[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.

[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.

[You Dirty Rats]

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

[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.

[mfreddy]

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

[mhking]

Black conservative ping

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!)

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[glc1173@aol.com]

There is no big "potential" locked up in U.S. prisons - other than potential for trouble.

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.

[mhking]

She's an idiot - I bet she'd change her tune real damn quick as soon as she was mugged or carjacked by one of our "misunderstood" brothas...

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Prisons today are a boon to rural communities, creating jobs, new housing, restaurants, hotels and other feeder industries. Inmate labor also generates capital.

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.

[Still Thinking]

If incarceration is such a raw deal for inmates, and particularly blacks, maybe they could consider refraining from committing felonies. Just a thought.

[Lurking Libertarian]

Davis, a 1960s radical, author and professor in the history and consciousness department at the University of California-Santa Cruz

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.)

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

"..."In the beginning of the 21st century, we should be talking about the abolition of the prison system," Davis said...."

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?....

[Rytwyng]

Incarceration slows the black community's economic progress.

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?

[FITZ]

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.

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.