Now, to address the deepest poison pill in our nation: the direct link between slavery and the systematic criminal injustice of our corporate policing and punishment system. What has the GOP done for black people lately? Not much. In fact, it goes further back—all the way back to 150 years ago.
The inherent flaw in the 13th Amendment is that it has long been credited with ending slavery and indenture servitude when in fact, it didn’t. Not completely.
We no longer have slavery or indentured servitude—unless a person has been “duly convicted.” That means arrested by a police officer, overseen by a judge or jury, then systematically deemed fit for use as a beast of burden without fair compensation or worker protections. That very subject is at the heart of a new documentary appearing soon on Netflix called 13th.
The film’s director, Ava DuVernay (who also directed Selma), makes her case.
Directed by "Selma's" Ava DuVernay, "13th" builds a compelling case for how after the Civil War racial division historically served the needs of political elites, and how coded language and policies -- including "wars" on crime and drugs in the 1970s and '80s, respectively -- advanced those objectives.
DuVernay prosecutes the case almost chronologically, from the image the original "The Birth of a Nation" painted of black men in 1915 through the steady rise of a prison population weighted toward them over the last 45 years.
Richard Nixon channeled his hostility to the civil-rights and anti-war movements into calls for law and order -- echoed today in Donald Trump's campaign -- while Ronald Reagan's focus on drugs disproportionately impacted minorities.
That was followed by George H.W. Bush's notorious Willie Horton ad -- using a furloughed African-American murderer to portray opponent Michael Dukakis as soft on crime -- and the realization by Democrats, starting with Bill Clinton, that they could no longer afford to play defense on the issue.
The film's final leg brings the conversation full circle, focusing on privatization of the prison system, and how corporations and their lobbying arms exploit that inexpensive source of labor.
Given the concerns about relations between law enforcement and minority communities, "13th" could hardly be timelier. The same goes for "Class Divide," which uses New York's West Chelsea -- and the two communities coexisting within that neighborhood -- to illustrate inequality and class division.
Despite the objections and complaints of Mike Pence, the systematic bias and institutional racism of our justice system is quite plain to see. By the numbers, the Bureau of Justice Statistics documents that African Americans are far more likely to be jailed or imprisoned during their lifetime.
The lifetime chances of a person going to prison are higher for men (9%) than for women (1%) and higher for blacks (16%) and Hispanics (9%) than for whites (2%). At current levels of incarceration newborn black males in this country have a greater than a 1 in 4 chance of going to prison during their lifetimes, while Hispanic males have a 1 in 6 chance, and white males have a 1 in 23 chance of serving time.
Some, like former New York Police Department Detective Harry Houck, would argue that this is the natural result of black men being more “criminal,” which is an inherently racist argument.
But the stats and figures he produced actually show something else: that police in New York repeatedly assume that black men are a more likely suspect than others, but they are consistently arrested at a rate that is actually lower than the level of suspicion against them. It’s something I discovered too when I went through the NYPD numbers touted by Houck. Here’s the raw data.
NYPD Petit Larceny Stats
AMER IND 0.8% Victims, 0.3% Suspects, 0.4% Arrests
ASIAN/PAC.ISL 11.1% Victims, 3.9% Suspects, 5.5% Arrests
BLACK 30.9% Victims, 51.0% Suspects, 44.4% Arrests
WHITE 32.5% Victims, 15.4% Suspects, 17.3% Arrests
HISPANIC 24.7% Victims, 29.3% Suspects, 32.5% Arrests
As this shows, blacks drop as a percentage from 51 percent of suspects down 6 points to 44 percent of arrests, while Hispanics increase from 29 percent of suspects up 3 points to 32 percent of arrests. This kind of shift happens on every [NYPD] chart, consistently. I don’t know why that is or what it fully means but perhaps it shows that for some reason black people are being suspected consistently at a rate higher than there is evidence to arrest them with.
This kind of skew is also present when you examine the NYPD’s “Stop, Question and Frisk” program, which only produced arrests in 3 percent of the interactions between police and citizens.
New York’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, hailed by the city’s mayor and police chief as crucial in fighting crime, could boast only a 3% conviction rate between 2009 and 2012, according to a report by the state attorney general released on Thursday.
The report by Eric Schneiderman, the first detailed examination of the policy’s arrest and conviction rate, used data from the New York Police Department and the Office of Court Administration to examine approximately 2.4m stops over the three-year period. Those stops resulted in almost 150,000 arrests, but only half of those led to a conviction or a guilty plea.
New York police stopped 2 million people—yes, 2 million—yet only produced 150,000 arrests and 75,000 convictions. That is a 97 percent failure rate. And even when these stops did uncover guns or find drugs, more of them were found on white citizens than black or brown.
