racismreview.com

Dedrick Muhammad has an interesting publication, 40 Years Later: The Unfinished American Dream, out of the Institute for Policy Studies (April 2008) that provides strong challenges to the end-of-racism nonsense that we hear much about these days. In his summary he accents these points:

Since Dr. King’s death, the African American high school graduation rate has increased by over 214%. At this rate, African Americans will reach equality with white Americans by 2018.

It will take more than 537 more years for Blacks to reach income equality with whites if the income gap continues to close at the same rate it has since Dr. King was assassinated.

If the racial wealth divide continues to close as slowly as it has since 1983, it will take 634 years for Blacks to reach wealth equality with whites.

Forty years since Dr. King called for the abolition of poverty, the annual decline of poverty for Black children is about a quarter of a percentage point per year. At this rate it will take over a century to end poverty for Black children. Today a third of Black children live in poverty.

These facts about racial inequality are well-known to researchers and activists in this area.

photo credit: caboindex
Since not long after Dr. King spoke often about them, since the late 1960s, they just have not had much impact on public policy action, especially in recent years. We certainly are a country where such catastrophic racial inequalities, which reflect basically the past effects of hundreds of years of past and present systemic racism, somehow stay on the policy backburner while white-collar, almost all white male, criminals on Wall Street get their companies bailed out with a trillion or more–and usually get golden parachutes of millions personally—even as they have raped and destroyed our economy.

Muhammad also makes two points that you probably have never heard in the mainstream media or among social science researchers:

While the incarceration rate of African Americans is extraordinarily high, the probability of incarceration for white men has been increasing at a faster rate (268%) than for Black men (240%) since 1974.

The increase in the share of white children living in a single parent home has been much higher (229%) than for Black children (155%) since 1960.

So, there is, in terms of acceleration in recent decades, a very serious problem of increase in white crime and incarceration and in terms of white children living without two parents. Of course, the baselines for whites are relevant here to the percentage increases, but these percentages are in any event very sharp increases, to say the least.

I certainly have not heard ANY politician or media commentator (or other scholar for that matter) make a point out of either one of these white problems. Why isn’t the “problem of white families” and their “lack of family values” being discussed? Or the problem of “increasing white incarceration” being discussed? Maybe if they were we could start getting into deeper issues of why these might be seen as “problems,” and what “family” really means in this society. Or is that wishful thinking?

In March, I posted an item alerting readers to a newly-released report from the Pew Center on the States showing that the United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country. Moreover, the report showed that the incarcerated population was disproportionately made up of young African American and Hispanic men and women. On May 5th, two additional reports were released detailing how drug enforcement policies and sentencing practices contribute to these racial disparities in arrests and incarceration. (photo: Pennington).


Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in America’s Cities, by Ryan S. King (Sentencing Project), is the first longitudinal analysis of city-level drug arrest data by race, covering the 23-year period (1980-2003) of the initiation and expansion of the “war on drugs.” Looking at 43 of the country’s largest cities, King found that 40 of these cities had a substantial increase in drug arrests during this time, with six cities showing an increase of more than 500%. Increases in drug arrests varied across the cities studied, but what is more interesting is that King found significant variations within states. For example, Tucson, Arizona had an 887% increase in drug arrests between 1980 and 2003, while the increase in Phoenix was only 52%. Once again, African Americans disproportionately bear the burden of these increases. The increase in drug arrests of African Americans was more than three times greater than the increase in drug arrests of white Americans (225% and 70%, respectively). In 11 of the cities examined, drug arrests of African Americans increased by more than 500% during the study period.


