Publication date: 1991 | First published in Political Affairs
Note: 1991 was over two decades since the assassination of Martin Luther King. Responding to the assault on the Black community through deindustrialization, mass incarceration, police brutality, and fratricidal violence, this essay clarifies the multipronged nature of the U.S. state’s counter-revolutionary attack on the Civil Rights Movement and King’s leadership. This occurred alongside the rise of a Black misleadership, and a new stage of crisis in the Black social system. Emphasizing the criminalization of the Black man, this essay anticipates the betrayal of Bill Clinton and the 1994 crime bill.
The criminalization of African Americans is the new face of racism. Its starkest forms are directed toward African American young males. They are victims of extreme levels of imprisonment, police violence and murder, high unemployment, homelessness, illiteracy and disease. More than 25 percent of them are either in prison, on parole, probation, or in some way under the control of the criminal justice system.
An African American male living in the USA is four times more likely to be in prison than a Black male living in South Africa. 200,000 more African American males are in prison than are in colleges and universities. Of the over one million U.S. citizens in federal and state prisons, more than 45 percent are African American males. Of the 14,625,000 African American males, 454,724 are in prison; for every 100,000 African American males 3,109 are in prison. African American males in their twenties experience an imprisonment rate 25 times the rate for the population in general.
In 1982, Alfred Blumstein indicated that on any single day one in thirty-three African American males were in a state prison; for the general population the rate was one in eight hundred. African American males in their twenties are 16 times more likely to be in prison or under the control of the criminal justice system than white males of similar age.
Eighty percent of prisoners fall below the government established poverty line. In 1978, 53 percent of African American prisoners made less than $3,000 per year. In 1983 the average pre-arrest income of Black inmates was about $4,000. Prisons in the 1980s became the nation’s poorhouse.
Racism continues to play a large role in determining who is arrested, imprisoned, and the severity of punishment. Using data provided by the National Crime Survey, Jeffrey Reiman indicates that Black males are arrested 45 percent more frequently than white males, even though white males commit the majority of assaults, burglaries, rapes and murders. Marginalization and criminalization are inseparable from the broader realities of the social existence of African American males. Their lives are characterized by one catastrophe after another. They experience higher levels of killer diseases such as cancer, hypertension, heart disease and AIDS. They have the shortest life expectancies of any single section of the population. They are the least educated segment of the entire population and experience the highest rates of permanent unemployment. These conditions constitute social homicide. Its colossal nature cannot be underestimated. While targeting for the most vicious treatment one part of the African American people, it is clear that the consequences impact on the entire African American community.
THE CRIMINALIZATION PROCESS
These extreme levels of imprisonment represent the criminalization of African American males. This process is a threat to the entire African American people. Criminalization is an ideological, political and legal process. In ideological terms, it targets African American males as a danger to society. This involves establishing a social perception that Black males are inherently prone to violence and crime. Defining the African American poor as an underclass plays an essential role in shaping this ideological stance. African American males, according to the underclass concept, tend to be socially and culturally pathological and part of a criminal subculture.
While not as severe, there is also criminalization of African American women. It occurs within the context of criminalizing poverty and pregnancy. The “war against drugs” has targeted poor women addicts. The criminalization of African American women takes place within this context. Lisa Maher points out that, under the cover of fighting drugs and “protecting the rights of the unborn,” so-called “crack pregnancies” have been criminalized. This, as funding for treatment and prenatal care is cut. These pregnancies are being defined as child abuse and cause for prosecution. Nationwide, at least 35 prosecutions are underway to date. Moreover, poor women who become pregnant are viewed as criminally irresponsible. In some states those who refuse sterilization or birth control are denied welfare assistance. The criminalization of African American women is reflected in their marginalization and portrayal by the media as sexually irresponsible, drug users and child abusers. They are more likely than white women to be arrested and imprisoned.