White New Yorkers make up a small minority of stop-and-frisks, which were 84 percent black and Latino residents. Despite this much higher number of minorities deemed suspicious by police, the likelihood that stopping an African American would find a weapon was half the likelihood of finding one on a white person.
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded a weapon was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. The NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out every 49 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 71 stops of Latinos and 93 stops of African Americans to find a weapon.
• The likelihood a stop of an African American New Yorker yielded contraband was one-third less than that of white New Yorkers stopped.The NYPD uncovered contraband in one out every 43 stops of white New Yorkers. By contrast, it took the Department 57 stops of Latinos and 61 stops of African Americans to find contraband.
It’s unlikely that the appropriate lesson to take from these findings is that stops of white people should increase because they are more likely to carry weapons and drugs. Rather, they suggest that police are excessively targeting minorities. Officers may be netting more successful stops of white New Yorkers because they are only likely to stop a white person when they actually suspect that person of committing a crime. Considering one officer’s testimony that superiors explicitly directed him to target young black men, minorities are judged by a much more flexible definition of “reasonable suspicion.”
Generally speaking even outside of New York City, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, African Americans are stopped twice as often during traffic stops and searched three times more often—yet again, guns and drugs are found in their possession less often.
For years, police records have shown that black drivers tend to be less likely than white drivers to turn up with guns or drugs when searched at traffic stops. At the same time, black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to be subjected to these searches, according to a 2013 federal survey.
…
This chart from the Times analysis shows how often black people were searched at traffic stops compared with whites. As you can see, the Connecticut State Police searched blacks 2.6 times as often as whites; the Rhode Island State Police searched blacks 2.5 times as often; the Illinois State Police searched twice as often; and the North Carolina State Police searched 1.5 times as often. In Chicago, blacks were searched more than five times as often as whites.
But all that extra scrutiny doesn't seem to be turning up any more illegal stuff. In Connecticut, Illinois and North Carolina, police found contraband less often when they searched black people than white people. In Chicago, for example, blacks were 30 percent less likely to be found with any illegal goods. State police officers from Rhode Island were the exception; they were more likely to search black drivers, but they also more likely to find contraband.
Overall arrest rates for black people are not out of proportion with their relative population. If you include the fact that they are stopped twice as often and searched nearly three times as often you should see, in the aggregate, that they are arrested about two to three times as often as well simply because of police behavior—and that’s exactly what you see, as I’ve pointed out previously.
If you apply a 2:1 correction for total arrests by race contrasting blacks and whites, the apparent disparity that O’Reilly speaks of completely disappears. The current 3 to 1 arrest rate between whites (6,214,197 total arrests in 2014) and blacks (2,549,655 total arrests) grows to ratio of 6 to 1, which is about the same as their relative percentages in the overall population. The real question then becomes, are blacks truly more violent and criminal—or are police more arrest- and trigger-happy when it comes to black suspects?
Greater police scrutiny based on the racist presumption of greater inherent criminality that Houck espoused of course leads to a higher arrest rate, a higher rate of uses of force, and ultimately a higher rate of police killings of black men—by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1.
In recent years there have been clashes and protests in the aftermath of the most violent of police confrontations with African Americans including the killings of Jonathan Ferrell, Jonathan Crawford III, Darrien Hunt, Freddie Grey, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Sam Dubois, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Phillando Castille, Tyre King, Keith Lamont Scott, Terence Cutcher, Alfred Olango, Donte Jones, and Carnell Snell. Yes, police kill more white people in total. But as a percentage of the population so far this year with 818 casualties, the likelihood of being killed by police by race is currently 2.03 per million for whites and 5.49 per million for blacks—which is nearly three times higher.
And when they’re unarmed it gets worse.
Of those killed by police in 2015 who were unarmed 76 were black, 103 were white. Again considering the smaller population of black people in the nation their chances of being killed by police when unarmed are 2.5 per million vs 0.52 per million for whites.
Yet again, that is not even close to equal odds. In fact, it’s five times greater.
Yes, there is a higher murder rate among young black men and this fact has been repeatedly and grossly exaggerated and exploited to rationalize and justify fear of black men, but the reason for this is most likely attributed to gangs and poverty rather than an inherent penchant for violence. Again, the BJS notes that rates of violence tend to vary by income and not necessarily by race, and that high rates of urban violence may be more related to the density of poverty in those areas rather than the race of those persons.
Despite the facts and figures the perception of guilt, inherent criminality, and violence persists, and it continues to influence how police behave as shown by all this data.
