Channell Burnette reminisces about her life in the Social Justice Autobiography. In doing so, she talks about visiting her Grandmother in her apartment owned by the housing authority. Though she enjoyed being there, the realizations she comes to through education and reading make her reevaluate the harsh circumstances that she faced. We see there is a pattern to play in the prison system and how people of color, especially Black men and women, of certain socioeconomic status are targeted by law enforcement. As she reflects upon her hardships, Burnette is able to fight against the system by advocating for better treatment and opportunities.
The prison population has increased considerably over the past few decades, and it is now at an all-time high. The war on drugs and racial profiling had significant roles to play in the advent of mass incarceration, however this problem goes deeper than this era. Approximately more than two million people are incarcerated in the U.S., the premier incarceration rate globally (Sawyer et al. 1). This is extremely concerning considering that the U.S have less than five percent of the world’s population, yet one quarter of its prisoners. Mass incarceration takes a larger toll on people of color. The prison is said to be made up of a diverse population. Yet, minority groups are disproportionately represented and the racial makeup of the prison population is skewed. The vast majority of prisoners are men, but the number of women in prison is also increasing. African Americans make up more than ten percent of the U.S. residents, but they make up more than 30 percent of the penal population (Balko 7). Horsford noted that African Americans and Hispanics are incarcerated at much higher rates than whites (259). It is not because they commit more crimes, but because they are more likely to be targeted by the police and treated unfairly by the justice system (Sawyer et al.).
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, contends that mass incarceration is based on a structure of racial control that has replaced segregation and Jim Crow as a way to keep African Americans in their place (7). In her account, the prison-industrial complex has replaced Jim Crow as the new way to repress African Americans. She supports her argument with statistics on how many African Americans are incarcerated compared to whites and other races. In the book, she also makes the claim that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it” using the criminal justice system and colorblind rhetoric (2). However, this racial caste has been around longer than the Jim Crow era. Race is socially constructed and signifies as well as symbolizes socio economic and political conflicts and interests by making references to different types of human bodies. As a consequence of race, people of color are subjected to racism, biases, negative stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. These deadly products of race are what makes or breaks your chances of getting that job or not, being arrested or not, getting fair aid in a crisis or not, and many other things. One can even say prisons are the modern day slavery. The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution clearly states that slavery and involuntary servitude is acceptable as a punishment for a crime. The makeup of today’s prison population is influenced by slavery, racism, Jim Crow and America’s effort to attach criminality to blackness.
The shift from slavery to freedom meant that the structure that capitalism thrives on was falling apart. This would lead to a debate and discussion that would have opponents of abolition wondering how they continue the system of coerced labor for private profit. As Frantz Fanon showed in The Wretched of the Earth, colonization and slavery were used for both economic gain and to erect a system of racial oppression through systematic global white supremacy. In that colonizing framing, the justification for slavery centered on the theory that Black people needed to be “civilized.”
Beginning in the 1830s in response to the abolitionist movement, proslavery writers, many of them slaveholders, sought to justify chattel slavery as the natural state of existence for Blacks. Despite these specious arguments, by the 1880s the best scientific efforts to prove the physical inferiority of African Americans had fallen short. Nevertheless, films like The Birth of a Nation and biased media created images of Blacks that stereotyped them as violent criminals. This leads to punitive extremism, black/ white incarceration disparities, and police profiling. However, these images were used to project fear into society and make people believe that Black people are undeserving. When looking at the history of prison, we understand that prisons are for capitalist benefit, like slavery. In Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis cited Mary Ellen Curtain’s Black Prisoners and Their World to show that “before the four hundred thousand black slaves in that state were set free, ninety-nine percent of prisoners in Alabama’s penitentiaries were white. As a consequence of the shifts provoked by the institution of the Black Codes, within a short period of time, the overwhelming majority of Alabama’s convicts were black.”
As these studies have shown, social stigmas surrounding Black criminality are linked to the construction of inferiority and savagery stigmas. For instance, Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America and the Making of Modern Urban America, provides a deep analysis of the history of how Black people became stigmatized as criminals. In the book, Muhammad points out that most prisoners today are Black men who grew up in poor neighborhoods with high unemployment rates and low incomes (10). Many people who live in these poor neighborhoods have never been in trouble with the law, but have been stopped by police multiple times during their lives simply because they are considered to be violent. According to Muhammad, Black criminality was not based as much in fact as it was an intellectual project falsely constructed by social science that skewed statistics to uphold notions of white supremacy and Black criminality. Muhamad demonstrates that the high rates of Black men in prison are due to this “construction of Blackness” as criminal. He claims that the justice scheme is stacked against Black men and that they are arrested, convicted, and sentenced to extended prison terms than white criminals(11). Muhammad also discusses how mass incarceration has had a devastating effect on the Black community, causing families to be torn apart and higher recidivism rates. He states, “The slavery problem became the Negro Problem. What began, in Shaler’s words, as the historical problem of “African negro blood that an evil past” had “imposed” on the nation turned into a contemporary crisis centered on an array of social issues related to what places blacks would fill and at what pace they would enter the modern urban world as citizens. The first four decades of the twentieth century, black criminality would become one of the most commonly cited and longest-lasting justifications for black inequality and mortality in the modern urban world.”
Rather than recognize capitalist own failures and racist tendencies to marginalize black people, criminality became linked to people’s own myths about black people. Policies and laws were also created to target black people.