- MICHELLE ALEXANDER: "Well, I think, you know, a
major point that is often lost in debates about the so-called underclass,
you know, poor African Americans who are trapped in racially segregated
ghettos, the point that's often missed is that huge percentages of the
people residing in those communities have been branded felons, and therefore
discrimination is perfectly legal against them. You know, employment discrimination
is perfectly legal. Most job applications, ranging from Burger King clerk
to accountant, ask whether you've been convicted of a felony. And studies
show that, you know, about 70 percent of employers say they won't even
consider hiring someone who's been convicted of a drug felony.
-
- Public housing is off-limits to you if you have been
convicted of a felony. For a minimum of five years, you are deemed ineligible
for public housing once you've been branded a felon. Discrimination in
private housing market's perfectly legal. So here you are, recently released
from prison, having been branded a felon for engaging in precisely the
kind of drug activity that's ignored in middle-class white communities.
You're branded a felon. You can't get a job. And then public housing is
off-limits to you? Where are you expected to sleep? So an aunt or grandmother
takes you in.
-
- Now, let's say you're one of the lucky few who manage
to get a job. Well, up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished-that's
right, up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished-to pay the cost
of your imprisonment. Increasing numbers of states are requiring former
prisoners to pay back the cost of their imprisonment, pay back court costs,
court processing fees, even the cost of their representation, even if they've
been assigned a public defender, and back child support. You're required
to pay back all of the accumulated child support that you incurred while
you were in prison. So up to 100 percent of your wages can be garnished,
even if you're one of the lucky few who manage to get a job after being
branded a felon.
-
- Given this "fix" that is firmly in place: It
is obvious that the point of doing things this way actually permanently
removes the ability of any individual caught up in the CRIMINAL- Just-us
System, will permanently disqualify these individuals from ever being allowed
to have any kind of life at all; by design, once they have made a few mistakes.
-
- It should also be said that when the exact same 'felonies'
are committed by white affluent children or young adults; their punishments
seldom take the same course as do the lives of those individuals that are
people of some color other than white. The conditions of early life for
most of those arrested ought to be looked at very carefully to insure that
their arrests are not just a direct-continuance of the initial conditions
of the lives that some happened to be born into. It's also worthwhile to
note here that roughly fifty percent of those who are now homeless began
life in Foster Care: which is another equally dire program that is driving
millions more people back into the streets by design.
-
-
-
-
- What is the system designed to do? The system is designed
to send you right back to prison, which is, in fact, what happens to the
vast majority of people who are released. About 70 percent of former prisoners
are returned within three years. And the majority of those who are returned
are returned within three months, because the obstacles, the legal barriers
to just surviving on the outside, are so great. I'm often-you know, people
often say to me, "Well, I know somebody who is a felonand who managed
to get a job.
-
- You know, it's possible to get a job," they say.
"Well, it may be possible, but what kind of job? Why is it that, you
know, our young kids, young black and brown kids, are expected to be locked
into low-wage jobs for life, if they're lucky enough to get them, but kids
in other communities are given the opportunity to go on to college, to
compete for a full range of job opportunities? During the Jim Crow era,
the problem wasn't that black people couldn't get jobs; it was that they
were locked permanently in a lower tier of jobs. And that's the reality.
That's the reality.
-
- This, for far too many is The Price of Prosperity in
America today.
-
-
-
-
- "For us to tell young African American kids in ghetto
communities, "Your destiny is in your own hands," that may be
an inspirational message, but for many of them it may turn out to be a
lie, because the rules and laws that govern ghetto communities today and
the war that is being waged there ensures that a large majority of black
and brown boys in those communities will be branded felons and then relegated
to a permanent second-class status for life."
-
- "AMY GOODMAN: Your reaction to Governor Schwarzenegger's
newfound concern about the situation with the prison system in his state?
-
- MICHELLE ALEXANDER: "Yes, well, many people reacted
with glee to Governor Schwarzenegger's kind of apparent embrace of the
Books Not Bars theme that had been a rallying cry for grassroots organizations
in the state for more than a decade. But if you read between the lines
there, what Schwarzenegger is actually saying is not that we should change
our laws to ensure that nonviolent drug offenders don't end up spending
years or decades behind bars or that we should rethink harsh mandatory
minimum sentences or our three-strikes laws, which have been responsible
for the prison boom in California and other states around the country.
His remedy has not been to reduce prison populations through kind of rethinking
draconian laws, but instead to privatize, try to save money, make warehousing
and caging human beings cheaper by privatizing the system.
-
- Certainly, you know, this announcement must have been
met with glee on Wall Street, where, you know, many companies like the
Correctional Corporation of America, you know, is making millions of dollars,
and it hopes to expand its market of caging human beings for a profit.
So, sadly, although, you know, Schwarzenegger embraced the Books Not Bars
motto, what he actually plans to do in practice is, or may well be, worse
than the system that we have today.
