Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama's political success and Oprah Winfrey's financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as “a system of social control” (“More African Americans are under correctional control today... than were enslaved in 1850”).        (More)       

Cops to Be Tried in Alleged Fatal Beating of Homeless Man Caught on Video

 The July 5, 2011, surveillance video, taken from a publicly mounted camera, coupled with an audio recording device worn by an officer, stunned a packed courtroom of Thomas' supporters when it was shown for the first time Monday.

"I can't breathe man," and, "sorry," Thomas could be heard telling officers as he allegedly endured punches to his left ribs and blows to his face from an officer's knee.        (More)       

Lock ‘em up: Mass incarceration and the
juvenile justice system

Mass incarceration is not just a problem faced by adults in the system. Juveniles face similar rates of over-incarceration with over 60,000 American youth being held in correctional facilities. In addition, mirroring the adult justice system, youth of color are significantly over-represented in the juvenile justice system.

Interestingly, the mass incarceration of youth is largely a U.S. problem. Although many other developed countries are similar to the US in their rates of youth arrests, they have substantially lower youth incarceration rates:         (More)       

News for judicial system: mass incarceration

Most people assume that the war on drugs was launched in response to the emergence of crack cocaine in inner city communities, but that's not true. President Reagan declared his drug war at the time when drug crime was actually on the decline -- it was a couple of years before, not after, crack hit the streets and became a media sensation. So, the drug war, really, has its origins in racial politics not drug crimes.

If you trace the origins of the drug war and the "get tough" movement and rhetoric, it can be traced back to the segregationist, and former segregationist, who were looking for formally colorblind rhetoric that could be used to appeal to poor and working class whites particularly in the South, who were resentful of, anxious about, threatened by, many of the gains of African-Americans in the civil rights movement -- particularly busing, desegregation and affirmative action.        (More)       

Building a Prison Economy in Rural America

An 11-year-old at a middle school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, took a lollipop from a jar on the teacher’s desk and was charged with theft. The boy was convicted of a misdemeanor and put on probation.

In St. Petersburg, Florida, a five-year-old girl was arrested and forcibly removed from her elementary school by local police for having a temper tantrum in class.

These stories are typical of what is happening in schools across America today.   Large numbers of students are being pushed out of school as a result of overly harsh school discipline practices, including so-called “zero tolerance” policies.  These practices are paving the way for higher dropout rates and involvement in the criminal justice system, a pathway often referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline.”  And the pipeline is simply the first step in the road to the mass incarceration crisis that currently exists in this country.         (More)       

Deadly symbiosis
When ghetto and prison meet and mesh

To explain the astounding over-representation of blacks behind bars that has driven mass imprisonment in the United States, one must break out of the ‘crime-and-punishment’ paradigm to reckon the extra-penological function of the criminal justice system as instrument for the management of dispossessed and dishonored groups. This article places the prison in the historical sequence of ‘peculiar institutions’ that have shouldered the task of defining and confining African Americans, alongside slavery, the Jim Crow regime, and the ghetto. The recent upsurge in black incarceration results from the crisis of the ghetto as device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for the containment of lower-class African Americans. In the post-Civil Rights era, the vestiges of the dark ghetto and the expanding prison system have become linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion, spawning a carceral continuum that entraps a population of younger black men rejected by the deregulated wage-labor market.         (More)       

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found?  The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies.  In real life, the answer is no. 

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders.  Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses.  What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests.  To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.        (More)       

Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Campaign

The New Jim Crow: Michelle Alexander describes how she came to recognize the new manifestation of a part of American history many claimed was dead (AUDIO)

Michelle Alexander Lecture: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:THE NEW JIM CROW (VIDEO)

The Caging Of America! (VIDEO)

The Impact of Mass Incarceration on Poverty (VIDEO)

Slavery and the Prison Industrial Complex - Angela Davis (VIDEO)

Voices from Behind the Bars (VIDEO)

The war on drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex) (video)

Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging - Full Movie (Documentary) (video)

Nation Behind Bars Mass Incarceration And Political Prisoners In the U.S. - Efia Nwangaza (VIDEO)

Pictures of Africa

My Love & Pride) The Africa They Never Show You.

Earthquake Song.wmv