What accounts for these disparities? While some might argue they reflect racial differences in drug dealing and usage, the Sentencing Project report states that African Americans and whites have relatively equal rates of illegal drug use. King’s analysis indicates instead that the disparities are largely accounted for by law enforcement practices. More specifically, many law enforcement agencies have adopted a practice of saturation policing in which they concentrate their resources on low-income urban neighborhoods with large minority populations under the assumption that in these communities drug dealing is more open and more violent than that which occurs in suburban neighborhoods with predominantly white residents. But the data indicate that most arrests are not for violent drug-related crimes or even for the sale or manufacture of drugs, but rather for simple possession. In fact, four out of five drug arrests are for possession, and 40% of all drug arrests are for possession of marijuana.


In Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States, researchers at Human Rights Watch (HRW) document some of the consequences of the saturation policing strategy and the disparate impact on minority communities. The HRW analysis uses data from 34 states compiled by the National Corrections Reporting Program for 2003, the most recent year for which data are available. In an effort to “get tough” on drug crimes, many states adopted mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenders, resulting in a swelling of incarceration rates. For example, in 1980, “there were about 40,000 people in jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000” (The New York Times, April 23, 2008, p. A14). But the HRW report shows that not everyone has an equal chance of being incarcerated for a drug conviction.


The analysis documents that despite the fact that African Americans are 12.8% of the U.S. population, they were 53.5% of all individuals who entered prison in 2003 because of a drug conviction. Overall, blacks were 10.1 times more likely than whites to go to prison on drug convictions. In agreement with the Sentencing Project’s report, the HRW researchers conclude that this disparity is a direct outgrowth of the conceptualization of the nation’s drug problem as largely an urban black problem, even though there are data indicating that there may be six times as many white drug offenders as black drug offenders. “The racially disproportionate results presented in this report are as predictable as they are unjust” (p. 4).


One outcome of the rise in incarceration has been prison overcrowding with many states incurring a huge strain on their budgets. As their prison populations have grown, states have had to spend a larger share of their funds on corrections, diverting funds from other areas, such as education. Nationally, between 1987 and 2007, state spending on corrections increased 127%, while state spending on higher education increased 21%, controlling for inflation. In Michigan, spending on corrections exceeds spending on high education. To save money, some states have been looking for ways to reduce their prison populations, using programs such as early release, community supervision, and unsupervised parole (See Keith Richburg and Ashley Surdin, “Fiscal Pressures Lead Some States to Free Inmates Early,” Retrieved May 6, 2008 from http://www.washingtonpost.com ).


But the emphasis on fiscal costs overlooks the human costs of the “war on drugs” law enforcement strategy. As the Sentencing Project report states, saturation policing of minority urban neighborhoods that has resulted in the arrests of hundreds of thousands of young black men has not stopped drug sales or drug use in these communities. Instead, it has created a group of able-bodied citizens with a criminal history that renders them chronically unemployable. Many employers simply will not hire ex-offenders. Inadequate education is also an employment obstacle for many ex-offenders, but individuals with a drug conviction do not qualify for federal tuition grants. Those who get jobs sometimes face transportation problems because they have difficulty getting driver’s licenses. The jobs they get are typically low-paying, but while in prison, child support and court fees have accrued so they may find their meager paychecks are heavily garnished, leaving them with little to live on, let alone to support a family (The New York Times, April 27, 2008, p. 26). In short, the “war on drugs” law enforcement strategy has not solved the drug problem, but it has substantially reinforced social inequalities.


In April of this year, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, a new law that provides $326 million in grants to local governments and nonprofit organizations for programs – from housing to drug treatment to employment services – that assist the approximately 650,000 people that are released from prisons and jails every year. Although the law received bipartisan support and has been praised by politically diverse groups, it is seen by many as insufficient largely because it focuses on the aftermath of imprisonment and not the factors that lead to imprisonment. Drug treatment, improved education, social services, community development to address urban blight, job training – all instead of using resources for saturation policing, arrest, and incarceration – would go a long way in not only reducing prison overcrowding and strained government budgets, but also reducing racial disparities in arrest and imprisonment and improving public safety in urban minority communities. As Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, recently commented regarding the Second Chance Act, “If we’re concerned [about] people coming out of prison, maybe we should think about how many people are going to prison in the first place. . . . This is the back end of the problem. We need to look at the front end” (quoted in Dan Eggen, “Bush Signs into Law a Program that Gives Grants to Former Convicts,” Retrieved May 6, 2008 from http://www.washingtonpost.com).


