Mass Incarceration

After the Emancipation Proclamation was passed in January of 1863, the slaves were freed but were left with nothing but poverty. On the other hand, those who were slave owners profited off of their free labor, so multitudes of folks in the South lost an abundance of money and needed to find a way to get it back. Many people, including corrupt government systems, were finding loop-holes around the 13th amendment. That was when slave owners and Southerners in general, realized incarceration was a way to have prisoners provide free labor. The 13th amendment states that everyone is free, with the exception of criminals. So, African-American people were arrested in mass for extremely insignificant crimes like vagrancy, loitering, and things of that sort. African-Americans were freed, only to be enslaved again, but through a different culprit. This is how the South rebuilt their economy after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed.

This information connects to our current issue of mass incarceration of people of color. There is an unspoken prejudice in our society, where it seems that the color of people's skin determines how dangerous one is. Although one may think he or she isn't "racist", everyone has preconceived thoughts and opinions about what other people's outward appearance has to do with their character. This is why I, and many others, believe that our criminal justice system is broken. Those in authority often are harsher on people of color compared to their white counterparts when it comes to things like police brutality, prison/jail sentencing, and the rate at which they are arrested in general. Just like how African-Americans were arrested for the smallest crimes in the 1800s-1960s, they still face similar tribulations regarding race and the criminal justice system. 1 in 3 black males will go to prison in their lifetime and 1 in 6 Latino males will go to prison in their lifetime, compared to their white male counterparts who will expect a 1 in 17 chance of going to prison within their lifetime. Black and Latino people are over-represented in jails and prisons. There has been slavery everywhere on earth that has been inhabited by humans, however, the United States is the only place where there was a distinct physical difference between the slaves and the slave owners, and that was the color of their skin. This is how the false notion of white superiority came about. The color of one's skin became a stigma in this country because of the cruel history of slavery. We need to understand that the history of our country has had a domino effect on the judicial and criminal justice systems of today. These systemic oppressions have cost many people of color in this country their time and their lives on behalf of the prejudices of authorities, all stemming from slavery.

According to the NAACP, African Americans and Caucasians commit the same amount of crimes, however, black citizens are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. "If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%" (Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, NAACP).

Lui Maile was born in West Valley, Utah and raised in Sandy, Utah. He and his siblings are first generation Tongan- Americans. Maile was exposed to gang violence, drugs, and crime in general at a young age and eventually got involved when he was a teenager. This inevitably caused Maile to be incarcerated at the early age of seventeen and charged as an adult. Maile continued the cycle of going in and out of prison for the next decade and a half of his life. He has now overcome this cycle and changed his life for the better. Maile is currently living in Tooele, Utah and going back to school. He shares his story and mentors troubled adolescence in hopes that they don't make the same mistakes he did.

The objective of my interview with Maile is to exhibit racial injustice in our judicial and criminal justice systems and to also expose the overall prejudice that is held by figures of authority when arresting and/or profiling people of color.

• They Don't Care About Us by Michael Jackson

"Tell me what has become of my rights

Am I invisible because you ignore me?

Your proclamation promised me free liberty, no

I'm tired of being the victim of shame

They're throwing me in a class with a bad name

I can't believe this is the land from which I came

You know I really do hate to say it

The government don't wanna see"

"They Don't Care About Us" ties into mass incarceration because Michael Jackson is literally talking about how the system doesn't care about African-American people. If you watch the music video, it takes place in a prison to show the injustice that black people face in America. He talks about how the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, yet they are enslaved by another oppressor, which is the corrupt government and criminal justice system.

• High For Hours by J. Cole

"For real? I thought this was "Thou shalt not kill"

But police still lettin' off on n****s in the Ville

Claimin' that he reached for a gun

They really think we dumb and got a death wish

Now somebody's son is layin' breathless"

J. Cole illustrates the hypocrisy in America in "High for Hours". In the verse right before the one quoted, he talks about how he saw political figures "high five each other" when Bin Laden was killed. He shreds light on how they are against terrorism when it is in other countries, yet when it happens in our own communities (i.e. police killing black people) they ignore it and pretend it isn't happening because it isn't personally happening to them. This mentality all ties into why the mass incarceration of black and brown people is much higher than their white counterparts.

• Point of No Return by Geto Boys

"And hold you in the penitentiary like a punk

But you can't do sh** unless a motherf***er tell ya

You ain't a motherf***in' man n**** yous a failure

You wonder why I hate cha and I paint this picture?

