The New American Apartheid Part I

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=5758

The New American Apartheid
Part I


by Randall Shelden and William B. Brown
www.sheldensays.com
June 22, 2004

Modern prisoners occupy the lowest rungs on the social class ladder, and they always have. The modern prison system (along with local jails) is a collection of ghettos or poorhouses reserved primarily for the unskilled, the uneducated, and the powerless. In increasing numbers this system is being reserved for racial minorities, especially blacks, which is why we are calling it the New American Apartheid. This is the same segment of American society that has experienced some of the most drastic reductions in income and they have been targeted for their involvement in drugs and the subsequent violence that extends from the lack of legitimate means of goal attainment.



An argument could certainly be made that blacks, especially males, are superfluous and expendable in American society (that is, they are not direct contributors to corporate profits). With constant corporate downsizing and deindustrialization during the past couple of decades came the elimination of millions of jobs that previously helped minorities to get out of poverty. Specific social control apparatuses have been deemed necessary to control human frustrations in the aftermath of diminished opportunities. The criminal justice system has been selected as the primary apparatus to apply social control mechanisms on the unskilled, the uneducated, the powerless and ethnic minorities.



While residential segregation continues unabated, policies which reek of apartheid have risen along side of it. It is apparent that the criminal justice system has been engaged in a systematic attack on blacks and that going to jail or prison has become a common event in the lives of millions of racial minorities. The modern penal system accommodates the “new American apartheid.”



The most recent imprisonment data reaffirm this. At the end of 2002, blacks constituted 45.1 percent of the total prison population (with an incarceration rate more than seven times greater than whites); Latinos constituted 18 percent and whites only 34 percent. In other words, racial minorities made up two-thirds of the entire prison population. This in direct contrast to what it was in the 1930s, when whites were overwhelmingly the numerical majority of all prisoners, constituting around 70 percent of the prison population.


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