When it comes to financing prisons the ball is in the black man’s court. He is the only one that can either put a dent in or almost shut them down completely through his abstaining from criminal activity. I recently heard Minister Louis Farrakhan state there are more black men incarcerated in America than anywhere else in the world put together (I believe he put the number of black inmates at one million).
If you think prisons would be the huge industry it is today if white men made up the majority of those sentenced, then you must be smoking crack. Without blacks there would be no Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). A recent December report by Human Rights Watch and the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that 2.25 million persons are incarcerated in the US prisons and jails (an all-time high). Of these, black men are incarcerated at a rate 6 times higher than white men. This puts the overall rate of incarceration in the US at 751 per 100,000 residents. Even when compared to other countries long criticized by the US as being less politically, economically, or morally advanced, the US figures conspicuously high. Libya is 217 per 100,000, Iran and China-whom the US is always trying to moralize about freedom and disarmament-are 212 per 100,000 and 119 per 100,000 respectively. The UK’s rate is 148, Canada is 107 and the dreaded France is 85. According to Prisonsucks.com of the Prison Policy Initiative, in 2006 the black male incarceration rate was 4,789 per 100,000. Juxtapose that with the black male lock-down in an openly racist country like South Africa during their final year of Apartheid 1993; 851 per 100,000 and what does that say about the US, especially under the Bush Administration?
It would be safe to assume that a major reason the US incarceration rate is so ridiculously high is too few people contest it. The lack of outcry is tied into the lack of empathy towards the PIC’s target population; blacks. Due to the success of some of the most idiotic laws in the world, we have an exaggeratedly high amount of black inmates that were arrested for non-violent crimes. Back in the ‘90’s even when there were an overwhelming number of blacks incarcerated I saw the prison boom with the onslaught of conservatism. A lot of people failed to understand what the 1994 mid-term Congressional and Senate elections were all about, but I heard the proclamations of less higher education and more prisons form a new wave of politicians; the "Angry White Males."
As a result of that republican takeover, more prisons were built. 1995 saw a new States Rights emerge from that because more money was spent building prisons ($2.6 billion) than universities ($2.5 billion) for the first time ever. Need I remind you that the prison budget increase was concurrent with heavy drug target demographics? Four years after many of the prisons were built The Center for Juvenile & Criminal Justice released a report revealing that 1998 was the 1st year that America’s prison’s incarcerated more than a million non-violent offenders: "What is most disturbing about the prison population explosion is that the people being sent to prison are not the Ted Bundies, Charlie Mansons and Timothy McVeighs-or even less sensationalized robbers, rapists and murderers-that the public imagines them to be. Most of the defendants who have been found guilty of nonviolent and not particularly serious crimes that do not features that agitate high levels of concern in the minds of the public... Over a million people have been warehoused for non-violent, often petty crimes, due to our inability-our choice not to sort out America’s lingering social problems from those which threaten us with real harm." In ’98 the US prison population was 1.8 million. This mass increase in black incarceration has not led to a big drop in crime, nor was it intended to. The purpose for the increase is self-evident, just as it looks; to get as many black males behind bars as possible. Prison is just the most popular and profitable population control for racist whites since slavery.
White conservatives and their supporters know you don’t fight crime with fear, but the damage was done with bizarre mandatory sentencing guidelines like the "Rockefeller Drug Laws." In spite of these overwhelming odds the war over black mass incarceration can’t be won by expecting whites to change their laws or racist thinking. Above all else white Americans are a very visual people. Black men must change their appearance and manner from thug-ism to professionalism.
