label is attached, certain people — young men of color, in particular — are targeted as society’s losers by the police, judicial bureaucracy and prison system. They face the possibility of police harassment, invasion of privacy and arrest, often on the smallest pretext possible, pretty much any time they step outside.

I live in a vital, racially and ethnically diverse Chicago neighborhood and I watch it happen — racial profiling, the stop-and-frisk game. This is not making my neighborhood safer. It’s wrecking lives at enormous public expense and, of course, like the insane war on terror, creating enemies. We don’t need a justice system based on stereotypes and armed bullying.

“His hearing’s at 1? OK,” I said, “I’ll try to make it.”

[Mnemosyne]

1. K&R nt

[RainDog]

2. k&r n/t