Jim Crow Incarceration Nation - Land of the Free?

[teryang]

Must read this article which is filled with interesting data. Excerpts cannot convey the impact of this well written description of our penal system. 5 percent of the worlds population but 25 percent of the worlds prisoners and the world's highest imprisonment rates.

Starve the Racist Prison Beast: Review of America's System of Mass Incarceration

by Paul Street

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=STR20060419&articleId=2284

April 19, 2006

Prison Nation: "Not Unless This Country Plunges Into Fascism"

...Contrary to the "law and order" rhetoric cultivated by many politicians and policymakers, however, there has been no clear or consistent pattern of rising criminality, including violent criminality, that might explain the upward trend of America's prison numbers. "Since 1980," journalist Vince Beiser notes, "the national crime rate has meandered down, then up, then down again, but the incarceration rate has marched relentlessly upward every single year." During the 1990s, indeed, the US incarceration rates rose dramatically in spite of crime rates that fell, thanks largely to fairly robust economic growth during the "Clinton boom." "Crime is dropping," noted the well-regarded public affairs journal Illinois Issues, "but the prison population isn't."

...The central factor is that imprisonment in the US has "changed," in Pager's words, "from a punishment reserved for only the most heinous offenders to one extended to a much greater range of crimes and much larger segment of the population . Recent trends in crime policy have led to the imposition of harsher and longer sentences for a wider range of offenses, thus casting an ever widening net of penal intervention." It is largely for this reason that the majority of Americans entering the inherently violent space of America's "prison nation," where as many as 7 percent of inmates are raped, now do so for nonviolent crimes. Between 1980 and 1997, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) reports, "the number of violent offenders committed to state prison nearly doubled (up 82 percent)," but "the number of nonviolent offenders tripled (up 207 percent)." People who committed nonviolent crimes accounted for more than three fourths of the nation's massive increase in prisoners between 1978 and 1996. The Justice Policy Institute estimates that there are currently more than 1.2 million nonviolent criminals behind bars in the US.

...These trends have impacted black communities with special harshness. While blacks make up just 15 percent of illicit drug users, they account for 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. They comprise 42 percent of those held in federal prison for drug charges and 62 percent of those in state prisons. Not surprisingly, white drug offenders are much less likely than their counterparts to serve time in prison. Blacks constituted more than 75 percent of the total drug prisoners in America in one third of all states according to a report issued in 2000 by the prestigious human rights organization Human Rights Watch. In my own state, Illinois, Human Rights Watch reported that "blacks constituted an astonishing 90 percent of all drug offenders admitted to prison in Illinois" in 1996. By 2000, the percentage had barely fallen to 89 percent, making Illinois number two in the nation in terms of this key disparity.

Chicago Story

As of June 2001, I learned, there were nearly 20,000 more black males in the Illinois state prison system than the number of black males enrolled in the state's public universities. There were more black males in the state's correctional facilities just on drug charges than the total number of black males enrolled in undergraduate degree programs in state universities.