Potential locked up in prisons (the new slavery)

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

[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.

[MichiganConservative]

I understnad what you're saying. If I had the choice of investments in factories vs. investments in slave farm-labor, I'd choose investing in factories. Machines don't have minds of their own that could turn against you, epspecially if you employ them in the war effort and give them weapons. Those farmboys from the midwest probably were not as big a worry for the Union army than it would have been for the South had the South tried to use lots of slaves in their army.

[mfreddy]

You're welcome. I am sending an e-mail to Mr. Duigiud today to challenge this article and ask for an opportunity for a guest editorial. I assume that being the vice president of community resources, he would have the power to grant this request. I am also sending this e-mail to the editor of the paper. I also assume the request will be denied and he will continue to hide behind his pen.

I invite all substantive comments and facts that I can use to formulate my response.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Nah - not a libertarian by a long shot - simply a practical, albeit sometimes nasty observer of human nature and economic conditions.

[mfreddy]

do you have any more background on Angela Davis?

[Ohioan]

Angela Davis was identified as a Communist, long ago. This whole tirade is Communist theory, pure and simple.

People who easily recognize Communism in action, when there is not a racial question involved, need to put aside their politically correct fears, and recognize that the malady is the same, whether the alleged exploiters and victims are identified by class, race, or whatever.

If I lived in Missouri, I would want to know why she was given this platform on a State University campus. It might be excusable, if she appeared as a Communist, under auspices where her venom would be immediately countered. This is not an excusable use of tax supported facilities.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[mafree]

Crime is the problem before prisons could ever be.

[Ciexyz]

I remember the flap over Angela Davis in the 60's. It was almost universally believed in mainstream America that she should have been in jail but that she was protected by the California leftist university system.

[Nick Danger]

Angela Davis deserves this. In fact all liberals deserve this. It is exactly what they set out to do, and they have achieved it.

Angela Davis has spent her life agitating on behalf of black women. She hasn't had a good thing to say about black men for thirty years. During the AFDC decades, when liberal Democrats were spending twelve trillion dollars on the care and feeding of poor black women... and zero on black men... Angela Davis said nothing.

When those modern-day Democrat plantations turned into fatherless Hell-holes -- at the government's insistence -- and began turning out generations of illiterate, untrained, sociopathic young males who were almost bred from birth to go to prison... Angela Davis said nothing.

When the country finally had enough of that, and instituted welfare reform, the money shifted from housing programs and welfare checks to job training and placement assistance... for poor women. What was the new program for poor men? More prisons.

Liberals have been caught for 30 years in the grip of feminist demagogues who have turned every program for the "poor" into a program for "poor women." Always and everywhere, it has been about women, and Angela Davis has been a big part of that.

Now they find out that half the young men in those communities are dead or in jail by the time they are 25. What's their answer? Crab about how unfair it is.

I'll listen to them when they've spent five full years yelling at themselves in the mirror for being self-centered bigots.

[mfreddy]

Nick, that's the problem. They will never blame themselves. I read this morning that of the 7 juveniles charged in the beating death of the man a month or so ago, 5 of their fathers were dead, and one of them (14 years old)was a father himself. The dems, while claiming to be the only ones who can help the lack community, have caused the breakdown of the family. Single women have more children to get more benefits. They'll never change because they can sit on the couch eating ho-hos and watching tv while they have no idea where their children are or what they're doing. My wife is presently counseling a 16 year old because it was mandated when he was caught shoplifting. She asked him why he did it and he told her "because I wanted it". He saw absolutely nothing morally wrong with it at all. When she asked him about the prospect of prison he told her "it's no big deal, my cousin is in and out all the time".

The dems want to further pervert the regressive tax system and try to take more money out of the hands of successful people to throw more money at this problem. In fact, they know it will do nothing to solve it, it just furthers their class warfare agenda. There are more "have nots" then there are "haves".