Mass Incarceration is NOT the Problem

Hola mi gente,
Thought I’d wade in… LOL

A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners… and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future?
 -- Angela Y. Davis

Yes you read that right: mass incarceration isn’t the problem. You could close all the prisons you want. You could end mass incarceration right now and it would accomplish very little. In fact, saying you’re for ending mass incarceration is a nice thing to say, but it doesn’t do squat if you’re not addressing the root causes at the core of our society’s way of interacting with Black and Latinx people.

In order to better understand the criminal justice system, one can no longer differentiate between prisons and jails and the communities that serve as feeders for that particular form of racialized social control. In fact, marginalized communities -- mostly Black and Latinx -- act as open-air detention centers that differ from institutions of incarceration only in the degree of freedom of movement. Much of what transpires inside “the walls” of prisons or jails occur in inside the walls of housing projects and surrounding ghettoes, for example. Housing projects very much resemble prisons in the way they are designed and policed -- isolated and rigidly controlled.

The social control of people of color has had several permutations. First there was chattel slavery, which morphed into Jim Crow apartheid, which mutated into the ghetto, and now we have mass incarceration. It’s the spiral dynamics of racialized social control. Mass incarceration is like a cough -- a symptom of a deeper disease. You can address the cough, but if you don’t address the root cause, the disease will continue to destroy the body. Do away with mass incarceration (which will not be happening any time soon, by the way), and you’re still left with the virus that sits at the core of this nation’s soul.

Mass incarceration is symptomatic of the social psychosis of institutional racism. I am asserting that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand the latter -- its timing, composition, and inception as well as the acceptance of its harmful effects on those it impacts -- without returning to the former as a starting point. In other words, from a historical perspective, the mass incarceration of mostly people of color in the United States is a direct offshoot of the roots of the institution of racism.

Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and even unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” There is usually a division of labor in committing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with direct brutalization and killing done by one set of individuals; and another section of society keeping the machinery (e.g., sanitation, food supply, correction officers, judges, lawyers, etc.) in order; still others producing the implements of brutalization, or working on improving the technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, a better prison or isolation cell). It is the function of intellectuals and other experts (many who call themselves social justice advocates), and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.

This is why it is incorrect to say that our criminal justice system is broken. It isn’t. It has been working exactly as it was meant to work for centuries.

The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-religious nation dooms the justification of punishment. The economic cost of our system of punishment stands at about 100 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, sometimes for a lifetime. Vacuous references to “ending mass incarceration” or vague phrases are woefully inadequate as resistance to a system of justice predicated solely on race and punishment and do not serve as a foundation with which to challenge the prevailing paradigm of justice as punishment.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

The Myth of Fingerprints

Hola mi gente,
If you’re in the NYC area, please come join the Alliance of Families for Justice at the Black National Theater tonight at 6PM as we begin to shape the organization and plan events. Your input -- especially the input of those directly impacted by criminal justice policies -- is important.

The following was partly inspired by a question submitted by a friend on Facebook. The person asked why almost no one addresses individual responsibility in the context of mass incarceration and racialized social control.

Individual Agency & the Carceral State

Individual Agency & the Carceral State

It was the myth of fingerprints
I've seen them all and man
They're all the same.
 -- Paul Simon, The Myth of Fingerprints

A CEO at a major financial institution once asked me to address an audience at an awards ceremony for a foundation that will remain nameless (I feel a need to protect myself, since I'm sure what follows will offend almost everyone). What follows are glommed from parts of that speech: 

One of the great ironies in the history of the United States is the way freedom and liberty were developed for white Americans on the backs of African Americans and other Americans of color. Until Michelle Obama noted it during a speech, it is a little-known fact, for example, that the first part of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., for a long time where a white-dominated U.S. congress has deliberated, was built by enslaved African Americans, whose white owners were paid for that labor.

Those who actually toiled on this great symbol of democracy were not paid, nor have their descendants been compensated for their labor.

The situation becomes more ironic when one considers the fact that it was enslaved African Americans who put the statue of Freedom at the top of the Capitol in the 1860s. This statue was of a Native American woman warrior dressed in a flowing robe and helmet. Those who cast the statue, loaded its pieces onto wagons, assembled it, and hoisted it to the top of the Capitol building were African American workers who did not have access to the freedom they were helping celebrate. In addition, the indigenous American peoples represented in this statue to freedom were in the process of being systematically eliminated.