THE POLITICS OF CRIMINALIZATION
Since the 1970s, U.S. politics has been profoundly shaped by the process of criminalization. The politicization of street crime was part of the so-called Southern strategy. The language of crime (and of fighting it) has become code language for a new racism designed to blunt the Civil Rights movement. Conservative explanations of the causes of crime are used to argue that African Americans are not “ready” for genuine equality. “Get tough” policies include the death penalty, mandatory sentencing, limitations of parole and probation, and unleashing police violence and surveillance on African American, Latino and Native American communities. The charge of “soft on crime” has become as politically damaging to mainstream politicians as being “soft on the Russians.” Liberalism is marked by indifference to the plight of its victims. George Bush’s 1988 domestic program was organized around an “anti-crime platform.” Horton was the central figure. He was an African American male who, while on a prison furlough program, raped and murdered a white woman. Lee Atwater, Chair of the Republican National Committee, invented “Willie Horton” as symbolic of the quintessential criminal — a Black male. Although the majority of such crimes against women are committed by white males, a Black male served the purpose of mobilizing racist attitudes and generating fears based upon racism.
“Willie Horton” became the metaphor for evil and violence — a tool to distort the national debate on racism and affirmative action and to hide the dismal record of the Reagan-Bush Administrations. He became Bush’s answer to the struggle for racial equality. In this sense, Atwater and the Republicans created “Willie Horton” to be the personalized symbol of African Americans.
CRIMINALIZATION’S LEGAL DIMENSIONS
This ideological and political superstructure is the foundation of a vast body of laws and Supreme Court decisions. The most significant of these are the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the Helms Amendment of 1988, and the Omnibus Anti-Drug Act of 1988. This legislation has expanded the role of police, FBI, prosecutors and other agencies of force and coercion. A large network of surveillance, which uses the new technologies of telecommunications and computers, has been put in place. The rights of the accused have been limited. Due process, the presumption of innocence, and the right to a fair trial have been severely undercut. This represents a fundamental shift in the focus of federal legislation, as compared to the 1960s. The legislative achievements of that period were the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The Supreme Court majority was pro-civil rights. The major civil liberties ruling of the 1960s was Miranda v Arizona, 1966, which upheld the concept that an accused person should be protected against self-incrimination. Since 1974, the Supreme Court has moved to a limited interpretation of civil rights. Rather than demonstrating the results of discrimination as proof of its existence, the court now insists that the intent to discriminate be shown. This is obviously an impossible situation, which undermines legal recourse to victims of discrimination. This criterion was the ideological, juridical and theoretical basis of the five anti-civil rights decisions of the Supreme Court in 1989. In the end, the current court majority has rejected any argument that suggests that racism is manifested in results and the effects of discrimination. At the same time, African American males have been defined as beyond the bounds of civil society and civil rights. They are treated as criminals, irrespective of whether they have committed a crime or not. Violations of their civil rights are the rule, rather than the exception. The new body of criminal law and the enhanced authority given the police and prosecutors are predicated upon the presumption that African Americans are inherently prone to criminality. The larger significance of this is that, by defining African American males as a physical threat to society, they are categorized as enemies of society. Diana Gordon refers to the new structures of coercion that have emerged as a “justice juggernaut.” In 1990, close to $70 billion was spent on the criminal justice system. Of the $14 billion spent in 1990 on keeping U.S. citizens in prison, $7 billion was spent on keeping African Americans in jail. While more people are in prison and more is being spent to apprehend, try and keep them there, we have come very little distance in solving the crime problem. Criminologist Jeffrey Reiman argues that the function of these vast structures of repression is not to end crime at all. They serve to defend the capitalist order. Moreover, the criminalization of large segments of the population becomes a justification for expending large resources in the “wars against crime” and expanding the police, prisons and agencies of repression. Diana Gordon further suggests that the criminal justice system serves to control social protest and dissent, thus threatening civil rights and liberties in general.
The decision to make a political and ideological issue of street crime went along with the decision, made in the wake of the Watergate scandal, to turn a blind eye to so-called “white collar crimes.” White collar crimes are for the most part corporate crimes. These are crimes flowing from the exploitation of labor, racism and gender oppression. They are crimes that cause workplace death, injury and illness, environmental pollution, embezzlement and fraud, like the Savings and Loan scandal, tax evasion, and so on.
THE SUPREME COURT’S ‘LAW & ORDER’
The Burger and Rehnquist Courts have been openly “law and order” courts. Burger campaigned on and off the bench to weaken the rights of accused by restricting their due process rights. In the end, this has meant that the poor, and especially people of color, have fewer rights when accused. Their rights to an equal and fair trial have been severely undermined. The police have been unleashed on the poor, African Americans and Latinos. Behind the fig leaf of the “rights of victims,” the courts have supported mandatory sentencing, preventive detention, house arrest and the widest use of the death penalty.
