It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (19 page)

Nino was right. Historically, it has been the “American way” to subjugate, murder, and oppress people of color. The War on Drugs, often fittingly described as the “War on Us,” proves no different. Chilling evidence of this can be seen if we look at New York, where African-Americans and Latinos comprise 25 percent of the total population, but 83 percent of all state prisoners and 94 percent of all those convicted of drug offenses.

It’s crucial to understand that “the typical cocaine user is white, male, a high school graduate employed full time and living in a small metropolitan area or suburb,” admits former drug czar William Bennett. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that African-Americans constitute about 14 percent of the drug-using population, 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of all drug convictions, and 75 percent of all prison admissions on drug offenses. As the
Los Angeles Times
concluded, “Although it is clear that whites sell most of the nation’s cocaine and account for 80% of its consumers, it is Blacks and
other minorities who continue to fill up America’s courtrooms and jails.”

In the early 1990s, with crack drenching deep into the ghettos of America, the federal government and twenty-three states ratcheted up the mandatory-minimum concept another notch by passing “three strikes” laws dictating prison sentences of twenty-five years to life for third felonies. These laws have undoubtedly taken some violent offenders out of circulation—but they have also handed out life sentences to thousands of people for petty crimes such as possession or stealing a spare tire.

Not only did the War on Drugs lock up an inhumane amount of Blacks, but it ensured that they would stay in jail for abnormally long periods of time. Now, “it’s less about more people going in than about people staying longer,” says Allen Beck, chief of the Corrections Statistics Program at the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Take, for example, California’s three-strikes law, which eliminates the possibility of parole for repeat offenders and mandates life in prison for persons found guilty of three felony convictions. The Sentencing Project reports that one out of every eleven people imprisoned are serving life, 25 percent of them without parole. Many of these people are in jail for nonviolent drug crimes, minor robberies or thefts, or are found guilty by association. In California, for example, more people are serving life in prison under the three-strikes law for simple marijuana possession than for kidnapping, murder, and rape combined. Further, under three strikes, more people have been sentenced for drug possession than for violent offenses. To give a personal example, when I was a
graduate student at UCLA, I was the editor-in-chief for
Nommo. Nommo
, a newsmagazine founded in 1968 at the height of the Black liberation struggle, is a historic institution and the first non-HBCU newsmagazine for Black students. Every day, without fail, at least two dozen letters like this one would arrive:

Even more tragic, more horrifying, is that the onslaught on poor African-Americans and Latinos begins early. According to the Justice Department, African-American youths are six times more likely to be sentenced to prison than white youths. For youths charged with drug offenses, African-Americans are forty-eight times more likely than
whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison and serve more time once there. Consider, for example, the unconscionable case of fourteen-year-old Shaquanda Cotton. She explains:

To illustrate how deeply entrenched judicial racism is, consider the fact that just three months before Cotton’s sentencing, Judge Superville sentenced a fourteen-year-old white girl who was convicted of arson to probation. Fortunately, a national campaign led by Cotton’s mother generated media interest and after a year, after support from the NAACP and other groups, Cotton was released after serving one year. For every Cotton, and she is still a victim, there are hundreds of thousands of others who, despite unfair trials and sentences, are never released.

Cases like Michael Lewis, an African-American from a ghetto in Atlanta, who at thirteen years old was arrested for a murder that a mountain of evidence suggests he did not commit. At the time of his arrest he was a ward of the state, but Michael was never assisted by Child Protection Services or even read his Miranda rights.

“We are going to try this boy like a man,” declared D.A. Paul Howard at the onset of the trial. Tried as an adult under Georgia Senate Bill 440, which allows children aged thirteen to seventeen to be prosecuted and sentenced as adults for certain offenses, Michael
was sentenced, after a mere three-day trial, to life in prison at the age of fourteen. This, despite the fact that the only evidence against Michael was the testimony of an admitted drug dealer and murder suspect; despite the lack of forensic evidence; despite not interviewing or subpoenaing any of Michael’s alibi witnesses; and despite the fact that Michael’s public defender was facing his own criminal charges. Despite all of this, Michael, at fourteen years old, was taken to Lee Arrendale State Prison, a maximum security adult prison. Michael’s case is not unique. Since Bill 440 was passed, 94 percent of the children tried and convicted under this law have been African-American. Michael rhymes in reflection: “The streets raised me / jail enslaved me.”

