A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
The Green Party, once perceived by many Blacks as a club for white counterculturalists, now champions an end to racially selective administration of justice in the U.S. By making Black and Brown mass incarceration a top priority, the Greens engage a public policy-created crisis that impacts all aspects of African American life. While the Democrats, including Barack Obama, make occasional feeble noises about the fact that half the U.S. prison population is Black, the Greens call for an end to the so-called "drug war" as "a war on youth and people of color." It is not surprising that the Democrats have little of substance to say about the Black Gulag: they helped create it.
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Greens Put Mass Incarceration at Top of Agenda, While Democrats Mumble
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
"One in three black males and one in six Hispanic males born today can expect to go to prison."
*The Green Party, which has been adding more color to its ranks but remains predominantly white, is putting to shame not only the Democratic Party, but also the rapidly disintegrating Black electoral and traditional leadership. The Greens, alone, have placed up front a demand for an end to "institutional biases" against "Blacks, Latinos and the poor" in the U.S. criminal justice system. In doing so, they make Barack Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus and most established African American organizations look like milk-toast.
The Greens call for an immediate "cancellation of the war on drugs," which they call "a war on youth and people of color." The death penalty, they say, is "barbaric," and is a further abomination because "black, brown, and poor white people disproportionately get executed." And the Green Party calls for a halt to privatization of prisons, which creates a corporate incentive to incarcerate more and more people.
Lots of individual Democrats pay lip service to the vast inequities in American criminal justice - but usually only when asked. One notable exception is former Senator Mike Gravel, who laid into the mass incarceration issue at his first opportunity to speak and without being prompted, at Tavis Smiley's recent Democratic presidential debate. Gravel indicted a system that has 2.3 million people behind bars, and pledged, in his words, to "do away with the war on drugs which does nothing but savage our inner cities and put our children at risk." The other candidates waited until the subject came up on Tavis's schedule, and then tipped around the edges of what is clearly a national public policy of mass Black incarceration.
"We commend the Greens, and especially their party's Black Caucus."
Like Gravel, the Green Party is making mass Black and Brown incarceration a political priority. They base their position on a study by The Sentencing Project, which found that "African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, and Hispanics nearly double the rate" of whites. In Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Wisconsin, Blacks are ten times more like to go to prison than whites. "If current trends continue," said The Sentencing Project, "one in three black males and one in six Hispanic males born today can expect to go to prison." Among the most important of the study's recommendations is its call for Racial Impact Statements, similar to Environmental Impact Statements, to document the criminal justice system's impact on people of color.
The Green Party treated The Sentencing Project's study as an important public policy document. We commend the Greens, and especially their party's Black Caucus, for putting Black mass incarceration at the top of their domestic campaign agenda. Don't expect that from the Democrats, who have been in league with the Republicans in the systematic creation of the American Gulag that imprisons one-quarter of the world's inmates, half of them Black. And don't expect a mass incarceration offensive from Black misleadership, either. They're not mad about the racist criminal justice system. They're just embarrassed that so many Black people have been caught up in it.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Orion Meadows is a non-violence trainer with Institute for Nonviolence Chicago.
Michael Li is Senior Counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
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