By Roberta Gubbins
Legal News
"There was a time when I rejected comparing mass incarceration with Jim Crow. And I once thought that people who made those kinds of claims were doing more harm than good," said Dr. Michelle Alexander, speaker at Thomas M. Cooley Law School as it marked Martin Luther King Day on January 17th.
"What a difference a decade makes," she said, "for after years of working as a civil rights lawyer attempting to assist people who (after serving their time) were trying to re-enter into society" her eyes were opened to the real issue.
"As a criminal," she writes in the introduction to her book, "The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," you have scarcely more rights and, arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it."
Alexander came to realize while serving as a civil rights lawyer with the ACLU in California, that society now can legally discriminate against felons, denying them the right to vote, to work, to housing, to food stamps and other forms of public assistance.
Alexander related the following facts found in the course of her research:
* More African American adults are under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, the decade before the Civil War began
* As of 2004, more black men were denied the right to vote, than in 1870, when there were poll taxes and literacy tests.
* A black child born today has less of a chance of being raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.
* In large American cities today, more than half of the men have criminal records.
While crime rates "are generally at historical lows, incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates have consistently soared."
The cause of the rise in incarceration rates, Alexander notes, is the "War on Drugs" and the "get tough" sentencing movement.
"For example, between 1985 and 2000, the period of the most dramatic expansion in the prison system, nearly two thirds of the increase in the Federal prison population was drug related offenses. More than half of the state prison population are drug convictions alone."
What can be done about this problem?
"We've got to begin by telling the whole truth," Alexander said. "We have to admit out loud that we as a nation have managed to rebirth a caste like system in this country."
This truth, she urged, must be told in "our churches, our schools, our community centers, and in our halls of power so that a great awakening can occur."
That means, explained Alexander, ending the drug war and shifting to a public health model rather than incarceration, using education and jobs to rehabilitate and restore, rather than punishment.
"We must end this notion that criminals are them, not us. Instead say, 'there but for the grace of God go I.' We must get to work to end this system as a whole. It is not enough to express concern one by one, we have to be willing to work for the end of this system of mass incarceration."
"If this feels too overwhelming, she said, "keep in mind that all these rules and laws rest on the same core belief that some of us are not worthy of care and compassion."
"A multi-racial, multi-ethnic human rights movement must occur, a movement that takes seriously the humanity of all people," she concluded. "Our task is to end the history and cycle of caste in America."
President and Dean of Cooley Law School in his welcoming remarks noted that Thomas M. Cooley Law School enrolls 1052 minority students and has more than double the African-American enrollment of the four other Michigan law schools combined. This is in keeping the school's mission "to provide access to the study of law."
Other speakers included Tammye Coles, Jack and Jill of America; Hon. Alma Wheeler Smith, former Michigan Senator and State Representative; Rene Canady, Ingham County Health Department; Hon. Fred Durhal Jr., Michigan State Representative. Cooley Law School Singers for the event were Rachael Hayes and Brian Smith.
Michelle Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court, and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Alexander joined the OSU faculty in 2005. She holds a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Prior to joining the OSU faculty, she was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, where she served as Director of the Civil Rights Clinic. Her book is in its tenth printing.
Published: Thu, Jan 26, 2012
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