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Judges are products of the containment
system. The criminal justice system makes a lot of money for everybody,
from the judge to the bailiff, from the bail bondsmen to the police. The
sheriffs deputies, everybody. The neoslave, the young Black male, becomes
the fodder, the raw material, for this industry-like profit-making system.
The fodder is black, and the beneficiaries - those who profit from the
system - are white
Their bright eyes search the tiny holding cell. One paces the five and a half foot long, four foot wide glass-doored cage, while the other sits on the hard, wooden slats of the bench, his eyes unfocused, inward looking. The other sits, and they talk to each other, their shoulders hunched bespeaking their mutual fear. All around then are men in their 20's, 30's and 40's, their eyes harrowed into slits of dulled anger. The two boys are 16, but they are certified as adults. They are Munchkins in the Land of Giants, and they are entering a courtroom that sees its highest duty as flinging them into the netherworld of American gulags for as long as humanly (legally) possible. For all intents and purposes, they are doomed. In an age when crime rates are in sharp decline, the youth and adults rates of incarceration are skyrocketing. The US government's own statistical data shows these trends convincingly in Correctional Populations in the United States, 1994 and Criminal Victimization, 1973-95. With regard to juveniles in US jails, in 1990 the average daily population was 2,140. By 1993 that number was 3,400, or an increase of 59%. The actual one-day count of the nation's juvenile jail population is even more damning, especially when examined over time. The 1990 one-cay count was 2,301, and by 1993 that figure rose to 4,300, or an increase of 87%. By 1994, that number swelled to 6,725, or 192.2% over the 1990, population figure ([see Correctional Populations in the United States, 1994, US Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (Wash, DC: US Gov't Printing Office, June 1996) p.24, Table 2.1]. As measured by the government's National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the 1995 rape, robbery and aggravated assault rates were at a 23 year low. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (VCR) measured a similar trend in murder rates [see Criminal Victimization, 1973-95, (US Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (Wash, DC: US Gov't Printing Office, April 1997) p. 1] In the text of the latter report: In 1994, compared to 1973, the US population was about as vulnerable to violent crime but significantly less vulnerable to property crime. From 1973 through 1994, the rates of violent crime victimization had intervals of stability, increased, and decrease, while the rates of property crime underwent a virtually uninterrupted decrease. The 1994-95 decline in the violent crime rate was the largest single-year decrease ever measured in the total violent category. [Crim.Vic., '73-'95, p.1] One wonders; what is the relationship between the crime rate and the incarceration rate? The answer seems to be: very little. The nation's incarceration rate appears to be driven, not by the crime rate, but by the needs if the prison-industrial complex. The poor, the young and the Black are unwitting fodder to feed the machine, like chickens on a McDonald's conveyor belt. Gone is even the shallowest pretense of rehabilitation, with prison's economic imperative assuming its brute mastery of the game of life and death. Those two young boys, unless they are very, very lucky, have in store for themselves years and years, perhaps decades, of brain-rotting, soul-smashing madness that they may, or may not, survive. They will grow to a sullen manhood out of the scent or presence of women, in a sexual slaughterhouse. They will enter a system that profits from their every hour of misery. They will feed a system that calls itself "corrections", yet outlaws any education beyond a G.E.D. They enter a man-made hell, where they cold eye of the "Law" has deemed them to be men, while nature has determined they are what they indeed are: Boys. Boys cast beyond the pale. Copyright 1997 Mumia Abu-Jamal. All Rights Reserved. |
