Incarceration and Race in Michigan: Grounding the National Debate in State Practice
296
Incarceration and Race in Michigan: Grounding the National Debate in State Practice
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628953770 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Curtis Stokes is Professor of political theory and black politics in James Madison College at Michigan State University. He has edited and authored six books, including the award-winning Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies and The State of Black Michigan, 1967–2007.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Policing Black/Brown Communities inside/outside the United States
Neoliberalism and the Rise of the "Carceral State" in the Twenty-First Century
Darryl C. Thomas
There has never been any time in the history of African Americans' presence in the United States, from the slavery era to the present, when peace and peaceful coexistence existed between the police and African American people. Nothing since slavery, including Jim Crow segregation, forced convict labor, lynching, restrictive covenants in housing, the shutout of blacks from the New Deal programs like Social Security and the GI Bill, or massive resistance to school desegregation, or the ceaseless efforts to keep African Americans from voting, has sparked the level of outrage by African Americans as when they have felt under violent attack by the police. During these episodes of police violence toward the black community, African Americans have abandoned traditional civil-rights strategies, such as bringing court cases and marching peacefully, and instead have resorted to violence in the streets, destroying property and attacking symbols of the state in response to violent behavior of the police toward black communities. Starting with Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967, Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, Charlotte in 2016 — each of these cities went up in flames in response to police killing of a black man. The recent acquittal of police in the killing of black men in Minneapolis and St. Louis in 2017 resulted in protest across the United States and some cases of civil violence.
Cathy Lisa Schneider notes that no attribute of a racially divided society is a more compelling symbol of racial supremacy or instills the message of subjugation more persuasively than police. The persistence of identity checks, the stop-and-frisks, the contempt and ruthless manner with which police address black and Latino youths, and worst of all, the utter freedom that allows the most racist and sadistic cops to commit gross violations of human rights and homicide: all of these constantly and painfully remind minority youths of their subordinate status. In unequal, racially divided societies, political elites depend on police to enforce categorical boundaries. Police violence further polarizes social relations around an "us/them" divide. If social movements, courts, or other institutions offer alternative paths to justice, no matter how limited, political violence can be avoided. Riots or political violence are the last resort of those who find all paths to justice blocked.
Eric Wolf observes that all societies establish boundaries that define rights of membership, construct justificatory ontogenies for their cadres, and lay down criteria for denying participation and benefits to groups deemed undesirable, undeserving, or deleterious. Basically, state creation by definition involves the formation of unequal bounded categories — Frenchman/German, citizen/noncitizen, and national and non-national. Hence, extreme categorical inequality occurs when hegemonic groups conquer less powerful groups and force them into submission. During and following the inception of such historical processes, members of the hegemonic groups justify their privileged position through master narratives of empire or nation building. Categories simplify and facilitate exploitation (the expropriation of profits, labor power, and resources) and opportunity hoarding (exclusion of others from access to valuable resources and opportunities). Categories constructed for the purposes of slavery, conquest, or colonialism can later be used to reinforce unequal systems of remuneration — establishing color bars or other barriers to upward social mobility. By the same token, Anibal Quijano and Ramon Grosfoguel and V. Chloe S. Geora emphasize "colonialities of power" in which social practices are implicated in relationships among people even after colonial relationships have been eradicated. Over time, the police departments are perceived as an occupying army. Police community relations deteriorate, and trust between citizen and the state is lost.
Policing and Mass Incarceration
The standard narratives on the origins of mass incarceration cite President Ronald Reagan's infamous "War on Drugs" (in the 1980s) as the key factor behind the growth in black conviction and imprisonment. Nevertheless, Elizabeth Hinton contends that the growth of the mass incarceration regimes should be understood as the federal government's reaction to demographic transformation of the United States in the 1950s, including the achievements of the African American civil rights movement and the tenacious threat of urban rebellion. From the First World War to the Vietnam War, more than 6 million rural African Americans escaped the exploitation and terror of the Jim Crow South and moved to the Northeast, Midwest, and the West Coast in a mass exodus that transformed the nation. Black civil rights activists and labor leaders began organizing at the start of the migration and eventually propelled President Franklin D. Roosevelt to desegregate the defense and government industries as a result of A. Phillip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters' threatened March on Washington. The black efforts during the Second World War to seek a double victory against fascism at home and abroad, and their unrelenting call for integration eventually led the U.S. Supreme Court to endorse desegregation of Southern public schools in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Increasingly, proponents of civil rights began to adopt the tactics of Gandhi promoted by Dr. Martin Luther King and began to engage in a strategy of civil disobedience — direct action — through marches, sit-ins, and public protests, challenging Jim Crow segregation laws. Still, Southern governors and law-enforcement officials categorized these actions, such as Rosa Parks's refusal to sit in the black section of the bus, as "criminal" acts committed by "hoodlums," and civil rights marches as "street mobs" that were attempting to undermine law and order. As black citizens continued to move to the urban North amid the escalating civil rights movement, the ongoing exodus of primarily white middle-class residents from cities to suburban areas required new approaches to the problems municipalities faced, with a tax base in decline side by side with a growth of a black population in urban areas.
