Racism is not over and America’s prisons prove it

A gentleman named Myron Magnet, whose muttonchop sideburns have to be seen to be believed, has this to say:

What is keeping down American blacks today is not racism, oppression, or lack of opportunity. That’s over. Black Americans are now free. What holds them back is the ideology of “authentic blackness”—a black identity rooted in the urban underclass culture of hatred of authority (especially of the police, the teacher, and the boss), indifference to learning, misogyny, sex stripped of love or commitment, hustling, resentment, drug trafficking and using, tolerance of lawbreaking, and rage, rage, rage, the hallmark of keeping it real. That’s the message rap hammers home constantly with its mind-numbing rhythm.

I have heard this idea voiced by many conservatives. There are many different ways to demonstrate that racism is alive and well, and that black people who resent authority are well motivated. The clearest proof is America’s horrifying prison system.

First, some background.

The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000 (Alexander 2012, 6).

We are especially obsessed with locking up people of color.

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid (Alexander 2012, 6).

The explosion of our prison population during the past few decades has largely been driven by harsher penalties for drug crimes.

Homicide convictions account for a tiny fraction of the growth in the prison population. In the federal system, for example, homicide offenders account for 0.4 percent of the past decade’s growth in the federal prison population, while drug offenders account for nearly 61 percent of that expansion. In the state system, less than 3 percent of new court commitments to state prison typically involve people convicted of homicide (Alexander 2012, 101).

Imprisonment of drug offenders accounts for a substantial amount of the racial disparities in sentencing.

In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives (Alexander 2012, 7).

Our criminal justice system has been formally colorblind for decades, so how is this possible? I have had conservatives tell me that we must lock up so many black people for drugs because black people use  drugs more. This is simply untrue. People of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates, and the little variance that exists among races suggests that white youth are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color (Alexander 2012, 7). This makes sense, because drugs are expensive, and rich people can afford to do more of them. The two biggest potheads I have ever met are both white CEOs of tech companies.

Drug crimes are not like other crimes–users and dealers are usually the only people involved, and they don’t report each other. Uncountable millions of Americans use illegal drugs, and law enforcement agencies only have the resources (and the will) to go after a small fraction of them. Police have broad discretion in who they stop, search and arrest, and prosecutors have wide discretion in who they choose to charge. This freedom opens up plenty of room for racial bias to operate.

A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes… African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of all juvenile arrests, 35 percent of the youth waived to adult criminal court, and 58 percent of youth admitted to state adult prison. A major reason for these disparities is unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting decision making. In the state of Washington, for example, a review of juvenile sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black and white offenders differently. Blacks committed crimes because of internal personality flaws such as disrespect. Whites did so because of external conditions such as family conflict (Alexander 2012, 118).

Studies by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse in 2000 showed white students using crack at eight times the rate of black students (Thompson 2010, 709). In studies of Operation Pipeline in the 1990s,

whites were actually more likely than people of color to be carrying illegal drugs or contraband in their vehicles. In fact, in New Jersey, whites were almost twice as likely to be found with illegal drugs or contraband as African Americans, and five times as likely to be found with contraband as Latinos. Although whites were more likely to be guilty of carrying drugs, they were far less likely to be viewed as suspicious, resulting in relatively few stops, searches, and arrests of whites. The former New Jersey attorney general dubbed this phenomenon the “circular illogic of racial profiling.” Law enforcement officials, he explained, often point to the racial composition of our prisons and jails as a justification for targeting racial minorities, but the empirical evidence actually suggested the opposite conclusion was warranted (Alexander 2012, 133-134).

People look at the racial disparities in prisons and it confirms their existing biases about “those people,” which increases their support for harsher punishments (Nellis 2016, 11). The bias doesn’t just affect the criminal justice system. A white job applicant who discloses a felony drug conviction is more likely to get a callback than a black applicant with no criminal record at all (Pager 2007).

All the statistics can be mind-numbing. Maybe it helps to focus on a specific person’s story.

Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas. All but one of the people arrested were African American/ You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years of imprisonment, you are sentenced to ten years probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care. A judge eventually dismisses all cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the entire sweep was based on the testimony of a single informant who lied to the prosecution. You, however, are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your children (Alexander 2012, 97).

By contrast, Alexander asks us to imagine SWAT teams rappelling from helicopters in gated suburban communities or raiding lacrosse players’ parties. Even if racism didn’t exist in law enforcement, this would be political suicide. As a result, I have known a lot of white drug users, and precisely one of them has ever been to jail. None of them have been charged with crimes–this includes one who was caught by an undercover cop with felony weight of prescription painkillers.

Incarceration doesn’t just harm the prisoners. As of 2002, there were about 1.5 million American kids under age 18 who had a parent in prison–that is one out of every forty-five minor children in the country. The majority of kids with a parent in prison are under the age of ten (Thompson 2010, 713). Children of prisoners are unsurprisingly likely to suffer from anxiety and attention disorders or PTSD, to live in poverty, and to have unstable housing or to be homeless.

Incarceration creates a host of collateral consequences that include restricted employment prospects, housing instability, family disruption, stigma, and disenfranchisement. These consequences set individuals back by imposing new punishments after prison. Collateral consequences are felt disproportionately by people of color, and because of concentrations of poverty and imprisonment in certain jurisdictions, it is now the case that entire communities experience these negative effects (Nellis 2016, 3).

Sesame Street has a program specifically for children with incarcerated parents, and it is the saddest thing I can imagine.

So what do we do? Racist incarceration is harder to organize around than Jim Crow laws were. The laws on the books do not allow racial discrimination, and overt racism is socially unacceptable in most circles. It’s difficult to protest implicit bias, especially if you are doing so on behalf of criminals, who are not as sympathetic a group as Little Rock schoolchildren.

[D]uring Jim Crow, racial stigma contributed to racial solidarity in the black community. Racial stigma today, however—that is, the stigma of black criminality—has turned the black community against itself, destroyed networks of mutual support, and created a silence about the new caste system among many of the people most affected by it (Alexander 2012, 202).

I believe that widespread implicit bias is a cultural problem, not a political one, and we will have to find a cultural solution for it. All of those cops, prosecutors, judges and legislators locking up black and brown people don’t live in a vacuum. They are part of the same society as the rest of us. They had to learn their racial biases somewhere. I believe that Eurocentric music education is a vector for reproduction of racial stereotypes, and I believe that antiracist music education could be a solution. Hip-hop has particular value here, because rappers talk about incarceration and its effects more often and more frankly than any other musicians.

See also this rap video shot in prison by prisoners.

We do not have to be locking up more people than any other nation in the world. Slavery and Jim Crow might be in the past, but our prison system is the present, and we are all complicit in it.

References

Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow : Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Nellis, A. (2016). The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons. The Sentencing Project. Washington DC.

Pager, D. (2007). MARKED: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thompson, H. A. (2010). Why mass incarceration matters: Rethinking crisis, decline, and transformation in postwar American history. Journal of American History, 97(3), 705–736.