But this isn’t just a case of police bias. The presumption of guilt also impacts our courts, judges, juries, and sentencing and parole boards, leading to the criminalization of generation after generation of young black men. Even though black people use drugs at the same rate or slightly less than white people, they do far more prison time for it.
White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine, marijuana and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely to go to prison for drug offenses.
Nearly 20 percent of whites have used cocaine, compared with 10 percent of blacks and Latinos, according to a 2011 survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — the most recent data available.
Higher percentages of whites have also tried hallucinogens, marijuana, pain relievers like OxyContin, and stimulants like methamphetamine, according to the survey. Crack is more popular among blacks than whites, but not by much.
Still, blacks are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites, according to a 2009 report from the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
Of the 225,242 people who were serving time in state prisons for drug offenses in 2011, blacks made up 45 percent and whites comprised just 30 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. [emphasis added]
This is the very definition of systemic bias and institutional racism. And despite what some say, it’s not an accident: it’s by design.
One hundred and fifty years after the supposed end of slavery, black men are disproportionately torn away from their families, leaving them fatherless. Disenfranchised from voting. Blocked from future employment and locked into a system of perpetual catch and release.
And while they remain in the system, they are exploited for low cost labor by private corporations.
Angola’s farm operations and other similar prison industries have ancestral roots in the black chattel slavery of the South. Specifically, the proliferation of prison labor camps grew during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, a time when southern states established large prisons throughout the region that they quickly filled, primarily with black men. Many of these prisons had very recently been slave plantations, Angola and Mississippi State Penitentiary (known as Parchman Farm) among them. Other prisons began convict-leasing programs, where, for a leasing fee, the state would lease out the labor of incarcerated workers as hired work crews. Convict leasing was cheaper than slavery, since farm owners and companies did not have to worry at all about the health of their workers.
In this new era of prison industry, the criminal “justice” system, the state determined the size of the worker pool. Scores of recently freed slaves and their descendants now labored to generate revenue for the state under a Jim Crow regime.
More than a century later, our prison labor system has only grown. We now incarcerate more than 2.2 million people, with the largest prison population in the world, and the second highest incarceration rate per capita. Our prison populations remain racially skewed. With few exceptions, inmates are required to work if cleared by medical professionals at the prison. Punishments for refusing to do so include solitary confinement, loss of earned good time, and revocation of family visitation. For this forced labor, prisoners earn pennies per hour, if anything at all.
Angola is not the exception; it is the rule.
Private prisons have now become a billion-dollar industry and have been throwing tons of lobbying money at government officials, in the same manner used by Donald Trump to influence politicians through his uncertified charitable “foundation:”
Several industries have become notorious for the millions they spend on influencing legislation and getting friendly candidates into office: Big Oil, Big Pharma and the gun lobby among them. But one has managed to quickly build influence with comparatively little scrutiny: Private prisons. The two largest for-profit prison companies in the United States – GEO and Corrections Corporation of America – and their associates have funneled more than $10 million to candidates since 1989 and have spent nearly $25 million on lobbying efforts. Meanwhile, these private companies have seen their revenue and market share soar. They now rake in a combined $3.3 billion in annual revenue and the private federal prison population more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, according to a report by the Justice Policy Institute. Private companies house nearly half of the nation’s immigrant detainees, compared to about 25 percent a decade ago, a Huffington Post report found. In total, there are now about 130 private prisons in the country with about 157,000 beds.
Marco Rubio is one of the best examples of the private prison industry’s growing political influence, a connection that deserves far more attention now that he’s officially launched a presidential bid. The U.S. senator has a history of close tiesto the nation’s second-largesct for-profit prison company, GEO Group, stretching back to his days as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. While Rubio was leading the House, GEO was awarded a state government contract for a $110 million prison soon after Rubio hired an economic consultant who had been a trustee for a GEO real estate trust. Over his career, Rubio has received nearly $40,000 in campaign donations from GEO, making him the Senate’s top career recipient of contributions from the company. (Rubio’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
Prisons are a profit center. They provide jobs, usually in rural areas which are largely white. Police produce the crop—prisoners who are largely black—due to their own and the court’s biases, which keeps these money mills operating. And by law, they have to be maintained at full capacity.
This system doesn’t require any particular individual involved in it to be an openly black-hating bigot. This system doesn't require police to have plots against black people. All it requires is that people continue to presume that the final results we see in the end—the lifetime likelihood of going to prison—is the result of the actions of the prisoners alone, and not any of the people they encounter in the system. That attitude removes the one key ingredient that can prevent and correct this systematic bias:
The presumption of innocence.
That’s something we certainly cannot expect from the GOP.