No justice, no peace
The Optimistic Will, or How the System Hurts White People
Hannah L. Walker
I am optimistic. Mobilized by Injustice has been described by multiple scholars as such. Perhaps because it contains the missive that the shared experiences of Black, white and Latinx Americans, “creat[es] opportunity for solidarity on the level required to challenge the criminal justice system.” The basic argument I’m making is that, based on all the data I’ve examined, the criminal justice system is so pervasive in the lives of Americans, and especially the poor, it impacts white people too, and like their Black and Latinx counterparts, they are compelled to take political action out of a sense of injustice.
In the words of Marie Gottschalk, “Bluntly stated, the United States would still have an incarceration crisis even if African Americans were sent to prison and jail at only the rate at which whites in the United States are currently locked up.” At a rate of 450 prisoners per 100,000 people in the population, the incarceration rate for white Americans still puts us among the top relative to other countries. That Black Americans are incarcerated at a rate of 2,306 per 100,000 is all the more stunning.
According to data collected for my research, 45 percent of white Americans indicated they had a loved one who became entangled in the criminal justice system at some point in their lives. Other researchers estimate that almost 30 percent of white folks had a close friend or family member who had spent time in prison or jail. This is still half the rate experienced by Black Americans. But neither is it trivial that a third of white people have second-hand experience with criminal justice.
Changing patterns in incarceration over the last 15 years have generated a striking trend: While incarceration rates in state and federal prisons, not counting immigration detention facilities (a horror for another day), have been declining, incarceration in county jails has been increasing tremendously, growth driven by incarceration in rural counties. At the same time, reforms to address hyper-incarceration have decreased the jail population in urban spaces. While Black and white people are among both the rural and urban jail populations, the dynamics of race, class and geography have meant that white people are among the fastest growing group in rural jails.
According to a report by the Vera Institute for Justice, (Vera Institute of Justice) this is true for a couple of reasons. The first has to do with the fact that rural communities are themselves isolated and strapped for resources. Rural counties have experienced extraordinary growth in pre-trial detention — that is, people held in jail while they await trial, even though they have not been sentenced or convicted. This is in part due to fewer available justices to hear and resolve cases quickly; more limited access to pre-trial services that would allow individuals to await trial at home; and fewer services available in communities that allow for diversion, and other alternatives to incarceration.
At the same time, in the last several years laws against minor behaviors related to poverty, like sleeping on the pavement and panhandling, have proliferated. In an embrace of zero-tolerance, law enforcement have increased citations for minor stuff like littering, jay-walking and having an open container of alcohol. Meanwhile, funding for social services has increasingly declined at the state and local level. As a consequence, prisons and jails are now the primary provider of care for the mentally ill in the United States. Our primary response to a variety of social ills is law enforcement, jails and prisons.
The second reason why rural jails are driving the expansion of incarceration rates at present has to do with some of the issues I raised in my last post: jails and prisons are attractive ways to make money for communities otherwise lacking in diverse sources of income. Jails have expanded capacity in some rural communities so they can lease beds to state and federal prisons to alleviate overcrowding. This sounds like it should benefit communities where jails are located by providing jobs and economic stability, but instead researchers have demonstrated that it creates a perverse incentive to increasingly use pretrial detention to justify the ongoing need for the jail.
Likewise, when you embed an economic incentive in the business of criminal justice, you incentivize the meanest version of jail and prison, where maximum profit is achieved by increasing the hardships faced by prisoners. Cost-saving measures include reducing the use of electricity, especially for heating and air-conditioning; cutting out a meal during the day, so that prisoners eat only twice; fitting more people into a single cell; purchasing low-quality, damaged or old food; and cutting addiction and educational programs. Exploiting lax regulation and the public thirst for austerity, at every turn criminal justice actors have found ways to make money from the country’s vast prison and jail population.
The fact that so many people have experienced some aspect of the criminal justice system first and second hand, and know the injustice of the system intimately helps explain the massive outpouring of resistance to which we now bear witness. Because on the other side of an altercation with a cop on the street, should one survive it, lies jail and prison.
That strong sense of injustice that develops from seeing prisons, jails, courts and police up close is not limited to Black Americans. White Americans feel it too. And, they speak about their belief that the system is unjust in raw terms, that clearly points to what I’ve been describing for you all along — they are incensed by the idea the system purports to deliver justice, but instead seems to feed endlessly off the bodies of the poor.
In the words of one individual interviewed for the book whose partner was criminal justice involved: “She is destitute…because she is a broke single mom living in public housing she didn’t have any choice but to go along for the ride…there is no one, not a soul, who benefited from her experiences, except the people who make a living from the system.”
In reference to services for returning citizens to prevent recidivism, a formerly incarcerated woman interviewed for the project reports, “they have no idea what the struggles are and so things are not appropriately provided for a person to be self-sufficient when they come out…in my opinion they do not want any of that to change because we are job security. And we generate billions of dollars in the United States when we recidivate.”
The data I collected and analyzed consistently show that when white people view the criminal justice system as fundamentally unjust, they become politically mobilized to contest it alongside people of color. Thus, basic numbers are what give me some cautious optimism that if we keep raising consciousness, keep demanding justice, and keep listening to and supporting Black voices, we might actually have a shot at precipitating transformative change.
Yet, I can’t blame people for meeting optimism with skepticism. White people do not have a good track record of consistently supporting Black movements for civil and human rights, and history is rife with examples of so-called white allies throwing Black activists and interests under the bus. First wave suffragists intentionally excluded the right to vote for Black women. It is impossible to cover the full history of how racism has inhibited labor organizing in the United States. Second wave white feminists failed to recognize the importance of demands for racial equality within their own movement.
The data collected for this book evince these dynamics with respect to activism to address the injustices of the criminal justice system. The mistake we often make as white people is centering the demands of our own experience, and decentering the demands of people of color. Individuals interviewed for this project explained racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes via class. Survey data indicate that while Black Americans point to all kinds of underlying issues leading to their overrepresentation in the system, inclusive of discrimination by officials and poverty and inequality, the majority of white Americans pointed to poverty alone. This, despite the fact that the preservation of racial hierarchy is at the core of modern day criminal justice policies and practices. We must hold the value of Black lives at our center because the political economy of prisons, which demands more and more and more bodies, was built around the fundamental notion that Black lives do not matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr. lamented at length about the White moderate, sympathetic to calls for racial justice while condemning tactics used to advance liberation, and unsupportive of actions that would help achieve it. And indeed, fresh data measuring attitudes in this present political moment reveal the potential limits of white solidarity.
In the last two and half weeks since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has increased by 15 points. The majority of white Americans are more troubled by police violence during protests than by the protesters themselves, and support for police among this group has dropped dramatically.
Yet, at the same time that sympathy towards demands for racial justice are on the rise, only about a quarter of white Americans support defunding the police — this, compared to nearly 60 percent of Black Americans for whom the same is true. Even the more palatable reallocate money to community alternatives, garners only 33 percent support among white people relative to 64 percent support among Black people.
We are no longer at a place where the majority of the public thinks that racial injustice is not real, that it isn’t a problem, or that we live in a color-blind society. The last four years have disabused the public of that notion. The question that remains is whether we are willing to commit in no uncertain terms to dismantling the systems that perpetuate racial violence.
I am optimistic. One thing I learned from the activists I’ve worked with is that to be active, one must be both intellectually pessimistic, but practically optimistic. Antonio Gramsci wrote that, “The challenge of modernity is to live life without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but am an optimist because of will.” Today my practical optimism resides in the belief that white Americans have the capacity to fight unequivocally for Black life, knowing that by doing so they fight to preserve their own humanity.
