Description
Refer to the Mass Incarceration Power Points
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Mass Incarceration
Part 1
Professor Donnalynn Scillieri
Professor Scillieri
Mapping Police Violence
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
Professor Scillieri
Mass Shootings Since Sandy Hook
• https://www.the74million.org/article/map-in-decade-since-sandyhook-nearly-500-killed-in-mass-shootings-across-u-s/
Professor Scillieri
Patrick Moynihan (1927 – 2003)
• Grew up with a single mother in a disadvantaged home.
• He studied at Tufts University and London School of Economics.
• He wrote for The Reporter and became an anti-communist and a liberal.
• Moynihan went on to work for the Department of Labor and became
disillusioned with Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Professor Scillieri
Patrick Moynihan’s Beliefs
• “He believed in the marriage of government and social science to
formulate policy (Coates 2).”
• Moynihan wanted to get away from traditional welfare models and
provide job trainings for males and guarantee minimum income for
every family.
• Male unemployment was the largest obstacle for social mobility.
Professor Scillieri
Patrick Moynihan’s Report:
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
• It was published in March 1965, influenced by the Civil Rights Act and meant to
be a government report.
• The report explained “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment”
to the black community, along with “racist virus in the American blood stream,”
which would continue to plague blacks in the future.
• “Moynihan’s aim in writing “The Negro Family” had been to muster support for
an all-out government assault on the structural social problems that held black
families down. (“Family as an issue raised the possibility of enlisting the support
of conservative groups for quite radical social programs,” he would later write.)
Instead his report was portrayed as an argument for leaving the black family to
fend for itself (Coates 5).”
Professor Scillieri
Slave Trade
• http://www.slate.
com/articles/life/t
he_history_of_am
erican_slavery/20
15/06/animated_i
nteractive_of_the
_history_of_the_a
tlantic_slave_trad
e.html
Professor Scillieri
Patrick Moynihan’s Report:
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
• The report backfired by blaming black women for setting up obstacles
affecting black men’s ability too move ahead; and he did not provide
policy changes.
• Also, the report victim blamed and missed the target of white
oppression.
• Currently, the US holds 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the
jailed.
Professor Scillieri
New Left Wing in the United States (1959 – 1970’s)
• “In 1967, the Civil Rights Movement was losing it’s wind and the New Left
was rising.
• Inspired by, the African American Civil Rights Movement, the main U.S. New Left
organization, Students for a Democratic Society(SDS), was founded in 1959 and
issued its political manifesto The Port Huron Statement, in 1962.
• As American involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, opposition to the war
became the major focus of American activists.
• New Left movements generally avoided traditional forms of political organization
in favour of strategies of mass protest, direct action, and civil disobedience.
• The revolutionary mood dissipated through the 1970s, although important lines
of continuity remained between the New Left and new social movements such as
feminism and environmentalism.
• A minority of activists went on to found clandestine “revolutionary”
organizations practicing violent direct action; examples the Weather
Underground in the United States.
• https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Left
Professor Scillieri
Moynihan in the Nixon Administration:
The Family Assistance Plan
• Nixon promoted Moynihan’s proposal before the American
public in a television address in August of 1969, and officially
presented it to Congress in October.
• Most important was Moynihan’s suggestion for a minimum
income for all American families.
• This The Family Assistance Plan died in the Senate.
• Moynihan pointed out that his pessimistic predictions were
now becoming reality.
• Crime was increasing.
• So were the number of children in poor, female-headed families.
• Moynihan issued a dire warning: “Lower-class behavior in our cities is
shaking them apart.”
Professor Scillieri
Results
• From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about
150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000.
• From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again.
• By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a
modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012.
• In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has
increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million.
• The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—
and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants.
• In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10
times the rate of their white peers.
• In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39
were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.
Professor Scillieri
Results
• In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until
today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million.
• The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s
inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants.
• In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was
incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers.
• In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages
of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their
white peers.
• Moynihan explained this was from the systematic oppression for 350
years.
