No mercy.
Coming soon: Tha SYNDICATE.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
Posted on 11/08/2002 9:00:09 AM PST by mfreddy
Potential locked up in prisons By LEWIS W. DIUGUID The Kansas City Star
Angela Davis drew many parallels between slavery and today's growth of the prison industrial complex.
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.
Prisons today are a boon to rural communities, creating jobs, new housing, restaurants, hotels and other feeder industries. Inmate labor also generates capital.
Like slavery, "we've reached the point where the prison economy is not marginal to the larger economy," said Davis, a 1960s radical, author and professor in the history and consciousness department at the University of California-Santa Cruz. But prison growth drains resources from health care, education and jobs. "It devours funds needed for institutions that let people lead decent lives," Davis said.
Like slavery, prisons also are violent places where many black people suffer. Racial profiling, unfair drug laws and judicial inequities contribute to blacks constituting nearly half of the people in prisons, though they're only 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Slaves had no rights and couldn't vote. Davis said prison has become "a major impediment to a democratic society," one that leaves many African-Americans "civically dead."
Davis noted that the abolitionist movement helped end slavery in the 19th century.
"In the beginning of the 21st century, we should be talking about the abolition of the prison system," Davis said.
Randall G. Shelden, in his book Controlling the Dangerous Classes, argued that "imprisonment is one among many forms that have developed over the years to contain and house those individuals who are part of the dangerous class."
Prisons after the Civil War helped re-establish white supremacy. Through "convict leasing" prisons provided "an abundant source of cheap labor to help rebuild the war-torn South." Jim Crow laws helped change prisons from being mostly white to mostly black, Shelden wrote.
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.
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."
The growth of prisons parallels the 20th century rise of the black middle class. According to the Census Bureau, the median household income for blacks in 1999 was the highest ever recorded. Also, 51 percent of black married-couple-families had incomes of $50,000 or more compared with 60 percent of whites. Incarceration slows the black community's economic progress.
Prison growth also mirrors hopeful periods for blacks. The first from 1790 to 1830 followed the American Revolution when slaves also fought for freedom against the British.
The second wave of prison growth from 1830 to 1870 paralleled the abolitionist movement, the Underground Railroad, the end of slavery and Reconstruction. Prison growth from 1870 to 1946 occurred at the same time of the great migration of blacks from the South to jobs in the North and West.
"The last two eras (1946 to 1980 and 1980 to present) have seen the greatest growth in the prison system," Shelden wrote. That also parallels the integration of the military and the civil rights movement.
Davis said of the 9 million people in prisons worldwide, 2 million are behind bars in America. The new majority in prisons are minorities.
Davis urged people to do more to create a better environment outside of prison to eliminate the need for incarceration. Society needs alternative sentencing, improvements in education and jobs.
We don't need more prisons.
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
These people are overwhelmingly drug addicts, high-school dropouts, or both - in an era of vast underemployment and even unemployment among college graduates in the U.S. Many are aliens not even legally eligible to work in the U.S. anyhow.
What crap. From what I've seen, prisons rip the economic guts out of the communities in which they're placed. Not only is valuable land taken out of the development mix, the associated tax base is lost. Spinoffs include crappy trailer parks for the guards and employees to live in, a couple of fast food joints and convenience stores to support the same low paid population, etc.
It ain't a boon.
We need fewer laws, and less jail time in general.
No mercy.
Coming soon: Tha SYNDICATE.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
What in the wide world of sports is the "History and Consciousness" Department? Does UCSC also have a "History and Unconsciousness" Department? (I guess not, because that's where Davis ought to be teaching.)
This comes under the heading of "stopped clock is right!!"
Characteristically, Davis is unable to bolster her argument by describing the slavery inflicted upon society as a whole by the current "criminal justice system". Like most Lefties, she is uninterested in the health of "society as a whole." Lenin is reputed to have burst out crying when he heard that the czar was carrying out land reforms that benefited former serfs. I'm sure most of the soi-disant social reformers among us would have a caniption fit if any real, beneficial social reforms ever took place in their life time.
I wonder how long white Americans will continue to invest in the delusion that they can buy off the inevitable cultural "confrontation" by building more and more prisons?
Furthermore the Power Elite are intent upon removing any taint of "racism" in our incarceration practices by targetting more and more poor white men. And, of course, we all know what awaits whitey in American prisons. Luckily none of us are like those ugly red-necks. It will never happen to us.
Someone else on this thread mentioned the Carr brothers--one of whom is a graduate of what, for many black males, is their institutions of "higher" learning--prison.
But don't worry, be happy. Just like the women of Afghanistan, the people of Iraq will soon be "free at last, free at last."
And that's what really counts, isn't it?....
Crime slows the black community's progress.
Davis urged people to do more to create a better environment outside of prison to eliminate the need for incarceration
Biblical justice eliminates the need for penitentiaries. Crimes against persons are punished eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life. Crimes against property are punished with restition, or indentured labor (for a limited term) if one is unable to pay the debt. Crimes against God (blasphemy, sodomy, adultery, etc) are punished by death. Perjury is punished by giving the false accuser, what the falsely accused would have received.
Simple, elegant, cheap. Who needs prisons?
Worth repeating.
The sole encouraging result from Downeast Maine on Tuesday was the voter refusal to fund the building of a prison.
(Unfortunately, it was the only thing they refused to fund.)
She can't find anything positive in this? Black married couples making over $50,000 aren't the same people going to prison either. She seems to lump all blacks together.
The Civil War accelerated the industrialization of the North--that's true. But vast areas of the North were still largely agrarian and without the "investment" in human slaves were, technically, "poorer" than the South.
It was, in the main, FARMBOYS from the midwest who vanquished the South.
You've fallen prey to the common marxist analysis of the war--strangely, a favorite analysis of modern "Southern Nationalists"....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.