America’s Criminal Injustice System

America’s Criminal Injustice System
June 5, 2012 | Filed under: Featured,Headlines | Posted by: Editorial_Staff

American prisons have become human warehouses
If police states are ranked by the number of persons imprisoned, then America is the world’s worst and biggest police state. The system runs on greed and racism. “Being ‘tough on crime’ is a metaphor for keeping Black people under control.” It is a place where being a “big Black guy” means conviction, and where “prosecutors routinely overcharge defendants with long sentences, and force innocent people to plead guilty in order to avoid decades behind bars.”
There are so many things amiss in the United States that one hardly knows where to begin discussing them all. Yet of all the calamitous situations faced by Americans, the cruelest by far is the criminal justice system. America is the world’s prison capital, and just one state, Louisiana, has an incarceration rate 13 times higher than China’s and 5 times higher than Iran’s.
Mass incarceration did not come about by happenstance, but was a coordinated and perfected reaction to the successes of the civil rights movement. Jim Crow was made illegal, so a legal means of destroying the Black community had to be created.
America’s obsession with punishment always results in a cause celebre which gets media attention because of obvious unfairness, prosecutorial misconduct or blatant racism. However, these details are less important than the unmitigated horror of American justice. The ordeal of Brian Banks is a case in point.
Banks was a 16-year old high school student and football stand out in Long Beach, California when he was falsely accused of raping a classmate in 2002. Banks faced a charge not only of rape, but kidnapping as well. He wanted to invoke his right to plead innocent, but Banks was facing a 41-year sentence if convicted. As Banks’ recalls, his lawyer pointed out that he was “a big Black guy” whom the jury would assume to be guilty. Banks followed the advice to plead no contest.
Even after serving five years in prison, Banks was forced to be monitored with an ankle bracelet, and register as a sex offender. Sex offenders in particular are in effect prisoners forever, unable to live where they want or monitored for years at a time. The draconian measures don’t end sexual assaults or make anyone safer. They are just added to the long list of ways to mete out more suffering.
Such is the case with untold thousands of Americans who end up in the maw of the system despite being innocent of any wrongdoing. The recantation of the alleged victim made the Banks case a headline story, but the entire criminal justice system ought to be on trial.
Prosecutors routinely overcharge defendants with long sentences, and force innocent people to plead guilty in order to avoid decades behind bars. Prosecutors in the state of Florida have decided that they don’t really want to try cases in court any longer. They punish suspects who want to go to trial by seeking sentences that are 5, 10 or even 20 times longer than the sentence that would be served had they pleaded guilty. Marissa Alexander fired a shot at her husband, and could have pleaded guilty and served only 3 years in prison. By insisting upon going to trial, and despite the fact she didn’t actually shoot anyone, Alexander will now serve 20 years behind bars.
What we witness in American courts bears no resemblance to a justice system, which would give judges discretion and allow defendants a day in court without fearing a life sentence. The system even punishes the innocent for saying that they are innocent. Many states automatically deny parole to individuals who assert their innocence and keep them locked up until they confess the guilt that isn’t theirs.
The corrections and criminal justice system in this country is nothing but a nest of corruption and must be torn apart. Prisons and jails are used to create jobs for prison communities, make money for corporations and keep Black people from effectively challenging the system as they did forty and fifty years ago. Prosecutors and politicians benefit from tough sentencing and can expect publicity, election victories and higher office should they seek it.
They have little to lose with “three strikes your out” life sentences and decades in jail for low level drug dealers. Being “tough on crime” is a metaphor for keeping Black people under control. The code words are clearly understood and the fear created by media’s “if it bleeds it leads” obsession makes even many Black people support these awful measures.
No crime is too small to put thousands of people away. Even child support enforcement is used to put Black people behind bars who, once there, obviously can’t support their children at all. But dead beat dads, sexual predators, drug kingpins and other imagined or exaggerated criminals are never the point. They are used to keep the dreadful system running, make money for corporations, get votes for politicians, and keep racist and/or uninformed Americans happy.
The case of Brian Banks gets media attention because a liar put him behind bars. It is tempting to remember that aspect of his case but it shouldn’t be what we think about. We should think about an unnecessarily long sentence, presumption of guilt of a “big Black guy” and permanent punishment.
There will always be people whose stories generate more sympathy or who have better organized supporters. Even as they get our attention we must acknowledge that there are thousands more like them. The cause of the moment should be an occasion to expose the beast and kill him once and for all. That will be the story most worthy of our attention.