Moreover, the anti-civil rights direction of the Supreme Court is part of its anti-labor thrust. The breaking of the air controllers strike and their union (PATCO) Union by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s, the attacks on TWA’s flight attendants union, and the court’s pro-scab decisions are part of this direction. Thus the criminalization of African American males and the assault on the rights of African Americans generally, occur while powerful efforts are simultaneously made to outlaw strikes and restrict the rights of unions.
Considerable evidence suggests that the “wars on crime” and the “wars against drugs” have very little to do with fighting crime. Their effect is not to fight crime, but rather to justify the expansion of the instruments of coercion and control over society. While enormous social resources are allocated to police, programs of benefit to the working class, the poor and peoples of color (such as funding for schools, housing, health care, job training and other important social programs) have been cut. The twenty-year growth of the criminal justice system, have been the years of decline in the standard of living of the majority of workers and middle income people. More Americans are imprisoned than ever in history.
CRIMES OF THE RICH AND OF THE POOR
The problem in estimating crime rates is that crime data are collected by two surveys. The National Crime Survey indicates that the rate of violent crime declined by 13.6 percent between 1973 and 1986. More significantly, the NCS reports that rapes were down by 30 percent and robberies down by 23.7 percent. Household burglaries declined by 33 percent.
The National Crime Survey is a phone sample of households done each year. On the other hand, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, compiled on the basis of reports of police departments, shows a very different trend. The UCR shows that violent crimes have risen 29.7 percent between 1977 and 1986, (down 17.1 percent according to the NCS). According to the UCR rapes were up 27.6 percent, robberies increased 18 percent, while burglaries declined 5.3 percent. Researchers have argued that local police and the FBI have a direct interest in reporting increases in crime, because of their interest in increased funding — similar to the military industrial complex’s effort to maintain the perception of foreign military threats to guarantee large Congressional allocations for weapons.
Much of the fear of crime is stoked by the media and politicians. The perception of crime, and the dangers of street crime in particular, often go beyond the reality. This serves the ideological and political interests of the most reactionary segments of the population.
The poor are targeted as the symbols of crime. However, based upon the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Handbook of White Collar Crime, 1974 Jeffrey Reiman estimates that in 1986 white collar crime cost society more than $107 billion. This was 6000 times the total amount taken in all bank robberies in 1986 and nine times the total amount stolen in all thefts reported in the FBI Uniform Crime Report for that year. When added to the magnitude of tax evasion (between $216 and $296 billion in 1986) the magnitude of loot acquired by corporate theft and embezzlement is colossal. Furthermore, the super-rich are seldom arrested for their crimes; and if arrested, seldom tried in court, seldom convicted and hardly ever sentenced to prison. For the most part, the rich are filtered out of the criminal justice system.
Violence affects all classes and strata of society. The National Center for Health Statistics indicated in 1990 that the U.S. was the homicide capital of the world. Dr. James Mercy, of the Center for Disease Control, said of this situation, “Homicide is a health problem in the United States. We’re so immersed in violence here that it’s easy to miss that.” This problem of violence is intensified by the wide availability of handguns and automatic weapons.
Criminal behavior is widespread among white youth from upper middle class and bourgeois families. A study of 180 white males, ages 15 to 17, from different social economic strata, found that, although the youth from upper income families were 55 percent of the group, they admitted to 67 percent of instances of breaking and entering, 70 percent of instances of property destruction, and 87 percent of all armed robberies. Eugene Doleschal and Nora Klapmuts, conclude,
“In support of recent studies … the relationship between social status and delinquent behavior was weak except that higher status white boys were more delinquent than lower status white boys. The greater seriousness of the higher status boys’ delinquent behavior stemmed from their committing proportionately more thefts, joy riding, and (surprisingly) assaults.”
Yet five times more poor and working class boys are found in official records of arrests than upper middle class and bourgeois youth.
