When Ta-Nehisi Coates says that America’s bloated and enormously expensive dependence on imprisonment has created a “social service program … for a whole class of people,” he hits the nail on the head. Perhaps correctional expenditures—police, courts, jails, prisons, halfway houses, parole offices, and all the rest—are better classified as “welfare” expenditures.
Mass incarceration is not just (or even mainly) a response to crime, but rather a perverse form of social spending that uses state power to address a host of social problems at the back end, from poverty to drug addiction to misbehavior in school. These are problems that voters, taxpayers, and politicians—especially white voters, taxpayers, and politicians—seem unwilling to address in any other way. And even as this spending exacts a toll on those it targets, it confers economic benefits on others, creating employment in white rural areas, an enormous government-sponsored market in prison supplies, and cheap labor for businesses. This is what the historian Mike Davis once called “carceral keynesianism.”
.. Bringing together Moynihan’s concerns about black family structure with the cold fact of mass incarceration produces a striking conclusion: Mass incarceration actually causes crime. In its long-term impact on the black family, mass incarceration has many of the disintegrative effects that Moynihan attributed to slavery.
.. Still, this continuity does leave open important questions—why did the incarceration rate, which remained steady for a century after the end of slavery, spike after 1970? Why did the black incarceration rate, which had always exceeded that of whites, increase so much more rapidly in the same era?
One view is that cries for “law and order” in the late 1960s brought together southern Democrats and conservative Republicans under the umbrella of the “southern strategy.” Unable any longer to object openly to housing and school integration, civil rights, or black political power, politicians decried instead the threat of “crime” and “welfare” as shorthand for white racial resentment.
.. How would the nation react if one out of every four white men between the ages of 20 and 35 spent time in prison
Ahmed Mohamed, 14, Builds Clock, Is Cuffed for Bomb Hoax, Then Gets Invited to White House
To me this also highlights the failing of a broad trend in education over the past decade or so: zero-tolerance policies. Such policies are applied to a range of topics/issues, from language to clothing to weapons to drugs/medications, etc. These issues are serious and real, but zero-tolerance far too often means “zero judgment.” Such policies free teachers & administrators to act first and think later (if at all), rather than thoughtfully examining the context of the issue. They teach students that judgment and reason are not to be valued, and that “fairness” means applying the same rigid answer to all situations. Life is rarely black and white, right or wrong; yet such policies falsely teach our children to view the world that way.
.. If they’d truly thought this was a bomb, they would have evacuated the school. Clearly no one thought it was. They said thought he had a hoax bomb, which he would have, had he said “this is a bomb.”
.. So according the police spokesperson, “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.” Exactly what kind of “broader explanation” were they looking for?
.. Looking at the picture of the “clock”, you can understand the teacher’s concern. It should not have gotten to the point that Ahmed was detained by the police, but you can understand the school getting them involved.
Chris Rock’s poisonous legacy: How to get rich and exalted chastising “bad blacks”
It doesn’t matter how much debunking is done, because this strain of respectability politics is easy to comprehend, fits neatly into our racist system, and has the potential to be lucrative. You won’t go broke by taking up the chastisement of “bad blacks” as a career. You may lose your soul, but you can just go buy a new one with the cash from your book deal/radio show/TV pundit gig/speaking fees.
What bothers me just as much, if not more, than the profitability of this line of thinking, is that anyone who engages in it (Barkley, Lemon, Riley or whoever) positions him- or herself as some sort of exalted truth teller, revealing the secrets black America is too afraid to face. They won’t touch the truth of how white supremacy has dictated the contours of black American life, but telling kids to pull up their pants and stop acting like “thugs” is right up their alley.
.. But instead of asking why the options for black survival are so limited, the proselytizers of respectability politics would rather reify the theories of black inferiority that excite the white racist imagination.
Officer Who Arrested James Blake Has History of Force Complaints
More disturbing are the comments of Patrick Lynch, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President who stated, “We … believe that placing this officer on modified duty is premature and unwarranted. No police officer should ever face punitive action before a complete review of the facts.” That Mr. Lynch believes that an officer with a lengthy civilian complaint record, who exercise such poor judgment, and repeatedly uses unjustifiable force against members of the public should not be given a modified duty in light of this video, yet again demonstrates that police unions are one of the chief impediments to ensuring police officers obey the law are held accountable for their actions when they do not.