-
- JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to ask you about another aspect
of this whole issue, in terms of-you mentioned mandatory sentencing laws,
especially in relationship to the war on drugs. One of the aspects that
rarely gets much attention, and you might want to talk about it, is how
mandatory sentencing laws have essentially corrupted the criminal justice
system by pressuring many defendants to basically cop a plea rather than
take their chances through an actual trial, where their guilt or innocence
might be decided by a jury.
-
- MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That's right. We will never know
how many innocent people are doing time for supposed drug offenses in the
United States, but there's good reason to believe that those numbers are
higher than they've ever been, because of mandatory sentencing laws. Today,
for a relatively minor drug crime, you could be looking at five, ten, even
a life sentence in prison. Now, if you are arrested and charged with, you
know, a relatively minor drug offense and told that you will spend twenty-five
years in prison if you take your case to trial, but if you cop a plea and
get only three years, a few months, or even be willing to be labeled a
felon for life, you know, you'll be out in a matter of months, days or
just a few years, most people aren't willing to take the risk that they
could be forfeiting decades of their life for a minor drug offense and
will take the deal, whether innocent or guilty.
-
- AMY GOODMAN: And then, explain, Michelle Alexander, what-
-
- MICHELLE ALEXANDER: The pressure to plead guilty is overwhelming.
-
- AMY GOODMAN: Explain then what that means, once a person
is a felon, in terms of the rights they lose for life.
-
- MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, well, once you're branded a
felon, you may be denied the right to vote; automatically excluded from
juries; and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access
to education and public benefits. You know, the very rights that we supposedly
won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist
for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste
in America; we've merely redesigned it. All the old forms of discrimination,
the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly
legal once you've been labeled a felon. And thanks to the war on drugs,
millions of people of color have been branded felons for relatively minor
drug activity, you know, in the past few decades."
-
- AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to ask if you could talk about
the jailing of black men often in white, rural communities and what that
means in terms of bringing federal aid into those communities.
-
- MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes. You know, kind of a well-kept
secret about the way our census laws and redistricting operates in the
United States is that people who are warehoused in prisons-and the majority
of new prison building in the United States has taken place in relatively
white rural areas-the majority of the people who are put in those prisons,
particularly in a state like New York, are poor people of color. But the
people warehoused in those prisons are denied the right to vote, right?
But those people behind bars are counted through the census as part of
the local population for the purposes of redistricting, leading to a greater
number of state representatives assigned to those rural communities, even
though the people behind bars can't vote, and they're not accountable to
them. And additional federal funding flows to those communities, because
their population has been inflated because they have such large prison
populations. Meanwhile, the poor communities of color, you know, from which
these prisoners came, lose representation in their state legislatures,
because their population has declined. And the funding and support that
might otherwise flow to those communities is reduced, because their numbers
have been deflated as a result of the mass imprisonment of their community
members in rural white communities." See the interview: (1)
-
- The depths of this problem are a direct result of the
quintupling of the number of prisoners' that are incarcerated. When I worked
with the California Department of Justice there were only about 300,000
people behind bars in the late 1970's. Today there are over 2 million in
prison, with a recidivism rate that is off-the-charts: because of the polices
which Michelle Alexander has described so clearly above. The policies of
the California prison system are designed to punish people and not to rehabilitate
anyone; despite the fact that most people know that most of the inmates
will one day be returned back into the general population. The 'cash' generated
by these trumped up charges created by political insiders, is apparently
worth far more to the society than are the lives of those that are unjustly
imprisoned by a two-tiered society that values only the elites and their
agendas.
-
- This happens because too many do not consider the long
term effects of basically leaving far too many to die in prison, rather
than even attempting to rehabilitate anyone back into the society. The
three-strikes law must be reevaluated or done away with entirely. The system
that removes the once real discretionary choices that judges were supposed
to have ought to also be scrapped; otherwise we have no real need
for any judges if any conviction means an automatic sentence with no discretion
and no choice left to the so-called magistrate who presides over the supposed
trial of anyone accused of anything. We might as well use an automated
key pad to dispense prison terms and forget about the need for judges,
prosecutors or defense lawyers given that the rules of the courts
have become that severe against anyone who is not part of the ruling elite
or their most valued employees!
-
- The 'system' today is nothing more than a vast income
stream for the largely privatized-prison systems all over the nation. Of
course to people like me; this has been something that was designed to
create this outrage, but even if you do not share that view: By any humane
standard the current facts-on-the-ground inside America's prisons has never
been worse. To any fair-minded observer of this situation; it has to be
clear that this is about politics and not about crime otherwise, we would
not have imprisoned over 85% of those currently inside for crimes that
most white people would not ever have been charged with in the first place!
-
- And that very stark fact is something that will build
up a culture of hatred that will endure long after those unjustly imprisoned,
by a criminally-inspired and corruptly administered system have been released.
-
- kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net
-
- 1) Michelle Alexander on "The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness"http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/12/part_ii_michelle_alexander_on_the
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