The full Sentencing Project report is available here; the Human Rights Watch report is available here.

This week I came across an article in Playboy (June 2008) suspiciously and nonsensically named, “The Black KKK: Thug Life is Killing Black America. It’s Time to Do Something About It” by Jason Whitlock. First the title grabbed my attention and caused my blood pressure to rise, for my scholarly intuition alerted me that the blame of Black violence would be placed on Blacks. Mr. Whitlock noted that the title was crafted not by him, but by the “second in command” under Hugh Hefner, Chris Napolitano, editorial director of Playboy magazine. Whitlock refers to Napolitano as a person “committed to stirring a racial controversy” with use of the title and his efforts in this regard are “calculated and deliberate.”


Whitlock missed pointing out that the title attempted to tie a white hate group that has historically (and presently) attempted to psychologically and physically terrorize people of color for centuries within the U.S. for the purposes of social control to an epidemic of violence between a segment of poor Black people. It is easier to compare oranges to apples than the KKK to Black violence.


The article in essence makes “a desperate plea for America to change course from its lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key criminal justice system. The approach doesn’t create safety. It breeds corruption and gang culture. And it is currently crippling state and federal budgets.” This is a point I and others (here and here) agree with.


The article does a good job at presenting information on the uniquely politically strong prison-guard union in California and their effects on policies and procedures around Black and Brown incarceration. This in fact is the same system that leads the country in the mentality of the “lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key criminal justice system” that has swept the country.


Whitlock fails in presenting an encompassing analysis of the issue of Black and Brown people being incarcerated. First, he fails to discuss or acknowledge the effects poverty has on the occurrences of crime. Secondly, he goes no where near presenting to the reader the effects of racism, oppression, and social control within the judicial system. Seeing him on varies television shows, it is apparent that Whitlock is grounded in a color-blind functionalist paradigm, therefore it does not amaze me that these variables were left out of the discussion. Now, I know that Mr. Whitlock’s forte involves writing within the sphere of sports. But he needs to stick to his arena of expertise of field goals and touch downs for writing on social issues without a critical lens within an arena such as Playboy can do more harm than good. What did he think would happen when publishing within a magazine (see also this) that has historically courted a particular population–well-to-do White males.

Slate.com has posted scanned copies of the racist emails the Secret Service has finally turned over to a judge in the long-running lawsuit filed by African American employees. This batch of emails sent in recent years (several date from 2003) by at least 20 high-ranking supervisors in the Secret Serviceare excellent examples of two-faced racism. As blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, many of the emails seem fixated on Jesse Jackson and the jokes in the emails focus obsessively on sexual innuendos about black men’s bodies. The majority of the racist emails posted at Slate.com take the form of jokes of the sort that many whites use to bond with each other in whites-only private, backstage spaces. One of the emails is noteworthy because it departs from this pattern. Instead, it’s more of a general rant that encapsulates much of the white racial frame. What’s especially interesting about this rant is that the middle-class, college educated, well-employed, white, male, heterosexual, author of the email characterizes himself as such a victim of the current cultural milieu of “reverse racism.” Here’s part of what the (very long) email says:

“Reverse racism and political correctness are destroying virtually every aspect of American life. We’re completely surrounded by illegal aliens (who even illegally vote in our elections…) suck up our welfare dollars, steal public educations, commit massive amounts of crimes to include rape and murder, and refuse to learn English (why the @#^* should I have to choose which language I want to use at the ATM? It wastes my time and disgusts me.) …”