Burglaries, assaults, thefts and drug trafficking occur widely among the bourgeoisie. Much of the most violent criminal behavior among bourgeois males is seldom defined as criminal. Professor Peggy Reeves Sanday has studied the epidemic of rapes on college campuses. She indicates that many of these rapes are ritualistic gang rapes, carried out in fraternity houses or in athletic dormitories. She was unable to uncover any evidence of prosecutions for these gang rapes. While rape is among the most violent of criminal acts, males of bourgeois families, at elite universities are not arrested or prosecuted for this behavior. Usually university administrations and alumni conspire to “protect” these youth from the criminal justice system. For the poor, and especially African Americans, the situation is the total opposite.
CRIME AND ECONOMIC DECLINE
The situation of crime in the African American, Latino, Native American Indian and working class communities must be addressed. Indeed, the rise in crime among the poorest segments of the working class is alarming. The principal sources of this are lack of opportunity and the horrible rise in poverty. The structural crisis of capitalism and the processes of restructuring during the 1970s and 1980s, are central to the rise of poverty, unemployment and crime. In this period the industrial base of the U.S. economy contracted. With this contraction came a general decline in the living standards of the U.S. working class. African Americans, however, were most devastated, losing close to 30 percent of the industrial jobs they previously held.
The restructuring of U.S. industry, was at the same time a deindustrialization process. As Bluestone and Harrison argue, this deindustrialization caused a widening inequality of incomes. The working class became poorer and, increasingly, the poor became even poorer. As the report of the Economic Policy Institute, written by Lawrence Mishel and David M. Frankel indicates, there was a massive redistribution of wealth and incomes from the lower 40 percent shifted to the highest 10 percent of the population during the 1980s.
The deindustrialization process occurred alongside the relocation of the productive forces of U.S. capitalism. Plants and factories once located in urban and close to urban areas were moved far beyond the reach of the urban working class, into suburbs or rural areas. In other cases, plants and major sections of industry were moved outside the country. Restructuring produced a profound crisis of unemployment and poverty among African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and large sectors of the working class.
Ghettos, reservations and barrios began to resemble “third world” nations. Elliot Currie argued that the course of U.S. economic development in recent decades has rended community bonds and accentuated economic processes which disrupted the African American community. In sociological terms, family bonds and community solidarity have been severely wounded.
CHANGED WORKING CLASS COMPOSITION
Large migrations of African Americans from the South, resulting from the revolutions in agricultural production, increased the number of Blacks in major industrial centers. African Americans became the most highly working class of all nationalities and ethnic groups in society. The Civil Rights Movement in the early part of this century fought to open the doors of industry to African Americans. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s added the demands for occupational upgrading and affirmative action. The urban rebellions of the 1960s demanded the opening of the auto, steel, aerospace and other basic industries to African Americans.
But now, the movement from agriculture to industry has been fundamentally set back as a result of the relocation of the productive forces of U.S. capitalism. This restructuring and the concentration of major productive forces in military production are at the heart of the increase of deep poverty in the African American community. The migrations of Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Haitians and other Caribbeans to New York, Philadelphia, Connecticut and Northern Jersey, produced similar aspirations and outcomes as in the case of African Americans. The large migrations of Mexicans and other Central Americans to the Southwest and West, while creating a pool of low-paid agricultural and service workers, produced a large Mexican American and Latino proletariat. At the same time, there grew barrios filled with unemployed and poor.
Immigrants from Indochina, most fleeing the tragic outcome of the U.S. aggression and its social and economic consequences, have increased the Asian and Pacific population to well over six and one half million. The vast majority of Indochinese live in deep poverty and work in small manufacturing industries, service and agriculture.
A NEW RACIST DIVISION OF LABOR
The processes of restructuring, based upon shifting the location of productive forces (militarizing a significant part of them), and deindustrialization has produced a new racist division of labor. This is part of a ruling-class policy geared to segregate the workforce, weaken Black-white and Brown unity, and undermine class consciousness. Japanese auto producers play a special role here. As a rule they build plants in rural areas, far removed from African American workers. This decision goes well with anti-African American statements made by leading officials of the Japanese Government.
However, to these economic causes must be added the rise in the availability and use of highly addictive drugs, especially crack cocaine. Drug abuse is connected to ready availability of drugs and the social, economic and cultural conditions which produce despair and hopelessness.
