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.
Ahem, that is because most people worldwide are just killed.
Pookie & ME
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.
Well, DUH.
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?
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.
You actually have to do something to get thrown in prison, usually. You have no real choice about the income tax.
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?
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