1

It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back: The War on Drugs, Mass Incarceration,

and a Call to Action for America's Black Youth

By

Carl L. Young

An Alternative Plan Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Degree Master of Science

In

Sociology: Corrections

Minnesota State University, Mankato

Mankato, Minnesota

Spring 2013

Final Draft 4/20/2013

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This Alternative Plan Paper has been examined and approved by the following members

of the Examining Committee.

_____________________

Dr. Leah Rogne, Advisor

_____________________

Dr. William Wagner

_____________________

Dr. Penny Jo Rosenthal

_____________________

Dr. Nadarajan Sethuraju

________________ Date

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Abstract

This alternative plan paper examines the circumstances that have evolved as a

result of the Reagan Administration’s War on Drugs and the increase of mass

incarceration of the Black community. In the last thirty years, the federal government of

the United States of America has engaged in campaign known as the “War on Drugs,”

which has involved a variety of policies to stop the production, distribution and sale of

illegal narcotics. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in a war that has

targeted the most vulnerable in our society, impacting its youth for generations to come.

This alternative plan paper addresses the impact of the War on Drugs and the criminal

justice policies that have impacted the life chances of Black youth nationwide and calls

for a new social movement, introducing a 21st century Black Youth Manifesto to ask the

youth of the Black community to pick up where previous social movements left off and

take back their communities, their families, and reclaim their hope for the future.

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Table of Contents

Abstract . . . .

Chapter One: Introduction

My Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Strain and Adaption: The Ideas of Merton and Durkheim

Strain, Adaptation, and Life Changes: My Story

The Reagan Effect

Race and Ethnicity and Reagan’s Rise to Power

Reagan and Civil Rights

Reagan and the War on Drugs

Chapter Two: Literature Review……………………………. 20

Weber and the Concept of Life Chances (1ST level)

Key Criminal Justice Legislation in The War on Drugs (1st level)

The Rockefeller Drug Laws (2nd level)

Consequences of the Rockefeller Drug Laws (3rd level)

California’s Three Strikes and You’re Out Law (2nd)

Consequences of the Three Strikes and You’re Out Law (3rd)

The Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (2nd)

Consequences of the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement

Act of 1994 (3rd)

Overall Consequences of These Three Crime Bills (2nd)

Chapter Three: The New Abolition Movement…………… 38

A Call To Action: A 21ST Century Manifesto For Black Youth

Historical Perspective

Slavery

Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration

Historical Social Movements For Resistance

The Abolitionist Movement

The New Abolitionist Movement

Who Needs To Do It

How It Should Be Done

Conclusion…………………………………………65

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

MY GENERATION

We are accustomed to every generation being given a name. In the 1960s there

was the flower power generation or love generation. People born in the 1970s have been

called Generation X and those born in the 1980s Generation Y, cohorts said to be

exceptionally wired, networked, and plugged in. If you came of age in the inner cities of

America in the 1980s during the Reagan era, those generational terms meant little to you.

Rebellion, love, and access to technology didn’t even seem possible. President Ronald

Reagan’s fiscal cuts of social programs that had helped to keep kids off the streets and

hold communities together were devastating. Add to that the recession and the loss of

economic and job employment opportunities, and you have a Molotov cocktail just

waiting to explode in the inner cities. All it needed was a spark, and that spark came in

the form of an illegal narcotic that went on to truly be the name of my generation living

in the inner cities: the Crack Generation.

Imagine growing up in an environment where you are seeing people struggling to

make ends meet, keep their lights on, put food on the table, and keep a roof over their

heads, yet at the same time not too far away, you are also seeing people are not having

that experience, people who have everything you would like to have.

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What would you be prepared to do to change your situation? Would you seek out

ways to educate yourself in hopes that maybe you could better your situation, or would

you feel that is something you couldn't attain and seek another route to change your

economic status, which is sell drugs, commit robbery? What choices would you make

when you feel all of your opportunities are limited?

If you are a law abiding, impressionable young person struggling with no

emotional compass, no balance, and no parental guidance, and someone comes to you

and asks you to work for them and all you have to do is stand on a street corner for a few

hours and make $2000 or you could fill out a job application at McDonald’s and work for

$4.25 hour and at the end of the week maybe have $150, what would you do, what

choices would you make? In 1995 director Spike Lee released a movie chronicling these

choices. The film, Clockers, was based on the best-selling novel by Richard Price. For

those unaware of the language used in the streets to identify drug dealers, “Clockers” is

the code name for street level drug dealers who work around the clock on an organized

schedule. The film is a very bleak and insightful outlook at the problems that have been

plaguing the Black Community since the infusion of drugs. The film addresses mothers,

fathers, young people and law enforcement officials, while taking a brutal look at drugs,

guns, violence, and life in the inner city as a result of illegal narcotics infiltrating the

inner city (Ebert 1995).

Imagine being a young teenager mother who becomes overwhelmed with the

stress and strain of raising a child, who financially and emotionally is barely hanging on

with no food in the house, no diapers for the baby, no help from the father of the child, no

support system at home, and no other resources available to them.

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Imagine being a young Black or male/female living in the inner city, who has no

support system, mother/father barely able to keep food on the table and pay the rent,

seeing nothing but violence, poverty, degradation, no job opportunities, and an

educational system that is not meeting your needs.

What do you do? Do you attempt to work hard and educate yourself to be able to

find opportunities to earn the things we need in a law-abiding way, or do you look for fast

money to achieve the things that you want and desire?

STRAIN AND ADAPTATION: THE IDEAS OF MERTON AND DURKHEIM

In his theory of anomie, Merton (1957) offered a typology of adaptations based on

the individual’s acceptance or rejection of cultural goals and institutionalized means to

realize the goals. Anomie theory provides an explanation of the concentration of crime.

The theory leans heavily on the work Emile Durkheim, who used the term anomie to

describe the lack of social regulation in modern societies as one factor that could elevate

suicide rates.

Merton, a criminologist, applied Durkheim's definition of anomie to modern

industrial societies. Merton was writing in America during a time when there was

inequality and discrimination between ethnic groups. Merton observed that not all

individuals within society have an equal chance of success; he believed that inequality in

society blocked people from attaining the means needed to achieve their goals. Many

Americans were aiming to achieve “the American dream,” and he was interested in how

they pursued their goals, and whether or not dreams were equally attainable to everyone.

(Merton 1957:121)

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Like Durkheim, Merton held that crime and deviance were caused by society.

According to Merton (1957), “the functional analyst considers socially deviant behavior

just as much a product of social structure as conformist behavior” (p. 121). But Merton's

view of deviance is different from Durkheim’s. While Durkheim believed that identifying

deviance is a demonstration of society’s norms, and serves as a barometer of cohesion

and change, Merton held that “crime does not generate social solidarity or social progress

and that crime and deviance demonstrate poor societal organization” (Merton 1978:378).

Merton suggested that society does not evolve from mechanical to organic

solidarity but that society is constantly changing and generating new goals, if not

necessarily the means by which to achieve these goals. According to Merton, anomie is

the form that societal incoherence takes when there is a significant detachment "between

valued cultural ends and legitimate societal means to those ends" (Akers 2000: 161).

Merton suggested that society does not evolve from mechanical to organic

solidarity but that society is constantly changing and generating new goals, if not

necessarily the means by which to achieve these goals. According to Merton, anomie is

the form that societal incoherence takes when there is a significant detachment "between

valued cultural ends and legitimate societal means to those ends" (Akers 2000:161).

This anomie leads to strain, which according to Merton (1957), starts with the

general assumption that society provides both culturally valued goals and culturally

valued means. These goals are based on the shared assumptions in a society about what

people should strive for in their individual lives—that is, what constitutes success.

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In this country to achieve the “American Dream,” we emphasize education and

hard work. Doing this would allow you to have a nice car, nice clothes, money in your

pocket and the ability to own a home in a nice neighborhood with others who are just like

you. The problem with this assumption is what happens when there is an imbalance

between the goals and the means? Specifically, what happens when a society doesn’t

provide the means necessary for everyone to accomplish the goals it sets out for them?

This means that there are some people in society who are working for something that

they probably can’t obtain because of the lack of opportunity and resources. The result of

this, according to Merton, is something called strain, an unpleasant emotional condition.

In his classic work Suicide (1897) Durkheim classified strain into two basic

categories: social processes and personal experiences. These in turn produced two

general types of strain: structural and individual. Social processes create the

environment necessary for the development of structural strain, and personal

experiences cause individual strain. Structural strain applies to members of society

who determine their needs based on the ideals of society and are in a constant

struggle to meet those expectations.

Individual strain is the personally created stress applied by individuals while

searching for a means of meeting their needs that are defined by their personal

expectations that they hold for themselves (O’Connor 2003).

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According to general strain theory, as aspirations increase and expectations

decline delinquency and the amount of deviant acts that occur increase. Merton

recognized that certain expectations were created by the two general types of strain and

identified five specific “modes of adaptation” to these strains (Akers 2000).

1. Conformity - People strive to obtain success by the most pure conventional means

available (Akers 2000).

2. Innovation - People seek success by using innovation. Their purpose is to obtain the

success by taking advantage of any illegal means available to them in place of legal

means in order to attain their conventional goals (Akers 2000).

3. Rebellion – People have completely rejected the idea that everybody in society can

achieve success. They no longer trust legitimate means to reach success and have

replaced such ideas with irrational objectives to overthrow the system (Akers 2000).

4. Retreatism – Described by Merton as an escapist response, retreatism occurs when

people become dropouts of society. They give up all goals and efforts to achieve success

because they view it as an impractical, impossible, almost imaginary, and irrational

possibility (Akers 2000).

5. Ritualism – In this final mode, people realize that they have no real opportunity to

advance in society and accept the little relevance they have. They adhere to conventional

norms in the hopes of maintaining the few possessions or possible gains that they have

attained (Akers 2000).

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Strain, Adaptation, and Life Chances: My Story

I could be another grim statistic as a Black male, because I had none of the

opportunities mainstream society says is required to attain balance. How do we learn

what we believe? How do we balance what we need and want and our ability to attain

them? In most cases seeing another human being killed will evoke a powerful emotional

response in most people; yet others may feel emotionally unaffected.