Cause the government is fu**ed up and I ain't that n****

So you can point the fingers at the motherf***in' press

Cause they be feeding me with all the sh** that I address

It ain't my motherf***in' fault n****s ain't learnin'

We in too deep and ain't no returnin'"

In this specific verse, Geto Boys wrote this from the perspective of a racist cop speaking to a young black man. They specifically show the way in which prisoners are treated within the penitentiary and how they have little control of what they do (i.e. when they eat, sleep, do activities, etc). The Geto Boys also display the way the press perceives people of color and presents them in the media in a negative way. Writing this piece from the perspective of a racist police officer illustrates the prejudice in America that has created the uproar in rising rates of mass incarceration of African-American and Latino people specifically.

• Changes by 2Pac

"Cops give a damn about a n*gro

Pull the trigger, kill a n***a, he's a hero

"Give the crack to the kids: who the hell cares?

One less hungry mouth on the welfare!"

First ship 'em dope and let 'em deal to brothers

Give 'em guns, step back, watch 'em kill each other

"It's time to fight back," that's what Huey said

Two shots in the dark, now Huey's dead

I got love for my brother

But we can never go nowhere unless we share with each other

We gotta start making changes"

Tupac Shakur is one of the most influential Hip-Hop artists of all time, and when he released "Changes", he was using his platform to bring awareness to police brutality, the excessive amounts of people on welfare, high drug use rates, and gang violence within communities of lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Shakur also sheds light on the war on drugs and how Nixon and the rest of the government put drugs into communities of color to put more black citizens in prison and basically destroy their communities. He illuminates the harsh conditions that people of color live with daily within these communities and really depicts how the system does not value the lives of people who look dissimilar to them and frankly, do not care if they are to live or die.

• Police State by Dead Prez

"The average black male live a third of his life in a jail cell cause the world is controlled by the white male

And the people don't never get justice

And the women don't never get respected

And the problems don't never get solved

And the jobs don' never pay enough so the rent always late can you relate?

We living in a police state"

Dead Prez starts the first line of the hook in "Police State" with the statistic that 1 in 3 black males will go to prison within their lifetime. He then goes to say that many other issues arise because of this statistic: Incarcerated people of color are faced with unjust prison sentences compared to their white counterparts, women aren't respected (specifically single black mothers because of the absence of their significant other in prison), bills not paid on time due to only one income to take care of a household, etc. These are specific examples that Dead Prez plays off of, but are a harsh reality to many within his community.

• Black America Again by Common

"I know that black lives matter and they matter to us

These are the things we gotta discuss

The new plantation, mass incarceration

Instead of educate, they'd rather convict the kids

As dirty as the water in Flint, the system is

Is it a felony or a misdemeanor

Maria Sharapova making more than Serena

It took Viola Davis to say this

The rose of the help and the gangsters is really all they gave us

We need Avas, Ta-Nehisis, and Cory Bookers

The salt of the Earth to get us off of sugar and greasy foods

I don't believe the news or radio, stereotypes we refuse

Brainwashed in the cycle to spin

We write our own story, black America again"

Common discusses many social issues that exist within the black community in "Black America Again". He brings up issues of black women being paid less than white women when he references Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams, Flint, Michigan not having clean water since 2014, mass incarceration being the new form of slavery, and unhealthy eating habits that people have to turn to simply because it's cheaper. Common ends the verse on an empowering note by saying that his community needs to come together and refuse what the media has depicted them as and the stereotypes society has placed before them. He says that they need to rewrite their story together, and that the time is now.

This comic illustrates some of the racial inequalities that are overlooked in America and ultimately play a part in the same mentality and prejudice that is imposed on marginalized people and contribute to high rising rates of mass incarceration of minorities compared to their Caucasian counterparts.

1 in 3 black males will go to prison within their lifetime. 1 in 6 Latino males will go to prison within their lifetime. 1 in 17 white males will go to prison within their lifetime. As we look at these statistics, some of us may wonder why people of color are more than twice as likely to be imprisoned than their white counterparts. All too often have I heard others try to belittle brown and black people by saying that their incarceration and arrest rates are much higher than Caucasians because they simply commit more crimes. This is not true in the slightest and that very thought process and attitude is one of the main reasons why people of color are over-represented in the prison system.

Ignorance, racial bias, and bigotry are some of the many faults in our criminal justice and judicial systems that have led to the previously stated statistics. It has been stated in many sources that white people and people of color commit the same amount of crimes but black and brown people are arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate. According to the NAACP, “African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites.” Lower socioeconomic areas, which are usually highly encompassed with people of color, are policed more than areas that are predominantly white. David Kirk of The University of Maryland (Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice) says in his article “The Neighborhood Context of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Arrest” that, “At the neighborhood level, black youths tend to reside in areas with both significantly higher levels of concentrated poverty than other youths as well as lower levels of collective efficacy than white youths. Variations in neighborhood tolerance of deviance across groups explain little of the arrest disparities, yet tolerance of deviance does influence the frequency with which a crime ultimately ends in an arrest. Even after accounting for relevant demographic, family, and neighborhood-level predictors, substantial residual arrest differences remain between black youths and youths of other racial and ethnic groups.” Kirk’s insight helps us understand that the racial disparities experienced in communities of color are fueled by racial bias, legislation that disproportionately affects minorities, and the correlation of poverty stricken areas with high crime rates (due to not being able to meet certain basic needs, mental illness, lack of resources, etc). Overall, communities that are predominantly made of up of brown and black people are over-policed and often times, the residents of these areas develop a distrust for police because they witness the unfair treatment (pretextual stops, assumptions of crime which leads to false arrest/persecution, etc.) and racial injustice (harassed and arrested for things that white people wouldn’t be badgered for) that happen in their sections.

