The prison system in the United States has now become a system that oppresses a particular race: black Americans.
It all started with the Attica Prison rebellion in 1971, when prisoners took over the facility for four days, giving the media footage of how life was like and how a majority of those incarcerated were black.
On live TV, police took back control, killing 43 inmates, according to Prison Policy.
Dartmouth University put it best: “the mass incarceration of black men is the result of a historically embedded racial caste system in America’s political, cultural, and social institutions that can be traced back to slavery”.
Whites in society relied on the free labor of blacks in order to have their own economic opportunity and prosperity, and although laws have put an end to de jure slavery, the incarceration system has institutionalized racism, which gives whites the chance to continue profiting from this advantage.
In other words, not only did imprisoning blacks became a way for society to enforce labor, but it also took out the chance for black Americans to rise up in society, stay employed, and have access to the same resources as white people.
But how did imprisoning more blacks became a reality?
Dartmouth outlines how it started with the “War on Drugs” under Nixon, where he “increased the power of federal drug control agencies, approved no-knock warrants, and magnified punishments for marijuana possession”.
Inner-city communities were policed much more heavily — the very communities where more blacks resided than whites.
It might have appeared like a war against drugs on paper, but the fighting was all happening where black Americans lived — just take a look at imprisonments for crack cocaine.
Dartmouth shares, “the penalties for crack cocaine were 100 times more severe than powder cocaine — more commonly associated with whites — even though their chemical effects are the same. This difference put disproportionate numbers of black men in prison”.
When Reagan took office, the measures became stricter and the number of black Americans behind bars rose and rose.
America began to fear that the country was full of communities with gangs, violence, and drugs, further allowing police to throw blacks behind bars without so much a thought as to the stems behind, not only why those communities were susceptible to certain drugs, but also why whites, who were using drugs, were left alone.
Then came President Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, a legislation that “increased federal spending on policemen and investigative lawyers, imposed tougher prison sentences, and opened new prisons”.
This directly lead to the reality of today, where “around half of all federal inmates are in prison for drug convictions, attributed to the anti-drug policies of the 70s, 80s, and 90s”, according to The Sentencing Project.
To this day, mass incarceration continues, due to the foundation set by government policies of the past.
Today, the US has the highest rate of incarcerations in the entire world, with scary statistics that prove there is prominent systemic racism influencing who is being thrown behind bars.
American Progress reports that black Americans are “five times more likely to be imprisoned than white Americans”, and “twice as likely as their white counterparts to have a family member imprisoned at some point during their childhood”.
The normalized culture of incarceration is arguably what makes it so scary, as generation after generation sits with lingering racism in the fabric of society — racism that gets people shoved behind bars and is not talked about.
A new CAP analysis found that “1 in 4 black Millennials had an incarcerated loved one before they even turned 18, and for “those born in the early 1990s, the rate is almost 1 in 3”.
And it gets scarier.
The NAACP reports, “a criminal record can reduce the likelihood of a callback or job offer by nearly 50%” and the “negative impact of a criminal record is twice as large for African American applicants” — ultimately showing that mass incarceration contributes to the further cycle of economic oppression of black Americans.
The statistics are right here — perhaps it is time we read them, understand them, empathize with them and take action.