A great deal of emphasis is placed in the current popular discourse on the

importance of having intact families and having strong father figures present in the home

as key sources of shaping what we believe and how we behave. But it isn’t that simple. I

didn't know my own father. From the time I was two weeks old my grandmother raised

me. She struggled but made sure I was loved. I can count on my hands and feet the times

I had actually seen my mother. I grew up in the inner city. These would all be considered

negatives.

I know what it’s like to come home from school and the lights are off because the

bill couldn't be paid. I know what it was like to not always get everything I felt I needed

or what I wanted as a child. So I can relate to those who have faced that struggle because

I faced it. The one thing I did have, however, was the opportunity to travel and in 1983 at

the age of 13 I left the United States for Frankfurt, Germany, where I spent a year with

my aunt and uncle who were stationed there in the United States Army.

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When I left South Florida, the War on Drugs had not yet hit my home state. Crack

had yet to be invented, and the area I grew up in was very peaceful. I found it interesting

spending a year of my teenage life in a country that had a notorious history just forty odd

years before yet I never felt any sense of racial discrimination or class struggle as I

moved about the German community every day during my time there. I felt totally at ease

in my own skin and accepted as such and very much welcomed.

My stay in Germany changed my life. Having the opportunity to see different

parts of Europe, Sweden, France, Holland, Italy, and England changed my worldview and

altered my life. I felt a veil had been removed from my eyes and I was able to see the

larger world. This one opportunity helped change my life’s chances. However, when I

returned home to the United States in 1984 and attended high school, everything had

changed. Marijuana had been replaced by cocaine as the drug of choice. Life had gotten

faster and more dangerous. The energy in the neighborhood had changed and so did the

attitudes of the people. I was now seeing friends I grew up with playing in the streets all

of a sudden driving nice cars, having pagers, wearing nicer clothes, and gold jewelry

whereas two years before we were collecting bottles to recycle for money to buy candy.

I began to wonder what happened, and how did it happen so quickly, knowing

they were not working for these things, or at least working in the law-abiding sense of the

word. How did crack cocaine get into the Black Community and not Beverly Hills,

Minnetonka Beach or South Hampton? We owned no land to grow opium poppy seeds to

produce cocaine; we had no wealth and natural resources to barter with South American

drug dealers to secure large ship of drugs on consignment?

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Why were we chosen for this economic opportunity? If what Durkheim was

saying is true, then in two years my neighborhood became unbalanced by these very real

choices that had to be made when illegal narcotics were introduced into the Black

Community.

On a personal level, this topic means a great deal to me. My life chances along

with the life chances of millions of others all over the United States were affected by

President Reagan’s domestic policies. I have lost eight relatives and a mother from either

incarceration or death as a result of the War on Drugs. It is my hope that this research

paper helps us to understand the cost that was paid and is still being paid as a result of the

mass incarceration that occurred as a result of President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs.

In this paper I examine the effect of the War on Drugs and the criminal justice

policies that have impacted the life chances of Black youth nationwide. I briefly review

the consequences of three institutional means of oppression of the Black Community:

slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration and the social movements that

helped end the first of those two eras. Finally, I present a call to action to Black youth to

become involved in a New Abolition Movement to end mass incarceration and address

the problems that it has created in the Black Community in the United States.

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THE REAGAN EFFECT

The Founding Fathers knew a government couldn’t control the economy without

controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that; it must

use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for

choosing.

Ronald Reagan 1964 (Harris and Tichenor 2009:384)

To determine how President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs has affected the life

chances of Black youth, one has to first understand the history of the Black Community

in this country. The history of Black Americans in the United States is steeped with

racism, servitude, injustice, inequality, hostility, degradation, and death. Our lives are

shaped by who we are, what we are and where we come from. What race or ethnic group

we belong to determines our life chances in contemporary society.

Race and Ethnicity and Reagan’s Rise to Power

The thesaurus defines ethnicity as the cultural background of a group of people

who share a belief in common ancestry (Merriam Webster 2013). According to Max

Weber’s study Ethnic Groups, Economy and Society (as cited in Driedger 1987), the

belief in group affinity, regardless of whether it has any objective foundation, can have

important consequences especially for the formation of a political community. Ethnic

membership in itself does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation,

particularly in the political sphere. However it is the political community, no matter how

artificially organized, that inspires the belief in this idea of common ethnicity (p. 18).

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Ethnicity is something we all have, but in United States and many others parts of

the world; ethnicity is often applied towards minority groups to highlight dominant

groups of people on the basis of race or culture. Being a part of a dominant group

provides prestige, power, and control over those less dominant in society (Alexander

2010).

The process of race or ethnicity being applied to keeping Blacks subservient,

ignorant, and unequal all the while maintaining their labor as a valuable commodity has

played a significant role in American politics and social life. In fact the very structure and

content of the U.S. Constitution that we sacrifice so much to protect was based on the

effort to protect the racial caste system (slavery) maintaining white supremacy

(Alexander 2010).

On November 13, 1979 Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for President of

the United States in Philadelphia, Mississippi for the second time. Why Governor Reagan

would choose to start his campaign in Mississippi, a state with such deep seeded racial

division and history, is an interesting question. What is known is that it was in this city in

June 1964, three civil rights workers were brutally murdered. The outrage and national

attention that followed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael

Schwerner helped to facilitate the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting

Rights Act of 1965, setting the stage for Governor Reagan’s political platform of

opposition.

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The Civil Rights Movement led to the Voting Rights Act, other federal

legislation, and federal enforcement efforts to guarantee the legal rights and equality of

opportunity for Blacks and other racial minorities. In the last half of the 1960s three

major events or factors came together to shift national attention and resources away from

the fight against poverty and Civil Rights. First, the Vietnam War (1965-1973) diverted

public attention and fiscal resources from anti-poverty programs. Second, the murder of

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. along with the slow pace of economic recovery in Black urban

areas contributed to civil disorders and riots that badly damaged the already fragile

infrastructures of inner cities all over America (Grier and Cobbs 1963). The National

Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders warned that America was headed towards “two

societies, one Black, one White separate and unequal largely maintained by white

institutions and condoned by White society” (Briggs 1968:200).

The third key factor that contributed to a crisis in the Black Community in the

inner cities was a change in the pattern of drug use and the political response to it. Three

major drug eras began and overlapped each other. The Heroin Era (1965-1973) occurred

primarily among inner city youths, especially in New York City and somewhat later in

other cities (Hunt & Chambers 1976). The Psychedelic Era (1967 – 1975) saw substantial

use of LSD primarily among Whites from middle-class backgrounds; inner city youth

largely avoided psychedelic drugs (Johnson 1973). The Marijuana Era (1965 – 1979)

began when college students in New York City and California began using the drug. The

number of users increased steadily through the 1960s and 1970s (Johnson 1973). Prior to

this alcohol use was common, marijuana, heroin, and cocaine use was rare and the sale

and distribution of illegal drugs was virtually unknown.

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Reagan and Civil Rights

Governor Ronald Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Movement and the voting

rights and fair housing laws that came as a result; he condemned busing for school

integration, and he opposed affirmative action (Williams 2004). During his campaign for

President he threatened to veto an extension of the Voting Rights Act, which appealed to

southern whites. As a result they became a large part of his political constituency

(Williams 2004).

Reagan’s political and social positions during the election were part of his

southern strategy to appeal to southern whites that felt that they were now under siege by

the federal government and losing their place to Blacks. In 1980, after his landslide

election win over President Jimmy Carter, President Ronald Reagan began to effectively

strip away all of the gains made in the Black Community as a result of the Civil Rights

movement (Williams 2004). President Reagan’s cuts in government spending hit the most

vulnerable segment of the Black Community very hard even though Black Americans

were not in direct competition with white Americans for jobs or economic status

(Alexander 2010). The recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s brought furious

opposition among white Americans to what they considered to be race-biased

government policies, and the Reagan administration did a masterful job of exploiting and

promoting his campaign promises to create a wave of fear of Blacks amongst his

Republican constituents, especially in the South (Alexander 2010).

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Reagan and the War on Drugs

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan, along with his Vice President, former head of

the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) George Bush, furthered his domestic agenda by

declaring a continuation of policies of former President Richard Nixon (who was the first

to use the term “War on Drugs”) by communicating to the nation that illicit drug use

would be considered a threat to U.S. national security (Reagan 1982). While this was a

bipartisan effort with both Democrats and Republicans supporting the policy it was

President Reagan that lit the fire sweeping the entire country up in the hysteria that our

country was being overrun with the enemy already identified as located in the urban

areas of the Black Community (Schaffer 2004).

In describing Reagan’s War on Drugs Bill Piper, director of national affairs for

the Drug Policy Alliance said that: "Drug policy was one of the few areas where Reagan

strayed from his conservative philosophy by expanding the power of the government and

undermining the Constitution. There is no better example than the War on Drugs, with its

increased overdoses, broken families and effect on the Constitution” (Schaffer 2004:1).

According to Sanho Tree, drug policy analyst for the Institute for Policy Studies:

"Reagan preached 'Just Say No' and sought tougher criminal penalties while at the

same time his administration worked hand in hand with some of the most

notorious drug traffickers in the world” (Schaffer 2004:1).

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By the time I returned home to Florida in 1984, in the middle of Reagan's second

term, cocaine had flooded the streets of South Florida. Crack cocaine appeared and, along

with it, hysteria and violence unseen before perpetuated by a willing media portraying

images and news of battlegrounds in the inner city. There was only one problem—the

drugs were not contained in the inner city they are now reaching the suburban areas.

It was different when the cocaine users were poor and Black instead of wealthy

and white. Now something had to be done. In summarizing President Ronald Reagan’s

War on Drugs, Eric Sterling, counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, said:

“When Reagan came into office, marijuana was cheap and plentiful and cocaine was

scarce and expensive. When Reagan left office, pot was expensive and hard to find and

cocaine was cheap and plentiful” (Schaffer 2004:1).