Interestingly, part of what the author of this racist email is complaining about is the technology of ATM’s - many of which offer built-in options for selecting different languages.   These kinds of options that build racial or ethnic identity into the machine is what Lisa Nakamura has referred to as “menu driven” racial identity in the digital era.  While some writers have suggested that cyberspace offers there are new, liberating possibilities for moving away from old forms oppression tied to modernity, the actual picture is more complex.    What used to be an ‘old media’ form of racism, shared either face-to-face, written on the back of lynching postcards, or via telephone, today takes on a slightly new twist when some of these old forms of backstage communication make the transition to digital media and such messages are now sent between whites via email. In this instance, the emergence of cyber racism opens up the possibility of disrupting old patterns through the mechanism of forwarding email. What was once only said in private can now, through forwarded email, move beyond the private whites-only space for which such communication was intended. However, such a possibility was not sufficient to lead to an actual interruption in the transmission of white supremacy.  Note that in this instance, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a single white ally within the Secret Service who would ‘break rank’ and forward these racist emails outside the white-only intended audience.  Instead, what it took to wrest these emails from the backstage and bring them into the frontstage for all to scrutinize was it always takes to change entrenched forms of oppression:  political action.   In this instance, that took the form of a lawsuit by African American employees of the Secret Service.


The rest of the email quoted above goes on to make the case for the importance of intersectionality in discussions of racism.  He goes on to include elements of gender and sexuality in the latter part of his rant:

“I’m not even going to start on partial birth abortions and selling baby parts to heal old people (Are the Nazis back in power doing experiments?).  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the two lesbians down the street from me…with their adopted Korean SON, menorahs in the front window….are a typical American family.   And I’m the sicko nut because I think they’re about as far from what God intended a normal family to look like as giant grasshoppers playing croquet on my front lawn.  But I’m the one with the screwed up view of reality.”

Screwed up, that’s one interpretation.   With this last, broad rhetorical swipe, the author pulls together themes of reproductive and sexual politics, homophobia, antisemitism, and combines it with yet more racism - this time against the adopted child of his lesbian neighbors.   The views he expresses here are indistinguishable from the overt white supremacist websites that I examine in my work.   Yet, people in power and the vast majority of whites in this country, continue to maintain that we have moved”beyond” racism.   Emails like the one discussed here suggest a far different reality.

A new study by a sociologist confirms what many of us have suspected for a long time, that drug policies which criminalize marijuana use are ‘weeding out’ blacks and latinos in New York City. The study, by Queens College sociologist Harry G. Levin and Deborah Peterson Small, an attorney and advocate for drug policy reform, is called “Marijuana Arrest Crusade” (opens .pdf), and was released yesterday by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which says:

“The NYPD arrested and jailed nearly 400,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana between 1997 and 2007, a tenfold increase in marijuana arrests over the previous decade and a figure marked by startling racial and gender disparities…”

And, indeed, those disparities are striking, as this graph illustrates. The study, based on data from the NY State Division of Criminal Justice Services showed that between 1997 and 2007, 52 percent of the suspects were black, 31 percent Hispanic and only 15 percent white.


As I’ve mentioned here before, for about five years I directed a large (N=565) study of young guys leaving incarceration at Rikers, and a huge proportion of these young men had been arrested on marijuana charges. The fact is, these arrests don’t make the city any safer and only serve to make sure it is the same people who are locked up at Rikers. And, the bias in the arrest process is part of the problem, according to an article on this study in the Village Voice, in which Levine asserts that:

“… most of those who’ve been busted ‘were actually not guilty of what they were charged with.’ Levine says that …[based on interviews with]… Legal Aid and defense attorneys, that two-thirds to three-quarters of the people arrested ‘are not smoking in public,’ but instead had marijuana in a pocket, purse, or backpack. Possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana is a non-criminal violation—not even a misdemeanor—and the cops used to just issue tickets for it. But the arrests cited in Levine’s study were all made for having marijuana ‘burning or open to public view,’ a misdemeanor charge meant to dissuade open lawlessness.