During the Reagan-Bush years the African American community has been flooded with crack cocaine. There was a 3,500 percent increase in the amount of cocaine coming into the nation during these years, from 1,872 kilograms in 1981 to 35,970 kilograms in 1987. In this same period the price per kilogram went from $40,000 to $20,000. Drug trafficking became a $160 billion a year industry, most of it controlled from the U.S. The connections between the White House, the CIA, banking and financial circles, gun dealers, Central American and Middle Eastern counter-revolutionaries and major drug producers are at the heart of the international drug trade. The influx of drugs is, therefore, inseparable from U.S. foreign policy. In this sense it is impossible to separate the influx of heroin in the 1960s and 70s from the CIA’s financing of counter-revolutionaries in Laos and Cambodia, as it is not possible to separate the massive flow of cocaine from the Reagan Doctrine in Central America. The so-called drug of choice of U.S. citizens is usually the available drug in the region of the world where the U.S. military and the CIA are the most active.
STREET DRUGS & BLACK MALE HOMICIDES
At the street level the drug trade assumes an especially violent form. It is warfare usually fought over crumbs. Nonetheless, in urban areas where the economy has collapsed and job opportunities and education are all but non-existent, the trade in drugs becomes the major economic activity. On the other hand, widespread addiction to crack, combined with profound misery, poverty and unemployment, leads to alienation, despair and violence. Drug addiction and the drug trade are the consequences of similar processes of economic decline. They are two sides of the coin. Both create high levels of crime and destabilization.
At the same time, handguns and automatic weapons are available in quantities never before seen in the African American community. To understand the simultaneous availability of highly addictive drugs and automatic weapons, the connections between international drug cartels, international gun runners and the CIA must be grasped. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the networks that control the international drug trade and those which control the underground market in high powered and automatic weapons are overlapping and mutually supporting networks. Crack, cocaine and automatic weapons reach the African American and Latino communities through these networks. Surely, the role of the highest agencies of the U.S. government cannot be discounted as part of this cabal. Street drug wars and the rise in Black male homicide rates are directly connected to the cartels of drugs and guns. In the end, millions of dollars are made from the misery and deaths of Blacks.
Homicide is the leading cause of death of African American males from twenty to forty four. However, the opposite side of this picture is that African American males account for 36 percent of all suicides. The homicide and suicide rates are inseparable, reflecting high levels of social oppression and despair. As is well known, the overwhelming majority of murders are within the same race and within the same socio-economic group. Hence, poor Black males usually assault and murder other poor Black males. This level of intra-group violence is increasingly being explained as a public health, rather than solely a crime problem. The roots of this public health situation are poverty, joblessness and despair. The triple impact of poverty, drug addiction and the drug trade has produced this current level of violence
However, those whose interests are served in defining African American males as part of a violent subculture wish to make it appear that either genes or culture produces violence. James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein argue that African Americans are biologically less intelligent. They contend that since crime is biologically, rather than socially produced, there are few, if any, workable social answers to it. Such views support the most racist explanations of social and economic inequality. Their cynicism concerning social remedies to poverty is combined with a deep opposition to civil rights and, especially, affirmative action.
High rates of homicide become an argument for denying Black youth civil rights and access to education and employment. This becomes another justification for criminalizing them. Harsh punishment, social retribution, police brutality, sterilization, and surgically induced behavior modification are the rightwing’s answers.
EARLY CRIMINALIZATION
The criminalization of African American males begins early in life. By the fourth grade, initial signs of enthusiasm and excitement about learning are replaced with apathy and resignation. Professor Javanza Kunjufu defines this as a “fourth grade syndrome,” after which a downward learning spiral is observed. As a result African American boys are stigmatized and isolated into “special” classes or warehoused into dysfunctional schools.
Rather than address the causes of this radical turn in the attitudes of African American boys toward schooling, they are too often labeled as “violent,” “trouble makers” and “uneducable.” They are subjected to harsh punishment, suspension and deprived of elementary learning opportunities. Their marginalization becomes an additional excuse for not educating them. (In the era of science and technology this treatment is nothing less than criminal.) Increasing numbers of African American boys are being pushed out of school and denied minimum education. As a result, increasing numbers are illiterate. The media portrays them as vicious and dangerous. Uneducated and without skills, they find it exceptionally difficult to find a place in a rapidly changing technological and economic environment. At present, 26 percent of them are totally excluded from the labor force; upwards of 40 percent are at any one time unemployed or underemployed. Together with the over 25 percent who are in prison or under the control of the criminal justice system, close to 60 percent could be considered chronically socially disabled. In this sense they have been marginalized and turned into a surplus population, constituting, as it were, the largest component of the reserve army of the unemployed. These factors have made them the principal targets of the most racist forces in our society, including the police and the courts, as well as neo-nazi and fascist organizations. The vicious beating by the Los Angeles police of Rodney King is a current example of this barbarity. So ferocious is the violence and social degradation that social scientists have begun to refer to African American males as an endangered species.