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CHAPTER II

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES: THE EFFECT OF THE WAR ON

DRUGS ON THE LIFE CHANCES OF BLACK YOUTH

This chapter examines the effect of Reagan’s War on Drugs using the lens of

sociologist Max Weber’s concept of “life chances.” First, I discuss the theories of Max

Weber and the concept of life chances. Then, I examine the three key pieces of criminal

justice legislation that have impacted the life chances of Black youth: the Rockefeller

Drug Laws of New York State, California’s Three Strikes and You’re Out Laws, and

lastly President Bill Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.

I point out in each case the racial disparities created by these policies and some of the

consequences for the Black Community.

MAX WEBER AND THE CONCEPT OF LIFE CHANCES

There have also been many theories and explanations put forward to explain how

social class is determined and its effect on the life’s chances of people in certain

categories. According to Bilton et al. (1996), Max Weber argued that:

“Social inequality needed to be understood in terms of a number of distinct

categories which are not reducible merely to economic property relations: the ownership

of land, factories and so on is accepted as an important determinant of social position but

is only one factor shaping social stratification” (p. 144). What Weber is saying here is

that individuals’ level of education and accumulated skills determine their market value,

and as a result these individuals have access to a variety of life chances and opportunities

to further their lives.

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Weber used the term “status groups.” He defined class as an “unequal distribution

of economic rewards: whereas a status group is an “unequal distribution of social honor”

(Giddens 1991:212). Haralambos and Holborn (2002) describe a status group as a “group

made up of individuals who are awarded a similar amount of social honor and therefore

share the same status stratification” (p. 37).

According to Weber, social groups and classes are in the sphere of power and are

connected to the distribution of power. Given that there are various ways that power can

be exercised, it is not possible to reduce the organization of all these groups to a single

classification or factor such as ownership or non-ownership of the means of production

like Karl Marx implies (Gerth and Mills 1946).

Taking his ideas on social stratification further, Weber spoke more on life chances

in his essay “Class, Status, and Party” (Gerth and Mills 1946). In this essay, first written

more than 100 years ago, Weber argued that depending on race, ethnicity, gender, socio-

economic status and where a person lives, his or her life chances could vary

tremendously. Weber argued that people’s life chances were guided by not only their

economic position, but by other factors, such as race, ethnicity, gender, social class,

social status, and political affiliation (Fitzpatrick and La Gory 2000). Weber’s basic

premise was that each individual had opportunities to improve the quality of his or her

own life and that given certain factors, either positive or negative, an individual’s life will

turn out a certain way.

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The opportunities Weber referred to involved the extent to which one has access

to resources, both tangible (such as food, clothing and shelter) and intangible (such as

education, job, and health care) (Kendall 2009). According to Weber, different life

chances are all connected; education can affect the type of employment that a person

gains, which can effect where they live, the type of housing they can get, and the type of

job they can acquire. These different life chances can all affect quality of life and income

and will have a bearing on how much choice an individual has.

Max Weber’s theories are seen as an expansion of the ideas of Karl Marx.

Whereas Marx focused primarily on class/social status and correlated life chances with

the attainment of material wealth, Weber focused in addition on factors such as social

mobility, social equality, and, more important for the purpose of this research question,

race and ethnicity. Urban Black youth or the Black social classes, for example, have in

common a specific component in their life chances: they are in a similar situation, which

would then imply a similar outcome to their actions (Weber 1987).

In the social science field there has been deal of debate over the influence of

structure and agency in shaping human behavior (Barker 2005). Structure is defined as

“the recurrent patterned arrangements that influence or limit the choices and

opportunities afforded to the individual. Agency is defined as the capacity of individuals

to act independently and make their own free choices” (Barker 2005: 448).

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To Max Weber life chances are based on structural factors, such as where one

is placed in the class structure and one’s educational status, ethnicity, and political

power (most of which the individual has no control over). It is these factors that are of

particular importance to the research question of how have the life chances of Black

youth in America been affected by President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs policy.

KEY CRIMINAL JUSTICE LEGISLATION IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

If our life chances are impacted by structure as defined by Weber, the passing of

three controversial pieces of criminal justice legislation, the Rockefeller Drug Laws,

California’s Three Strikes and You’re out Laws and the Violent Crime Control and Law

Enforcement Act of 1994 are critical to our understanding of the life chances of members

of the Black Community. These three bills bear discussing because they have severely

impacted the opportunities afforded to Black youth as a result of their impact upon the

Black Community.

The Rockefeller Drug Laws

The Rockefeller Drug Laws are the legal statutes that deal with the sale and

possession of narcotic drugs in the state of New York. Since the Rockefeller Drug Laws

were passed in 1973 under then Governor Nelson Rockefeller, New York State has had

the harshest sentencing for low level, non-violent drug offenders of any other state in the

nation. Under the Rockefeller drug laws, offenders convicted of drug offenses face the

same penalties as those convicted of murder and harsher penalties than those convicted of

rape (Sullum 1993).

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The penalty for selling two ounces or more of heroin, morphine, "raw or prepared

opium," or cocaine was made the same as that for second-degree murder: a minimum of

15 years to life in prison and a maximum of 25 years to life in prison (NORML 2013).

This punishment is intended to deter drug users and dealers from continued involvement

in drugs.

Consequences of the Rockefeller Drug Laws

Studies have shown that the majority of the people who use and sell drugs in New

York State and across the country are white (Duane 2007). The irony here is that when

promoting the same sentences his legislation promoted for all drug pushers, both big and

small, Governor Rockefeller and other political officials familiar with the landscape knew

that small time “street pushers,” the poor habitual users who were often African

American and Latino, would be disproportionately affected (Kohler-Hausmann 2010).

Using race alone to explain why Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately

targeted compared to whites for arrest would be highly speculative. However, while

studies have shown that racial bias exists in the criminal justice system, the issue is much

larger. Disparity results more from both ethnic groups being economically and socially

marginalized to the point where they lack the political power to fight the criminal justice

system. Perry (2007), testifying on behalf of the New York Civil Liberties Union, stated

that: “The causes of these disparities, including selective arrest and prosecution,

inadequate legal representation, and the absence of judicial discretion in the sentencing

process cannot be evaluated without analyzing the ways in which race enters into law

enforcement and judicial procedures” (Perry 2007:1).

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Sociologist Michael Tonry (1995), in explaining why Blacks and Hispanics made

easy prey during the War on Drugs, said: “For a variety of reasons it is easier to make

arrests in socially disorganized neighborhoods, as contrasted with urban blue-collar and

urban or suburban white-collar neighborhoods” (Tonry 1995:378). This leads to a tactical

strategic focus on disadvantaged minority neighborhoods all over the country resulting in

large disparities of arrests and prosecutions in communities poorly equipped to fight

back.

Since the 1980s and the start of the War on Drugs in New York State, there were

886 persons incarcerated for drug offenses in 1980. Of these individuals, 32 percent were

Caucasian; 38 percent were African American; and 29 percent were Latino. In 1992, the

year in which the state reported the highest number of commitments for drug offenses, 5

percent of those incarcerated were Caucasian; 50 percent were African American; and 44

percent were Latino. The demographics of the inmate population serving time for drug

offenses in 2000 had changed little from the data reported in 1992. Of the 8,227 new

commitments for drug offenses in 2000, 6 percent were Caucasian; 53 percent were

African American; and 40 percent were Latino (Perry 2007:1).

In a relatively recent government study, a total of 1.8 million adults in New York

about 13 percent of the total adult population reported using illegal drugs in the preceding

year. Of those reported users of illicit drugs, 1.3 million or 72 percent were white. Yet in

2012 these gross disparities in drug arrests in New York State still persist. Today more

than 90 percent of people incarcerated for drug offenses are African American or Latino

(Perry 2007).

26

Criminologist Alfred Blumstein, the nation’s leading expert on racial disparities

in criminal sentencing practices, has concluded that with respect to drug offenses, the

much higher arrest and conviction rates for Blacks are not related to higher levels of

criminal offending, but can only be explained by other factors such as racial bias

(Blumstein 1993).

This racial bias is remarkably evident in New York City’s arrest statistics. Whites

use illegal drugs at least as often as Blacks, but in 1997, whites constituted 5.3 percent of

the total population of drug felons currently in prison in New York; blacks and Latinos

constituted 94.2 percent (Human Rights Watch 1997). Among whites committed to

prison in 1994, 16% were convicted of a drug offense. Among blacks 45% were

committed for a drug offense, and among Latinos 59% were committed for a drug

offense (Department of Corrections 1994).

As of 1996, Blacks and Latinos made up 23% of the state's general population,

but over 85% of the people indicted for drug felonies and 85% of its overall prison

population. Fifty-four percent of those arrested were Black and 30 percent were Latino;

only 14 percent of the arrestees were white (Human Rights Watch 1997).

Going back to Max Weber’s theory of life chances, and how positively or

negatively the lack of opportunities can hinder an individual’s actions, take into

consideration the unequal access to legal resources. Most offenders charged with drug

crimes are poor and must rely upon the state’s public defense to represent them in court

(Duane 2007). Currently this system is in a state of crisis, according to a recent report by

the Commission on the Future of Indigent Defense Services.

27

The Commission’s report concludes that:

Whereas minorities comprise a disproportionate share of indigent defendants and

inmates in parts of New York State, minorities disproportionately suffer the

consequences of an indigent defense system in crisis, including inadequate

resources, sub-standard client contact, unfair prosecutorial policies, and collateral

consequences of convictions (Duane 2007:1).

According to Duane (2007), with the enactment of the Rockefeller Drug Laws the

state of New York has chosen to subvert judicial fairness and to subvert the constitutional

right to a fair trial, to a zealous defense and, if found guilty, to a sentence that is

commensurate to the wrong committed. This subversion of the judicial process, argued

Duane, “is a consequence of the harsh mandatory sentencing scheme that relegates the

judge to the role of bystander in the courtroom” (Duane 2007:1).

Over the past 25 years, hundreds of thousands of poor, minority New Yorkers

have been cycled in and out of the prison system. While Blacks and Hispanics represent

only two-thirds of the New York State population, over 94% of the inmates are

minorities, and more than 70% come from a few inner-city communities of New York

City (Drucker 2002). According to Perry (2007), New York’s drug sentencing guidelines

have damaged the state’s most vulnerable communities and damaged the social and

economic networks that are essential to maintain community well being.