Mass Incarceration is a very complex issue that has many facets. It can be hard to comprehend at first but once you start to put two and two together, you begin to realize how prevalent yet overlooked it is in our society. Mass incarceration is not a new topic, however, it is more recently coming into the limelight because of the given climate of our nation. This issue grows each and everyday as the systems that dictate our society becomes more cunning with how they “redesign racial caste”, as Michelle Alexander would say. Mass incarceration stems from America’s greatest sin: slavery. When Alexander says that racial caste has been redesigned in America, she means that in the climax of racial segregation and even before that time, it was socially acceptable to be blatantly racist and you didn’t need to disguise your malicious ignorance, but in our current day and age, racism is institutionalized, and the statistics exhibit this profoundly. The extreme gap between arrest and incarceration rates of minorities and Caucasians should be of great concern, yet racial bias and injustice has somehow become normalized in our society. People have accepted that the system has time and time again been unfair to racially marginalized individuals. We, as a national community, need to come together and lobby for reform within the corrupt and unjust system that administers this country.

As we look back on history, we can see that a grand portion of mass incarceration stems from the War on Drugs passed by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. One of Nixon’s top aides, John Ehrlichman subsequently admitted to Nixon’s unjust acts saying, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” This is another way that America has reconfigured institutionalized and systemic racism. The government at the time knew they couldn’t throw African-American people in prison for no reason, so they targeted their communities and came after something that was struggled with in those sections: drugs. The malicious acts displayed through President Nixon’s legislation and demands displays the deep-rooted racism that has been planted for centuries within the United States.

Another thing to consider with the War on Drugs, and individuals convicted of drug related offenses, is that along with communities of color being targeted by police for crime, minorities also receive longer prison sentences compared to their white counterparts for the same exact crime and criminal record. In my personal experience as a woman of color, too often, people of authority have treated me as a threat. When my white friends go into stores, they are left alone to go about their business. When I walk into a store, clerks often follow me around in a discreet manner, as they automatically assume I would steal something because of the color of my skin. There have been too many times that I’ve seen police use extreme amounts of excessive force on African- American individuals in videos on social media, but then they turn around and have tolerance for the white people they are arresting. I’ve seen too many hashtags of innocent black men and women that were murdered because of the color of their skin by police who get to walk away with a just slap on the wrist. The color of their skin is not a weapon. It is not a threat. It is not a peril. All of these situations have a common denominator: racial bias. Judges have this same racial bias when giving sentences. They give people of color longer sentences compared to their white counterparts because white people are seen as less of a threat. Minorities are seen as a threat to society and are ineluctably deemed as dangerous. Our criminal justice and judicial systems need to do better.

There needs to be serious change within the prison system. The ACLU has come up with a few solutions to decrease the prison populations. Their first proposal is to eliminate incarceration as a penalty for certain classes of low-level, non-violent offenses- especially when these offenses are the result of mental illness, drug addiction, or are first-time offenses. Their following solutions contribute to strengthening cost-effective alternatives to incarceration and drug treatment programs, distinguishing between the people currently in prison who continue to pose threats to safety and those who are ready to re-enter society, and requiring regular, systemic evaluations of our criminal justice system. All of these proposals will be the cause for reform. As a society, we need to do better in not conforming to racial bias and injustice, even if it is prevalent. Becoming aware that mass incarceration exists, and ultimately was birthed from racism and prejudice, is the first step in recognizing this up-roaring issue in our nation. Simply educating yourself on how you can personally contribute to the reform of mass incarceration can do so much. Start by identifying the prejudices and racial assumptions associated with your own, and other people's identity and unlearn them. Treat every person the same regardless of their physical appearance. And finally, an ode to white people: stop clutching your purse when a brown or black person is in the elevator with you. The black guy struggling to get into his apartment? Don’t call the police on him, he’s your new neighbor. When you ask a person of color where they’re from and they respond with another state, don’t say, “No, where are you really from?” She’s a U.S. citizen even though she’s not white. It all begins with unlearning racial assumptions and knowing that people of color are not a threat. Thank you for tuning in to my Ted Talk.