The Voice article goes on to describe the kinds of police tactics that result in these sorts of disproportionate arrests, and these amount to dirty tricks. For instance, according to Levine, the cop tells the person being detained, “Show me what’s in your pocket and I’ll go easy on you,” or may simply order in a loud voice: “Let’s see what’s in your pockets.” When the person pulls out the marijuana, it now becomes the misdemeanor offense of “open to public view.”


This is no coincidence, of course. The racial disparities in arrests for marijuana are skewed less by individual bigotry of individual cops (although that makes it an easier more seamless process), but rather a “racially biased, discriminatory, unfair, and unjust” systematic focus within the NYPD on black and latino young men. And it is young men, the study also reveals that about 91% of the total 400,000 arrested were male. The Voice article goes on to point out the obvious here, but it’s worth stating the obvious sometimes:

Statistically, there are just as many young white people walking around the Upper West Side neighborhoods near Columbia University with pot in their pockets as there are blacks holding marijuana a few blocks away in Harlem. But Harlem has one of the highest marijuana-arrest rates, while the Upper West Side has one of the lowest. That’s because more city cops are assigned to “high-crime” areas, most of which are disproportionately black or Latino, Levine says. The cops are then pushed to meet Kelly’s “productivity goals,” which the police union’s lawyers contend in pending lawsuits are actually “illegal quotas” for arrests and stop-and-frisks.

So, what are the consequences for these young men who are arrested for marijuana, sometimes as young as 14 or 15? Often, they are locked in adolescent wings within adult facilities (as were the guys in our research project), they are then “in the system” meaning that they now have an arrest record. Once they have an arrest record, they are more likely to get arrested again if caught in one of the stop-and-frisk sweeps, and they are less likely to finish school. Indeed, at most public schools in New York City, once a young person has been arrested they are also no longer welcome to attend classes. When they are released from Rikers, they are taken by bus to Queens Plaza (a bleak little spot) and dropped off at 3am with a MetroCard and little else. It’s little wonder then, that the likelihood of re-arrest for these guys once they’re “in the system” is around 65%. It’s a structure that makes any other outcome for young black and latino men other than arrest unlikely….except for the outcome in the Sean Bell case. The undercover operation that all those detectives were involved in at the Kahlua Club? A routine, buy-and-bust drug operation.

         This morning I learned that the officers who faced trial for the 2006 murder of Sean Bell were acquitted of all charges. For those who don’t know, Sean Bell was murdered on the morning of his wedding as NYPD officers fired a torrent of over 30 bullets into his car. The officers were working undercover at the club where

        Bell held his bachelor party. They allegedly heard a member of

Bell’s group say he was going to get his gun, and followed the group outside. Though the events immediately following are disputed—the officers claimed they identified themselves as police, witnesses claimed they did not and opened fire without provocation—the end results are unambiguous.

Bell was murdered in a hail of gunfire hours before his wedding. There were no weapons on him or in the car. At age 23, he left behind a fiancé and two daughters.

        Few incidents drive home the bleak devaluation of Black men’s lives the ways that stories like this do. Even one case like this is too many, but New York police officers are developing quite a record of murdering Black men with little to no punishment or repercussions. In 1999, Amadou Diallo lost his life in a hail of 41 bullets after trying to produce his wallet for identification. Abner Louima was one of the “lucky” ones. In 1997, he escaped police custody with his life, but only after officers savagely beat him and sodomized him with the handle of a toilet plunger. As Black men are increasingly represented among the ranks of the un- and underemployed, in prison, and in caskets, I find myself almost overwhelmed with sadness that our society can’t seem to view—and value–these men as people with loved ones and lives that can’t be replaced. Sean Bell could have been my husband, stepson, or cousin; indeed, he was someone’s father, someone’s fiancé, someone’s son. Cases like his, however, are a cruel reminder that at the core of racism is a denial of someone else’s humanity, complexity, and inherent value and worth.

