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<font size=3>Racism: The Growth Engine of the American Prison Gulag
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<a href="http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=86" eudora="autourl">
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=86</a>
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Tuesday, 20 February 2007 <br><br>
<b>by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford</b> <br><br>
The U.S. prison system is projected to suck up 200,000 additional bodies
between now and 2011, half of them African American. The burden of the
Gulag, which has grown eightfold since 1970, is unbearable for Black
America, whose institutions and dreams have for two generations been
ravaged by a public policy of mass Black incarceration. The very
existence of the American Gulag - the largest and most pervasive prison
system in the history of mankind - presents a clear and present threat to
U.S. society at-large, as the Bush men scheme to assassinate the
Constitution in their bogus War on Terror. Over the past two decades, an
infrastructure of social death has been constructed, that may ultimately
become the tomb of American freedoms. It is past time to place a cap on
any further expansion of the American Gulag, lest it swallow us all.
<br><br>
</font><h1><b>Racism: The Growth Engine of the American Prison
Gulag</b></h1><font size=3><b>by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford</b>
<br><br>
<i>"The Gulag infrastructure is a Weapon of Mass Social
Destruction."</i> <br><br>
By 2011, the U.S. prison and jail population will have added
<a href="http://blackamericaweb.com/site.aspx/headlines/prison215">nearly
200,000 inmates</a> - a 13 percent overall increase and a 16 percent jump
for women, according to a <a href="http://12.130.62.149/">50-state
study</a> by the Pew Charitable Trusts. About half these new inmates will
be Blacks, whose mass confinement is the imperative that fuels the
relentless growth of the largest and most pervasive Gulag in the history
of mankind. The U.S. prison system is a horrific national monument to
racism, that dwarfs and mocks the Statue of Liberty, revealing the United
States as by far the planet's foremost Land of the Un-Free, Home of the
Locked-Down - a rebuke to the authenticity of the Emancipation
Proclamation. <br><br>
The 200,000 new inmates projected for 2011 understates the huge presence
of the Gulag in American society, especially African American life. The
anticipated increase is for inmates serving sentences, currently about
1.5 million. The actual total currently behind prison and jail bars is
about 2.2 million - again, half Black. This number would rise to just
under 2.5 million in five years. However, more than seven million men and
women are today under criminal justice system supervision, either prison,
jail, parole or probation - a mass of humanity that would swell to nearly
eight million by 2011, based on the Pew projections. That's roughly the
population of New York City, or the
<a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763098.html">combined
populations</a> of Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. The number of
<i>new</i> justice system-supervised persons, alone, will exceed the
population of Detroit. <br><br>
<i>"Even the enormity of the gross incarceration numbers fails to
express the grotesque intimacy with the Gulag that has been imposed on
African American society."</i> <br><br>
In 2005, seven percent of state and federal inmates were incarcerated in
private facilities, a proportion of captives-for-profit that is certain
to rise dramatically unless current political trends are reversed. (For a
comprehensive breakdown of the various components of the American Gulag,
see the Bureau of Justice Statistics'
"<a href="http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p05.pdf">
Prisoners in 2005</a>.") <br><br>
Yet even the enormity of the gross incarceration numbers fails to express
the grotesque <i>intimacy</i> with the Gulag that has been imposed on
African American society. As Paul Street reports <u>in this issue</u> of
BAR, "one in three black males will be sent to state or federal
prison at some point in their lives compared to one in six Latino males
and one in seventeen white males." <br><br>
The poisons of the Gulag have leached into the very fabric of Black
society, obliterating "prospects for progress in every arena of
African American life," as stated in an
"<a href="http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/cbcmonitor/"><u>Urgent
Petition to the Congressional Black Caucus</a></u>" now circulating
on the Internet. <br><br>
Only a purposeful, conscious, unrelenting, systematically executed
<i>national public policy</i> of Black mass incarceration in the United
States - all 50 of them, and the federal government - can explain the
Gulag's exponential growth over the last three and a half decades. The
genesis of this public policy - which is arguably genocidal in its
nature, dimensions, and impact - is equally clear: Mass Black
incarceration is America's answer to the Black Freedom Movement of the
Sixties and early Seventies. <br><br>
Prison populations have ballooned eight-fold since 1970, and more than
<a href="http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/corr2tab.htm">
quadrupled</a> since 1980. Tim Wise, the anti-racist activist and author,
<a href="http://www.zmag.org/RaceWatch/colcons.htm">notes that</a>:
<br><br>
"In 1964, 65% of all prison admits were white,
while only 35% were people of color. By 1991, these figures had reversed.
Did whites decide collectively to stop committing crimes in the
intervening years, while Black and brown folks went nuts? Or was
something else at work? According to FBI data, the percentage of crimes
committed by African Americans has remained steady over the past 18
years, while the number of Blacks in prison has tripled and their rates
of incarceration have skyrocketed." <br><br>
The mass Black incarceration public policy that emerged as a reaction to
the Black Freedom Movement, has long since taken on a life of its own - a
Gulag that continues to spread like a pestilence across the land even in
the absence of a Black movement and amid falling crime rates. Far from
being satiated by the constant digestion of new Black bodies, the monster
reaches back to the era of its birth, to snatch aging men who most
exemplified the Gulag's reason-for-being: Black Panthers. <br>
<b>Past is Present<br><br>
</b>Last month's arrest of the
<a href="http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/24/COPKILLED.TMP">
Panther Eight</a> in the killing of a San Francisco police officer in
1971 signals that the FBI is making good on former Bush Attorney General
John Ashcroft's vow to
<a href="http://cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2007/02/24430.php">take
vengeance</a> against all ex-Panthers. At 64, Ashcroft is of the same
generation as the defendants, but the persecution of the Panther Eight,
the flimsy evidence against whom is soaked in police
<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559250">
torture</a> and political vendetta, is anything but some kind of
"blast from the past," a settling of scores among old men.