Professor Scillieri
Mass Incarceration Part 2
Gray Wastes: “A Carceral State of Sprawling
Netherworld of Prisons and Jails”
• Through the middle of the 20th century, America’s imprisonment rate hovered
at about 110 people per 100,000.
• Presently, America’s incarceration rate (which accounts for people in
prisons andj ails) is roughly:
• 12 times the rate in Sweden,
• eight times the rate in Italy,
• seven times the rate in Canada,
• five times the rate in Australia,
• and four times the rate in Poland.
• America’s closest to-scale competitor is Russia with Vladimir Putin locking up about 450
people per 100,000, compared with our 700 or so, it isn’t much of a competition.
• China has about four times America’s population, but American jails and prisons hold
half a million more people.
Professor Scillieri
• https://www.priso
npolicy.org/report
s/pie2020.html
Professor Scillieri
The History Leading to the Gray Wastes
• “Black criminality is literally written into the American Constitution—
The Fugitive Slave Clause, in Article IV of that document, declared
that any “Person held to Service or Labour” who escaped from one
state to another could be “delivered up on Claim of the Party to
whom such Service or Labour may be due.” From America’s very
founding, the pursuit of the right to labor, and the right to live free of
whipping and of the sale of one’s children, were verboten for blacks.”
• Propaganda was circulated portraying black men as deviants and
unable to control themselves. This was perpetrated in Birth of a
Nation
Professor Scillieri
The History Leading to the Gray Wastes
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvG0K5AdKiM&t=1s
Professor Scillieri
Dream World 3
Professor Scillieri
The History Leading to the Gray Wastes
• Before Emancipation, enslaved blacks were rarely lynched, because
whites were loath to destroy their own property.
• But after the Civil War, the number of lynchings rose, peaked at the
turn of the century, then persisted at a high level until just before the
Second World War, not petering out entirely until the height of the
civil-rights movement, in the 1960s.
Professor Scillieri
Emmett Till
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V6ffUUEvaM&t=198s
Professor Scillieri
Gray Wastes
• The Gray Wastes differ in both size and mission from the penal systems of earlier eras.
• As African Americans began filling cells in the 1970s, rehabilitation was largely abandoned in favor of retribution.
• Prison should no longer reform convicts but punish them.
• For instance, in the 1990s, South Carolina cut back on in-prison education, banned air conditioners, jettisoned
televisions, and discontinued intramural sports.
• Over the next 10 years, Congress repeatedly attempted to pass a H.R.663 – No Frills Prison Act.
• To amend the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 to prevent luxurious conditions in prisons.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/663/all-info
• A goal of this “penal harm” movement, one criminal-justice researcher wrote at the time, was to find “creative
strategies to make offenders suffer.”
• In 1984, 70 percent of all parolees successfully completed their term without arrest and were granted
full freedom.
• In 1996, only 44 percent did.
• As of 2013, 33 percent do.
Professor Scillieri
Gray Wastes
• The sociologist Bruce Western explains the current inevitability of prison for
certain demographics of young black men.
• A series of risk factors—mental illness, illiteracy, drug addiction, poverty—increases one’s
chances of ending up incarcerated.
• “Roughly half of today’s prison inmates are functionally illiterate,” according to
Robert Perkinson, an associate professor of American studies at the University
of Hawaii at Mānoa.
• “Four out of five criminal defendants qualify as indigent before the courts.”
• Sixty-eight percent of jail inmates were struggling with substance dependence or abuse in
2002.
• “One can imagine a separate world where the state would see these maladies through
the lens of government education or public-health programs. Instead it has decided to
see them through the lens of criminal justice.”
Professor Scillieri
Mass Incarceration Part 4
Back to School
Professor Scillieri
• Leaseback
• Build the prison
• Architects, engineers, surveyors
• Materials, construction
• Guards, law enforcement, nursing, workers
• Laundry service, food service,
• Waste,
• Police unions, carpenters, teamsters
Professor Scillieri
Prison Stocks
Geo Group Inc. (GEO)
Core Civic Inc. (CXW)
(formerly Corrections Corporation of
America)
• https://www.marketwatch.com/i
nvesting/stock/geo
• https://www.marketwatch.co
m/investing/stock/cxw
Professor Scillieri
Gray Wastes
• Maryland has followed the National Movement is to punish inmates more
harshly and keep them imprisoned with longer sentences.