        It’s interesting to me to connect the life and sad death of Sean Bell with Bill Cosby’s recent news coverage for coming to the defense of an African American judge who kicked white lawyers and spectators out of his courtroom to deliver a stern lecture on appropriate behavior to black defendants. The judge initially claimed to have been inspired by Cosby’s speeches chastising the black poor for failing to take responsibility for their lives and recognize the value of hard work and education. The biases, logical errors, and factual misrepresentations of the implication that the black poor are primarily for their plight have been articulated in several spaces, so I won’t repeat them here. I will say, however, that Sean Bell’s tragic death (and the criminal justice system’s sanctioning of it) does more than any verbal argument can to illuminate how taking personal responsibility falls far short of changing the social systems, institutions, and ideologies that reproduce the racist thought that contributed to Sean Bell’s murder.

         Sean Bell was the responsible, upstanding citizen Cosby exhorts poor blacks to be, but ultimately, personal responsibility couldn’t save his life. Instead, the racist framing of black men as criminals prevailed with deadly consequences, and social systems worked to reflect once more how little value our society places on the lives of black men.

The Pew Center on the States, part of the not-for-profit Pew Charitable Trusts headquartered in Washington, DC, released a report last week entitled, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008. The report’s principal author, Jennifer Warren, notes that the incarcerated population in the US has grown steadily over the past three decades to reach the point in 2007 where about one in every 100 adults in this country – the actual incarceration rate is one in every 99.1 adults – is now confined in a prison or jail. The total prison population in 2007 was nearly 1.6 million with an additional 723,000 people in local jails. China, the country with the second highest incarceration rate in the world, has about 1.5 million people in its prisons.


The report is significant not only because of the shocking statistics it presents on the US incarceration rate relative to other countries, but also because of the data on the disproportionate incarceration of some groups relative to others and on the costs of incarceration. As the report points out, the one in 100 statistic

“masks far higher incarceration rates by race, age and gender” (p. 5).

Men and women of color, especially young African American and Hispanic men and women, are far more likely to be incarcerated than white men and women. For example, among men, the highest incarceration rate is among African Americans: one in 21, compared with one in 54 for Hispanics and one in 136 for whites. But the rate jumps to one in nine for African American men ages 20-34, the highest rate of any gender, race, or age group. Among women, African Americans again have the highest incarceration rate: one in 279, compared with one in 658 for Hispanics and one in 1,064 for whites. The highest incarceration rate among women is for African American women ages 35-39: one in 100.


According to some commentators who have seen the report, these figures simply show higher crime rates among these groups. As a law professor and former federal judge stated:

“One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense” (quoted in The New York Times, February 29, 2008, p. A14).

However, the report indicates that much of the growth in incarceration is due to an increased willingness of the criminal justice system to imprison nonviolent offenders – especially drug offenders – as well as those who have committed minor or technical violations of probation or parole. States have enacted “three strikes” laws, indeterminate sentencing structures, and mandatory minimum sentencing policies that have contributed significantly to “how big the crowd behind bars will be” (p. 7). And one important outcome of this “get-tough” approach is growing strain on states’ budgets. On average, states spend nearly 7% of their total budget on corrections. While most states still spend more on health care, education, and transportation, the percentage of state budgets going to corrections has risen in the past two decades. For instance, in 1987, for every dollar spent by the states on higher education, 32 cents was spent on corrections. In 2007, however, the states were spending 60 cents on corrections for every dollar spent on higher education (p. 32). There appears to be little recognition of the relationship between inadequate or deficient education and crime, not to mention the relationships between racism, sexism, and social class inequality and crime.


The Pew report recommends diversion programs, such as community supervision, for nonviolent offenders as well early release for nonviolent inmates. Some states that have felt the budget strain of growing incarceration rates most intensely are making changes to their sentencing and correctional policies and practices. Texas, for instance, leads the country in incarceration even though the state saw a slight drop in its prison population in 2007. That same year the Texas legislature approved expansions to drug courts and drug treatment programs to divert substance abusers from prison. It will be worth monitoring the impact of these changes to gauge who benefits from them and if they can overcome the racism, sexism and class inequality inherent in our criminal justice system.


