War on Drugs, Prison Industrial Complex
“Michelle Alexander, highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”
See on www.youtube.com
The New Jim Crow, book cover
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Rating: 5 of 5 stars
Pros: Detailed analysis of history, politics, and law, Mind-blowing insights, Content…
I read the book on Kindle and highly recommend it.
The book flows well. It’s full of frustrating facts of U.S. hypocrisy.
Click through to read the full review by Charles Franklin.
Last month The Atlantic article ‘Did the Wrong Man Spend 40 Years in Solitary Confinement?’ asked the question ‘ a sham trial in Louisiana says about the U.S. court system’. Andrew Cohen explains …
Herman Wallace is dying, so he is not really free. His life is over.
How many European-Americans have been held in solitary confinement for anywhere near this long?
Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment.
This story is further evidence that the U.S. does not apply punishment equally across racial lines.
In the U.S. we often hear about human rights violoations in other countries, but how often does the U.S. address our own human rights violations?
See on politicalblindspot.com
“Many of the heirs of those who profited from neo-slavery are captains of industry today. Their fortunes remain intact. No one was ever held financially accountable.”
Today’s prisons continue having people work in order to profit business owners.
The incarcerated are still disproportionately Black and Brown.
And field work, which makes agricultural companies richer, is still here, but has simply changed from Black to Brown.
See on www.racefiles.com
Police Brutality: F
In 2012 police officers, security guards and vigilantes killed at least 136 unarmed black people – unarmed! Trayvon Martin is just what made the news. The police still get away with murder. The civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s left the police and the courts pretty much untouched. It is next to impossible to prove in court that a police officer or judge acted out of racism.
The rampant police brutality of African-Americans and Latinos came to light for me when I ran across a Scoop.it page that was run by @usaslumdog
He doesn’t run the Scoop.it page anymore but he does continue to tweet about African-American rights, similar to @normbond @ColorLines and @TimWise
I recently learned that in Germany the death penalty is illegal. Can you imagine if it was found that Germany was putting Jews to death, or that they were disproportionately putting Jews to death today?
That’s exactly what is happening to African-Americans in the U.S. today. After being oppressed through slavery and Jim Crow – they continue to be oppressed by a racist U.S. culture of violence and oppression.
In 2013 U.S. culture still targets Black and Brown communities via
See on abagond.wordpress.com
“We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is, in too many ways, broken,” Holder said. “And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget.”
“A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities,” Holder said Monday. (Excerpts of his prepared remarks were provided Sunday to The Washington Post.) He added that “many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate these problems rather than alleviate them.”
It is clear that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no truly good law enforcement reason,” Holder said. “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation,” he added later in the speech.
Holder is calling for a change in Justice Department policies to reserve the most severe penalties for drug offenses for serious, high-level or violent drug traffickers. He has directed his 94 U.S. attorneys across the country to develop specific, locally tailored guidelines for determining when federal charges should be filed and when they should not.
Progress!
See on www.washingtonpost.com
