http://www.nationalreview.com/node/424059/print The Truth about Mass Incarceration
From the September 21, 2015, issue of NR
By Stephanos Bibas — September 16, 2015
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, outstripping even Russia, Cuba, Rwanda, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Though America is home to only about one-twentieth of the world’s population, we house almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Since the mid 1970s, American prison populations have boomed, multiplying sevenfold while the population has increased by only 50 percent. Why?
Liberals blame racism and the “War on Drugs,” in particular long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. This past July, in a speech to the NAACP, President Obama insisted that “the real reason our prison population is so high” is that “over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” The War on Drugs, he suggested, is just a continuation of America’s “long history of inequity in the criminal-justice system,” which has disproportionately harmed minorities.
Two days later, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a prison. Speaking immediately after his visit, the president blamed mandatory drug sentencing as a “primary driver of this mass-incarceration phenomenon.” To underscore that point, he met with half a dozen inmates at the prison, all of whom had been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. Three days earlier, he had commuted the federal prison terms of 46 nonviolent drug offenders, most of whom had been sentenced to at least 20 years’ imprisonment.
The president is echoing what liberal criminologists and lawyers have long charged. They blame our prison boom on punitive, ever-longer sentences tainted by racism, particularly for drug crimes. Criminologists coined the term “mass incarceration” or “mass imprisonment” a few decades ago, as if police were arresting and herding suspects en masse into cattle cars bound for prison. Many blame this phenomenon on structural racism, as manifested in the War on Drugs.
No one has captured and fueled this zeitgeist better than Michelle Alexander, an ACLU lawyer turned Ohio State law professor. Her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is, as Cornel West put it, “the secular bible for a new social movement in early twenty-first-century America.” She condemns “mass incarceration . . . as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.” Ex-felons, like victims of Jim Crow, are a stigmatized underclass, excluded from voting, juries, jobs, housing, education, and public benefits. This phenomenon “is not — as many argue — just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work,” like Jim Crow and slavery before it. She even implies that this system is just the latest manifestation of whites’ ongoing racist conspiracy to subjugate blacks, pointing to the CIA’s support of Nicaraguan contras who supplied cocaine to black neighborhoods in the U.S.
continued
