Segregation by Incarceration: America’s New Apartheid

Weekend Edition June 13-15, 2014

Segregation by Incarceration

America’s New Apartheid

by GARRY LEECH


Many people associate the mass imprisonment of a population with authoritarian regimes. Consequently, many Americans are surprised when they learn that the country that incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other is the United States. With 2.3 million prisoners, the “land of the free” has more people in prison than China, which has a population four times the size of the United States. A hugely disproportionate percentage of those incarcerated are African-Americans as Washington’s war on drugs constitutes the latest incarnation of racist policies that have existed since the country’s founding.

The United States has a long and ongoing history of implementing policies ensuring that Blacks are segregated from whites, both physically and in terms of experiencing different rights. While still a British colony, the white settlers, having exterminated much of the indigenous population, imported Black slaves from Africa to work the plantations and to serve as domestic servants. Upon achieving independence from Britain, the new “democracy” with its “Bill of Rights” immediately made evident its hypocrisy to the benefit of privileged white males by continuing the practice of slavery and only allowing white male property owners to vote. In short, there was no “independence” for Blacks.

Our history classes celebrate that white hero Abraham Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves while ignoring the fact that most nations in the Americas had abolished slavery almost half a century before the United States. In fact, only two countries—Brazil and the Spanish colony of Cuba—maintained slavery longer than the “land of the free.” That celebrated champion of freedom, Thomas Jefferson, only freed his slaves upon his death, when he no longer had a need to exploit them. In fact, slavery wasn’t abolished until almost one hundred years after independence. And when slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865, blacks still remained second-class citizens under a system of apartheid in which a series of Jim Crow laws kept African-Americans segregated from whites.

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s, one hundred years after the abolition of slavery and almost two hundred years after independence, that officially-sanctioned segregation eventually ended and all Blacks in the United States finally obtained the right to vote and to equal access to public schools and other public spaces. But the US government soon found another tool for implementing social control over Blacks in order to segregate them from the general white population: the war on drugs. In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared illegal drugs to be “public enemy number one.” During the next two years, drug arrests and incarceration rates increased significantly, with a disproportionate number of those targeted being African-Americans.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/13/americas-new-apartheid/