http://www.africanglobe.net/headlines/americas-private-prison-corporations-slave-traders/
America’s Private Prison Corporations Are Slave Traders
April 30, 2012 | Filed under: Featured,Headlines | Posted by: Editorial_Staff
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Prisoners now the cheapest labour source in U.S.
AFRICANGLOBE – Crime has been going down for nearly a generation, and the states have finally put the brakes on prison growth in response to the fiscal crunch. But Wall Street prison profiteers see the crisis as an opportunity.
The Corrections Corporation of America has offered to buy nearly all the nation’s state prisons. “To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full.”
The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, this month sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright.
To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.
For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.
The attempted prison grab is also defensive in nature. If private companies can gain both ownership and management of enough prisons, they can set the prices without open-bid competition for prison services, creating a guaranteed cost-plus monopoly like that which exists between the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.
But, for a better analogy, we must go back to the American slave system, a thoroughly capitalist enterprise that reduced human beings to units of labor and sale. The Corrections Corporation of America’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission read very much like the documents of a slave-trader. Investors are warned that profits would go down if the demand for prisoners declines.
That is, if the world’s largest police state shrinks, so does the corporate bottom line. Dangers to profitability include “relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.”
The corporation spells it out: “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.” At the Corrections Corporation of America, human freedom is a dirty word.
But, there is something even more horrifying than the moral turpitude of the prison capitalists. If private companies are allowed to own the deeds to prisons, they are a big step closer to owning the people inside them. Many of the same politicians that created the system of mass Black incarceration over the past 40 years, would gladly hand over to private parties all responsibility for the human rights of inmates.
The question of inmates’ rights is hardly raised in the debate over prison privatization. This is a dialogue steeped in slavery and racial oppression. Just as the old slave markets were abolished, so must the Black American Gulag be dismantled – with no compensation to those who traffic in human beings.

http://www.africanglobe.net/headlines/reasons-united-states-worlds-worst-police-state/
The Reasons Why the United States is the World’s Worst Police State
August 29, 2012 | Filed under: Featured,Headlines | Posted by: Editorial_Staff
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The United States is a police state
There’s no getting around the fact that the United States is the Mother of All Police States. China can’t compete in the incarceration business. With four times the U.S. population, it imprisons only 70 percent as many people – about the same number as the non-White prison population of the U.S. Even worse, 80,000 U.S. inmates undergo the torture of solitary confinement on any given day.
When U.S. corporate media operatives use the term “police state,” they invariably mean some other country. Even the so-called “liberal” media, from Democracy Nowto the MSNBC menagerie, cannot bring themselves to say “police state” and the “United States” without putting the qualifying words “like” or “becoming” in the middle. The U.S. is behaving “like” a police state, they say, or the U.S. is in danger of “becoming” a police state. But it is never a police state. Since these privileged speakers and writers are not themselves in prison – because what they write and say represents no actual danger to the state – they conclude that a U.S. police state does not, at this time, exist.
Considering the sheer size and social penetration of its police and imprisonment apparatus, the United States is not only a police state, but the biggest police state in the world, by far: the police state against whose dimensions all other police systems on Earth must be measured.
By now, even the most insulated, xenophobic resident of the Nebraska farm belt knows that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any country in the world. He might not know that 25 percent of prison inmates in the world are locked up in the U.S., or that African Americans comprise one out of every eight of the planet’s prisoners. But, that Nebraska farmer is probably aware that America is number one in the prisons business. He probably approves. God bless the police state.

The US has the worlds largest prison population
For the American media, including lots of media that claim to be of the Left, it is axiomatic that China is a police state. And maybe, by some standards, it is. But, according to United Nations figures, China is 87th in the world in the proportion of its people who are imprisoned. China is a billion people bigger than the United States – more than four times the population – yet U.S. prisons house in excess of 600,000 more people than China does. The Chinese prison population is just 70 percent of the American Gulag. That’s quite interesting because, non-Whites make up about 70 percent of U.S. prisons. That means, the Black, brown, yellow and red populations of U.S. prisons number roughly the same as all of China’s incarcerated persons. Let me emphasize that: The American minority Gulag is as large as the entire prison population of China, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people.
However, police states must be measured by conditions behind the bars, as well as raw numbers of inmates. And, by that standard, the American Gulag is even more monstrous.
Civilized people now recognize that solitary confinement is a form of torture. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, reports that solitary confinement beyond 15 days at a stretch crosses the line of torture, yet, as Al Jazeera recently reported, it is typical for hundred of thousands of U.S. prisoners to spend 30 or 60 days in solitary at a stretch. Twenty thousand are held in perpetual isolation in so-called supermax prisons – that is, they exist in a perpetual state of torture. Studies now show that, all told, 80,000 U.S. prisoners are locked up in solitary on any given day. That’s as many tortured people as the entire prison system of Germany, or of England, Scotland and Wales, combined.
If that is not a police state, then no such thing exists on planet Earth.