The full report is available for download here.

The United States government has officially sanctioned itself as in the business of human trafficking. Like the international sex trade, the federal and state governments attach monetary value to bodies: they sell lives and futures for profit. Unlike the sex industry and the adoption hierarchy, however, this form of human trafficking privileges the bodies of Black, Brown and poor youth. The business is the prison-industrial complex: an entire economy and industry based upon “putting people in cages.”


Books Not Bars is a documentary that is a digital media advocacy project that documents the activist responses to California’s Proposition 21, in which the state would have built a “superjail,” a structure that was to be the largest per capita juvenile detention center in the country. This superjail, Van Jones, National Director of the Books Not Bars Campaign, calls a “monument to racism.” But I would extend this brilliant phrase even further: we have merely replaced slavery, an institution of racism, with its contemporary form—prisons—which are simply another institution and economy of racism.


And like the photographs of lynchings discussed by Smith, the criminalization of youth of color terrorizes both Whites and communities of color—further reifying the hegemonic social order. As the lynching photographs did at the turn of the twentieth century and as current images of murdered and tortured Iraqis do, the prison-industrial complex and the media’s visual construction of it, say more about whiteness than they do about those being warehoused, disposed of, erased and silenced. Importantly, the media also plays a “doubleness” in the case of the prison-industrial complex, where it both constructs this issue at the same time as it provides a format for introducing to the public at large information that the mainstream either warps or silences while also serving as a successful medium for resistance; as is the case with Books Not Bars. Regardless: race is visible.


Costing over 10 times as much to keep a young person in a juvenile justice facility then it does to educate them, the prison-industrial complex and the school-to-prison pipeline are current tentacles in a long history of America’s war on youth, and they offer a way to traffic and warehouse poor, youth of color. This documentary critically contributes to this conversation. As James Bell, Staff Attorney at the Youth Law Center remarks in Books Not Bars, the U.S.:

“is a society that does not like teenagers and likes to keep them at arms length. And when you add coloredness to it, it leads to fear.”

Public knowledge is, inherently, the sum of what the public knows. And what the public knows is a direct result of what the media tells it. Given that the majority of the U.S. receives its information through major media outlets—which are structurally and systemically raced, classed and gendered—the public is grossly, “profoundly, exponentially misinformed” by the media about the accurate account of youth crime, and therefore the “public has little context to judge” this issue other than what the media, or news, constructs and disseminates. Media is involved in the business of “the production of unreality.” For example, only 15% of all violent crimes are committed by youth, and yet the public thinks that 60% of violent crime is committed by youth. Yet this misimpression is also racialized: with African American adolescents being arrested at rate 48 times their White counterparts. The message is clear: we are not only pervading our war on youth, but as Vincent Schiraldi, President of Justice Policy Institute reminds us:

“Black kids matter less than white kids.”

Books Not Bars also delicately challenges society’s fear, distrust and dislike of youth, where they are the problem, by offering a perspective of youth as the solution. (For a discussion of the historical roots of the racialized construction of youth delinquency, see “Tracing the Historical Origins of Youth Delinquency & Violence: Myths & Realities About Black,” by Dr. William Cross). The message of activism in Books Not Bars is also achieved through its macro stance, locating the problem in systems, and not on individual bodies. It asks not about what youth behaviors are, but instead about what the structural arrangements are facilitate the proliferation of the prison-industrial complex.


Despite the prison-industrial complex and the criminalization of youth being an issue that invades the social, political, economic, historical, and human rights fabric of our society (or as James Bell says, “the civil rights, human rights issue of the 21st Century), Books Not Bars does not steer us into believing we are in imminent social doom. Effective for its use of a variety of visual and audio imagery, Books Not Bars weaves together a fine balance of information and history with a variety of successful, current activist campaigns and, most importantly, with a persistent theme of the way that the audience can get involved in fighting this issue; this documentary creates—as the finest of digital media advocacy does—“a space for action.”