28

The Justice Mapping Center in coordination with the New York Civil Liberties

Union analyzed prison admissions for drug offenses and concluded that in parts of New

York State urban minorities “disproportionately suffer the consequences of an indigent

defense system in crisis, including inadequate resources, sub-standard client contact,

unfair prosecutorial policies, and collateral consequences of convictions” (Perry 2007:6)

This has resulted in extremely high unemployment rates, which in turn has led to

diminished opportunities for economic and life success for current prisoners and those

who have been previously incarcerated (Perry 2007).

In New York, up to 60 percent of ex-offenders are unemployed one year after

release. For an incarcerated Black man, wages earned after release from prison are 10

percent less than wages earned before incarceration (Duane 2007). According to Loury

(2007), the ramifications of Black males serving time for a drug offense are direr: While

locked up, these felons are stigmatized – they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming.

Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished. They

suffer civic ex-communication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a

permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men – whatever their shortcomings – have

emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and husbands, we

are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new

generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as

the primary path to social hygiene (p. 6).

29

Since the Rockefeller Drug laws were first passed, public support has succeeded

in gaining some small victories, and the laws were reformed under New York Governor

George Pataki in 2004. However, three overlapping policy decisions: the concentration

of drug law enforcement in inner city areas, harsher sentencing policies (particularly for

crack cocaine), and the drug war’s emphasis on law enforcement at the expense of

prevention and treatment continue to have a dramatic impact on African American

communities (Mauer and King 2007).

California’s Three Strikes and You’re out Law

California’s Three Strikes and You’re Out mandatory minimum sentencing laws

are quite different than New York State’s Rockefeller Laws. Passed in response to the

public outcry that followed the murders of 18-year-old Kimberly Reynolds and 12-year-

old Polly Klaas by men with criminal records, this law was intended to stop violent

recidivist offenders (Skelton 1993). Signed into law by Governor Pete Wilson, March 7,

1994, California statute AB 971 mandates that state courts impose 25 years to life

sentences on individuals convicted of three or more serious criminal offenses.

The Three Strikes law significantly increases the prison sentences of convicted

felons who have been previously convicted of a violent or serious felony and limits the

ability of these offenders to receive a punishment other than a prison sentence (Career

Criminal Punishment Act 1994).

30

Violent offenses include murder, robbery of a residence in which a deadly or

dangerous weapon is used, rape and other sex offenses; serious offenses include the same

offenses defined as violent offenses, but also include other crimes such as burglary of a

residence and assault with intent to commit a robbery or rape. In 2000 and again in 2006

the law was amended to add to the list of offenses that qualify as a “strike” (Career

Criminal Punishment Act 1994).

Consequences of the California Three Strikes and You’re Out Law

New data released by the Justice Policy Institute reveal that California's Three

Strikes law disproportionately locks up African Americans compared to Whites.

According to the Justice Policy Institute, African Americans are given life sentences

under the Three Strikes and You’re Out laws at nearly 13 times the rate of Whites.

Currently African Americans are 6.5 percent of California's state population, but make up

nearly 30 percent of the prison population and 44.7 percent of those sentenced to life

under the Three Strikes law compared to Whites, who are 47.1 percent of the state

population, but only 29 percent of the prison population, and 25.4 percent of third strikers

(Ehlers 2004).

When comparing arrest and incarceration rates for African Americans and

Whites in the state of California as a whole, African Americans are arrested at 4.4

times the rate of Whites, imprisoned at 7.5 times the rate of Whites and sentenced

for life at nearly 13 times the rate of Whites (Ehlers 2004).

31

In the state of California, African Americans are penalized at every stage of the

criminal justice system at rates disproportionate to the general population. According to

Vincent Schiraldi, of the Justice Policy Institute, “Three Strikes is systematically

funneling African American defendants into prison for longer sentences; mostly for non-

violent crimes and that the racial disparities for African Americans were particularly

harsh by criminological standards. Rarely does one see any law imposed so

disproportionately against one racial group” (Ehlers 2004).

Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

In 1994 amid strong public concern for violent crime as the War on Drugs

continued to escalate, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control

and Law Enforcement Act. This bipartisan act of Congress was six years in the making

and is the largest crime bill ever passed in this country. When President Clinton signed

the bill, he called it the "toughest and smartest crime bill in our history” (Clinton

1994:567).

In the Black Community, the bill came under intense criticism because it failed to

address racial issues and the addition of the three-strikes law. For example in 1994,

according to data from the United States Sentencing Commission (2000), despite the fact

that about two-thirds of crack cocaine users were White or Hispanic, 84.5% of defendants

convicted of crack possession in federal court were African American, 10.3% White, and

5.2% Hispanic. Trafficking offenders were 4.1% White, 88.3% Black, and 7.1%

Hispanic. By contrast, powder cocaine offenders convicted of simple possession of

cocaine powder were 58% White, 26.7% Black, and 15% Hispanic.

32

The powder trafficking offenders were 32% White, 27.4% Black, and 39.3%

Hispanic. However, those offenders convicted for trafficking powered cocaine were

given less jail time. This bill authorized a total of $30.2 billion for law enforcement and

crime prevention programs under the Violent Crime Reduction Trust Fund. It provided

for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in

funding for prevention programs that were designed with significant input from

experienced police officers (McCollum 1995).

The Act also significantly expanded the government's ability to deal with

problems caused by criminal aliens. The Crime Bill provides $2.6 billion in additional

funding for the FBI, DEA, INS, United States Attorneys, and other Justice Department

components, as well as the Federal courts and the Treasury Department (McCollum

1995). This Crime bill is very extensive, but some of the most significant provisions of

the bill as it relates to the current research are summarized below (McCollum 1995):

Death Penalty - Expands the Federal death penalty to cover about 60 offenses, including

terrorist homicides, murder of a Federal law enforcement officer, large-scale drug

trafficking, drive-by-shootings resulting in death and carjacking resulting in death.

Domestic Abusers and Firearms - Prohibits firearms sales to and possession by persons

subject to family violence restraining orders.

Gang Crimes – Provides new and stiffer penalties for violent and drug trafficking crimes

committed by gang members.

Juveniles - Authorizes adult prosecution of those 13 and older charged with certain

serious violent crimes. Prohibits the sale or transfer of a firearm or possession of certain

firearms by juveniles.

33

Triples the maximum penalties for using children to distribute drugs in or near a

protected zone, i.e., schools, playgrounds, video arcades and youth centers.

Three Strikes - Requires mandatory life imprisonment without possibility of parole for

Federal offenders with three or more convictions for serious violent felonies or drug

trafficking crimes.

Other – Creates new crimes or enhances penalties for: drive-by-shootings, use of semi-

automatic weapons, sex offenses, crimes against the elderly, interstate firearms

trafficking, firearms theft and smuggling, arson, hate crimes and interstate domestic

violence.

The bill also established new grant programs and provided funding authorization

for additional correctional facilities, the expansion of alternative sanctions for non-violent

young offenders, and the costs incurred by states incarcerating criminal aliens

(McCollum 1995).

Consequences of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994) managed to put

thousands of new police officers into our communities. Prisoners were given longer

mandatory prison sentences, and victims were given a greater voice in the criminal justice

process and women and children were given more protection from violence and abuse in

their homes and communities. Because of mandatory minimum sentences built into the

call, judges can no longer reduce the term according to their discretion or any mitigating

circumstances.

34

Judges are restricted from imposing alternative to incarceration sentences.

Prosecutors are now empowered to decide what charges to file against defendants.

Finally, politicians who support the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act

appear to be tough on crime (Feldman, Schiraldi, and Ziedenberg 2001).

The Black Community has been disproportionately affected and targeted during

the enforcement of this legislation, and as a result federal prisons are filled with

nonviolent offenders, many of whom could be punished more cheaply and more

effectively in community sanctions (Feldman, Schiraldi, and Ziedenberg 2001).

As a part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the

U.S. Sentencing Commission (2000) was directed to study the effects of this law. In

1995, a year after the Violent Control Act was passed the US Sentencing Commission

was directed to go back and re-examine equalizing the quantity of crack and powder

cocaine that would trigger a mandatory sentence for offenders. The commission came

back with a recommendation that the sentencing guidelines in the Violent Control Act

should be equalized. Congress rejected their findings, which was the first time a

recommendation from the US Sentencing Commission was not followed. President

Clinton didn't fight for it he just signed off on what Congress said. The law remained as it

was written and passed in 1994 (Feldman, Schiraldi, and Ziedenberg 2001).

The Violent Control Act took specific aim at the large number of individuals

convicted and incarcerated for drug offenses, specifically African Americans and

Hispanics, not by name but through its implementation withdrawing services that could

have helped prevent recidivism. One of the first things this legislation did was eliminate

Pell Education Grants and other educational resources for state and federal prisoners.

35

Prior to 1994, Pell Grants for job training or other educational programs served as the

primary method for funding inmates’ education (Blumenson and Nilsen 2002).

In 1998, Congress denied federal grants, federally subsidized loans, and work-

study funds to college students who had convictions for any drug offense, regardless of

whether it was a felony or a misdemeanor. “The legislation stripped this resource from

certain students and restricts federal funds to those students Congress deemed to be more

deserving” (Blumenson and Nilsen 2002:68).

The legislation does not extend the prohibition to individuals who may have been

convicted of serious felonies such as rape, robbery, or murder. Instead, the legislation

prevents those individuals without financial resources, who happen to have been

convicted of any type of drug offense, from acquiring the tools necessary to reintegrate

fully as working, productive members of society (Blumenson and Nilsen 2002).

The population that was entering prison in the 1990s experienced greater physical

and mental health problems. At a time when the offender population was experiencing

greater need for assistance and intervention to enable individuals to return to society in

better position than when they were incarcerated, this bill drastically reduced the

assistance provided to inmates (Travis 2000). Without access to education, job training,

or substance abuse treatment, ex-prisoners attempting reentry must rely upon parole

agents, who, because of the demands on the parole system, who are unable to address

parolees’ needs adequately (Travis 2001).

