Gulag America

SOYMB has posted before on the America prison population and on our cyber travels we came across this interview conducted by the Boston Globe with Robert Perkinson author of a new book, “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,’’ , a history of American punishment from slavery to the present and the result of a decade of research and of hundreds of interviews that he conducted throughout the prison system.

Q. How large is that [US prison] industry?
A. It’s on a scale unlike anything attempted by a democratic government in human history. There have been larger prison experiments — the Soviet gulag, for instance — but only in totalitarian states. The total prison population in the US is about 2.4 million; if you count those on probation and parole, it rises to almost 8 million. We have chosen to lock up more people for longer than any other country in the world. And those incarcerated are not just disproportionately African-American and Latino but increasingly so. In that sense, the US criminal justice system has become not more, but less equal over the last 40 years.

Q. Is there simply more crime?
A. There is not more crime. Crime has been declining since the 1990s. What really drives up prison populations is politics; the sentencing decisions that politicians and judges make. For instance, the majority of offenders who go to prison for illegal drug use are black or Latino, whereas roughly 70 percent of users are white. This reflects how the US has come to deal with inequality and intractable social ills, not with Great Society solutions but with hard power solutions.

Q. Why do you focus on Texas?
A. Texas is ground zero of the prison boom. It locks up more people than any other state; it executes more people than any other state...

Q. How do you explain that?
A. I think it’s rooted in the legacy of violence, historically speaking, in the settlement of the West, and, more importantly, in the cultural and political inheritance of slavery. In the South, the rehabilitative model pioneered in the North never took hold. Instead, punishment traditions were tied to hard labor, racial subjugation and retribution. After Emancipation, courts turned former slaves into felons who were sold to mining and railroad companies, to sugar and cotton planters and that system dominated the Southern criminal justice system into the 20th century. In the wake of the civil rights era, the same politicians that fought integration immediately began increasing sentences...

Q. You also describe a prison guard culture.
A. That has started to change, but one of the things that made Texas unique and preserved the lifeways of slavery into the 20th century was that prisons were primarily plantations, many of them operating since the 1830s with unfree labor. The white guards would live on the prison plantation; they would have houseboys, even babysitters who were prisoners. This lasted into the 1980s and persists to some extent.

Q. In all your travels, were there particularly striking moments?
A. I remember the first time I saw a line of prisoners in Texas, most of them black, going out to the fields with an armed white guard on horseback. In a juvenile unit on the Gulf Coast, I met a skinny 16-year-old who had been sentenced to 99 years. I’m sure he committed murder or something, but the fact that we’re locking juveniles up for life suggests that we’ve given up on the idea of reforming them.

The Socialist Standard relates how more than half of the 4,000 executed since 1930 have been black — some five times the proportion of African-Americans in the US population as a whole. Forty-two percent of all back men on death row are black, even though they make up some percent of people living in the U.S. Almost 85 percent of those executed since 1997 have been convicted of killing whites. In that same period only one person has been executed for killing an African-American. In the history of executions in the USA, of 8,000 executions carried out, only 8 have involved a white person killing a black person.
Not so long ago, the US General Accountancy Office , the alleged non-partisan audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of Congress, put out a report addressing the racism endemic in capital cases. It stated: “Our synthesis of the 8 studies shows a pattern of evidence indicating racial disparities in the charging, sentencing and imposition of the death penalty . . . In 8 percent of the studies, race of victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty”, and “those who murdered whites were found to be more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks.”

The death penalty rarely targets the rich and never the company directors knowingly responsible for corporate manslaughter. If you are wealthy, then you can afford the best legal representation money can buy.The working class is murdered and battered and robbed and dehumanised every day. Our duty is to respond by urging our class to end capitalism and, in so doing, finally eliminating all the social problems that presently plague us; forever changing a society that sees its poorer and more desperate members killing one another and thus ending up victims themselves at the hands of the capitalist state’s killing machine.