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 worlds population lives in the U.S., yet we hold captive within our borders a whopping 25 percent of the worlds 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). Its growing because of the same sleaze thats behind most of our countrys problems: giant corporations are incentivizing, and profiting from the expansion of the prisons industry.
Over that gaping wound that is mass incarceration, were 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 its 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 nations 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
no_hypocrisy
(45,771 posts)Judi Lynn
(160,211 posts)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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