Potential locked up in prisons (the new slavery)

The Kansas City Star ^ | 11/08/2002 | Lewis Diuguid

[mfreddy]

The new slavery of the 20th and 21st century. It doesn't matter that they committed crimes, it is the color of their skin.

[Lewite]

Angela should be in prison now for supplying aid and weapons to the black scum responsible for the murder of a judge in California. She is from Birmingham Alabama and is a dirtbag.

[Pookie Me]

Davis said of the 9 million people in prisons worldwide, 2 million are behind bars in America.

Ahem, that is because most people worldwide are just killed.

Pookie & ME

[caa26]

I live in Baltimore, if anything there should be more people in prison not less.

Don't want to go to jail, easy don't commit crimes. Although if we legalized drugs much of the crime in the US would disapear. But I'll save that argument for another thread.

[mfreddy]

I should've put a barf alert--sorry, one of my first posts. I should've posted his article days before the election that basically said the Republican effort to court blacks votes was an attempt to screw them. I'll see if I can find that one.

[mfreddy]

Can you expand on your comments? I'd love to write a rebuttal with this chick's background for the letters section.

[sharktrager]

For example, in 1855, 66 percent of the 200 inmates at the state prison at Nashville, Tenn., were white. By 1879 the prison's population soared to 1,183, and 68 percent were black.

Could this be because blacks who committed crimes were either lynched or beaten severely? Also could it be influencsd by the idea that they were not human, but property? Nobody ever proposed putting someone's dog in jail when it does something that is essentially criminal.

[Tired of Taxes]

I don't care about a person's skin color. If you commit a violent crime or a crime against another person, you should be imprisoned.

However, we are imprisoning too many people for victimless crimes, like illegal drug possession. That means we spend money to imprison them, treat them, rehabilitate them, and we're taking their freedom away, too. All in the name of saving people from themselves.

[mfreddy]

Understood and partially agreed. The offensive nature of this article however, is the implication that blacks are only in prison because of the color of their skin. They even say that the communities are profiting from what amounts to "slave labor" because they demand these guys that get shelter, three meals a day, cable tv, and free health care to actually do some work for it.

[You Dirty Rats]

Richard Pryor: "Thank God they've got penitentiaries!"

[bribriagain]

"Incarceration slows the black community's economic progress. "

Well, DUH.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

Slavery boosted the economy of the South, where U.S. wealth until 1865 was concentrated.

Does this assertion strike anyone else as bogus? Prior to 1865, U.S. wealth was concentrated in the agrarian south rather than the industrial north?

[mfreddy]

Shelden wrote the penal system now "is sort of a ghetto" reserved largely for "racial minorities, especially African-Americans -- which is why this system is being called the new American apartheid."

I'd like to know who, besides the author and a few extremists who view the world through "negro colored glasses" is saying this. Absolutely absurd!!!!

[MichiganConservative]

Each is a profitable economic system, Davis told more than 500 people last week at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Slavery boosted the economy of the South, where U.S. wealth until 1865 was concentrated.

This is so factually incorrect. Those northerners with their factories, raliroads, and commerce were just SOOOOO much poorer. These people like to think slaves drove the economy. They didn't. The industrial revolution left the slave-labor-powered agrarian society of the South in the dust.

[MichiganConservative]

The INCOME TAX is the new slavery. You have to pay it or you go to prison or maybe get shot by the overseers, er, the IRS.

You actually have to do something to get thrown in prison, usually. You have no real choice about the income tax.

[TroutStalker]

Louis DooGood is the house Negro on the KC Red Star editorial board. He is so far left, I am amazed he has lasted as long as he has.

I wonder whether he thinks the Carr brothers are members of the dangerous class.

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

...I wonder whether he thinks the Carr brothers are members of the dangerous class....

Interesting that you would mention the Carr brothers since the elder of the two bros was "rehabilitated" by the American prison system before he embarked upon what his mother calls an "accident".

But there could be no possible connection between what he learned in prison and that night of beatings, rape, sodomy, torture, degradation, abuse and slaughter-- now could there?

[mfreddy]

someone help me with some additional info on Angela Davis if they have it.

[TroutStalker]

DooGood is the head of an NAALCP group he runs in one of Missouri's prisons. He has written in the past about how good these people are now.