36

Furthermore, the communities to which ex-offenders return typically do not have

a wealth of programs that might serve their needs. As a result, these ex-offenders often

are unable to locate programs that can address their problems. Because of these

competing demands, most parolees simply find themselves unable to lead law-abiding

lives. The only option left for many of these inmates is re-offending and facing re-arrest

(Petersilia 2000).

Overall Consequences of These Three Crime Bills

What all three of these crime bills have in common is the detrimental affect they

have on the life chances of Black youth and the Black Community. Their families are

torn apart and their communities have socially and economically disintegrated.

Considering the large populations for two of the three largest states, these disparities are

extremely troubling. In New York State, for example, there are an estimated 11,000

incarcerated drug offenders, including 1,000 women, who are parents of young

children. In 2012, close to 25,000 children have parents in prison convicted of non-

violent drug charges (Duane 2007).

As a consequence of losing a parent to prison, these children and their extended

families experience psychological trauma, financial deprivation and physical dislocation.

The vast majority of incarcerated drug offenders come from poor, inner-city

neighborhoods. The constant removal and return of prisoners the “churning effect” make

neighborhoods less safe (Human Rights Watch 2002:1). Recent research shows that the

“concentration of incarceration” leads to the further destabilization of our most

vulnerable neighborhoods.

37

According to Loury (2007):

“Three mechanisms contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods:

the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on

neighborhoods where they tend to reside, resource and relationship strains on

families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children, and

voter disfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods

because of the loss of political representation (p. 5).

Most incarcerated drug offenders come from inner-city communities of color

(Perry 2007). In the last legislative redistricting for New York State, these inner-city

communities lost 45,000 residents to upstate, mostly white districts (Perry 2007).

In addition, according to Perry (2007), because of the New York and California’s

felon disfranchisement laws, tens of thousands of Black prisoners and parolees cannot

vote and lose the ability to have an impact politically in their own communities.

According to Perry:

Studies have shown that intact families, churches, workplaces, social clubs,

organized youth groups, and civic associations have a greater positive impact on public

safety than the police do. All of those institutions are weakened when such large

disproportionate numbers of urban residents are either incarcerated or returning from

prison” (p. 1).

38

If the public knew how influential these laws are and how they have created

massive change in the Black Community throughout the nation, then there would be more

urgency to revoke these draconian laws, to make right our nation’s varying drug laws, to

create one, cohesive protocol for all states and, most important, to create a system that

does not continue to differentially and negatively impact the life chances of members of

the Black Community.

CHAPTER III

A CALL TO ACTION: A 21ST CENTURY MANIFESTO FOR

BLACK YOUTH

INTRODUCTION

In the year 2013, the Black Community is at a crossroads. In which direction does

it turn? Does it turn towards utter collapse, or does it turn towards reclaiming and re-

envisioning and activating an empowered future and purpose? The Black Community’s

most valuable commodity, its Black youth, is suffering. After enduring four hundred

years of slavery and the burden of systematic racism, mass incarceration as a result of the

policies of the War on Drugs has devastated the health of the Black Community and

severely affected the life chances of Black youth. Black young people are suffering from

fractured families; fractured communities; lack of role models, identity, and motivation;

and a loss of hope. Millions of Black youth of this generation see no future in

contemporary society outside of what they can create for themselves. Hope and dreams

have now been stripped away replaced with apathy and cynicism. As a result, what is left

is the feeling of neglect and of being expendable.

39

This is a call to action for youth around the country who want to advocate for

social change and equality But this manifesto is being specifically directed at America’s

Black youth--youth who are lost and are wandering society’s wilderness all alone,

shepherding themselves; youth who have been lied to, exploited, and marginalized for so

long that they are now easily led in the wrong direction and find it difficult to imagine

that there is another direction.

This 21st Century Manifesto recognizes that the Black youth is the Black

Community’s link to the future and that they must be protected, nurtured, respected,

loved, and educated if we are to change the life course of the Black Community. Most

important, they must be empowered to take charge of a positive destiny for themselves

and their community.

In the preceding chapter, I outlined the legacy of Reagan’s War on Drugs,

focusing on its impact of mass incarceration on the Black Community and the life

chances of Black youth. In this chapter, I briefly review how three institutional

structures of oppression—slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and mass incarceration have

adversely impacted the life chances of Black youth. I then review the historical social

movements that resulted in the end of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Finally, I

outline the resources that could be mobilized in a New Abolition Movement to end mass

incarceration and its harmful consequences for Black youth in the United States today.

40

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Edmund Burke

Slavery

The United States was founded and flourished on the kidnapping and enslavement

of millions of African slaves. Between 9.4 and 12 million Africans were kidnapped, sold,

and sent to the Americas for the purpose of slave labor (Meltzer 1993). The institution of

slavery is embedded into the very fabric of American society, and it is not a stretch to

believe that the United States would not exist as it does today without slavery as its

backbone.

Slavery created a sub-conscious inferiority complex within the Black Community,

which can be in part attributed to forced disconnection from our African heritage. Our

history and accomplishments were replaced with a reinforced and repetitive doctrine of

black inferiority. “These systems of domination, imperialism, colonialism and racism had

the effect of actively coercing black Americans to internalize these negative perceptions

of being Black” (Hooks 1992:172). Through harsh treatment and violent reprisals slave

owners reinforced these negative perceptions. For example, learning to read or write was

punishable in some instances with maiming or death (Davis 2006)

According to Hopson and Hopson (1990) negative identities are “usually learned

and internalized in childhood, and passed from generation to generation” (p. 83). Patricia

Hill Collins in her book From Black Power to Hip Hop said, “unlike other immigrant

groups that typically arrived in the United States with their ethnic cultures intact, as a

result of slavery Black Americans faced the unique challenge of having to construct a

new group identity or African American ethnicity under the confines of what white

41

society would allow” (Collins 2006:100). So, the values and structures of the dominant

society play a large role shaping the identity of the oppressed minority and just how

members of the minority construct messages about their value and their self-worth.

Slavery didn’t just impact Black self-identity; it also affected the Black family

structure because of the separation of mother/father and child or husband and wife or by

destroying African family bloodlines. Black Americans have no genealogical map from

which to draw a family history or bloodline, no accurate records were kept, and no way to

effectively trace one’s roots. Without these records, there is no way of knowing who our

true relatives are here in this country or Africa (Patterson 1998).

This has a tremendous impact because those slaves brought to America were

mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers, and cousins

who were taken from their families during slavery without documentation to track where

they were taken or by who.

According to Du Bois (1908) in The Negro American Family:

“Black male slaves were stripped of any form of pride and or self-respect, by

being humiliated in front of their families for any attempt at seeking any

resemblance of justice or escape. Black slave women were often taken from their

husbands and raped at the slave owner’s discretion, which further diminished the

male's sense of self-worth as well as the women's” (p. 47).

Du Bois noted that slavery had a crippling effect on the slave father, who lacked

the authority to govern or protect his own family. A slave’s life would entail his "wife

being made his master's concubine, his daughter raped, his son whipped, or he himself

sold away without being able to protest or lift a preventing finger" (p. 49). Women’s

42

positions as mothers were undermined by slavery, as she was "often the concubine of the

master or his sons" and could be separated from her family at any time by the "master's

command or by his death or debts"(Du Bois 1908: p. 49).

This was a very effective psychological tool because it deprived slaves the

opportunity to establish monogamous and stable familial relationships. Even slaves who

were married could be forced into relationships with other slaves at the whim of their

slave owner. This methodology developed a mindset within black male slaves that

familial relationships were not important and had no value that created instability within

slave families. (DuBois 1908).

Slavery served to create hatred, dissention, a sense of inferiority, and

inadequacy between stronger and weaker male slaves. Slave also affected the self-esteem

and emotional state of the female slaves forced into relationships with other slaves and

their slave owner.

“The degradation, dehumanization, and racism extracted upon the racial identity,

self-esteem, and self-image of black slaves powerfully illuminates the lingering, complex

dualities, and cultural mis-orientation caused by slavery upon black Americans”

(Genovese 1972:564).

Leary (2005) tackled the issue of the psychological effects of slavery by

developing she described as a multigenerational maladaptive behavior theory, Post-

Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS). She argued that centuries of slavery in the United

States, followed by systemic and structural racism and oppression, have resulted in

multigenerational maladaptive behaviors, which initially originated as survival strategies.

The syndrome continues today because children whose parents suffer from PTSS will

43

often be indoctrinated into the same behaviors, long after the behaviors have lost their

contextual effectiveness (Leary 2005).

The author states that PTSS is not a disorder that can simply be treated and

remedied clinically but requires a profound social and structural change in our society

and American institutions to promote inequalities and injustice. This syndrome might

also explain the preference of many young African Americans for limiting educational

aspirations and lower ambitions in the larger American society (Leary 2005).

Jim Crow

In 1865, Southern states began to counter the Federal legislation passed as a result

of the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that officially freed black Americans

from the institution of slavery. This created a harrowing situation for Southern whites

who felt that this new amendment officially on the books would bode well for the

children and grandchildren of former slaves, who would have no experience or memory

of slavery and be free to determine their own future (Litwick 1998). The first form of

retaliation was the passing of the Black Codes that were instituted, by Southern

Democrats after the death of President Abraham Lincoln as a means of controlling the

activities of free black slaves and determining what freed slaves could and could not do.

Blacks were denied the right to vote or permitted to possess firearms allowed

local officials to arrest and find unemployed African Americans and make them work

without pay for white employers to pay off their fines. The Black Codes also forbade

black families from renting, purchasing, or building homes except in neighborhoods

designated for them (Wilson 1965). These policies severely limited the life chances of

persons newly released from slavery, making them vulnerable to physical and economic

44

exploitation by their former owners and other members of the post-Civil War power

structure. These laws were in effect for only a few years and were ruled unconstitutional

after the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted full

citizenship to newly freed slaves. However, in the South the Black Codes continued to be

used, severely limiting the life chances of freed blacks (Wilson 1965).

The Jim Crow laws that followed were state and local laws enacted between 1876

and 1965 (Kousser 1974). Whites implemented poll taxes, literacy tests, residency

requirements, and “understanding” clauses to prevent blacks from registering to vote and

despite the rights guaranteed them by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; these

freed black slaves were systematically excluded from the political process and as a result

every phase of their life was dictated to them (Kousser 1974).

