Race and Incarceration Rates

Introduction
Race has always been a cultural factor in the U.S. and it is certainly a factor in today’s criminal justice system. James (2018:30) has shown that current “research on police officers has found that they tend to associate African Americans with threat” (30). A significantly higher percentage of the African American population is incarcerated than any other population in the U.S. And, worse, as Lopez (2018) points out, “Black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population.” The evidence indicates that African Americans receive a disproportionate amount of attention from police and are disproportionately punished and incarcerated because of institutionalized racism within the American ruling class. This racist worldview was evident from the early days of the nation, when the concept of Manifest Destiny was put forward by John O’Sullivan (1845). That concept expressed the belief that White Anglo Saxon Protestants were essentially God’s chosen people and thus had a right—i.e., it was their manifest destiny—to rule others, take their land, and lord it over them. This worldview became so ingrained in American culture that it led to the spirit of Jim Crow laws being put in place—such as the “separate but equal” clause of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—segregation and more oppression. The Civil Rights Movement drew attention to the plight of the African American but today there is evidence of a New Jim Crow responsible for the association of race with incarceration (Alexander 2012).
The Root of the Problem
Alexander (2012) notes that the mass incarceration of African Americans is because of racial prejudice in the criminal justice system (informed by the same culture that promote Manifest Destiny nearly 200 years ago): she points out, for instance, that 50% of the young African American male population is “currently under the control of the criminal justice system” (Alexander 2012:16). Another issue is the unjust War on Drugs which disproportionately impacts African Americans, who are commonly denied representation and are pushed into accepting unfair plea deals, which all the same cause them to end up in the prison industrial complex. Aguirre and Baker (2000) note that minorities often cannot afford bail whereas it is easier for white defendants to post bail. Minorities are routinely denied due process, and even the use of juries often lends itself to bias that the prosecution is able to exploit (Aguirre and Baker 2000). When the jury is stacked with white people and the defendant is a black or a Latino, it is unlikely that there is going to be much sympathy from the jury for the defendant—primarily because the white culture in America has been conditioned to view the minority as a threat (Davis 2012). As a result, the minority is more often than not found guilty. Because he knows this is likely to be the outcome going in, the African American will accept whatever plea deal the prosecution offers in exchange for a lighter sentence. Of course, there is no such thing as a light sentence because once in prison, the jail cell follows one all his life. From that point on the African American male is stuck with the “prison label,” which prevents him from getting a job—and before long he is right back in prison, as though prison were where he belonged, or where the ruling class feels he should be. As Davis (2012:38) notes, the prison industrial complex is “accompanied by an ideological campaign to persuade us once again…that race is a marker of criminality.” In other words, slavery was never really abolished. Today it exists in the prison industrial complex, where African American prisoners are forced to work for pennies on the dollar for corporations.
African Americans are not the only ones being oppressed, however. As Aguirre and Baker (2000:100) observe, “police officers often exhibit prejudice against members of minority groups,” including Latinos, who also are overrepresented in the prison industrial complex. Latinos, like African Americans, however, fall outside the White Anglo Saxon Protestant group and thus are considered as inferior and not to be trusted from a cultural perspective. That perspective translates into a legal system that is inherently biased against them. That bias fuels the creation of laws that cause them to be unfairly targeted and because of those laws the criminal justice system absorbs them into the new plantation system—which is the prison industrial complex (Davis 2012).
Targeting African Americans
As Pettit and Western (2004:151) show, the prison population increased six fold from 1972 and 2000, and “by 2002, around 12 percent of black men in their twenties were in prison or jail.” This means that more than one in ten young African American males were having their lives completely upended by going to jail and having the prison label applied to them for the rest of their lives. This sort of approach to criminal justice has effects beyond the black men who suffer, however; it also ends up decimating African American families and communities. The more that African American men wind up in the prison industrial complex, the less stable their communities and neighborhoods become. It appears on the face of it that the criminal justice system is inherently racist towards minorities and is using the law to oppress them and enslave them in the New Jim Crow era.
The drug laws in the U.S. is one of the reasons so many minorities end up incarcerated for non-violent crimes: the drug laws make it illegal for people to sell substances like marijuana, while pharmaceutical companies can produce drugs like fentanyl, which is 100x stronger than heroin and market it legally to doctors, who then prescribe it to patients. It is the latter that has led to an unprecedented opioid epidemic in America, yet the purveyors of these opioids rarely end up being incarcerated. Instead, the prisons are filled to the gills with minorities who traffic marijuana, which is still considered a schedule 1 narcotic—i.e., as dangerous as crack cocaine and heroin. This type of hypocrisy is only possible in a country that has a strong racial/cultural bias against minorities.
It is really a vicious circle, too: for most minorities suffer from low income communities and have few opportunities to be upwardly mobile. Their schools are not on the same par as schools in upper or middle class white communities, and few of them can afford to go to college to open up more doors for themselves. Thus, many of them take to the streets to hustle for a living, which results in jail time, and which in turn results in the perpetuation of downtrodden communities as the prisoners cannot send money home to their families (Pettit and Western 2004).
The strong drug laws introduced in the 1980s helped to ensure that minorities would never have a chance to see a normal life outside the prison walls. The government that introduced drugs like crack and cocaine into the black urban regions of the U.S. now made it illegal for blacks to possess or sell them: “in 1986 Congress enacted disproportionately harsher penalties for possessing crack cocaine” and set up a ten-year to life punishment for individuals who possessed it (Aguirre and Baker 2008:101). The drug laws unjustly target African Americans and this is the reason the incarceration system can be likened to the new plantations of today. Instead of picking cotton, however, the inmates are making shoes and cell phones, working for the corporations that also exploit cheap labor overseas. It is all about exploiting minorities so that the ruling class can profit.
Conclusion
As Alexaner (2012:258) states, “If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration—if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America—we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.” The criminal justice system has thus been called out by critics and activists, reformers and scholars. The problem is that the criminal justice system is really just an extension of the culture industry that has been fueling the country since its inception. The same White Anglo Saxon Protestant ruling class that founded the country is still essentially in charge today. The only difference is that the nature of the tension between the races has become even more hostile and hard to address. Today’s culture is one in which white communities are taught to fear minorities and view them as threats to their way of life. So many whites feel that there is no problem with so many minorities being imprisoned. They view the ones who are not in prison with suspicion and see them as criminals who are walking freely about. The problem is inherently a cultural one and the racial expressions that are found in the disproportionate incarceration rate signify that racial attitudes are components in the culture that have to be changed—or else the minority populations will continue to suffer unfairly.
References
Aguirre, A., & Baker, D. V. (Eds.). 2008. Structured inequality in the United States: Critical discussions on the continuing significance of race, ethnicity, and gender. New York: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow. New York: New Press.
Davis, Angela. 2012. The Meaning of Freedom. San Francisco: City Light Books.
James, Lois. 2018. The stability of implicit racial bias in police officers. Police Quarterly 21(1):0-52.
Lopez, German. 2018. There are huge racial disparities in how US police use force. Retrieved July 30, 2019 (https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938186/police-shootings-killings-racism-racial-disparities).
O’Sullivan, John. 1845. Annexation. United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17(1):5-10.
Pettit, Becky, and Bruce Western. 2004. Mass imprisonment and the life course: Race and class inequality in US incarceration." American sociological review 69(2):151-169.
Plessy v. Ferguson. 1896. Retrieved July 30, 2019 (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/163us537).