A recent Sacramento Bee op-ed by Michelle Alexander challenges Governor Schwarzenegger to treat prison reform not simply as a quick buck for the budget, but rather as a matter of racial justice. She calls on the Governor to address the policies and practices that have led to the disproportionate representation of people of color in the criminal justice system and ensure that dollars generated from prison reform actually reach the communities that have suffered most from mass incarceration. Below we have published a longer version of Alexander’s piece, which mentions the work of the Ella Baker Center in struggling for a justice system that benefits all.
On Wednesday, February 10 at 6pm, Alexander will appear at the Ella Baker Center to discuss these ideas further and share insights from her new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The event is co-sponsored by Akonadi Foundation, All of Us or None, and Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. Please RSVP to zachary “at” ellabakercenter.org if you would like to attend.
Governor’s plan for prisons ignores racial history
By Michelle Alexander
In a move nearly as audacious as his fleet of Hummers, Schwarzenegger elated many public educators and criminal justice reformers last week by publicly embracing the “books not bars” motto that had become a rallying cry of grassroots organizations, such as the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, for a decade. He declared that California should no longer spend more money on prisons than education and proposed a state constitutional amendment that would reverse the current spending ratio. “The priorities have become out of whack over the years,” he said. “I mean, think about it, 30 years ago, 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education, and 3 percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons, and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education.” He then asked incredulously, “What does it say about any state that focuses more on prison uniforms than on caps and gowns?”
Good question, governor.
California has long been a national leader in mass imprisonment — which is really saying something, since our nation leads the world. No other nation in the world puts so many of its own people in cages. The U.S. rate of incarceration dwarfs the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.
Until very recently, the governor didn’t seem terribly bothered by the fact that California‘s taxpayers were spending vastly more money on prison guards than school teachers. He gave lip service to the need to reduce the state’s prison population, but in practice fought tooth-and-nail lawsuits that were designed to achieve that very result.
Last February, a federal court ordered the state to reduce California’s prison population by as many as 55,000 inmates within 3 years to provide a constitutional level of medical care to prisoners and adequate living conditions. California prisons had been operating at twice their capacity. Evidence of deplorable living conditions and inadequate medical care led federal judges to conclude that the state’s prison system was killing at least one inmate a month and violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Schwarzenegger, however, was unfazed. The state vowed to appeal those decisions, decrying federal intervention into state affairs, despite the fact it was predicted that the reforms ordered by the court could save the state up to $900 million a year — money that certainly could have been spent on caps and gowns.
So what changed?
Few people seem to believe Schwarzenegger experienced a moral awakening, despite his claims that he was moved by university students protesting drastic budget cuts. Everyone knows this is about the numbers. He’s staring down the barrel of a $20 billion deficit, few options, and a bleak legacy. So what if he’s playing politics and trying to pass it off as a grand gesture? Shouldn’t we celebrate anyway?
Perhaps not. Caution is in order — not because of what Schwarzenegger said, but rather what he didn’t say. For example, he didn’t say that prison sentences should be drastically reduced or that three strikes laws imposing life imprisonment on people who are convicted of stealing videotapes should be erased from the books. In fact, he said close to nothing about how spending on prisons would be funneled to schools, except to suggest that the prison system could be operated more cheaply if it were privatized.
That announcement most certainly cheered the Correctional Corporation of America — the nation’s largest private prison company — which is deeply interested in increasing the supply of prisoners who can be held captive for a profit. Wall Street investors would be the primary beneficiaries of any large-scale privatization effort, and there is good reason to believe that problems plaguing California’s prisons will get much worse, not better, if private companies slash the amount of money spent on health care, shelter, and food, without policy changes dramatically reducing the number of people behind prison walls.
But even if prison privatization were not an issue, a much deeper moral problem remains. When announcing his belated revelation that schools are worth more to society than jails, he failed to acknowledge — must less apologize for — the devastation caused to communities of color by the policies of mass incarceration.
The skyrocketing incarceration rates of the past three decades have not affected all segments of California’s population equally. In the early 1980s, whites were the majority of the prison population; today, the overwhelming majority of California prisoners are African American and Latino. Demographic changes explain only a small portion of the shift. Gross racial disparities can be found throughout the criminal justice system, from stops and searches, through plea bargaining and sentencing. In California (and nationwide), the explosion of the prison population and the striking shift in the racial composition of those who can be found behind bars has been driven largely by the War on Drugs — a war that has targeted African Americans and Latinos for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites. Studies have repeatedly shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, yet they are targeted, arrested, and prosecuted at grossly disproportionate rates.
Several days ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit acknowledged the rampant racial bias in the criminal justice system, particularly in the prosecution of the drug war. It struck down Washington state’s law prohibiting felons from voting as violative of the Voting Rights Act, on the grounds that uncontroverted evidence exists that racial bias permeates the criminal justice system.
Those who imagine that the bias documented in Washington does not exist in California should recall the wave of racial profiling studies that were conducted several years ago documenting biased stop and search practices in dozens of police departments, including the California Highway Patrol.
The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable. They have been rounded up by the thousands, locked in cages, and upon release ushered into a parallel social universe in which they can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits — reminiscent of an era we supposedly left behind. Most of the people labeled felons and ushered behind bars today are not murderers or dangerous criminals. They are black and brown, very poor, and paying the price of a get-tough movement driven not by crime rates, but by politics — a politics that has scapegoated the most vulnerable as a means of scoring political points.
Some might argue that the racial history doesn’t matter now, so long as the tide has begun to turn. The problem, though, is that if we fail to reckon with our history, we will be doomed to repeat it. If and when the economy improves, we’ll be able to afford once again to round up people of color en masse for imprisonment and social ex-communication.
The subtext of Schwarzenegger’s speech was that we need not worry about who’s in prison or why, so long as it doesn’t cost too much or interfere with the ability of middle-class university kids to get a good education. But private prisons that warehouse impoverished black and brown folks, while the relatively privileged trot off to college, is not a step in the right direction. What we need now is not a grand speech, but a day of reckoning.