The enslavement that Michael speaks of is a keen observation and one of the critical components to this crisis. Many have been writing, saying, singing, speaking, and hollering that the current crisis is a form of enslavement. You cannot have any real discussion of the modern-day prison industrial complex without addressing the economic component. Dr. Tukufu Zuberi, director of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that “when you lock up millions of brothers, you have reinstituted the institution of slavery.”

Although most people believe that slavery was abolished in the United States after the Civil War by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, it wasn’t. The Thirteenth Amendment reads:

Clearly, the Thirteenth Amendment was not about abolishing slavery, but rather limiting it to prisoners. After the Civil War, many freshly
“free” Africans found themselves enslaved once again as prisoners leased out to plantation owners to work fields of cotton for free.

“Prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’ compensation or pay,” explains Linda Evans, a prisoner in California. Since the Supreme Court’s 1993 ruling that inmates did not have the right to minimum wage, corporations such as American Airlines, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, and Toys “R” Us have exploited and continue to exploit prisoners to meet their bottom line. Prison labor allows corporations to boast “Made in the U.S.A.” while paying paltry wages that are even lower than the slave wages doled out in Southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America. This has made prison labor a cost-effective alternative to relocation. And because of this fact, the number of prison inmates working in prison industries between 1972 and 1992 shot up by 300 percent, from 169,000 to 523,000. Put another way, the prison industry hires more people than any Fortune 500 company, with the exception of General Motors. Prisons profit so much from leasing out their prisoners to corporations that they’ve even begun ad campaigns like the following one from Wisconsin:

A willing workforce waits…

The prison crisis is exacerbated even further by media corporations who further politicize the issues surrounding African-American prisoners. Television, especially with the rise in competition from twenty-four-hour news channels, has a vested interest in perpetuating the idea that crime is rampant. Consider the Center for Media and Public Affairs study that showed crime was the number one topic on the nightly news for more than a decade. As the homicide rate dropped by half nationwide, homicide stories on the news quadrupled. This media saturation has a direct impact on public perception, which has a direct impact on political campaigns and policy. It’s “impossible to run an election campaign without advocating more jails, harsher punishment, more executions, all the things that have never worked to reduce crime but have always worked to get votes,” concludes George Gerbner, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and one of the nation’s foremost experts on the media. “It’s driven largely, although not exclusively, by television-cultivated insecurity.”

The images shown by the mass media of Blacks being arrested, detained, or imprisoned have a serious impact on our psyches. We begin to think of Blacks, and this is true for all races, as perpetual criminals. During the early eighties, as America’s drug epidemic hit all-time highs, news crews became increasingly fixated on drug stories. However, they were not able to gain access to elite yacht clubs, high-rises, and gated suburban neighborhoods where most of America’s drugs are consumed, and they found poor Black communities extremely accessible. As a result, impoverished Black communities became fertile ground for reporters to show the “dark” face to America’s “drug war.” Consider that researchers at the University of Michigan discovered that starting in 1985, the number of whites shown on TV using cocaine dropped by 60 percent, and the number of Blacks using jumped up by 60 percent.

All of this is reinforced and justified through a sensationalized media that present images of Blacks as “violent,” “aggressive,” and “hostile,” influencing everyone’s notions about race, crime, and punishment. There exists a psychological connection between perception and conviction. This is why time and time again, racial bias can be clearly seen in capital cases where juries are more likely to execute the killers of white victims than Black victims. Writer, activist, and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal explains, “Perhaps we can shrug off and shred some of the dangerous myths laid on our minds like a second skin—such as… the ‘right[s] to a fair trial,’ even. They’re not rights—they’re privileges of the powerful and rich…. Don’t expect the media networks to tell you, for they can’t, because of their incestuousness… with government and big business.”

America was
founded on the exploitation of African labor during slavery, which lasted more than two hundred years. Even after the Civil War, imprisoned Africans were leased out to plantation owners to
work fields of cotton. The current crisis is just as political as slavery, the Civil War, or Jim Crow.