The Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement should, I believe, have the status of a political imperative on the African-American leadership agenda. An Anti-RacistCriminal Justice Movement will address the massive and cynical expansion of incarcerated Black males since the late 1970s. Between the 1970s and 2003, the state and federal prison population in America increased from 200,000 to 1,500,000. Today that population numbers over 2,000,000, giving the United States the dubious honor of possessing the largest incarcerated population in the world! Above all, the bulk of the increase in America’s incarcerated population comprises working-class and poor Black males, along with working-class and poor Latino-American males.
The political philosophy scholar, Daniel Lazare, has advanced our understanding of the expansion of incarceration in the post-Civil Rights Movement era and how that expansion has devastated the life-chances of working-class African-American males. As Lazare informs us in an article titled “Stars and Bars”, The Nation (August 27/September 3, 2007):
The proportion of the U.S. population languishing in [prisons] now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and five to twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners…. With 2.2 million people behind bars and another 5 million on probation or parole, it has approximately 3.2 percent of the adult population under some form of criminal justice supervision, which is to say one person in thirty-two.
Daniel Lazare’s article also provides special insight into the wreckage visited upon the lives of working-class African-American males, noting that “By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 27 and 29 now stands at one in eight.” Furthermore, Lazare observes that “surprisingly few denizens of the American gulag have been sent away for violent crimes. In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession (the modern equivalent of rum-running or getting caught with a bottle of bathtub gin) accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent.”
Today in major industrial states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, etc., Black males comprise on average between 50% and 80% of inmates in either state or federal prisons. Data amassed by Professor Manning Marable (BC Editorial Board member) of Columbia University show that by 2000 nearly 50% of inmates in federal prisons were African-Americans. Marable’s research also found that the vast majority of Black inmates committed non-violent offenses, most of which were drug-related. The racist dimension of these criminal justice system outcomes for Black males becomes apparent when it is recognized that national data on illegal drug use show White Americans typically using illegal drugs at higher rates than Black Americans. As Professor Marable has observed:
The pattern of racial bias in [incarceration rates] is confirmed by the research of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which found that while African Americans today [2000] constitute only 14 percent of all drug users nationally, they are 35 percent of all drug arrests, 55 percent of all convictions, and 75 percent of all prison admissions for drug offences.
Professor Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Center, probes this racist development in the country’s criminal justice system in his very important book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), a book that warrants a wide readership. Massey’s study reinforces the indings made by Professor Marable — that today’s incarcerated Black males committed mainly drug-related non-violent offenses. Moreover, Massey reveals that the 1980s redesign of America’s criminal justice system in the direction of what Massey dubs the “new war on crime” (the “war on drugs”) was engineered and generated mainly by Republican controlled state legislatures and reinforced by Republican federal administrations, always of course with assistance from conservative Democratic state legislators and Congresspersons. As Massey observed in his important book Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System:
That Republicans led this new “war on crime” is indicated by the fact that the strongest single predictor of imprisonment rates across states between 1980 and 2000 was a change from a Democratic to a Republican gubernatorial administration. Imprisonment rates are also higher in states with Republican legislatures, and nationally incarceration rates have grown more rapidly under Republican than under Democratic presidents. Richard Nixon’s “war on crime” during the 1970s was followed by Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” in the 1980s. In 1986 Reagan signed a national security directive that named drugs a threat to national security and authorized the military to cooperate with civilian authorities in prosecuting the newly declared “war”. Drug offenses that had formerly been left to the states to prosecute were now made against federal law, and mandatory minimum sentences were enacted for the newly federalized crimes.
During the 1980s severe penalties were enacted for non-violent drug violations, and in the wake of the crack epidemic, possession or sale of that particular form of cocaine was singled out for harsher punishment than for offenses involving its powered counterpart. In a very real way, criminal possession of controlled substance came to replace “vagrancy” as the statutory mechanism used most commonly by state authorities to regulate and control the behavior of poor African Americans. (Emphasis Added) (See Massey, Categorically Unequal, pp.97-99).
On the basis of Professor Massey’s and other scholars’ study of the racist dimensions of today’s American criminal justice system, there is a pressing need for today’s Black elite sector to mount an Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement. The impact of the criminal justice practices on societal decay in the daily lives and future life-chances of millions of African-American weak working-class and poor citizens is massive. Accordingly, an Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement would represent a crucial first-step toward reversing the role of high incarceration rates in the social crises among African-Americans . Another reference to Daniel Lazare’s analysis in The Nation of the political consequences of today’s incarceration dynamics tells us how necessary an Anti-Racist Criminal Justice Movement is. Drawing on materials in a new study by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen titled Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Lazare observes:
…Only two states, Maine and Vermont, permit felons to vote while incarcerated [while] most limit felons’ voting rights after they complete their terms and that even if not legally disenfranchised, some 600,000 jail inmates and pretrial detainees are effectively prevented from voting as well. All told, this means that 6 million Americans were unable to vote on election day in 2004. This is not peanuts. Nationwide, one black man in seven has been disenfranchised as a consequence, while in Florida, the state with the most sweeping disenfranchisement laws, the number of those prevented from voting now exceeds 1.1 million.
Manza and Uggen say there is little doubt that, had the disenfranchisement laws not existed in Florida in November 2000, the extra votes would have provided Al Gore with a margin of victory so comfortable that not even the Republican state legislature could have taken it away. If the ranks of prison inmates and hence of disenfranchised ex-inmates had not multiplied since the ‘70s, much of the wind would also have been taken out of the sails of the great GOP offensive. Amerians have not gone right, in other words. Rather, by taking control of the criminal-justice issue, the right wing has winnowed down the electorate so as to artificially boost the power of the conservative minority.
Daniel Lazare concludes his discussion of the systemic aspects of America’s monstrous incarceration rates with observations on the prominence of what might be called “moralist deology” at the foundation of today’s criminal justice practices. As Lazare put it:
…American mass incarceration is not what social scientists call “evidence based.” It is not a policy designed to achieve certain practical, utilitarian ends that can be weighed and evaluated from time to time to determine if it is performing as intended. Rather, it is a moral policy whose purpose is to satisfy certain passions that have grown more and more brutal over the years. The important thing about moralism of this sort is that it is its own justification. For true believers, it is something that everyone should endorse regardless of its consequences. ….Moralism of this sort is neither rational nor democratic, and the fact that it has triumphed so completely is an indication of how deeply the nited States has sunk into authoritarianism since the 1980s. With the prison population continuing to rise at a 2.7 percent annual clip, there is no reason to think there will be a turnaround soon. (Emphasis Added)
