How Can the “Land of the Free” Have So Many Prisoners?
In 2016, America’s prison population was at 1,458,173 people. This is the leading country in the incarceration rate by miles. America accounts for only 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. The reason for this huge population is due to the mass incarceration of our nation’s people of color, especially our black men. The term mass incarceration refers to the way America has targeted and locked up mass amounts of this nation’s people of color. In their lifetime, white men have a 17 in 1 chance of going to prison, while black men have a 1 in 3 chance. And in 2016, people of color made up more than 1.01 million of the 1.45 million prisoners in circulation at that time. Mass incarceration has been a plague to America’s minorities more than anyone and is rooted from years of systemic racism and prejudices, and further pushes unfair stereotypes into society and has been pushed from the beginning of America as a free country.
While black women still succeed white women in the prison population, there still are not nearly as many black women compared to black men. This most likely stems from the stereotype that black men were seen as rapists and beast in post civil war times. When looking at the movie “The Birth of a Nation”, one of the first full-length movies ever, there is a scene where a young white woman would rather throw herself off of a cliff than get raped by a “black” man. I use quotations because the actor was really a white man in black-face. This was how black men were seen and are in a sense still seen as today. After the 13th amendment that abolished slavery, there was a sort of loophole within the amendment. The amendment reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”. That one part that states, “except as punishment” is what has left in a systematic way to keep slavery around way after it was abolished. They need men to still be out in the fields, so white people would go after black men for petty crimes in order to keep them in the loop of slavery.
Mass incarceration has been a systematic plague that has resulted from years of racism and hatred. After slavery was abolished and the thirteenth amendment was enacted with the loophole “except as a punishment for crime”, slavery was basically brought back just in a new and “legal way”. Slavery has never really gone away, it just evolved to fit what was “acceptable” in society. The fact that our school systems are not teaching our children about this history is why it is repeating. We as a society are not learning from this mistake, which is why it continues to practically destroy our black communities and now with all this police brutality and aggression, trying to silence our black population into submission. Michelle Alexander, civil rights lawyer says, “Police violence, that isn’t the problem in and of itself. It’s a reflection of a much larger, brutal system of racial and social control known as mass incarceration, which authorizes this kind of police violence”. We are no better than our forefathers and if it continues without fixing the system could possibly result in another civil war that could tear this country apart even worse than it already is.
