America’s incarceration rate is at world’s highest and it is believed that, the social benefits of keeping many young black men in prison far outweigh having them out on the streets…DAMN!
According to a report, “one in 87 working-aged white men is in prison or jail compared with 1 in 36 Hispanic men and 1 in 12 African American men. Today, more African American men aged 20 to 34 without a high school diploma or GED are behind bars (37 percent) than are employed (26 percent)”.
Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.
No one denies that some people belong in prison. Mr. Harris, now 47, and his wife, 45, agree that in his early 20s he deserved to be there. But they don’t see what good was accomplished by keeping him there for two decades, and neither do most of the researchers who have been analyzing the prison boom.
The number of Americans in state and federal prisons has quintupled since 1980, and a major reason is that prisoners serve longer terms than before. They remain inmates into middle age and old age, well beyond the peak age for crime, which is in the late teenage years — just when Mr. Harris first got into trouble.
This is not only scary, it also calls for deep thinking. Are black men in America gradually destroying themselves or is the society built in such a way that, the real home for the African American is prison?
Whether the numbers are correct or not, I find it very sad that so many African Americans get in trouble, shot, or turn to crime and gangs. this clearly destroys the family structure in the Black community. If a person is incarcerated, it not only affects the convict, but his/her family as well. It takes fathers and mothers away from their children, if they took care of them to begin with. So oftentimes children in broken and/or single parent homes learn how to be “grown up” from their peers (who are also misguided), other criminals in their environment, or (as in my case) productive/positive people. So they either grow up to be like their parents or “alternative” father figures or they change for the better. The cycle is either continued, or stopped.
Also, although many people are taught that the 13th Amendment completely ended slavery, it did not. What the 13th Amendment does is defines what paid vs free labor is and what a person can or cannot do to make another person work for free, or less than their fair pay. It outlaws physical coercion (killing, beating, other acts of violence), blackmail, abusing the law, threats, etc. But what it does allow is psychological coercion (“brainwashing”). This amendment, let alone any of the Bill of Rights, does not apply to convicts.
Prison is a multi-billion dollar industry. Not only do you have contractors who make money from building and supplying prisons, but the prisoners are also pretty much forced to work – the prisons contract prisoners out to work, so the prison owners themselves make money too. Most jails and prisons in America today are owned and operated by private companies, not the government. For example, in the freshman dorms at my school, all of the mattresses used there were made in the Texas Department of Corrections there was someone who made millions, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling these beds to the company that handles housing for this school.
On top of that, politicians pass laws that give longer sentences, for less and less serious crimes. Most of these laws directly affect low income neighborhoods, as opposed to middle and upper classed ones. They claim that sending to people to prison longer will deter further crimes, but it obviously does the opposite. So what happens is, businessmen lobby politicians, and use the media to create fear within the general population, and the politicians in return make harsher laws that get more people sent to prison longer. This is the prison industrial complex.
If prison was about changing people to become productive people, the justice system would function completely different from how it does now.