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polly7

(20,582 posts)
Wed May 4, 2016, 03:25 PM May 2016

Getting People out of Prison Is Just the Start to Solving America's Incarceration Crisis

CIVIL LIBERTIES

Angela Davis and asha bandele: Getting People out of Prison Is Just the Start to Solving America's Incarceration Crisis

Millions of people's lives are still controlled in racist and dehumanizing ways after they leave prison.

By April M. Short / AlterNet May 3, 2016


The United States is locking up and dehumanizing its people at extraordinary rates. Just over 4 percent of the world’s population lives in the U.S., yet we hold captive within our borders a whopping 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. This gives the U.S. the largest prisoner population in the world. And that population is growing, though not for any noble reason, like “crime is on the rise” (au contraire). It’s growing because of the same sleaze that’s behind most of our country’s problems: giant corporations are incentivizing, and profiting from the expansion of the prisons industry.

Over that gaping wound that is mass incarceration, we’re pouring a noxious vinegar called racism, which is distilled from the most putrid seeds that sprouted our nation: slavery. Our bloated prisons are disproportionately full of poor men and women of color, and it’s no accident. Nor is it a coincidence that as smartphones have turned us all into vigilante documentarians, able to capture injustice on our streets, some cops are caught murdering black men, and seldom forced to answer for their crimes.

These issues are all linked. They are part of a perpetual motion set off a couple hundred years ago with this nation’s shameful beginnings on the backs of stolen and imported humans. This is the crux of a powerful argument that activist, author and scholar Angela Davis threw down in a recent public phone conversation about the prison-industrial complex with asha bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance.

“It would seem to me that the recent emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement causes us to reflect on the connection between our lives in the second decade of the 21st century and the history of slavery, and particularly the failure to entirely abolish the consequences of slavery. We are still living with those consequences today. I like to think of racism also as a way of acknowledging the fact that we continue to be haunted by the institutions connected with slavery,” Davis said.

Full article: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/angela-davis-and-asha-bandele-getting-people-out-prison-just-start-solving-americas?akid=14220.44541.sQoamH&rd=1&src=newsletter1055776&t=6

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Getting People out of Prison Is Just the Start to Solving America's Incarceration Crisis (Original Post) polly7 May 2016 OP
Start with Alabama Governor Don Siegelman no_hypocrisy May 2016 #1
Countries with far more of their people in prison are clearly not more civilized. Judi Lynn May 2016 #2

Judi Lynn

(160,211 posts)
2. Countries with far more of their people in prison are clearly not more civilized.
Wed May 4, 2016, 10:36 PM
May 2016

Why do so many US Americans refuse to acknowledge the truth?

Also, before the greedy people who imported slaves to do their work for them took the very land upon which the slaves, (their lives and loved ones, and homeland stolen from them) toiled for their entire lives for the white "owners" away from settled, civilized Native Americans, through murder, and filthy abuse, more plainly, unbearable, brutal genocide from sea to shining sea.

Not so much to celebrate, actually.

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