The United States Supreme Court’s Plessey vs. Ferguson (1896) decision had a

profound impact on the life chances of freed blacks. The issue addressed by this case was

whether laws that provided for the separation of races violated the rights of blacks as

guaranteed by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme

Court upheld the constitutionality of the state of Louisiana’s right to enact legislation

requiring persons of different races to use “separate but equal” segregated facilities

continuing the discriminatory Jim Crow laws for another sixty-nine years (Fireside 2004).

In a society in which whites now had the political authority to dictate the social

order, they were free to use intimidation, harassment, and violence to contain and control

blacks. Freed Blacks who showed positive individual attributes like confidence,

intelligence, and achievement in individual or business endeavors, Black families who

achieved even modest economic success, Black men and women who attempted to vote,

45

or those who failed to act in a servile manner in the presence of whites were doing so at

risks to their lives (Raber 2003).

The Jim Crow era lasted for almost a century until the successes of the Civil

Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century, largely because the federal government

and the majority of non-Black Americans ignored or condoned this practice and the

violence that came with it. The economic poverty of the Black Community and poor

education opportunities of black children in Jim Crow schools severely hindered their life

chances. Poorly trained teachers, an academic curriculum that did not account for the

cultural heritage of Black youth, and an emphasis on physical discipline had a

tremendous psychological impact on Black youth. Many of these youth were coming

from families who were basically functionally illiterate and could not support their

children’s academic endeavors or struggles (Irons 2002).

Those who could change their circumstances did so. Six million Blacks migrated

North during the Great Migration 1910 – 1950 to escape the Jim Crow laws for better

economic opportunities. These were younger, better educated Black Americans. However,

ten million Black Americans who were not able to move north were left behind and

continued to suffer under the racial discriminatory laws of the South (Irons 2002).

Just like the institution of slavery, the Jim Crow Laws forced Black Americans

into passive and sometimes cooperative submission. Black Americans have been

prohibited from receiving equal access to the political process, education, employment

and economic opportunities. This has resulted in a struggle for many Blacks to build

stable familial relationships and provide financially for themselves or their families. This

46

created circumstances where large numbers of Black families were without fathers and

positive male role models, leading to frustration, depression, and fractured Black families.

Mass Incarceration

As the chains of slavery were removed and the Jim Crow laws repealed or ruled

unconstitutional, white America adapted to the change using political influence at the

state and local level to circumvent federal legislation. Wanting to maintain power, the

dominant classes found ways to keep it. Slavery morphed into the Black Codes, which

morphed into the Jim Crow Laws, which then morphed into the prison industrial complex

and mass incarceration, which for the 21st century is the new form of slavery and a new

form of Jim Crow (Alexander 2012) for quarantining and controlling black Americans.

With mass incarceration white America was able to switch its tactics into

something that was much more subtle. Now our communities are being impacted

indirectly. We are participating in the destruction of our own communities and families,

so we can now be blamed for our own demise. How else can you explain the infiltration

of crack into the inner city and not wealthier communities or that crack cocaine offenses

are charged one hundred times more than powdered cocaine offenses? The rise of crack

gave law enforcement the manufactured excuse it needed continue exploiting the Black

Community. This one factor alone accounted for the rapid increase of African Americans

in state and federal institutions as a result of the war on drugs. (MacCoun and Reuter

2001).

47

Tonry (1996), in his book Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in

America, charged that the racial disparities in the criminal justice system were not merely

happenstance, but the result of a “calculated effort foreordained to increase the

percentages of Blacks in prison” (p. 82).

Tonry, also argued that the drug war's planners were aware that the ineffective

policies they proposed to implement against the War on Drugs would adversely affect

African American males and would not work to curb illegal narcotic use (Tonry 1996).

This has resulted in what Nunn (2002) called mass incarceration. He explained,

“African Americans are incarcerated at percentages that exceed any legitimate law

enforcement interest and which negatively impact the Black Community. While African

Americans only comprise 12% of the U.S. population, they are 46% of those incarcerated

in state and federal prisons” (p. 381).

African American males compromise 6% of the nation’s population and 46% of

the nation’s prison population. Twenty-five percent of African American males age 18-30

are imprisoned for at least twenty five years, 30% are unemployed and another 22%

suffer from alcohol and other forms of drug abuse. This accounts for 77% of the African

American male population in the United States (West 2009). The absence of fathers due

to these circumstances has left many Black families economically imperiled and the

removal of mothers from homes has left many Black children in the care of extended

families or persons who are biologically unrelated to them (Hall 1997). The lack of

positive male role models, the fractured families, and the loss of earning potential,

political empowerment, and educational opportunities have severely hindered the life

chances of Black children. These forces increase the risks of Black children being

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involved in criminal activity, damaging their educational prospects and emotional and

physical health.

HISTORICAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS FOR RESISTANCE

In this section I briefly highlight the role of the Abolitionist Movement and the

Civil Rights Movement in empowering the grassroots to overthrow slavery and Jim Crow

segregation.

The Abolitionist Movement

The abolitionists denounced slavery as a moral evil and worked with a higher

sense of moral purpose in calling for an end to slavery and the freeing of slaves. In the

North, religious abolitionist organizations played a major role in development a

consciousness for the elimination of slavery. Prominently supported by the Society of

Friends, abolitionist successfully forced the abolition of slavery using a passive and

gradual strategy. In the South, the abolitionist movement splintered into two distinct

groups. Benjamin Lundy’s abolitionist movement established a more passive and gradual

strategy more in line with what the Society of Friends used with success in the North, but

a much more aggressive and confrontive strategy was promoted by black and white

abolitionist leaders such as Frederick Douglas, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips,

Theodore Weld, and Angelina Grimes who founded the American Anti-Slavery Society

in 1833. The Anti-Slavery Society created a large network of state and local

organizations that bombarded federal and state legislatures with petitions to end slavery,

put lecturers on the road across the country, organized, petition drives, published a wide

variety of printed materials, and ran abolitionist presidential candidates in both elections

of 1840 and 1844 (McPherson 1975).

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The work of the abolitionist movement created opportunities for freed blacks to

make some social and political progress, gaining the right to vote and winning political

office. Many very important Black institutions were founded some that continue to exist

today such as Black churches, colleges, and businesses. In the South some freed Blacks

were able to become farm and property owners, and in the West some were even able to

create independent and prosperous towns that showed that given opportunities freed

Black were able to improve their life chances and take control of their own destiny

(McPherson 1975).

The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement was the largest mobilization of Black Americans in

this nation’s history and had an effect on the lives of Blacks all over the world. The Civil

Rights Movement battled oppression, injustice, and racial prejudices that had weighed

down African Americans since their arrival in the country as slaves (Morris 1964).

This movement started as a movement to end segregation and racial injustice. In

addition to legal challenges such as the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education in

which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate educational facilities were inherently

unequal, this struggle for equality widely used the tactics of passive nonviolence

successfully used by the Society of Friends years before. In addition to the nonviolent

resistance strategies of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Dr. Martin

Luther King, Jr., other Black leaders came to prominence. Ralph Bunche, for example,

was best known for his work in the United Nations and for becoming the first African

American to win the Nobel peace prize in 1950 for his work in resolving Arab-Israeli

disputes after World War II.

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Malcolm X was a New York City social activist who started as a vocal and

leading member of the Nation of Islam advocating Black self-sufficiency, identify, and

pro-Black separateness. His position evolved after a visit to Mecca and became

independent of the Nation of Islam and began advocating a broader, more globally

sophisticated, and inclusive platform of advancement for Black Americans in the United

States (Morris 1964)

With the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and Malcolm X in 1965,

the Civil Rights Movement as many knew it ended. The loss of the movement’s most

important leaders and visionaries, however, did not prevent the Black Community from

achieving two very important things: a formal federal government commitment to civil

rights and key legislation undoing some of the worst aspects of legal segregation and

disenfranchisement. The dedication and sacrifices of many led to Supreme Court cases,

such as Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of legislation such as the Twenty-

Fourth Amendment which ended the practice of denying Black Americans the ability to

vote by reason of failure to pay a poll tax, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting

Rights Act of 1965. These accomplishments provided the legal framework for protecting

Blacks’ rights after hundreds of years of systematic racial discrimination (Pickney 2012).

As a result these legislative victories, Black Americans began to be admitted to

public schools, colleges, and public accommodations formerly closed to them. Blacks

Americans once again began to occupy high public office and actively participate in

many aspects of American society from which they had long been excluded by

segregation and discrimination.

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Worldwide the image of Black Americans began to change any aspects of Black

American culture and style became in vogue. The phrase "Black Is Beautiful" and “Say It

Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” took hold in the Black Community. Assumptions of

inferiority were challenged and for the first time in American history it became illegal to

discriminate against Blacks (Morris 1964).

Younger and more culturally activist African Americans started to accept and be

proud of their physical features promoting Black unity through organizations such as The

Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party did not adhere to the passive and gradualist

policies of the Civil Rights movement. Their political philosophy was more direct and

combined militant nationalism with Marxist philosophy. They stressed the empowerment

and self-defense of the Black Community, often through direct confrontation. The Black

Panther Party fought against poverty, criminality, police brutality, unemployment,

slavery, and oppression in the United States. Fighting for the liberation of the working

class, the Black Panther Party focused on social, political and economic equality across

regardless of color or gender (Alkebulan 2007).

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THE NEW ABOLITION REVOLUTION

There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.

Dr. Martin Luther King 1965 Oberlin College Commencement Address)

In this final section I call for a new abolition movement. I highlight the ideas of

several scholars who are likeminded in their support for a new social movement to

change the system and break these cycles of oppression that are affecting a new

generation of Black Americans and its most vital Black youth. Finally, I state my desire

for a new social movement geared towards rallying the youth of the Black Community in

what I call The Black Youth Manifesto.

What Is To Be Done

Social movements have been a key part of every major social change in American

history. I have mentioned a few here that there have been based on political or religious

convictions that sprung from the desire to fight oppression and discrimination. The

support of White America played a large role in these movements. For instance, the

Abolition movement and the Civil Rights movement are clear examples of how the work

of a grassroots constituency of Blacks along with socially conscientious Whites was able

to create change when the vast majorities were reluctant to change. During those times

Black America needed the help of others because we were held back through lack of

resources, political power, and our single voice alone was not loud enough.