http://www.africanglobe.net/headlines/mass-incarceration-white-supremacy-america/
Mass Incarceration and White Supremacy In America
January 30, 2013 | Filed under: Featured,Headlines | Posted by: Editorial_Staff
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Mass incarceration has provided prisoners who are now being used as cheap labour
AFRICANGLOBE – In a 2011 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Newt Gingrich said, “There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential…The criminal justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it.”
An advocacy group called Right on Crime is spearheading Republican efforts to “demand more cost effective approaches that enhance public safety.” Signatories to its statement of principles include, in addition to Gingrich, other notable Republicans like Jeb Bush and Grover Norquist. A recent Washington Monthly article celebrated the right’s new focus on crime claiming it would “put the nation on a path to a more rational and humane correctional system.”
But by focusing on achieving “a cost effective middle ground,” Republican reform strategies end up eschewing the relevance of social justice and largely ignoring racial disparities and the disruptive social costs created by mass incarceration.
Justice and White Supremacy
The travesty of mass incarceration and its devastating social effects and of the malfeasance of American jurisprudence cannot be measured purely in terms of economic rationality. It is an issue deeply entwined with long histories of racial oppression and White supremacy. True reform will require grappling with this larger problem.
A 1987 Supreme Court case illustrates what I mean when I say that the justice system is saturated with racism. In McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court declined to define the death penalty as racially discriminatory. The case involved the appeal of the death sentence for Warren McCleskey, a Georgia man convicted of armed robbery and the murder of a White policeman. In his appeal McCleskey cited research analysing 2000 Georgia homicides over an eight year period beginning in 1972 that found Black defendants were nearly twice as likely to be sentenced to death as White defendants.
The research, described as the “most sophisticated study of the criminal justice system in the 20th century,” also found that the death sentence was applied 4.3 times more often when the murder victim was White. McCleskey’s appeal (based upon the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection and the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment), argued that the death sentence was racially biased. Justice Powell, in the majority opinion, accepted the general validity of the data and the likelihood that race was a factor in death penalty cases, but wrote that in the specific case of Warren McCleskey there was no proof of “the existence of purposeful discrimination.”
In the analysis of Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the Supreme Court’s decision in McCleskey upholds the constitutionality of the Georgia death penalty, even while it validates the data showing clear racial bias. Stevenson summed up the case by arguing that in McCleskey v. Kemp the Supreme Court viewed the problem of racial bias as “too big” to confront.
Indeed, in the majority opinion Justice Powell wrote that “if we accepted McCleskey’s claim that racial bias has impermissibly tainted the capital sentencing decision, we could soon be faced with similar claims as to other types of penalty… [S]ince McCleskey’s claim relates to the race of his victim, other claims could apply with equally logical force to statistical disparities that correlate with the race or sex of other actors in the criminal justice system, such as defence attorneys or judges.”
In effect, the Court declined to recognise that racism and White supremacy were factors in the administration of justice. “The Court,” Stevenson argued, “said if we recognise disparities based on race in the administration of the death penalty it’s going to be just a matter of time before lawyers begin complaining about race disparities for other kinds of criminal offences…”
McCleskey v. Kemp powerfully reinforced White supremacy in the administration of justice by obscuring a long American history of systematic racial violence and oppression, and normalising racial bias and racial disparities in sentencing. Although the decision was a specific deliberation on racial bias and the death penalty, its logic clearly ramifies throughout the entire criminal justice system.
Race, Class and Incarceration

