U.S. citizens constitute 5 percent of the global population. U.S. inmates constitute 25 percent of the world's prisoners. The U.S. has a higher proportion of its citizens jailed than any other country in history. Close to 70 percent of America's prisoners are people of color. A black male has a greater than one in four lifetime chance of serving a prison sentence. Besides the obvious education and income argument, blacks are disproportionately incarcerated as a result of the “prison-industrial complex” and the “war on drugs.” Through identifying these two central factors, I believe it will be clear that this was a premeditated systematic attack on the black community.

First, I will discuss the prison-industrial complex. The U.S. Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC) is the cruel, hastily emerging domestic component of imperialist globalization. The prison-industrial complex is the process in which the interest groups that represent organizations engage in business with correctional facilities like prison guard unions, construction companies, and surveillance technology vendors, who as a result of the lucrative dealings become more interested in profit than actually rehabilitating criminals or reducing crime rates.

We can understand this better by understanding and analyzing the facts. Since 1991, the rate of violent acts has decreased by 20 percent. But the number of people in prison has increased by 50 percent. The incarceration of such a huge sector of the U.S. population is rooted within the laws of capitalist economics, which in effect has become the insatiable drive to make profits at the expense of human development. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the industrialized world (2 million people) and it is growing by leaps and bounds in the current period of so-called economic prosperity. The destructive role of the PIC in the lives of poor people in the U.S. mirrors what the IMF is doing to destroy poor people throughout the world, especially in the developing countries.

The expansion of private prisons is considered by many experts to be the most profitable industry in the U.S. today. The Corrections Corporations of America, the country's largest private-prison conglomerate, generates huge profits by operating 46 penal institutions in 11 states, including seven juvenile facilities. Many of the most influential Wall Street firms and investment banks, from American Express to Smith Barney pour an estimated $35 billion annually into supporting prison bond issues, construction and the privatization of prisons. You may ask how the prisons create profit. Many prisoners are paid only pennies an hour to build houses for the elderly and the disabled, wire schools for computers, fight forest fires, and so on. Between 1980 and 1994 the value of goods produced by prisoners rose from $392 million to $1.1 billion. The PIC is the second-largest employer in the U.S. Corporations, such as American Express and Microsoft, profit off prison sweatshops. This slave labor takes the jobs of unionized workers who could be doing the same tasks. Unions should make it their business to organize these prisoners into unions so that they aren't used as scab labor. If you will recall, the unpaid labor derived from African slavery for nearly three centuries provided the platform for the accumulation of capital by a tiny segment of the U.S. population. U.S.-style apartheid continued legally for another 100 years after the abolition of slavery in 1863-65. Today the prison system is the institutional legacy for extreme racist repression.

The PIC has in many ways been fueled by the aforementioned “war on drugs.” At the end of the 20th century, the perception of widespread abuse of cocaine caused policy-makers in the U.S. to consider drug abuse a serious social problem rather than as cases of personal failures. I characterize this as the apparent sentiment of the American majority that working class addiction to crack is a crime. But, middle- and upper-class addiction to drugs or alcohol is a disease. That sentiment is responsible for influencing politicians' ridiculous tough-on-crime rhetoric, which would lead to zero tolerance policies in all walks of American life including school, workplace, and etc.

In federal prisons, 60 percent are drug offenders with no history of violence. It is not unusual that inmates are doing 20 years and more for just being present in a house where drugs were found. The ten states with the greatest racial disparities are: Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine, Iowa, Maryland, Ohio, New Jersey, North Carolina, and West Virginia. In these states, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 27 to 57 times the rate of white men.

According to Jamie Fellner, Human Rights Watch associate counsel, "Most drug offenders are white. Five times as many whites use drugs as blacks, But blacks comprise the great majority of drug offenders sent to prison”. The solution to this racial inequity is not to incarcerate more whites, but to reduce the use of prison for low-level drug offenders and to increase the availability of substance abuse treatment." U.S. federal, state and local governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make America “drug-free.” Yet heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs are cheaper, purer and easier to get than ever before. Nearly half a million people are behind bars on drug charges, which is more than all of Western Europe (which features a larger population) incarcerates for all offenses. The war on drugs has become a war on families, a war on public health, and a war on our constitutional rights.

In conclusion, both the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex are major factors that contribute to the disproportionate imprisonment of black people. These factors have a distinct relationship that creates a cycle that when many enter the prison system it they cannot escape it. This is a result of policies that make it difficult to reintegrate back into society because of limits on employment, voting, and basic civil liberties. Hopefully, through awareness the inhumane byproducts of these factors can be minimized.



by Nick Walker

Agreed, I don't like to called "Man", or "Hey you" or many other generic names.

I am not self absorbed.
Look at me.
I love myself.
I am great.
Listen to my words.
Call me.

Self absorbed? Americans are the epitome of narcissism.