The New Plantation

By Silja J.A. Talvi, Gadflyer. Posted July 9, 2004.

I am not a black man.

But these days, I can't imagine a riskier thing to be.

Keep reading. This isn't about to become a competition of ranking oppressions, or an indictment of white people everywhere. People have it hard in this country, period. Poor people, Indian Nations, immigrants, and women of all backgrounds. It's a long list, and it's a damn shame. It is, in fact, an embarrassment of suffering in a nation with an embarrassment of riches.

But speaking in purely statistical terms, this isn't a good time to be a low-income African American in the U.S. (when was it ever, you may rightly ask?), but especially if you're one of the nearly 900,000 African Americans sitting behind bars at this very moment.

Already, the U.S. Justice Department itself projects that 32% of African-American men born in 2001 will spend time in prison. That's one in three black men, folks. One in three.

And nearly every month, I come across another shocking new study, another class action lawsuit, or a straight-ahead government report that confirms another escalation in what amounts to a national phenomenon of mass incarceration. Nearly every month, I'm left staring at another staggering finding about the disproportionate impact of imprisonment on people whose skin tones largely range from brown to black. And every month, I'm left wondering what to do with the information at my fingertips. What new twist, what new angle on the facts will finally push the issue to the forefront?

And, more to the point, who cares?

Last month, a team of highly respected sociologists, Becky Pettit of the University of Washington and Bruce Western of Princeton University, published a new report in the American Sociological Review. The study, "Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration," reported that African American men are more likely to end up in prison than to earn a bachelor's degree or even serve in the military.

Pettit and Western, who have tackled related topics for many years now, sounded another alarm that should have made front-page news: Fully 60 percent of African-American male high-school dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 had been incarcerated by the time they reached their early 30s.

Could the link between ethnicity, income, education and incarceration in the U.S. be any clearer?

Fifty years ago, the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision resulted in the (gradual and hardly complete) desegregation of schools. The Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project set out to find out how much things had changed since then, where African Americans in the prison system were concerned.

Here's what they found. In 1954, there were 98,000 African Americans in prison or jail. By 1974, that number had crept up to 153,500. By 1994, it had grown fourfold to 635,000. And in 2002, it had risen to a record high of 884,500.

What's going on here? No one's denying that crimes are being committed. But the real, underlying questions are how we define criminal behavior; how we decide to punish that behavior; and why, in the face of declining crime rates, are prison numbers – especially for people of color – climbing year by year?

Take California's ten-year anniversary of the "Three Strikes and You're Out" law earlier this year. The law was supposed to take care of the "worst of the worst," but it has been bad news all the way around. Men and women have gotten life sentences for shoplifting, for repeat petty offenses, and out of the very nature of their persistent and untreated drug habits. By the end of 2003, it had cost the cash-strapped state about $8.1 billion in incarceration costs.

When the Justice Policy Institute decided to take an even closer look at the situation in a March 2004 report, Still Striking Out, they found something that made my head reel. The African American incarceration rate for Three Strikes was no less than 12 times higherthan that of European Americans.

Silja J.A. Talvi writes for In These Times, the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation and other publications. Her work appears in the anthology, "Prison Nation" (Routledge, 2003).

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