Notes from “The New Jim Crow”

This book is particularly inspiring for those who are interested in social justice and fighting for change.

• Using the legal system to do all the oppression of the past
• It is legal to discriminate criminals as it was legal to discriminate African Americans in the past
• Drug crime was declining when the War on Drugs was declared
• 3 out of 4 black men can expect to serve time in prison
• People of all colours use and sell illegal drugs at similar rates
• Overwhelming evidence that jails create crime
• Racial caste systems do not need bigotry to survive. They need indifference.

The rebirth of Caste

• Racial bribes in 1600 – before, white slaves and black slaves rose up to fight against their landowners
• Then the planter class extended special priveleges to the poor whites and drew a wedge between them and black slaves
• This eliminated risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor whites = poor whites had a personal stake in the existence of a race-based system of slavery
• Reconstruction Era – impressive legislative achievements – 13th amendment, abolishing slavery, education of blacks, right to vote
• Created backlash over people who wanted against “Negro supremacy”
• Still had loophole for literacy tests
• Created a Redemption campaign – to abandon Reconstruction Era = created convict labour camp = Parchman Farm, Mississippi
  • New racial order that would protect the economic, political superiority of whites
• Segregation laws drove a wedge between poor whites and African Americans
• Conservatives used fraud, intimidation, bribery, terror – pressured populists (Who wanted harmony) to join conservatives
  • Created Jim Crow laws that discriminated blacks in every part of their life

Death of Jim Crow

• War effort – fight Nazi’s racism = ironic
  • Also bc they were scared lower class = attracted by communism
• Civil rights movement in the 1960s – huge impact
  • Also focused on economic development to avoid blacks + whites being locked up in poverty
• BUT people still had racist sentiments found a new system called “law and order” in replace of “segregation”

Birth of mass incarceration

• Civil rights protests = criminal in nature
• “Integration causes crime”
• Crime rates increased in 1960s – coincedence, it was due to the baby boom but many blamed this on the blacks
  • Race riots after MLK’s death = instilled image of CRMs violent nature
• After CRA – debate went into crime
• Integration and racial equality had affected lower class whites who had to cmpete with blacks for jobs and stats

Reagan – appeal to people who resent/feared Negros

• Welfare queen = black ghetto mother
• Only 2% of people were concerned about drugs but then he prioritized the War on Drugs and increased funding for law enforcement agencies
  • And decreased funding for treatment/prevention/rehab for drugs
• 1980s was the same time that communities suffered from economic collapse, due to globalization (jobs went to countries that had no unions)
• Overwhelming majority of As couldn’t adapt to changes in US economy
  • Increased incentives to sell drugs, e.g. crack cocaine

• Legal changes
  • Media frenzy + Anti-Drug Abuse act – minimum sentences
    • EXTREMELY long minimum sentences  
  • President Clinton executed a mentally ill man who didn’t know what was happening (he asked dessert to be saved for tomorrow) – and stated that he wasn’t soft on crime
    • Public housing projects exclude people with a criminal history: 1 strike, you’re out
  • Fourth Amendment – all protected civil liberties have been undermined by the drug war
    • Drug testing of employees and students
    • Search warrants based on anonymous tips
    • Approved surveillance of homes without a warrant
    • Allow taking of property/cash based on unproven allegations
    • “SHould place no meaningful constraints on the war on drugs”
      • People can be stopped and searched, if they disagree, bring a drug sniffing odg
  • Operation pipeline in 1984
    • Stop people based on traffic violations and then search their vehicles for drugs
      • No authority to do so
      • 95% of stops had NO use, no illegal drugs
  • 31 million people arrested since drug war – there are more people in prisons in jails today for drug offences than were incarcerated for ALL reasons in 1980
    • Only ⅕ arrests for SALES, ⅘ arrested for possession
    • 80% of arrests have been for marijuana possession = less harmful than tobacco or alcohol
    • 55% of black in Chicago have felony record ⇒ 57/98 jobs have criminal record restribtions
  • 20,000 more black men in jail than in uni, in 2001 in Illinois

What is the incentive for police to crack down on drugs?

• Federal grant money – $$ funded if you prioritize war on drugs
• Finders keepers – taking the property of people suspected of drug use or sales: EVEN if they’re innocent
  • Altogether seized 1bn in assets
• “Innocent Owner” defense created
  • Burden is on the owner to prove that they DID NOT involve themself, “did all to terminate drug use” or “did not know at all”
  • It is not about proving beyond reasonable doubt
  • + PEOPLE don’t want to pay for an attorney

• Problem with legal misrepresentation
  • 80% of defendants are unable to hire a lawyer
  • Pressure to plead guilty to crimes has increased exponentially since the War on Drugs
    • If there is a mandatory minimum sentence – it can be used as a bargaining chip to be given away for a more lenient charge
    • Pressure to convict yourself = extracting guilty pleas from people who may be innocent
• Swat teams
  • Military style raid, no warrant,
  • Military cooperation with law enforcement act – military give police access to bases, intelligence, weapons, equipment for drugs
• Gov’t bribery
  • Snitches in drug cases soured
  • Law enforcement offering cash
  • Ratting out a family member/acquaintance helps YOU avoid minimum sentence
  • People fabricate stories about drug related activity for money or leniency in pending criminal cases
• Conclusion
  • Innocent people are locked up (2 to 5%)
  • Thousands are swept into CJS due to drug war
  • Police are allowed to do anything based on a hunch
  • Houses can be searched for based on an unreliable informant
  • People are denied attorneys
  • Harsh sentences for minor crimes
• After you’re labelled a felon
  • Second class citizen
  • Badge of inferiority
  • Barred from public housing, food stamps, employment, licences for professions
  • People on parole – regular surveillance – likely to be arrested AGAIN