CRIMINALIZATION ATTACKS CIVIL RIGHTS
The criminalization of African American males is part of the attack upon civil rights in general. There is abundant evidence that civil rights violations have become widespread in criminal courts throughout the nation. This situation raises questions of the impartiality of justice in cases where Blacks or Latinos are involved.
The most reactionary sectors of monopoly capital believe the answer to the “Black problem” is to be found in new levels of repression and state initiated violence. In this project they count upon the complicity of the media and leading forces in both bourgeois parties.
A major argument against affirmative action and quotas is that since the achievement of legal equality the main obstacle to racial equality is crime. This is another “blame the victim” position. “Real equality,” this reactionary position demands, must begin with an anti-crime campaign. It insists that the “war against crime” replace the struggle for civil rights and social programs to alleviate poverty and unemployment. Prisons replace schools, factories, recreational and cultural centers. House arrest and preventive detention replace health care, decent housing and nutrition programs. The ghetto and barrios become apartheid-like concentration camps.
However, high unemployment, homelessness, hunger, drugs, guns and violence weaken the struggle for full equality and justice within the African American community. The police are used to guarantee that poor African Americans remain within the confines of the ghetto. The media portrays the crisis as the result of crime rather than of the economic and social policies of the White House and the majority in the Congress.
THE COURTS AND THE POLICE
The Bush-Bennett phony war on drugs was predicated upon presumptions about the inherent criminality of African American males. As a result, a new spate of “anti-crime” laws and Supreme Court decisions have enabled the federal and state governments to open an unremitting attack upon the rights of the poor under the guise of fighting crime. The most important features of this legislation are: (a) Restrictions upon Miranda rights and weakening the exclusionary rule; (b) setting in place the system of mandatory sentencing; (c) extending the use of the death penalty. There is a powerful racist component in this vast body of new crime legislation.
In the most celebrated cases in which Blacks or Latinos have been accused of assaulting or murdering whites, the courts have permitted gross violations of the due process rights of the defendants. Judges, D.A.’s and public defenders have usually colluded in this. The presumption of innocence is either thrown out or severely limited. The Central Park Jogger case is an example of this.
Miranda rights require that all persons be informed at the time of arrest that they have the right to remain silent; that any statement they may make can be used against them; and that they have the right to have an attorney present before making any statement. Miranda rights protect the accused against self-incrimination and uphold the presumption of innocence.
The youths who were charged in the Central Park case were all minors. While in custody, they were deprived, for hours, of contact with their parents or guardians. The police claim that they agreed to forego their Miranda rights. The first question is whether minors can forego Miranda protection in the absence of parents or guardians. In the course of the police interrogation several of the youth allegedly confessed to assaulting the woman jogger. These confessions were the sole evidence leading to convictions in the trial.
The second major question is whether evidence from the confessions of minors in the absence of parents or guardians can be considered legally obtained confessions. Under provisions of the exclusionary rule, illegally obtained evidence, even confessions, cannot be allowed as trial evidence. The point here is not one of guilt or innocence, but the role of the criminal courts in a larger process of criminalizing African American males.
Another issue raised in this case was the role of public defenders. African Americans rely heavily upon court appointed attorneys. Many of these attorneys proceed from the presumptions about the criminality of African Americans, and so do judges and prosecutors. The possibility of a fair trial and a reasonable defense become remote, and court proceedings are too often turned into a charade.
Police are given a free hand. Their “investigations” and methods of gathering evidence usually bend or totally ignore legality. When it comes to the poor almost any police evidence, no matter how it is obtained, is permitted in court. Prosecutors, along with the police, go to extreme lengths to prejudice juries unfairly against peoples of color. Judges often stand aside and permit this.
The fact that most poor and working class defendants cannot afford bail means that they enter the court handcuffed and surrounded by sheriff’s deputies. This is perceived by many jurors as a sign of guilt or criminality. All the cards are stacked against African Americans, Latinos and the poor.