Starting in the early 1960s, the federal government began struggling with problems associated with remedying racial discrimination, ending poverty, and fighting crime in American cities, and these issues were crucial to domestic programs. Most African Americans were barred from participation in Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the GI Bill, and many other social welfare programs associated with the New Deal, making the Kennedy administration's total attack on delinquency one of the federal government's first reactions to the impact of the Great Migration in American cities. Cities with a high concentration of black population came under the scrutiny of the Kennedy administration as the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime in 1961 targeted urban black youth for increased surveillance. Anxieties about managing crime in black urban neighborhoods, however, limited the range of possibilities of New Frontier and Great Society alike. Elizabeth Hinton asserts that federal policymakers and officials did acknowledge unemployment and subpar urban school systems as some among many factors contributing to both poverty and crime. Nevertheless, incidents of collective violence during the second half of the 1960s moved liberal sympathizers away from structural critiques of poverty and support for community action programs. One of the outcomes of the Watts Rebellion in August 1965 was the developing consensus among policymakers, federal administrators, law-enforcement officials, and journalists who perceived crime as a specific problem associated with black urban youth. These actors concluded that the best way to suppress disorder and lawlessness on the nation's streets was through intensified enforcement of the law in black urban neighborhoods, where contempt for authority was extensive. After 250 separate incidents of urban civil disorder — euphemistically referred to in the literature as riots — that occurred in 1968, nearly half of them in the aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April, President Johnson signed the Safe Streets Act in June.
During the 1970s, the discourse on "law and order" and crime captured the national imagination. The Bronx became a national symbol of urban decay, and out of the ashes of despair sprung the hip-hop music genre. All over America, the movement of factory jobs to the Third World exacerbated the conditions set in motion by Nixon's aggressive domestic and foreign policy agenda. Increasingly, as employment, tax bases, and economic opportunity shrank, both federal and state governments began to shift their interest from education and infrastructure to the eradication of crime, expanding police budgets and triggering the passage of punitive laws such as the notorious 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws in order to calm the national fears about crime. The demonization of blackness was critical to this discourse on crime. White fears accelerated in the shadows of Black Power, defeat in Vietnam, the postWatergate discontent, the economic stagflation of the decade, the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, and the widespread perception that America was in decline. African Americans in urban spaces emerged as an "enemy of the state," and later the Latino/a and Muslim populations joined them. The historical condemnation of blackness provides a rationale for aggressive and sometimes violent policing.
Policing Black and Brown Communities
Police forces across the United States have been given the task of surveillance, monitoring, and protecting middle and upper classes from a growing population of poor black/brown communities excluded from experiencing the benefits of the American dream, globalization, and neoliberalism. One of the results of this new situation has been the growth of mass incarceration of African American and Latino (black/brown) populations in the United States. At the same time, there has been a surge of police killings of unarmed black suspects. To date, few police officers are actually convicted in these cases. The recent acquittal of a Minnesota police officer in the killing of Philando Castile also reflects other cases where officers have faced similar charges but not convictions. Other examples may be found in Cleveland, Pennsylvania, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, where police officers have been found not guilty of manslaughter. Elsewhere, including Cincinnati and South Carolina, jurors have deadlocked on charges after a fatal shooting and failed to deliver a verdict at all.