However, this is not a narrative of a racism of old that no longer exists. I am here to tell you that the same forces that oppressed and denied people of color in the past, and which are dismissed or denied by most white Americans (and conservative people of color) today, still exist. U.S. society and its basic institutions -- indeed, the very rhythm of contemporary life -- continue to be infested with the elements of racism, a systematic reality with deep roots in the past and major consequences for all Americans in the present. This is a continuing reality (Bell, 1993).

But before I directly address the question of individual responsibility, I need to come to terms with you, the reader. I conceptualize racism in structural and institutional as well as individual terms. My definition of racism describes a system of oppression of African Americans and other people of color by white Europeans and white Americans. There is no black racism because there is no centuries-old system of racial domination designed by African Americans that excludes white Americans from full participation in the rights, privileges, and benefits of this society. Racism requires not only a widely accepted racist ideology but also the systematic power to exclude people of color from opportunities and major economic rewards (Feagin,Vera, & Batur, 2000).

Now, let me address the thorny (and admittedly complicated) question of “personal responsibility” with regard to those who have been incarcerated.

First, I am going to disagree with the premise that most people working in the nonprofit/ industrial complex do not emphasize personal responsibility. In fact, most of the people assisting persons returning to society after incarceration (“reentry”) I know and have observed over the last 20+ years of doing this work, certainly stress personal responsibility and the need to acknowledge agency. I see this question of personal responsibility versus societal accountability similar to the charge of black and brown disinterest of “black on black” crime racists use to excuse state-sanctioned violence. Even a cursory Google search will yield untold organized efforts to reduce crime in our communities. In fact, black on black crime is a fiction, as most crime is intra-racial. In other words, where’s the outrage on “white on white” crime? 

I perceive the question of personal responsibility from the opposite end of the spectrum: I believe people in this field stress individual agency at the expense of societal responsibility. This is especially true of people who are intellectually lazy and want to place “failure” solely on the individual. Part of this can be explained that reentry work (which is in actuality a recycling) is hard, challenging work that can cause burn out can erode our view of humanity. Very few, in my experience, have a good grasp of the systemic forces that impact choice, opportunity, and options.

In any case, a part of personal responsibility is to learn about and attempt to transcend the systemic nature of oppression. You can pull all you want on your bootstraps (and some don't even have boots) and if you don't have an adequate analysis of the problem, you'll never get anywhere.

 

One type of explanation for the persistence of black poverty, mass incarceration, and inequality argues that blacks have been victims of themselves. Advocates of this point of view point out that formerly incarcerated people self-inflict damage by demanding unrealistic high wages, failing to enhance their skills, turning housing projects into crime and drug-infested areas, aided by females of low morality only too happy to have single parent families and live off welfare (D'Souza, 1995; Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1999). Others dismiss the importance of race, citing other factors such as culture, gender, and class (Wilson, 1980).

I see this attempt to emphasize individual responsibility while ignoring or diminishing the importance of systemic oppression, as a newer form of racist expression that has come to prominence. One that is preoccupied with matters of moral character, informed by the virtues associated with the traditions of individualism (Kinder, D. R., & Mendelberg, 1996). Today, I say, racism is expressed by the language of the American mythology rugged individualism.

The work, as I see it, is to highlight how systemic racialized social control influences and impacts individual agency. Indeed, the biggest obstacle in taking down the carceral state isn't so much about helping people empower themselves, though that's part of it, but in changing this society's obsession with the individual and while willfully blinding itself from systemic state-sanctioned abuse. Here my work is informed by a racial contract (Mills, 1997) predicated on a militant ignorance not merely confined to the illiterate and uneducated, but spread at the highest levels of the land, presenting itself unabashedly as knowledge.

 

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Resources

Bell, D. (1993). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. New York: Basic Books

D'Souza, D. (1995). The end of racism. New York: Free Press.

Feagin, J. R., Vera, H., & Batur, P. (2000). White racism New York: Routledge.