Prosecutors and police, in highly publicized cases, rely upon the electronic and printed media to create a lynch-mob atmosphere where the defendants are presented as criminal and violent. In the jogger’s case the media made it impossible to insure a fair trial of the accused youth. Jurors had been prejudiced before the trial. The DA merely accentuated these prejudices. The defense did little to alter that situation.
THE PENAL SYSTEM
In the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, mandatory sentencing and the elimination of parole are its central features. Congressman John Conyers has found a much to protest in this Act and its violation of the rights of defendants. Secondly, after conviction and sentencing, there is no possibility of parole.
Mandatory sentencing and the elimination of parole are responsible for the enormous rise in the prison population and prison overcrowding. Larger numbers of drug addicted, hence physically and psychologically ill young people, are behind bars. In this regard the Helms Amendment to the Sentencing Reform Act is significant. It holds that a person convicted in federal court of possessing five grams of crack cocaine, must be sentenced to from five to twenty years on the first conviction. If the same person is caught a second time with three or more grams of crack, the mandatory sentence is five to twenty; and for a third conviction, with one gram or more, the sentence is five to twenty. This relatively small quantity of crack cocaine means that many addicts and small and comparatively insignificant dealers are targeted for long prison sentences.
Along with overcrowding, prisons have become more brutal. The civil and human rights of inmates are non-existent. Since 1975, the penal system has been organized upon the principle that most people in jail are violent and cannot be rehabilitated. In place of rehabilitation, severe punishment, brutal retribution and behavior modification are the chief methods applied. Overcrowding, lockdowns and beatings are the rule. The racist character of this system cannot be ignored. The fact that the most brutal prisons are those where Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans are the majority, is evidence of this. The fact that prison authorities allow open racist and nazi organizations free movement is part of the racism inherent in the prison system.
EXTENSION OF THE DEATH PENALTY
The death penalty is being more widely applied. According to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in January 1991, there were 2,412 inmates on death row in 38 states: 50.5 percent were white, 39.4 percent were Black, 6.79 percent were Hispanic, 1.86 percent were Native American, .62 percent were Asian and .74 percent were unknown. Since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty, there have been 143 executions: 56 percent of them white, 39 percent Black and 5 percent Hispanic. Reactionary legal scholars and judges argue that the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. Progressive scholarship, however, shows the opposite. The extensive and disproportionate use of the death penalty in cases involving Blacks and other peoples of color is part of an attitude that the harshest punishments, including death, must be applied to them.
Authoritative evidence indicates that, in most instances, the death penalty is discriminatively applied to African Americans. In McClesky v Georgia, McClesky’s attorney demonstrated that in the state of Georgia, Blacks are eleven times more likely to receive the death penalty when convicted of murdering whites. The Supreme Court majority on April 22, 1987, however, ruled that a clear intent to discriminate was not shown in this disparity. The statistical relationship between race and the death penalty, which indicates discriminatory results, was ruled insufficient because McClesky could not show that the judge, the DA and the jury intended to discriminate. As in other civil rights cases, the Supreme Court majority argued that it is more important to show the intent to discriminate than the results of discrimination.
The racial disparity in the use of the death penalty is but another indication that African Americans are being singled out for special racist treatment. It is connected irreversibly to the criminalization of African American males.
THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY
The criminalization of African American males is part of the criminalization of the entire African American people. This is a threat to democracy generally. It represents a new stage of racist oppression. What cannot be overlooked is that this policy is a policy of the most racist sections of monopoly capital — in particular, those connected to law enforcement, the FBI and CIA, prosecutorial agencies, and the military. It is an anti-working class policy. It is geared to attacking a militant section of the working class and separating it from the general working class movement.
The answer to this criminalization lies in a new and powerful mass civil rights movement, whose agenda it is to protect and extend existing civil rights, to fight for affirmative action and quotas in jobs, education and job training. This new civil rights direction must be part of the struggle for the peace dividend and for military conversion to domestic production. A radical redistribution of wealth must occur, beginning with the enormous wealth concentrated in the military industrial complex and the criminal justice system.
The struggle against racism must be stepped up. The disguised racism which hides behind “anti-crime” policies must be attacked. While the primary threat is to African Americans and other peoples of color, the general threat is to democracy itself.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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