The United States contains five percent of the Earth’s population but twenty five percent of the world’s prison population. One out of four human beings behind bars call America, the land of the free, home.
It all began with the abolition of slavery and the constitutionalization of the 13th amendment. At the end of the civil war, the southern economy was completely destroyed with the abolition of slavery, and over four million people who were formerly property, were freed. The South, distressed by this situation, quickly found a loophole in the plan that had originally granted their slaves as free people. In the 13th Amendment, it is stated that the holding of a human as a slave is illegal unless that person is a criminal. Almost instantly, this was taken advantage of. African Americans were arrested for petty crimes such as trespassing, loitering, and vagrancy so that they could provide labor to rebuild the southern economy. Perhaps this wouldn’t have been as awful if the same rules were applied to everyone, including white people, but they, predictably, were not. If a white man committed the same crime that a black man did, he would be given a slap on the wrist at most whereas the black man would be jailed. With the increased incarceration of African Americans, the notion that anyone of color was a danger to the public became more accepted as fact. This can be seen through the depictions of people of color in one of the earliest motion pictures, The Birth of a Nation. In it, black people are represented as cannibalistic, and barbaric animals. Another example of The Birth of a Nation inspiring racism and discrimination was apparent in its depiction of the Klu Klux Klan, a white supremacist group. In the film, this group was painted as the hero figure and the black population were painted as the villains. The romanticism of the KKK was what ultimately led to the mass hate crimes towards people of color. Public lynchings of black people and criminals became more and more common and disgustingly accepted into society. In one case, a black man was hung upside down from a tree, beat with chains, and carved into with a knife. The scars from the dagger spelled out “KKK”. The threat of these hate crimes caused thousands of African American families to flee from the South to more Northern cities, such as Harlem. With time, hate crimes towards people of color boiled down to segregation. Although this system was racist and awful, it had one positive outcome: the Civil Rights Movement. For the first time in black history, being arrested for actions against the white favoring government was no longer feared. African-americans were finally banding together for the common good. Despite the positive outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement, there was still a negative counterpart to the positive attributions made. With the recent baby boom in the 1960’s, crime rates increased because there were more people to commit crimes. The government, looking to pin the blame upon anyone, blamed the rising crime rates on the Civil Rights Movement and all those who partook in it. The election of former president Richard Nixon was who had, truthfully, pushed the public to be hard against crime and drugs. This war against crime seemed acceptable and reasonable from the surface until actually looked into. The wars he declared were not against drugs and crimes but rather against minorities. His intentions were to strip the small amount of power given to them, as publicly proven by one of Nixon’s Chief domestic advisors, John Ehrlichman. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities… We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” With the increased concern of the rising crime rates and drug use, the white population ate up the notions that Nixon preached out of fear and ignorance. Nixon treated the drug problem of the United States as a crime issue rather than a health issue. Then once Nixon was out of office, Ronald Reagan was there to take his place and further carry out the war on drugs. Nixon’s vision of eradicating ‘the drug problem’ was mostly abstract, whereas Reagan truly made this war real and concrete. Similar to Nixon, Ronald Reagan saw that crack was an inner city minority issue, while cocaine was a suburban issue. He brought the real consequences down on those who used crack rather than cocaine. A single ounce of crack is equivalent to over 100 ounces of cocaine in regards to prison sentences, putting countless african americans in jail for their estimated lifetimes. The discrimination against black people is still seen today, not just through the awful acts of police brutality but through school systems falling under Nixon and Reagan’s notion that marijuana is dangerous when, in actuality, it has little to no negative side effects compared to legal hallucinogens and drugs. Over the last 30 years the incarceration rate has increased by 400% because of the war on drugs and crime.
American prisons violate international standards through the use of solitary confinement and the abuse of prisoners. In many other countries, solitary confinement is seen as torture but not in the United States, where the rules of the prison are not decided by the law but instead by the prison officials. Even after having had been in prison, we intentionally make it difficult for past inmates to get a job in america, resulting in high homelessness and suicide rates in released inmates. Convicts are ineligible for welfare, student loans, public housing, and food stamps [etc]. The incarceration of people of color for petty crimes has become a normal occurrence in many families, so much so that the offspring of a former criminal are entirely expected to carry on the family ‘tradition’ of spending their time. The argument that jailing masses of people will keep the general public safer is flawed because no more than 25% of the decrease of crime can be attributed to incarceration. We’re living in 75 billion dollar failed experiment built off of a racist, anti-black foundation. It is not until recently that people and government officials have realized the magnitude of the mistake we have made, but at this point, we’ve inflicted too much damage to truly right our wrongs.
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