My first crime-bill post (here) raised a question about the heart-breaking story of the execution of Ricky Ray Rector when it is used to imply that Bill Clinton was a racist and to call for blacks not to vote for Hillary Clinton when Trump was the alternative.
The question was whether it’s OK to leave out the facts that Rector killed a man at random because his friend was short a $3 entrance fee and that he then shot in the back and killed the town’s well-liked police officer when the officer was doing him a favor he had requested. And also to leave out the fact that he was not mentally disabled when he committed those crimes but only became so because his suicide attempt failed after he shot his childhood friend, police officer Robert Martin, in the back.
Of course, anyone is free to decide those facts are irrelevant. But the question was, should these facts be, in effect, hidden from people like myself who are trying to understand Clinton’s predicament and motives? (I was fooled for quite some time, and learned this only because I was researching a book I was writing.)
In my view, an honest discussion would include these facts. But note, I did not and do not, condemn Michelle Alexander and other prominent writers as immoral for their omissions. Some didn’t know what they were doing, and others, with unquestionably good intentions, felt they were simply furthering an urgently important cause.
It is simply my view that they were mistaken to omit these facts, and the rest of us need to take their behavior and strategies into account when evaluating their positions and arguments. The same considerations hold for part #2 of this discussion.
From Chapter 6: The Crime Bill Myth (#2)
‘The New Jim Crow’
Alexander’s book is the best-selling book on the criminal justice system—ever. The paperback version spent at least three years on The New York Times paperback bestseller list and was still #3 eight years after the hardback’s publication. Her remarkable claim is that the drug laws were designed to produce mass incarceration with the “well-disguised” intent to function “in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow," the segregation laws overturned by the civil rights movement.
In a nutshell that’s the crime bill myth, and like most myths, it sounds pretty amazing. But is mass incarceration of Blacks and Whites really “strikingly similar to Jim Crow?” Or is it an evil of a very different kind?
The first obvious difference between Jim Crow laws and the crime bill is the attitude of Blacks. None of them favored Jim Crow laws, but when the 1994 crime bill passed, Gallup found that more Blacks (58%) favored it than Whites (49%). Note, too, that two-thirds of the Black Congressional Caucus voted for it. [Were they so stupid as to vote for the equivalent of re-instating Jim Crow? I think not.] Like the background to the Ricky Ray Rector story, these facts are typically omitted by the myth makers (I’ve never seen an exception).
Because mass incarceration has nothing to do with segregated lunch counters, schools, buses, or other public places that Jim Crow laws targeted, the only possible “striking similarity” to Jim Crow left is the impact of felony convictions on the right-to-vote. And that’s where Alexander rests her case.
But Jim Crow laws prevented almost all Southern Blacks from voting and cost the South nothing to implement, while the drug wars and mass incarceration keep only a fraction of Black people—[many of] those with felony convictions—from voting and about that many Whites as well. It costs the country around $100 billion per year. This looks nothing like Jim Crow and makes no sense as an effective way to suppress the Black vote.
In short, mass incarceration is in no way parallel to the Jim Crow laws. The very title of her book is a deception. But as the graph above shows, mass incarceration did grow by five times over a 30-year period. So if it wasn’t about Jim Crow, what was going on?
P.S. Again, make no mistake this myth will be used against Joe Biden by the Russians and the Republicans. If the Democrats by into it, they are accidentally working for the wrong team.
P.P.S.
I spent three years researching and writing a book on what’s so wrong with the Democrats that we cannot beat the worst president the country’s ever seen. I’m selling it on Amazon. But after all that work, I want as many people to read it as possible. So I’m giving away the PDF that the book was printed from (except it has color illustrations). [Full disclosure: I gave away a previous book online and it made it sell very well. So there is method to my madness.]
And you can get it here for free: RippedApart.org.
It’s completely free, I don’t even ask for your email. Read it before it’s too late.