• Overcrowding, the stripping of programs, resources, cutting out weights in the
yard and college programs.
• At one time, inmates did their time and went to pre-release facilities
• Requirements for release became more laborious and rigorous.
• Meanwhile, the prisons were filling to capacity and beyond.
• The prisons are overcrowded and hold two people in cells meant for one (8-by10 space) – creating more stress.
Professor Scillieri
High Incarceration Rates
Have No Correlation to Crime Rates
• Between 1963 and 1993,
• the murder rate doubled,
• the robbery rate quadrupled,
• and the aggravated-assault rate nearly quintupled.
• However, the relationship between crime and incarceration is more discordant
than it appears.
• Imprisonment rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s,
• even as violent crime increased.
• From the mid-’70s to the late ’80s, both imprisonment rates and violent-crime rates rose.
• Then, from the early ’90s to the present, violent-crime rates fell while imprisonment
rates increased.
Professor Scillieri
• Derek Neal, an economist at the
University of Chicago, has found
that by the early 2000s, a suite of
tough-on-crime laws had made
prison sentences much more likely
than in the past.
• From 1985 to 2000, the likelihood of
a long prison sentence:
• nearly doubled for drug
possession,
• tripled for drug trafficking,
• and quintupled for nonaggravated assault.
• (Robert Sampson. Data from:
Bureau of Justice Statistics;
Sourcebook of Criminal Justice
Statistics; Uniform Crime Reporting
System.)
Professor Scillieri
1.5 Million Missing Black Men
By JUSTIN WOLFERS, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quely
The New York Times
APRIL 20, 2015
• For every 100 black women not in jail, there are only 83 black men. The
remaining men – 1.5 million of them – are, in a sense, missing.
• 17 missing black men for every 100 black women
• Among cities with sizable black populations, the largest single gap is
in Ferguson, Mo.
• 40 missing black men for every 100 black women
• North Charleston, S.C., has a gap larger than 75 percent of cities.
• 25 missing black men for every 100 black women
• This gap – driven mostly by incarceration and early deaths – barely exists
among whites.
• 1 missing white man for every 100 white women
Professor Scillieri
1.5 Million Missing Black Men – Charts
• https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing
-black-men.html
Professor Scillieri
Statistics
• Among all black males born since the late 1970s, one in four went
to prison by their mid-‘30s; among those who dropped out of high
school, seven in 10 did.
• The Prison Pipeline – “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event
among our nation’s most marginalized groups,” Devah Pager, a
sociologist at Harvard, has written. “Rather it has now become a
normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.”
• The jobless rates for the year 2000 to include incarcerated young
black men, Pager found:
• joblessness among all young black men went from 24 to 32 percent;
• among those who never went to college, it went from 30 to 42 percent.
• One in four black men born since the late 1970s has spent time in prison.
Professor Scillieri
Mass Incarceration Part 4
Families Suffer
• By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison—
• Roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were locked
up.
• “More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary breadwinner in their
family,” the National Research Council report noted.
• Should the family attempt to stay together through incarceration:
• the loss of income only increases,
• as the mother must pay for phone time,
• travel costs for visits,
• and legal fees.
• The burden continues after the father returns home, because a criminal record tends to
injure employment opportunities.
• The children suffer.
Professor Scillieri
Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office Community Affects of DV/SA
http://patch.com/new-jersey/wayne/woman-caught-using-heroin-wayne-elementary-school-police-0
http://patch.com/new-jersey/wayne/164-bags-heroin-seized-7-people-arrested-wayne-0
http://patch.com/new-jersey/wayne/wayne-men-caught-heroin-marijuana-after-traffic-stops-0
Professor Scillieri
War Against Drugs
• In this climate of white repression and paralyzed black leadership, the federal
government launched in 1914 the first war on drugs, passing the Harrison
Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine.
