More on the Whys of Mass Incarceration

According to Harvard professor of history, race, and public policy, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, two new books on the complex issues of oppression, race,  crime and punishment have entered the scholarly debate.  Muhammad reviews Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. and A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes.

In his review Muhammad mentions attorney Jeff Sessions desire  to "return to Reagan-era zero tolerance approaches to drug use."  Will Sessions target white opiod users as aggressively as Reagan targeted black drugs users?

Muhammad writes:

"The other is that the punitive style of American racial politics has been a constant feature of our history; unless something foundational changes, The United States will remain an exceptionally punitive country, and the question is only one of degree.  According to this line of thinking, there will always be hell to pay for somebody, especially poor people of color."

He summarizes Chris Hayes' book with this statement:  "Chris Hayes show that throughout American history, freedom---despite all the high-minded ideals---has often entailed the subjugation of [an ethnic] another."  In other words, instead of freedom and justice, it has far too often been freedom and oppression.

In talking about Forman's book, Muhammad comments:

"First, black officials did not see mass incarceration coming.  No one did, he argues.  It was the result of a series of small decisions, made over time, by a disparate group of actors."  Not even black attorney Eric Holder, got it.

Even the brilliant black civil rights lawyer, Michelle Alexander, admits that for many years she did not understand that the American criminal justice system had fathered a new system of oppression, a new racial caste system, called mass incarceration.  Most Americans think too individualistically, not sociologically, not historically so even if they are surrounded by a new system of oppression it is invisible to them.  Only after careful historical and sociological study, did black lawyer Michelle Alexander understand that in America we really don't end systems of oppression, we merely redesign them.

So without comprehensive white repentance and restitution, no black can ever trust a white criminal justice system to actually do justice for its people.

See the April 18, 2017, New York Times Book Review for the review article "Power and Punishment."