Kinder, D. R., & Mendelberg, T. (1996). Individualism reconsidered. In D. O. Sears, J. Sidanius & L. Bobo (Eds.), Racialized politics: The debate about racism in America (pp. 44-74). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mills, C.W. (1997). The racial contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Thernstrom, S., & Thernstrom, A. (1999). America in black and white: One nation, indivisible. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Wilson, W. J. (1980). The declining significance of race: Blacks and changing American institutions (2nd ed.). Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Staying White

Hola mi gente,
As you might gather from the nature of some of my posts, I get a lot of “fan mail.” Private messages, often from conservatives and neoliberals, expressing hate and vitriol are not uncommon in my inbox. LOL The worst come from “well-meaning” white people (and their black and brown enablers) wanting to have a “conversation.” Get this: I don’t give a flying fuck about your desire to discuss your particular brand of racism disguised as an “intelligent” conversation.

Simply put, I don't know why I have to constantly remind people that I do not hate white people. I hate white supremacy. You should too.

I believe some people purposely misconstrue my analysis because they can't stand to be reminded that we live in a racist society. Therefore, I'm not going to remind people any longer. If you're defending, or caping for, white supremacy, regardless of the color of your skin, you're for white supremacy. At least be honest about that and STFU already. SMDH

Please consider donating to my anti-white supremacy writing and advocacy efforts ::snort:: by clicking HERE. You can also donate via PayPal HERE.

Where Have all the White People Gone?

It never fails... 

Anytime the issue of racial justice or racism comes up, I can never find a white person. I mean, when did all the white people become “Indian” by virtue of their big brother’s little sister, great aunt’s step granddaddy being 1/16 Choctaw on his little sister’s, big brother’s mother’s side?

Talk about racism and many whites will say, “But I’m not white.”

It’s amazing because though these people sure do look white, they are clearly distressed about being labeled so. I am of Puerto Rican descent; I do not consider myself white. My worldview is most influenced by my Puerto Rican/ Latinx cultural upbringing. However, I would be a lying muthafucka if I stood up somewhere and denied that my blue eyes and light skin hasn’t benefited me tremendously. While I don’t consider myself white, I benefit from the perception of being considered white in a white supremacist society.

That’s the thing, most of the time, white people don’t notice or question their whiteness. Yet, when the subject of racism comes up, no one wants to be white because it opens one up to charges of being racist. Others proudly claim their whiteness and simply deny or ignore the systemic, state-sanctioned violence this society has committed, and continues to commit, against African Americans, Latinx, First Nation people, and other marginalized people.

(On a personal note, growing up, most of my friends had a good time ribbing me because, though I appear white, I was always one of the most militant of the crowd.)

Historically, it has been dangerous even to talk about racism. I’ve seen some of my friends labeled “Nigger lover,” and “race traitor,” terms which have carried severe penalties. Many of us know of the white civil rights workers who were killed for their actions against racism. Many of us have been isolated from friends or family because of disagreements over racism.

Admitting to being white may have the effect of making some feel guilty over being racist or traitorous over other whites. Whites don’t want to be stereotyped or labeled (talk about irony). In addition, dialog around racism often takes place within the context of anger, hostility, and divisiveness. Whatever the case, many are quick to disavow whiteness, or claim some other status identity which will afford some legitimate victim status. Certainly, no one wants to be seen as somehow complicit with racism.

But this is where it has to begin.

It has to begin with this denial of whiteness, because racism keeps people of color in the spotlight and makes white invisible. To change this we must take whiteness itself, drag it out into the light, and realize that it is a color too. Whiteness is a concept, an ideology -- a possessive economic investment -- which holds tremendous power over all our lives.

The challenge to white people with regard to a meaningful racial dialog is to keep whiteness center stage. Every time their attention is shifted to people of color, they will have to notice and refocus. They must notice when they try to escape into another identity. There’s an understandable discomfort with the label “white.” It makes one feel boxed in and want to escape from the confines of racial categories. Being white is an arbitrary classification which overrides individual personalities, devalues, deprives the richness of identities, stereotypes, and has no scientific basis.

Yes, whiteness is problematic. It confers privilege on some while taking away from others. All the fear, anger, frustration, and confusion experienced by admitting whiteness is the result of racism. Many of these feelings are what keep us from recognizing the effects of racism and the devastation that racism wreaks in our society.

To acknowledge this reality is to not perpetuate or create it. In fact, it is the first step to uprooting racism.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…