BlogWood: MT Archives

The truth can be offensive

Dear Tommy: The truth can be offensive

Tommy at Sticks of Fire has a problem with my post on the activities in St. Pete the other night. Tommy thinks I am being too harsh on the St. Pete Police and too sympathetic to the Uhuru movement (InPDUM).

In fact, Tommy calls InPDUM "anti-American" for calling for an end to racial disparities in the US.

Tommy doesn’t seem to realize that police oppression and violence against blacks and other minorities is an ongoing problem in this and many other communities in the US. Perhaps Tommy is misinformed.

I stand by my original post. Tommy sounds like he’s bought into the myth of American equality, and he’s definitely an apologist for the police. A few posts before the one attacking InPDUM, he praises the falling crime rate and gives credit to our rising prison population. Arguments like this are absurd.

First, crime rate statistics are laughably manipulable. It behooves cities and states to report lower crime rates and therefore appear safe to potential visitors. Florida happens to be a tourist state, and is therefore extremely sensitive about these numbers. Also, rates often “coincidentally” go up when law enforcement is fighting hard for budget increases - higher crime rates tend to lead politicians to throw money at the “problem”.

Once the money is allocated, crime rates invariably go down, and people who don’t really understand what is going on buy into the statistical lies and trumpet higher law enforcement budgets, tougher penalties, and increased incarceration rates as the cure to all evil.

A quick Google search yields this study.

Results suggest that the growth in prison populations has little to do with changes in crime rates or government response to citizen attitudes. Instead it is the most basic elements of the political environment (partisanship and elections) and the continuing legacy of racial social cleavages that explain why incarceration rates have increased.

In America, we have over 2 million of our friends and neighbors in prison right now, many for non-violent drug “offenses” that, if not for our backward culture of prohibition, would harm no one. Drug laws keep non-violent “offenders” in jail for years, drug laws are racist by nature and racist enforcement causes even more resentment in minority communities. (Simple example: crack and powder cocaine are the same basic drug, yet penalties for crack remain higher. Furthermore, a poor black person is more likely to use crack than powder, and is more likely to be caught using or buying, since he will not have the luxury of an expensive home in a gated community in which to purchase and consume his drugs. In fact, the poor black person may be forced to use the drugs on the street where the odds of being caught are disproportionately high. Think about that the next time you’re cutting out a line behind the curtains of your air conditioned condo.)

Another problem: the privatization of prisons leads to corporations profiting from incarceration, thus the corporations lobby for tougher laws and penalties, thus increasing the numbers of prisoners and their bottom lines.

But crime is down, so according to Tommy, who apparently relies on knee-jerk reactions rather than factual research, incarceration must be making us safer and what’s more American than sending people to jail?

According to the latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, more than two million men and women are now behind bars in the United States.1 The country that holds itself out as the "land of freedom" incarcerates a higher percentage of its people than any other country. The human costs — wasted lives, wrecked families, troubled children — are incalculable, as are the adverse social, economic and political consequences of weakened communities, diminished opportunities for economic mobility, and extensive disenfranchisement.

Contrary to popular perception, violent crime is not responsible for the quadrupling of the incarcerated population in the United States since 1980. In fact, violent crime rates have been relatively constant or declining over the past two decades. The exploding prison population has been propelled by public policy changes that have increased the use of prison sentences as well as the length of time served, e.g. through mandatory minimum sentencing, "three strikes" laws, and reductions in the availability of parole or early release.

Although these policies were championed as protecting the public from serious and violent offenders, they have instead yielded high rates of confinement of nonviolent offenders. Nearly three quarters of new admissions to state prison were convicted of nonviolent crimes.2 Only 49 percent of sentenced state inmates are held for violent offenses.3

Perhaps the single greatest force behind the growth of the prison population has been the national "war on drugs." The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. In 2000, 22 percent of those in federal and state prisons were convicted on drug charges.4

Even more troubling than the absolute number of persons in jail or prison is the extent to which those men and women are African-American. Although blacks account for only 12 percent of the U.S. population, 44 percent of all prisoners in the United States are black (Figure 1).

Blacks in Florida make up a small minority of the population, however they form a majority within the state’s prisons.

So, when InPDUM says “We Demand an End to the Colonial Court and Prison Systems which have the Majority of African Men Incarcerated, on Probation or Parole,...” they know what they’re talking about.

While Tommy is enjoying Lightning playoff games at one of our many corporate welfare sports palaces, built with tax dollars to benefit wealthy, mostly white team owners, the vast majority of the black population in this country has no disposable income whatsoever. There is no equality in this country. Black and poor children start off so far behind the mostly pale middle class that it becomes almost impossible for the kids to escape their lowly beginnings.

A few exceptional people always manage to crawl their way up, and they will invariably be held aloft Alger-like by the Tommys of this country to prove that there really is no racial or economic divide in America, but these few examples are far from the rule.

I see nothing in the entire InPDUM platform which is “anti-American.” Quite the contrary: the platform calls for fair treatment and self determination. What could be more American than that? I was making a point with the posting of part of the InPDUM platform, but I also agree with the part that I didn’t post. Here’s the whole thing.

1 We Demand National Democratic Rights and Self-Determination for African People in the U.S. and Around the World.

2 We Demand Community Control of the Police in the African Community and the Immediate Withdrawal of the Terroristic Police and Military Forces from the African Community.

3 We Demand Community Control of the Schools and Mandatory African History in Public Schools.

4 We Demand African Community Control of Health Care.

5 We Demand Community Control of Housing.

6 We Demand the Removal of Parasitic Merchants and Slumlords from the African Community.

7 We Demand an End to the Colonial Court and Prison Systems which have the Majority of African Men Incarcerated, on Probation or Parole, and the Immediate Release of all Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War.

8 We Demand an End to the Theft, Kidnapping, Sale, Abuse and Removal of African Children from their Communities under the Genocidal Foster Care System.

9 We Demand an End to the Political and Social Oppression and Economic Exploitation of African Women.

10 We Demand Reparations for African People.

11We Demand a United nations Supervised Plebiscite to Determine the Will of the African Community in the U.S. as to their National Destiny.

12We Demand an End to the Political Economy of the Counterinsurgency; the Parasitic Relationship that Benefits the White Population with Millions of Dollars for Jobs, Resources and a Stabilized Economy off of the U.S. Counterinsurgency (war) on African People in the U.S.

Tommy’s posts, the ones under discussion, are written from the simplistic point of view of one whose comfortable middle class existence makes him feel that the police will never come after him or his family. I hope he’s right. I hope he never has to live in fear of the police and other government authorities who have been teaching black communities the harsh lessons of capitalistic American “freedom” ever since we liberated their forefathers from their homelands in chains.