With more and more businesses, factories, and establishments migrating out of the
United States for cheaper workers.  The now largest and growing businesses within the
United States are prisons.  And the biggest conspiracy within that is the "criminal
justice system."

With over 15 million people being arrested each year.  At present there are over 2
million people in U.S Prisons, 800,000 in jails and more than 8 million - almost 3 percent
of the US population - who are under some form of criminal justice control (including
prison, jail, probation, or parole.)  I can well understand how hard it is for the average
reader to understand or visualize the enormity of those numbers.  Especially when you
consider that the number of people who are in prison would comprise the 10th largest
states.  There are more people under control of the criminal justice system than those
who live in Chicago, or Detroit, or Houston, and which is vastly outgrowing even Los
Angeles and New York.

There is an independent organization operating out of Washington DC (SENTENCING
PROJECT) that attempts to propogate ideas about alternatives to incarceration.  In
January 1991 the Project issues a report entitled "Americans Behind Bars : A
Comparison of International Rates of Incarceration."  By Marck Mauer, the assistant
director of the organization.

Although incarceration rates are usually calculated by dividing the number of people in
prison by the relevant population group, in this report, summarized in the
accompanying table, Mauer uses the number of people in prison and jail.

It is important to examine closely the racial dynamics revealed in this table,
imprisonment rates for Black people are about 10 times higher than for white people.
Indeed the grotesque distinction of the US having the highest rate in the world stems
directly from the nature of Black imprisonment in the US.  While the incarceration rate
for white people in the US is twice as high as the rates for other European peoples.  It
is stunning to note that the rate for Black people in the US is seven times as high as
the rate for Black people in South Africa.

We have examined the size of the prison system, international comparisons in
incarceration rates, and the racial dynamics of these comparisons.  Let us now return to
the US and look at the racial dimensions of the criminal justice system.
There are many ways of expressing the horrors of Black incarceration :

as noted above, a Black person in the US is 10 times more likely to be imprisoned than
a white person;

one out of every two Black men will be arrested in his lifetime;

there are more Black men aged 18-30 who are under control of the criminal justice
system than there are Black men in College.

one out of every three Black men are under some form of Criminal Justice control;

more than 6 percent of all Black men are in prison (this means only prison, and does not
include any of the other criminal justice categories. )

Although most (94%) prisoners are men, the racial differential for women is even
greater than it is for men and the increase in the number of women in prison is growing
faster (at 7.5%) than for men (6.9%)

one out of every three Black men will go to prison at some point in his life.  It is
important to emphasize that this refers only to prison, not jail, parole or probation.

Imprisonment is a major social problem in the U.S.  While the entire social faric is
disintegrating (schools and hospitals are closing, housing is increasingly unavailable,
jobs are disappearing, life expectancy for Black people is decreasing), the only budget
items still being funded are tasks of destruction like prison and war.  In this context,
even the mainstream media are forced to acknowledge that the bulging prison system
is a problem.

This, however, certainly doesn't mean that the media will acknowledge the true mature
of the problem.
For example, in the past several years, the New York Times has printed several very
long articles on some issues surrounding the rapidly expanding prison system.   All of
these uniformly, even studiously, fail to mention Black people.  One of the articles
contained 36 paragraphs but didn't mention any racial dynamic until the 25th paragraph,
and then there was only a brief allusion to "minorities".  A short while ago, a major
article on imprisonment appeared in the prestigious U.S. journal, Science.  The central
question in the article what accounts for the soaring imprisonment rate.   There was
almost no mention of Black imprisonment and its implications.  Clearly, it is not the
advantage of the mainstream media to report accurately what is happening in prisons.

Imprisonment rates in the U.S. were first compiled on a regular basis in 1925.   From
then until 1971, or for almost 50 year, the rates stayed more or less constant,  Then in
1972 they started zooming upward and have not yet stopped.   U.S. imprisonment rates
have tripled in the past twenty tears.

The 1960's saw the birth and rise of groups such as the Black Panther Party (BBP) , The
Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, and the Black Liberation Army,
and many others.   The Government viciously attacked these groups, murdering many
members, and incarcerating thousands of
Black revolutionaries.  According to one article, in the three years after J. Edgar
Hoover's infamous COINTELPRO memorandum, dated August 25, 1967, nearly a
thousand members of the Black Panther party (BBP), The Provisional Government of
the Republic of New Afrika  and the Black Liberation Army
Were arrested and hundereds of key leaders were sent to jail.

Perhaps the culminating acts of this period were the murder of George Jackson on
August 21, 1971, and the great Attica prison rebellion on Sept. 9-13, 1971.  Just a few
months later the first control unit section of the United States Penitentiary at Marion
was established and imprison  rates began to soar.