US prisons have become human warehouses due to mass incarceration
The US incarceration rate began increasing in the mid-1970s, but exploded dramatically after passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Between 1970 and 2005 the prison population rose 700 per cent. The US comprises only 5per cent of the world’s population, but contains 25per cent of the world’s incarcerated people. Over seven million Americans are entangled with the criminal justice system through parole, probation or other forms of correctional supervision, while 2.3 million are behind bars. At 730 per 100,000 the US prison rate is 4-7 times higher than other western nations and up to 32 times higher than countries with the lowest rates like Nepal, Nigeria and India.
Racial disparities among the incarcerated are glaring: one in every 36 Latino man and one in every 15 Black man is a prisoner compared with one in every 106 White man. Four percent of Native American adults are under correctional control. Data comparing apartheid era Black incarceration rates in South Africa with current Black male incarceration rates in the US provides a jarring perspective. According to the Prison Policy Institute, in 1993, during the White apartheid era in South Africa, Black men were incarcerated at a rate of 853 per 100,000 total Black male population. In 2010, under the Obama administration, US Black men were incarcerated at a rate of 3,074 per 100,000. As the law of the land, McCleskey v. Kemp became an alibi for the racialised logic of mass incarceration, obstructing recognition and elimination of blatant racism in the criminal justice system.
Featured in the December issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, Stevenson was described as “the most important advocate for death row inmates in the US,” having successfully argued cases before the Supreme Court that banned mandatory life sentences without parole for minors. Stevenson is an eloquent, soulful man who sees the world through the eyes of imprisoned children and equates the incarceration of African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era with the enslavement of Africans in the US.
Mass incarceration, he argues, has radically changed society. He speaks of urban communities, like Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington, where 50 percent of young Black men are in prison, on parole or probation and where the disenfranchisement of convicted felons “has horrific implications for the political aspirations of African-Americans.” In Alabama, Stevenson said, 34 per cent of Black men have permanently lost the right to vote and within the next 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be higher than it has been since passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Stevenson points to the consequences of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law which denied drug offenders eligibility for public housing, food stamps and other benefits, and that has had a disastrous impact on Black women and children. Black women comprise half of the female prison population, although they are only 12 percent of the total population. Between 1986 and 1991the number of Black women incarcerated for drug offences soared by 828 percent.
It’s not just racism in Stevenson’s analysis that drives the shame of mass incarceration. A class system defined by gross wealth and income inequality and entrenched poverty also subverts the achievement of justice. “We have a system of justice in this country,” he said, “that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.” A racially biased war on drugs, poverty and political disenfranchisement combine, Stevenson argues, to create “a new class of untouchables, 1 million strong,” who cannot be reached by the public health or welfare systems and are “marginalised in ways from which there is no recovery.”
Using the institution of slavery as a lens through which to analyse the hugely disproportionate incarceration of African Americans men, women and children, Stevenson challenges us to question the logic of a justice system based on the rule of McCleskey v. Kemp. Why are Blacks more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than Whites? Why are two-thirds of those sentenced to life African Americans? Why, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, does a Black boy have a 32 per cent chance of going to gaol, compared with a 6 per cent chance for a White boy?
Mass Incarceration is a Legacy of Slavery
Stevenson and the EJI are prompting a discussion on justice, on American racial history, and on slavery and the racism as foundational to the criminal justice system. “America,” Stevenson argued, “… became a society where slavery was a proxy for caste, and value, and worth. So when you ended slavery, you didn’t end the presumptions about Black inferiority. All those things carried on… Until we have a conversation about that, we are going to continue to replicate those dynamics.” For Stevenson, it is clear that the justice system is based upon both the myth of Black inferiority and on the sadistic delusion of White supremacy.
In a recent interview Stevenson described White supremacy as a tragedy because “… generations of people … were raised and taught … that they were better than other people because of the colour of their skin… There is nothing more abusive that you can do to a child or to a community than to persuade them that their worldview should be shaped by a lie, and that they should … interpret everything through that lie. And because we haven’t talked about that lie, a lot of what we say and what we do reflects an identity that is complicated and compromised by this history.”
It is crucial for us to reflect on Stevenson’s analysis that slavery and mass incarceration are part of a continuum, part of a history of racial oppression and White supremacy that remain entrenched in the legal system. This analysis is especially critical at a time when Republicans are attempting to redefine our carceral state without considering the role of race and racism in criminal justice and American history. This nation’s inability to face a past that includes slavery and the lie of White supremacy severely constricts the possibility of justice in the present and the future.