It is worth mentioning, that as a result of the Books Not Bars Campaign and the Youth Force Coalition’s work, they were able to force a withdrawal of the $2.3 million dollars the state had earmarked to build the superjail.

~ Jessica Ruglis, PhD Candidate
CUNY-Graduate Center

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is one of Arizona’s wonders, right up there with the Grand Canyon. A Google search on Arpaio returns 329,000 hits, including articles in Madrid’s El Mundo, the London Times and the Johannesburg Star.   Arpaio owes his notoriety to a series of shenanigans he has committed in his capacity as Sheriff.   Two of his better known feats involved resurrecting the chain gang (going so far as to boast of having the only female chain gang in history), housing inmates in tents, and forcing them to wear pink underwear.   And, more than two-thirds of those in the Maricopa county jail are pre-trial detainees, so are not convicted of any crime and presumably innocent; but, that is not the way Arpaio treats the inmates in his custody.


Arpaio has found a new cause célèbre that will score high with many voters: the so-called “illegal” problem.   The latest episode of “illegal” persecution is taking place just outside Pruitt’s furniture store in Phoenix, even as I write this.   Latin American day workers congregate in some parts of town looking for work. After the Phoenix police moved them out of a Home Depot, they dispersed to areas in close proximity, including the area near Pruitt’s. Pruitt’s owner hired off-duty Phoenix Police officers to “protect” customers from day laborers. When Phoenix authorities put an end to this, Arpaio jumped into the fray with alacrity. He had 160 officers deputized as federal immigration agents.
A New York Times reporter who witnessed Arpaio’s deputies in action wrote:

“They’ll pull a car over for a traffic infraction, then check everyone’s papers. They say they act on reasonable suspicion only — if they see a shirt or shoes like those worn south of the border or hear Spanish. They say it isn’t profiling.”

While Arpaio, who loves the limelight, is basking in the attention he is receiving, Latin Americans are suffering the consequences of his sham. Members of a Latino congregation in a nearby Lutheran Church no longer drive to services, they walk. They fear Sheriff Joe, their pastor said.


Arpaio’s parents were immigrants from Naples. There was a time when Italians were not considered white in the United States. They worked in unsanitary and dangerous places that killed them disproportionately. Some were lynched in Florida and Louisiana. Their pain and suffering was deplorable. The Italian immigrants were human beings who deserved better, as do the Mexican day laborers in Maricopa County.  A piece of paper has no bearing on it.

~ José A. Cobas
Program in Sociology
School of Social and Family Dynamics
Arizona State University

There is a new report from ColorLines and The Chicago Reporter who conducted a joint national investigation of fatal police shootings in America’s 10 largest (more than 1 million) cities. Two significant points emerge from the report:

African Americans were overrepresented among police shooting victims in every city the publications investigated.

And, second:

Latinos are a rising number of fatal police shooting victims. Starting in 2001, the number of incidents in which Latinos were killed by police in cities with more than 250,000 people rose four consecutive years, from 19 in 2001 to 26 in 2005. The problem was exceptionally acute in Phoenix, which had the highest number of Latinos killed in the country.

The report points to the “implicit bias” of police toward Black and Latino people, and notes that this can be overcome with a combination of accountability and training, as in D.C. :

Washington, D.C., which had the nation’s highest rate of police shootings during the 1990s, has cut the rate of shootings dramatically through a combination of training and accountability. Others point to a small but growing number of police departments like Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. that are looking not so much at whether the shootings are justified or not, but about the decisions police and supervisors took that led up to the shootings.

Still, the fact is, the mere fact of being Black or Latino in most large cities in the U.S., such as here in New York, means being ontologically vulnerable to being shot by police.