The question of whether or not prisons deter crime is central to this discussion.  It may
come as a surprise to some that virtually everyone who has studied this question
believes that prisons do not deter crime.  A few quotes might be illuminating.

In 1976 the panel of research on deterrant and incapacitative effects was established to
investigate the appropriate role of prisons in reducing the crime rate.  After a
meticulous analysis of the existing research and a great deal of original empirical
research, the panel reported :  "California and Massachussetts, fir example, must
increase their index prison population by over 150 percent and 310 percent,
respectively, in order to achieve a 10 percent reduction in index crimes through
incapacitation…Thus, policy suggestions, based upon the existing evidence, can only
be made with a clear recognition of the inadequecy of the evidence.  Accordingly, such
suggestion must be very limited and posed with great caution…Policy makers in the
criminal justice system are done a great disservice if they are left wit hteh impression
that the empirical evidence, which they themselves are frequently unable to evaluate,
strongly supports the deterence dypothesis.  Furthermore, such distortions ultimately
undermine the credibility of scientific evidence as inputs to public policy choices. "

Again by a criminologist : "The results reported in the previous section provide no
reliable evidence that the risk of imprisonment or time served as a measurable impact
on the index crime rate."

In still one more report, "the National Academy of Sciences, in a 1981 summary of
previous penal research, concluded that "caution should be exercised in interpreting
the available evidence as establishing a deterrent effect, and especially so for the
sanction of imprisonment.

Andstill again by another criminologist :  "Incapacitation appears to have been only
slightly more effective in averting crimes in the early 1980s than in the 1970s despite a
near doubling of the US prison population in less than 10 years.

From Minnesota's Assistant Commissioner of Corrections :  "There is no relationship
between the incarceration rate and violent crime.  We're in the business of tricking
people into thinking that spending hundreds of millions (of dollars) for new prisons will
make them safe. "

From the Correctional Association of New York :  "The states new policies have been
staggerly expensive, have threatened a crisis of safety and manageability in the prison
system and have failed to reduce the rate of crime or even stop its increase.   After
almost ten years of getting tough the citizens of New York are more likely to be victims
of crime today than in 1971.  Moreover, the largest rise in crime at the end  of the
decade, during 1980 - 81, well after the introduction of more severe sentencing
practices."

The American Bar Associations Task Force on Crime has stated :  "There is no solid
evidence to support the conclusion that sending more convicted offenders to prison
for longer periods of time deters others from committing crime."

Even the Director of Corrections of Alabama understands this situation :  "We're on a
train that has to be turned around, it doesn't make any sense to pump millions and
millions into corrections and have no effect on crime rate. "

Finally from the Director of the Dept. of Corrections of Illinois. : "No state has shown
that locking up record amounts of people adds benefit to the society."

We have seen that prisons incarcerate huge members of Black people.  We have seen
that the initiation ofthe rapidly spiraling imprisonment rate coincided with the
prominence of the Black liberation movement.  We have also seen that imprisonment
do not deter crime.  And certainly no one seems to believe any longer that prisons
rehabilitate  people.  Finally, it turns out that prisons are enormously expensive.  For
example,. The entire budget of "justice system expenditures" accounted for over 20
billion of this.  (It has been estimated that all of the children of the world could be fully
vaccinated for about one billion dollars.)  Furthermore it costs about 24000 a year to
send a person to prison.  About what it would cost to send that person to Harvard.

And so its natural to ask, what is that a system like this does ?  What is its purpose ?
The most reasonable explantion, the one that best fits the facts, is that prison is a
control mechanism for people of color, some form of counterinsurgency which has as
its purpose the goal of preventing rebellion by people of color within the borders of the
US.  If not, then what the above Commissioner from Minnesota said must be ever so
true.   ("There is no relationship between the incarceration rate and violent crime.
We're in the business of tricking people into thinking that spending hndreds of millions
(of dollars) for new prisons will make them safe)

What will it take for progressive white people to do something about this peculating
system ?

Initially I think that we must stop believing that prisons have anything to do with crime.
If the arguments that I have tried to set forward here are not convincing, then any one
of the dozens of books are readily available on this topic, if we believe that prisons are
not about crime, then they must be about some form of control of Black people or about
robbing the people.  Except for a few isolated organisations, there is no outside prison
movement in this country and there is very little interest in prisons, as far as I can
determine.

I would like to hear from anyone interested in establishing a committee, anyone wishing
to find out more information , anyone wanting to help in awakening others up to the
truth, anyone with inforamtion wishing to help.  Please contact me at the below address.

By: Al Cunningham