Colour of justice

• Drug war – large scale – why?
• 1. Law enforcement has too much discretion over who to stop (unconscious beliefs – free reign)
  • Drugs are different to most crimes because drug trading is consensual, no clear victim and perpetrator
  • Drugs are used everywhere (so people have to pick where to target!)
    • Seattle’s police department = only focused on crack, even though HEROINE was the health problem, but the crack issue was a black problem.
  • Media – saturated with images of black crime
    • Implicit bias tests – BLACK participants show same amount of bias as whites – people were more likely to mistake a black target as armed when he was not, and mistake a white target as unarmed when armed
  • Police have the license to discriminate
    • Race CAN be used as a factor in decision making (it can’t be the “only one”, but it can be) – so if it’s along with your long hair, baggy jeans, and that you’re black = this is legit. If they just say “you’re black” = its not. Neither one is fair though!!
  • Police increase their database e.g. LA by stop and frisk
    • Having a relative or friend in a gang – put in black list
    • Denver, 8/10 of people of colour were on a list of suspected criminals
• 2. Stop all claims that the CJS is “racist” in court – remove evidence
  • Defendants charged with killing white victims were 4.3x more likely to receive death sentence than defendants killing blacks
  • There are no limits to racial bias in CJS – discrimination is a by-product of discretion, McCleskey case
    • McCleskey vs Kemp = at the height of media hysteria, the Supreme Court ruled that racial bias in sentencing could not be challenged in the 14th amendment = racial bias tolerated to any degree
    • McCleskey was chellenging his death sentence on the basis that defendants charged with killing whites were 4.3x as likely to receive death than defendants killing whites
      • Lost the case
      • Could not prove = unless the prosecutor was racist/racial reasons, then it would be unequal treatment. Anything else is fine.
  • In order to state claim of selective prosecution (Whites are prosecuted in federal courts, while blacks are directed to state courts, where punishment is a lot higher), the evidence needed was in the PROSECUTORS hand – so they couldn’t find evidence
    • Prosecutors have too much discretion, they won’t root out themselves for “racial bias” – they are immunized
      • Charging, bargaining, transferring cases, sentencing – all up to prosecutor
  • Jury duty
    • Lawyers can rule out the jury (strike peremptorily)
    • Lifetime felons – excluded from juries, racial minorities aren’t registered to vote therefore aren’t in the jury pool
  • No political power
    • Black poor targeted by federal policy because they don’t have political power
  • Lawsuits have disappeared
    • Because people cannot challenge racial bias
  • Unemployment of black communities are similar to those with 3rd world countries  

The cruel hand

• Criminals don’t have the right to vote
  • E.g. if you don’t pay the costs of court, you can’t vote
  • People are SCARED to have contact with gov’t authorities
    • Many on welfare worried that any little thing that brought attention to themselves might put their food stamps at risk
  • 1 in 7 black men lost the right to vote after the war on drugs
• Criminals excluded from juries – 30% black men
• Criminals can’t apply for housing
  • They are homeless = they lose their children
  • If they are given housing in NY – crime dropped from 74 to 40 percent when they were given housing
• Criminals can’t get a job
  • Discrimination is allowed
  • Only ¼ of employers willing to consider hiring criminal background, less than 1% for violent, less than 7% for property crime
  • NEARLY ⅓ of young black men in the US are out of work
• Criminals are in debt
  • Even if they have job and a house, they hare shackled to probation departments, courts, enforcement offices, even drug treatment
  • And if they don’t pay = they will be imprisoned!
• Social exile
  • Criminal for the rest of your life
  • Own neighbors, teachers, families, even in church – judgement, shame contempt
  • People self hate – they want to isolate themselves, they are the bad people,
  • It breaks down communities, because people repress their own thoughts and they hide away
  • Rural communities are 20% of US, 60% prisons are in rural communities ⇒ keeps them away from mainstream society

Solutions – civil rights organisations have become disconnected from communities they claim to represent

• Lawyers pursuing their own agendas, instead of a moral crusade, it has become a legal one.
• Lawyers are focused on problems they can solve through litigation, but not issues like mass incarceration
• People do not want to advocate on behalf of criminals either! E.g. claudette colvin
• Private prisons
  • Income increases
  • People are charged to communicate with criminals

Thirteenth Amendment

• Used after the civil war to imprison blacks in the South and revert them back to slavery → the dynamic was greatly influenced by the media, e.g. the movie Birth of a Nation, pictured every black man as an individual who was crazy, or was a criminal (e.g. scene where a white woman jumps off a cliff instead of being raped by a black man), or glorifying the Ku Klux Klan (cinema portrayed the burning of the crosses which wasn’t even a practice, turned into a practice)
• As the civil rights movement gained steam in the 1960s, there were more people who were being born (boom post war), hence more incarcerations, so politicians blamed it on the blacks
• Stand your ground (George Zimmerman innocent @ stalking and killing Trayvon Martin)
• ALEC – political lobbying group, write laws and give to republicans (Stand Your Ground, written by ALEC)
  • Politicians (mostly Republicans) and corporations (e.g. walmart) are in the same lobbying groups
  • 1 in 4 state legislators are part of this group
  • Walmart (SYG) provides biggest supply of long guns and bullets, after SYG → boom in sales
  • Legislation includes that the jury is told that GZ has the right to stand his ground, but the jury is not told that the victim has the right to stand his ground.
  • CCA (Core Corrections of America) – privately owned prisons, keep prisons full
    • Mandatory minimum sentencing, Stand Your Ground, 3 strikes and you’re out laws all proposed by ALEC – shaped criminalisation
    • CCA invested in ALEC