• “The use of cocaine by unfortunate women generally and by negroes in
certain parts of the country is simply appalling,” the American Pharmaceutical
Association’s Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit had
concluded in 1902.
• The New York Times published an article by a physician saying that the
South was threatened by “cocaine-crazed negroes,” to whom the drug had
awarded expert marksmanship and an immunity to bullets “large enough to
‘kill any game in America.’ ”
• http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archivefree/pdf?res=9901E5D61F3BE633A2575BC0A9649C946596D6CF
Professor Scillieri
Bryan Stevenson
• Attorney Bryan Stevenson, author of the bestseller “Just Mercy,” has
helped to save 145 wrongly-convicted prisoners from execution, but these
days the man behind Montgomery, Alabama’s National Memorial for Peace
and Justice might be better known his other job: educating Americans
about the legacy of slavery and racial violence in this country. Stevenson
talks with correspondent David Pogue about confronting history as a first
step in healing, and gives a tour of the brand new Legacy Museum in
Montgomery. Air Date: Jan 30, 2022
• https://www.cbs.com/shows/cbs-sundaymorning/video/FjN6AXcuFBGgV0_qEqFY6k7KiBYaWGya/confrontinghistory-to-heal-a-nation/
Professor Scillieri
J. Edgar Hoover
• J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI for nearly half a century, harassed three
generations of leaders.
• In 1919, he attacked the black nationalist Marcus Garvey as “the foremost radical
among his race,” then ruthlessly pursued Garvey into jail and deportation.
Video https://www.biography.com/people/marcus-garvey-9307319
• In 1964, he attacked Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the
country,” and hounded him, bugging his hotel rooms, his office, and his home,
until his death.
• Hoover declared the Black Panther Party to be “the greatest threat to the internal
security of the country” and authorized a repressive, lethal campaign against its
leaders that culminated in the assassination of Fred Hampton in December of
1969. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chichicagodays-pantherraid-story-story.html
Professor Scillieri
Stop and Frisk
• In 1994, Rudolph Giuliani became mayor of NYC and his police commissioner William Bratton
prioritized a strategy of “order maintenance” in city policing – stop and frisk.
• Police officers could stop pedestrians on vague premises such as “furtive movements” and
then question them and search them for guns and drugs.
• Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University law professor, found that blacks and Hispanics were
stopped significantly more often than whites even “after adjusting stop rates for the precinct
crime rates” and “other social and economic factors predictive of police activity.”
• Despite Giuliani’s claim that aggressive policing is justified because blacks are “killing each
other,” Fagan found that between 2004 and 2009, officers recovered weapons in less than 1
percent of all stops—and recovered them more frequently from whites than from blacks. Yet
blacks were 14 percent more likely to be subjected to force.
• In 2013 the policy, as carried out under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, was ruled
unconstitutional.
Professor Scillieri
17 disturbing statistics from the
federal report on Ferguson
police
• CBS News
watch?v=GVxjH4zlmIg
• John Oliver
https://www.youtube.com/w
atch?v=KUdHIatS36A
• https://www.washingtonpo
st.com/news/wonk/wp/20
15/03/04/17-disturbingstatistics-from-the-federalreport-on-fergusonpolice/?utm_term=.f12e54
92f0f2
Professor Scillieri
Angola Prison
• Crime in black neighborhoods was considered “black on black” crime but when
businesses were robbed and it spread, it became white fear – Jeffrey S. Adler, a
historian and criminologist at the University of Florida.
• Louisiana district attorneys promised that “Negro slayers of Negroes will be
thoroughly prosecuted.”
• The Louisiana Attorney General stated “Negro slayers of Negroes will be
thoroughly prosecuted.”
• A common tool in homicide cases was to threaten black suspects with capital
punishment to extract a guilty plea, which mandated a life sentence.
• 1925 to 1940, violent crime declined but black arrest rates increased 143% and
whites 39%.
Professor Scillieri
Angola Prison
• https://www.cbsnews.com/video/a-visit-to-a-prison-rodeo/
Professor Scillieri
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
