Tag Archives: mass incarceration

The Progress of Decarceralization in Woodard’s “American Nations”

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I wonder which of #ColinWoodard’s “American Nations” will be the first to decarceralize Black and Brown communities in their midst en masse.

Yankeedom was the first to abolish slavery in the 1780s and 1790s, followed by New Netherland and the Midlands, and all three would become the base for the abolitionist movement. However, Yankeedom and the Midlands were among the first to bar free black people from settling within state lines, which would persist in many states until after the 13th Amendment’s ratification. Then when these laws were rolled back and African-Americans were elected to public office in these states for the first time, these were also the states which promoted housing discrimination through redlining against African-American migrants. Then, when African-Americans scored political victories in the Deep South, New France and Greater Appalachia nations, with the downfall of Jim Crow, the War on Drugs began in earnest, with carceralization ramping up throughout the country over the next half-century.

Only now are we considering the destruction wrought by this combination of redlining and the War on Drugs. The states in the Left Coast, Far West and El Norte regions have legalized cannabis, but African-Americans in these areas have not benefitted from this legalization due to that aforementioned combination of housing discrimination + War on Drugs and all of its ensuing effects, from job discrimination to cash bail to asset forfeiture to health disparities to homelessness to disinvestment in public education to police violence against unarmed and disarmable civilians.

This is just like how Andrew Jackson pushed for suffrage for non-property owning white men but not for slaves.

This is yet another failure, another limitation of the white American regional liberal imagination. OK with ending slavery, but also OK with confining the undesired into quarantine, and killing them when they “get out of line”. It must now be pushed to tear down the walls of the carceral state it helped build for Black and Brown bodies for a century and a half. It must now push for #decarceralization.

#Decarceralization requires every civil, economic and environmental rights-expanding movement – cannabis legalization, YIMBY, FightFor15, EndCashBail, BanTheBox, Revising the 13th, Ending School Disturbance Laws, DSA, Ending Mandatory Minimums, public transit expansion, sidewalk and bike path expansion, ending parking minimums for cars, restricting police use of force standards, prohibiting hairstyle discrimination, and so on – to commit to getting this massive project done in at least one region of the country.

To decarceralize Black people, and hence poor people at large, requires a shared regional culture which is open to the possibility in this period. If the Deep South and surrounding areas won’t do it, which region will?

Which of Woodard’s 11 American nations – Deep South, New France, Spanish Caribbean, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater, El Norte, Yankeedom, Midlands, New Netherland, Far West or Left Coast – will push their liberalism forward and become the first to commit to decarceralizing all Black and Brown bodies, to bringing over 1.5 centuries of #MassIncarceration in ghettoes and prisons to an end?

The Congressional Black Caucus and the 1994 Crime Bill

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

You know what I’m missing about the #1994CrimeBill?

An actual rebuttal to all the 23 Congressional Black Caucus members who voted for it and all the African-American non/ex-politicians who defend it to this day.

I have read so many defenses and criticisms of the bill from White folks during 2015-2016, but they all center the Clinton family in their explications. Even Michelle Alexander’s rage piece against the crime bill in “The Nation” magazine during the primary centered the Clintons.

What about the African-Americans themselves? Where was our political agency at that time? What benefits did many of us, the Kweisi Mfume-Sanford Bishop school of 23, see in supporting the bill, versus the John Lewis-Jesse Jackson school of 11 who voted No? Why do many African-Americans today still support the bill and its harsher terms of law in the context of its time, and is there a proper rebuttal to *their* supportive arguments?

In the end, this became an election year attack line, and not a moment for reconciling the past with the present. I think those who demand the lessening of mass incarceration missed a grand opportunity for change because the conversation about the 1994 Crime Bill went nowhere this year.