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The last major social movement for Black America stopped at the end of the Civil

Rights era. The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t there to stop the War on Drugs, crime and

drug use, human rights abuses, mass incarceration, violence, police brutality, and the

exploitation and marginality of our communities and the great disparities in educational

opportunities to our children. It’s been over forty years that my entire generation has

suffered through these times, and new generations of Black youth are the products of

what we have not done to stem this tide in our communities. That is why we need a

revolution that does not stop but comes back around in the face of oppression. There are

academic scholars who are advocating for real change and the destruction of systems that

continue to be new and advanced forms of slavery and Jim Crow.

Civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar Michelle Alexander believes that

most Americans are asleep to the deep-seated, systemic racism in America’s legal and

penal system. Alexander stated in a speech to Yale University’s All School Conference

that, “This system has decimated so many communities, destroyed so many families, and

has literally turned back the clock on racial progress in the United States” (Alexander

2013).

Alexander agrees that nothing short of a major social movement has any

hope of ending mass incarceration in America. This system is now so deeply

engrained in our social, political, and economic structure that it is not going to just

fade away. Alexander explained that even though we are focused on our own

community, dismantling this system will not work with a race-neutral approach. We

need to rally the support of other marginalized communities and work together in a

common movement for basic human rights, basic human dignity (Alexander 2012).

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Long before the War on Drugs, Ronald Reagan, the emergence of crack cocaine

in the Black community, and the mass incarceration of Black Americans, scholar Derek

A. Bell, one of the leading proponents of “critical race theory,” saw this coming. His

views on what has happened in the Black Community were that the prison industrial

complex and mass incarceration are just tools used for racial control operating under a

new name.

Bell believed that Black Americans would never be allowed to get too far ahead.

He explained in his work Who is Afraid of Critical Race Theory:

Blacks have suffered greatly as a result of discrimination undergirded and often

justified by the general belief in black inferiority. But history shows with equal

clarity, though it is less frequently acknowledged, that indications of black

success and thus possible black superiority result in racist outrage (p. 895).

Professor Bell has argued that mass incarceration, just like the institution of

slavery, the Black Codes, and the Jim Crow laws that followed would continue to exist as

long as it served the interest of the White power structure. For the White power structure,

prison is big business in this country, and for one corporation it is big business around the

world. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) owns most of the private prisons

in the United States and sells its stock and shares on the New York Stock Exchange

(CCA 2011).

One of its major stockholders is the Paine Webber Group. This multi-billion

dollar industry has the capacity to influence public policies to ensure laws are

implemented that preserve their capacity to influence public policy that preserves their

capacity to operate and make a profit.

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The private prison system runs parallel to the U.S. prisons and currently accounts

for nearly 10 percent of U.S. state and federal inmates, according to the Bureau of Justice

Statistics. Those numbers rise and fall in response to specific policies, and CCA along

with the GEO Group has been accused of lobbying for policies that would fill its cells

such as the increase in enforcement. The CCA’s filings with the Securities and Exchange

Commission clearly point out that their business success is tied to a status quo in criminal

justice policy. "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by

the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and

sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are

currently proscribed by our criminal laws" (CCA 2010). This letter noted that “any

changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could

affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially

reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them" (CCA 2010).

Professor Michael Tonry of the University of Minnesota who specializes in

criminal law explained, “The drug war was fought largely from partisan political motives

to show that the Reagan and Bush administrations were concerned about public safety,

crime prevention, and the needs of victims. It generated wide spread public support and

unprecedented bipartisan political support, but it was a total failure” (Tonry in Nunn

2002:388).

The purpose of the War on Drugs was to make the price of the drugs more

expensive and riskier for those to sell it, thus making drugs less available. Massive arrests

and mandatory prison sentences did not make drugs harder to find. There is no evidence

that the War on Drugs lowered levels of drug use in the United States.

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Drug use was declining before the War on Drugs went into effect, so it should

take no credit for the decline. With the War on Drugs in effect it doubled arrests, police,

prosecution, court, and the prison system. 70% of federal funding was devoted to law

enforcement with the remaining 30% to be shared between treatment and education

(Tonry 1995).

Tonry suggested the drug policy was especially bad because the damage to Black

Americans would be inflicted primarily for the benefit of the great mass of, mostly

White, non-disadvantaged Americans. To change the system, he felt that there were six

steps politicians could take. First, consider the foreseeable effects of crime control policy

decisions on members of minority groups. Any policy implemented during any of the

past Presidential administrations should have seen the problems that were going to occur

when implementing their policies. Second, presumptive sentencing guidelines for

ordinary cases that set maximum penalties should be set up, in order to guard against

racial bias in sentencing. Third, we should give the utmost compassion to predecessors

and give the least amount of punishment in every case. Fourth, empower judges at

sentencing to mitigate sentences for all defendants, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or sex,

to take account of individual circumstances. Fifth, encourage programs, which are going

to treat the criminal and help them with re-entry back into their communities. We should

focus on rebuilding the person and their family. Sixth, transparency, being honest is the

key for politicians and citizens to agree on better corrections programs. If we can find

ways to keep the racial bias away from the legal system, we should do so (Tonry 1995).

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In order to create this revolution we need to take the truth to our communities. We

need to engage our Black Youth who are the unwitting victims of what is happening in

our communities. We need our churches to regain their place as community leaders and

centers of influence and network brokering. We need our community and recreation

centers, our schools, prison advocacy programs, and re-entry centers. This revolution has

to be about education, consciousness raising, and action.

That means we have to create forums for study groups to raise consciousness and

networking with other social justice organizations that are working on not only criminal

justice reform, but human rights and immigrant rights issues, educational reform, and job

creation and economic development in not just our communities, but in foreign

communities who also share in this plight. This revolution to end mass incarceration has

to be one movement--not isolated, separate campaigns, and policy agendas.

Who Needs To Do It

In order to create this youth movement we need to rebuild the relationships in the

Black Community that have served us well in previous generations. We need to

reinvigorate them with a new mission and a sense of purpose. We need to establish new

relationships with other community-based organizations. We need our business, sports,

and entertainment leaders to be spokesman. We need our schools and community centers

to be actively engaged, our Black fraternity/sorority organizations to be in action, Black

churches to be actively engaged in becoming the beacons once again of our communities.

Below is just a short list of these organizations and suggestions for how these

organizations can assist in supporting this revolution and impacting the lives of youth in

the Black Community in real way.

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Black Churches

The Black church is one of the oldest institutions in this country. Black churches

provided resources, social connections, and personnel during both the Abolition

Movement and the Civil Rights Movement and reached into a variety of communities and

social classes. The Black church is able to help provide access to Black professionals,

financial resources, and credibility for actions to end mass incarceration.

The following are just a few of the national Black church denominations that

could be mobilized to work on abolition of mass incarceration and on addressing the

individual and community deficits that mass incarceration has visited on the Black

Community. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Church of God in Christ,

National Baptist Convention, African Union First Colored Methodist Protestant Church

and Connection, Apostolic Faith Mission, Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, Church

of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A., Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Fire

Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas, Mount Sinai Holy Church of America,

National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., National Missionary Baptist Convention

of America, Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, United House of Prayer for All People,

United Pentecostal Council of the Assemblies of God, Incorporated and the Israelite

School of Universal Practical Knowledge, Progressive National Baptist Convention,

Spiritual Israel Church and Its Army.

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Black Fraternities and Sororities

These campus organizations and their alumni provide reach into communities

throughout the country and access to educated Black middle class and professionals who

can help provide resources and social and political connections for the new movement.

These are organizations that are rich with history and achievement. They all share the

same purpose, which is to better the Black Community and the lives of youth. These

organizations can help by promoting interaction through forums, meetings, and other

mediums for the exchange of information and engages in cooperative programming and

initiatives through various activities and functions. There are several local and national

fraternity and sorority organizations that are engaged in making change in the Black

Community and the lives of youth. The following is a list of these organizations. Alpha

Phi Alpha Fraternity, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Omega

Psi Phi Fraternity, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Zeta Phi Beta

Sorority, Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Iota Phi Theta Fraternity.

Community Based Organizations

These are organizations that can have a powerful and positive impact on

rebuilding the lives of youth by creating safe havens for them to move away from gangs,

criminal activity, and a traumatic past. They can also, through their networks, staff, and

volunteers, mobilize activists to engage in policy and political change necessary to end

the War on Drugs and mass incarceration. These organizations can provide the resources

in a variety of different ways to help build healthy and positive identities and productive

future and to help create a movement for policy change.

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The following is a sample list of a few of the community based youth

organizations in just one community (the Minnesota Twin Cites) that could be mobilized

to provide important support and reach for the New Abolution Movement: Kulture Klub,

Street Works Outreach, Employment Action Center, Face To Face, YouthLink, Urban

Centers Learning Lab, PPL Learning Center, Youth Thrive, Sabathani Community

Center, Avenues, The Bridge, Oak Park Neighborhood Center, Youth Opportunity Center,

Midwest Challenge, Minnesota Teen Challenge, The Link, 180 Degrees Evening

Learning Center and the Brian Coyle Community Center.

Entertainment Advocacy

Black entertainers and athletes give substantial amounts of their time, talents, and

treasures to charitable causes and tend to give most to causes that have the most impact

on their lives, with education, youth projects, health-related causes, and civic engagement

at the top of the list. They are able to do this by providing news, videos, and photos of

celebrity philanthropy, nonprofit organizations, and causes that directly correlate with the

Black Community. They have the ability to enrich the lives of others through celebrity

philanthropy, nonprofits, causes, and grants and to inform people on issues affecting the

Black Community and Black youth. The following are just a few of the national

entertainment advocacy organizations that have been working diligently to assist in

addressing these issues. Radio One, Black Entertainment Television, Carmelo Anthony

Foundation, Aspire, Keep A Child Alive, Big Kidz Foundation, Cam Newton Foundation,

The Tiger Woods Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Common Ground Foundation,

Wade’s World Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Blues Babe Foundation, MJ

Foundation, Youth 2 Leaders, TASF Foundation, Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation,

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Black America Web.Com, TJ Foundation, The Show Me Campaign, Admiral Center and

the G-Unity Foundation.