Starting in the 1980s the U.S. prison population increased more than 500 percent. Although its population is less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States holds roughly 2.3 million people, including 1.6 million in state and federal prisons and over 700,000 in local jails and immigration detention centers. America passed the point of negative return on incarceration rates long ago. Per head, the incarceration rate in the United States has risen sevenfold since the 1970s; it now locks up seven times as many people as France, eleven times as many as the Netherlands, and fifteen times as many as Japan. At any one time, one American adult in thirty-five is in prison, on parole, or on probation. Approximately one-third of African American men and one in six Hispanic men can expect to be locked up at some point in their lives, and one in nine black children has a parent behind bars. No country imprisons as many people as the United States does, or for so long. The American criminal justice system is particularly punishing toward blacks and Latinos, who are imprisoned at six times and twice the rates of whites respectively. According to a recent Economist report, the system is riddled with drugs, abuse, and violence.
Ta-Nehisi Coates notes that from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, incarceration rates in the United States doubled, from 150 per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000 before reaching a modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, American's prison and jail population from 1970 until today has risen sevenfold, from 300,000 people to 2.2 million. Currently, the U.S. incarceration rate — which accounts for people in prison and jails — is roughly twelve times the rate in Sweden, eight times the rate in Italy, seven times the rate in Canada, five times the rate in Australia, and four times the rate in Poland. America's nearest competitor is Russia — with the autocratic Vladimir Putin locking up about 450 people per 100,000. At the same time, China has about four times the American population, yet American jails and prisons house about half a million more people. According to an authoritative 2014 report by the National Research Council, the current American incarceration rate is unprecedented by historical and comparative standards.
Over the last couple of years alone, policing of black and brown communities resulted in significant civil rights violations that gained national and international attention. On April 25, 2015, a twenty-five-year-old African American male was stopped on the streets of Baltimore, forcibly taken into custody, and thrown, screaming in pain, into a police van. Later, he arrived at the University of Maryland R. Adams Crowley Shock Trauma Center in a coma from which he was never revived. He died one week later from a fatal spine injury after also experiencing complete cardiopulmonary arrest. His spine was 80 percent severed at the neck. As Jeffrey C. Isaac has observed, Freddie Gray never made it to prison. His incarceration began and terminated in the back of the police van. The Freddie Gray death at the hands of Baltimore police officers came only months after the controversial August 14 fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager in Ferguson, Missouri; the September 14, 2014, fatal shooting of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old African American child, in Cleveland, Ohio; the April 5, 2015, fatal shooting of Walter Scott, an unarmed African American man with a broken taillight, in North Charleston, South Carolina; and the list goes on. The number of African American males as well as females who have been killed by police has increased with regularity, and the language of justice and injustice has become part of the discourse around human rights and democratic legitimacy. The high American incarceration rates and the increase in police killings of unarmed African American suspects have raised questions about "American Exceptionalism."
Similarly, there are the policies associated with the practice of extraordinary rendition by which the United States sends terrorist suspects for interrogation in countries with a history of torture; unfortunately many of those receiving countries are in Africa — both north of the Sahara and in the Horn of Africa. President Obama only began to correct these injustices during his second administration. African countries with both Muslims and Christian citizens are still reportedly performing American dirty work. Good relations between Africa's Christians and Muslims are endangered by the policy of extraordinary rendition. It is also related to the growth and development of the "carceral state," blurring the lines between domestic and foreign affairs.
The militarization of policing may be connected to the increase usage of deadly force in urban areas. In recent years the police mobilization of armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and military-grade Kevlar vests have been linked to the 1967 creation of the SWAT unit in Los Angeles with the Watts Revolt and the so-called War on Drugs of the 1980s, as well as the current "War on Terror" supported by the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security. The militarization of the police may undermine democracy, freedom, and liberty of ordinary citizens as they contest public officials over access to public space. The introduction and usage by the police of paramilitary tactics and doctrines may also blur the lines between domestic and foreign policy. The show of force by the police in minority communities after the police killing of a person of color may have a lethal impact on police/community relations.
After decades of persistent prison growth, the prison population has reached a plateau during the past five years. There are several factors contributing to the reduction in the prison population, ranging from the financial crisis of 2009 to the widening budget pressures many states are facing, particularly the larger ones such as California, New York, and Texas, which have led to efforts to cut the growth in their prison populations. At the same time, reform in the sentencing regime by Eric Holder, former President Barack Obama's attorney general from 2009 to 2015, may explain the modest decline in federal prison numbers. The rising and untenable fiscal costs of incarceration, combined with a growing belief that the system is racially biased and extremely punitive for drug and nonviolent offenders have drawn increasing opposition to sentencing laws from across the ideological spectrum.
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