Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Crime, Color and Capitalism

From 1920 to around 1980, the American prison population held steady, even as our population grew rapidly. One could easily argue that racism was much more virulent during this period, especially in the Jim Crow South, from the hundreds of lynchings in the 1920s to violent repression of civil rights activists in the 1950s and '60s. So unless you believe that racism changed for the worse since 1980, then it alone can not possibly account for the explosive rise of the prison population. Even during the turbulent 1960s with its many demonstrations, and violent inner-city upheavals, the prison population hardly budged. Similarly, Nixon's infamous war on drugs, launched in June 1971, also did not boost the prison population during the 1970s. Then something major changed to send the prison population soaring. What happened?

Judges were compelled by harsh new sentencing laws to jail even those convicted of minor crimes, and to hand out sentences much longer than appropriate to the infraction. Because of urban housing segregation by race and income, lower income neighborhoods experienced higher crime rates, made even higher by the futile enforcement of drug prohibition. As the police enforcement increased, a disproportionate number of people of color were sent to prison. Although non-Hispanic blacks form only 13.6 of the U.S. population, they are 39.4 percent of the prison population. In 2011, for the first time Wisconsin spent more on its prisons than on its fabled university system.

In the late 1970s with the advent of the Better Business Climate model which was to cut taxes on the rich and deregulate business, especially Wall Street. That combination was supposed to put money in the hands of the few, who would then heavily invest it in our economy, thereby creating an enormous economic boom. Good jobs and rising incomes for all those willing to work would soon follow. It didn't happen. Instead these Better Business Climate policies led to runaway inequality, the destruction of middle-income jobs, and wage-stagnation for the vast majority of working people. The goal of nearly every company soon became the extraction of as much wealth as possible in behalf of investors, banks and CEOs. The workforce was downsized, plants shipped overseas, full-time workers replaced with temps, and unions busted.

Americans of color who had only recently found their way into the better paying industrial jobs in the 1950s and 1960s, suffered enormous job losses and were forced to find work in the low paying jobs, often in the service sector. Urban decay accelerated as inner city incomes declined and industrial tax revenues plummeted. To make ends meet a new generation of workers found work in the underground economy —some of it legal, some not. Drug dealing, like rum running in the 1920s, became an alternative path toward the American Dream.

Urban areas became a microcosm for the interplay between runaway inequality and runaway incarceration. As lower-income areas deteriorated, cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles also became magnets for the wealthy. Marginal neighborhoods were transformed by developers who bought and fixed up apartment buildings with an eye to squeezing out low-income tenants. Often, the first new wave of occupiers were young professionals, the children of the well-to-do. The "broken windows" theory of police enforcement took hold. It argued that by cracking down on minor offenses, like graffiti drawing and drinking booze on the street, a sense of law and order would develop in the neighborhood, which in turn would reduce the occurrence of more serious crimes. It was a short jump from efforts to stop quality of life crimes, to "stop and frisk."

Take the case of Eric Garner killed by police because was selling single cigarettes (tobacco, not joints. Garner's only crime was trying to scratch out a living in the underground economy. Eric Garner is just one of the 22.2 million surplus workers who now struggle to make ends meet.But to the police, he was committing a crime (not paying tobacco tax) that according to the theory should be addressed to prevent more serious crimes.

The growing prison population also creates growing business opportunities in the privatized prison-industrial complex. With Wall Street money, the larger prison firms lobby hard for the government to fund new prisons, create more prisoners, and employ more prison guards.

At the core of all our problems lies economic inequity and disproportionate power of corporations and financial institutions. Capitalism is the problem, and it continues to concentrate wealth in the hands of those that are wealthy. The very few poor who do become wealthy, those who rise up from the dregs of society are held as models but the odds are not in our favor. t would be very nice to see the monetary system abolished. Completely. For money to become useless as containers of value. Preferably value should be beneficial for all, rather than measured by the quantity of money, those illusory abstractions, units of so-called value, known as dollars, pounds, euros, yen, etc.
The police are there to protect the wealthy. To protect the property of the wealthy and to punish any who are audacious enough to challenge the status quo. The new prisons are being built to house Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, poor whites, and poor people in general. This is a class war, first and foremost, of the wealthy against everyone else.




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