Rather, the case is one among many indications that the American state is
gearing up to launch a new level of repression - that the mass Black
incarceration policy of the previous three and a half decades, although
hugely successful in both mutilating the social fabric of Black America
<i>and</i> acclimating white America to a pervasive prison and police
surveillance apparatus, is nevertheless insufficient to the new tasks
envisioned. <br><br>
<i>"The American state is gearing up to launch a new level of
repression."</i> <br><br>
Yes,
<a href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/printer_113003F.shtml">
Cointelpro is back</a> (as if it ever really left), but with a much more
ambitious mission: to more firmly establish in law and practice the
foundations for a centralized police-state regime that can respond
quickly and massively to the domestic turmoil that must inevitably
accompany a New International Order that George Bush had expected would
be nearly achieved by now, if the first stage, the conquest of Iraq, had
been successful. In this context, the arrest of the Panther Eight is just
the closing of a 36-year-old loop, a connecting and bringing forward of
older repressions - and ancient white hysterias - to buttress a New
<i>Domestic</i> Order justified by the fictitious War on Terror. The
Panther Eight are the specter of a permanent source of terror for white
America: angry Black men. <br><br>
Civil libertarians of all ethnicities understand the broad outlines of
the planned new regime, legally centered on presidential fiat in time of
(current and endless) war. As the Washington Post
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/17/AR2005121701233_pf.html">
reported</a> on December 18, 2005, when the Bush men were defending
wholesale surveillance of Americans: <br><br>
"On occasion the Bush administration has
explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose
boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the
president's war-making powers in legal briefs as ‘plenary' - a term
defined as ‘full,' ‘complete,' and ‘absolute.'" <br><br>
But white Americans will not acquiesce to a police state that negates
their civil liberties, or to inclusion in the corporate-refereed global
"race to the bottom" - unless they are buffaloed by issues of
race. It's the same old racial pattern, in which aging Panthers become
useful to the state once again. <br><br>
Immigrant "hordes" have joined Blacks as hysteria potions for
white folks, allowing Bush to give Halliburton contracts to build
"temporary" detention centers "for an unexpected influx of
immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for
<i>new programs</i> [emphasis ours] that require additional detention
space,"
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/national/04halliburton.html?ex=1296709200&en=01728da2eba059e4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss">
read</a> the Washington Post on February 4 of last year. However, the
Bush men know that arbitrary detention of masses of immigrant Mexicans
would cause profound political crisis south of the border, and among
American employers. Black people understand who is to be detained: the
usual suspects in the event of any "new programs" - us. Once
the practice is accepted as "necessary" to control chaotic
Black populations, another Rubicon will have been crossed in the march to
a corporate-state dictatorship that will encage white society, as well -
just as mass Black incarceration inevitably resulted in numerically more
whites going to prison than before, although in far lesser proportions
than Blacks. <br><br>
In the future, as in the past, the police state will be built on a
foundation of millions of living Black bodies stacked and sorted in the
American Gulag. For African Americans, the threat of constitutional
negation and mass detention did not begin on September 11, 2001. It
arrived in the late Sixties, and inexorably became an overarching reality
that has largely destroyed our Freedom Movement dreams. We are now
informed that 200,000 more bodies will be added to the penal system pile
by 2011 - half of them ours. <br><br>
African Americans will not accept this projected verdict as if written in
stone. Point One of the Black Agenda Report/Congressional Black Caucus
Monitor petition <u>now in circulation</u> demands that the CBC,
"individually and collectively, take immediate action to: <br><br>
<b>DISMANTLE RACIALLY SELECTIVE MASS INCARCERATION</b>, beginning with
action to sunset or repeal all mandatory sentencing legislation,
eliminate the differential in penalties for crack and powdered cocaine,
and halt privatization of prisons and prison health services.
America's prison population has multiplied eightfold since 1970. African
Americans are one-eighth of this nation, but fully half of her prisons
and jails. Mass Black incarceration is a <i>national public policy</i>
that destroys the prospects for progress in every arena of African
American life. With projections that the prison and jail population will
increase by nearly 200,000 in the next four years, the CBC should demand
an immediate cap on federal and state prison growth, the latter on
penalty of loss of federal criminal justice funding to those states not
in compliance." <br><br>
For two generations, virtually every Black family has heard the tolling
of the prison bell. In truth, it is tolling for the Constitution, as
well. Black America can no longer bear the weight of mass incarceration,
but the larger society - and those African Americans who mistakenly
believe they have somehow sidestepped the juggernaut - must also
recognize that the Gulag infrastructure is a Weapon of Mass Social
Destruction. Defuse it, or perish. <br><br>
<i>BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford (at)
BlackAgendaReport.com.</i> <br>
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