Social Media

Though nothing can replace the face-to-face interaction with others, the youth of

this generation are very technologically proficient. This revolution will not only be

televised; it will be done using all of these forms of social networking outlets. Social

media has become the new wave to talk to masses of people who are likeminded, where

information can be disseminated instantaneously. This is a very powerful tool that the

youth of today relate to and can be used from anywhere at any time. Movement

organizers use social media to inform and mobilize, as the demonstrations mobilized

through social media during the 2012 Arab Spring have demonstrated. Popular social

media entities include: Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube,

Stumbleupon, Digg, Newsvine, Blogs, Reddit, Wordpress, Blogger, Orkut, Hi5, Google

Buzz, Yahoo Meme, Mixx, Hulu, Enips, Scribd and Slideshare.

Parental Engagement

We need parent engagement. When parents are engaged in the activities of their

sons and daughters and support their education, children tend to do better in school and

like education more. Parental engagement can help youth improve behavior, develop

better social skills, and make greater gains. Parental involvement is a valuable

community resource and is critical to the lives of youths. There are a number of national

and local parental engagement organizations that are heavily invested in changing the life

chances of Black youth and Black families and could provide valuable energy to the New

Abolition Movement. Some of these organizations are: Parent Appleseed, The National

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PTA, National Network of Partnership Schools, Minority Parent & Community

Engagement, Headstart, PACE, Coordinate Family & Community Parent Mentoring

Program, Community Engagement Scholars, Families In Schools, Learning First, Child

Outreach Program, Positive Parenting Program, The National Center for Parent, Family

& Community Engagement and Parent Academy.

Higher Education

Colleges and universities, both mainstream and Historically Black Colleges and

Universities are centers for academic and athletic achievement; there is a wealth of

untapped potential within the students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees.

These institutions provide a wealth of resources and an environment to rally and engage

other students. There are various social organizations within this environment, students

who have been previously involved in some form of collective action and will continue to

be involved.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities play an important role. There are 105

of them in the United States, and these institutions enroll the largest number of Black

American college students (Provasnik and Shafer 2004). Because the majority of colleges

and universities in the United States are predominantly white, Black American students

may experience a sense of social isolation at those schools, which can distract them from

their studies and limit their desire to pursue extracurricular and social activities.

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When Blacks attend a historically black institution, they do not have to worry

about the potential distraction of being a minority student and they are provided an

environment that is conducive to bringing attention to the issues of Black youth and the

Black Community. There are a number of national higher education based programs that

have been involved with working to ending the practice of mass incarceration and

addressing the individual and community needs of the Black Community.

The following is a list of just a few of the types of programs that exist on college

campuses around the nation: college student volunteer programs, mentorship programs,

diversity programs, Black student unions, corrections/criminal justice programs, and

social justice programs.

Black Advocacy Organizations

These are organizations that are dedicated and directly involved with improving

the Black Community. They are very important because they are established and long

serving organizations with vast economic and social resources that are able to influence

political, legislative and public policy arenas. The following are just a few of the national

Black advocacy organizations have been staples of the Black Community and are an

invaluable networking and mobilizing resource that have a tremendous impact and could

be mobilized to help a New Abolition Movement: NAACP, Urban League, United Negro

College Fund, Color of Change, National Newspaper Publishers Association, A Better

Chance, National Association of Colored Women’s Club, Congress of Racial Equality,

National Council For Negro Women and the Nation of Islam.

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Prison Advocacy Organizations

Prisoner advocacy organizations are there to ensure that all of the rights of the

prisoner are preserved. These include medical attention/healthcare for prisoners, proper

treatment of inmates and counseling. They also provide assistance and support to friends

and families of those who are or who have been incarcerated.

These groups also work toward building strategies and procedures that foster

safety in our communities. Prison advocacy groups such as this also work with teachers

and activists on prison-related issues, assist prisoners with pre-conviction services, pre-

sentence reports, and post-conviction remedies. Prison advocacy is a valuable community

resource and is critical to the lives of inmates, families and youth. And what better voices

for ending mass incarceration than those of prisoners and their families, who can tell the

stories of the individual and collective harm, visited by this system of oppression.

The following are just a few of the national prison advocacy organizations that

could be mobilized to work on the abolition of mass incarceration and addressing the

individual and community needs of the Black Community and Black youth. Child

Welfare League of America, the Western Prison Project, Human Kindness Foundation,

Family & Corrections Network, F.A.C.T.S., Federal Cure Inc., ACLU, All of Us or No,

Families Against Mandatory Minimums, The Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice, and

The Sentencing Project.

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Conclusion

The Black Youth Manifesto, 2013

To The United States of America

And Black Communities Across

The Nation

We the Black youth of the United States of America are fully cognizant of the fact

that we are an endangered species. The advances of the Abolitionist and Civil Rights

movement of previous generations of Black American, though acknowledged, have

stalled and are no longer meeting the needs of this generation of vulnerable Black youth

and our Black communities.

We have always fought for racial equality, citizenship, justice, economic, and

political opportunity. This generation of Black youth now fights for a future, hope, our

families, our identity, and our spiritual and physical well-being. We are suffering from

sub-par educational systems that are not meeting our needs, apathy, broken families as a

result of the mass incarceration of our mothers and fathers, lack of opportunities, a crisis

of self-image, self-discipline, self-respect, and a predatory criminal justice system that

targets the most vulnerable of our communities.

In the 1970s through most of the 1980s some of our Black political leaders

encouraged the Black Community to view White society and its social norms as racist

and wrong, existing simply as a means to oppress the Black Community. As a result the

very image of school, learning, and academic achievement became for some Black youth

a “White thing.”

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We did not understand as a community that the rejection of mainstream social

norms could ultimately lead to possibly lack of opportunity, underachievement, self-

destructive and criminal activity, drug use, and broken family structures. Thus, Black

men have been continually vulnerable to being incarcerated in disproportionate numbers,

particularly for drug crimes, mostly because of racial profiling and targeting of our

communities. Statistics have continually shown that the majority of American offenders

are Caucasian (for varied crimes but especially for drug crimes).

Given that Black Americans are a statistical minority in the US, the

overwhelming majority of drug abusers will therefore be White. Nonetheless, Black

Americans are disproportionately targeted, arrested, and jailed for drug related crimes.

Disproportionality here cannot be justified by any other means except institutionalized

racism.

The criminal justice system use the pathological stereotype of the Black junkie or

drug dealer to rationalize the imbalanced scales of justice and continue to fill corrections

institutions with young Black males/females to propagate their illusion of safety with no

thought of the collateral damage it is doing in Black communities.

Our Black youth have to deal with:

1. A lack of positive peer, adult interaction and supervision.

2. High degrees of defensiveness and aggressive tendencies.

3. Low levels of cooperation, participation and emotional stability.

4. A negative sense of self.

5. A feeling of powerlessness rather than personal power.

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6. A feeling that they are incapable of exercising a degree of control over

their environment and circumstances

U.S. Department of Justice data for December 31, 1984 showed that 47% of state

prisons and 33% of federal prisoners in the United States were Black Americans

(Langan1991). Since the year 2000, more than 50% of young Black males have served

time in prison, 700,000 prisoners were parents of over 1.5 million youth. Of these

incarcerated parents 44% were fathers and 64% were mothers who were custodial parents

of their children and one-third of the mothers were the sole caretakers of their children

prior to being incarcerated. More than 70% of these parents were gainfully employed

prior to their incarceration and contributed significantly to the financial wellbeing of their

children (Mumola 2000).

The loss of one parent increases the load for the parent remaining and lessens that

available parent’s presence in the lives of their children, which leaves that youth open to

the influence of socialization process that could lead to criminal and deviant activity

(McLanahan and Sandefur 1994). The effect of mass incarceration for our Black youths,

who are already at a disadvantage, produces long-term effects that hinder the life chances

of Black youth (Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999).

The Black Youth Manifesto emphasizes the need to understand and take into full

account how Black youth from Black communities marginalized based on race, ethnicity,

and class think about their world and their place in it. This Manifesto is a call to action to

create a movement for Black Youth to become advocates for their community and

involved in civic engagement to benefit and improve their life chances.

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It is time to end the vicious cycle within the Black Community, and the change

must come within the community itself and must be led by our Black youth. The

Abolitionist movement has passed; the Civil Rights movement has passed. The Black

Panther Party’s agenda that was focused specifically on the Black Community and

attempted to pick up what was not being addressed by the Civil Rights movement

creating independent community focused programs such as social service, education and

health programs that were having an impact on our community was undone from within

with more than a little help from the federal government. And then the flag was dropped.

The youth of our communities are suffering—suffering from violence, abuse, and

neglect. They are suffering from apathy, abandonment, victimization, and exploitation

and most importantly from a lack of hope. Almost half of all the parents in state and

federal prisons are Black American, and about 77% of all Black American children

currently have a parent in prison (Glaze and Maruschak 2008).

Right now, a black male is seven times more likely to be imprisoned than a white

male (Nolan 2012). With the outrageously disproportionate sentences for possession and

use of base cocaine compared to powered cocaine, mass incarceration and the prison

industrial complex are thriving at the expense of generations of black men and women

behind bars.

To those who think the high incidence of black male and female incarceration is

some new phenomenon I would propose that the only time in this nation where black

prison rates were lower than the percentage make-up of the population was before the

first black person arrived and during slavery.

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In the late 1800s and early part of the 20th century black men were being

snatched away from their families in the South and put on chain gangs or forced to work

for whites without reason or compensation. What we call mass incarceration and the

prison industrial complex today was the peonage system and Jim Crow segregation

before that and chattel slavery before that. The peonage system used in the South

exploited legal loopholes to avoid prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black

workers against their will. The consequence was that:

Under laws enacted in the South specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of

thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous

fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these

debts, prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps,

brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations (Blackmon 2008: 3).

In the 1970s there were some advances for the small percentage of families with

education and job skills. But in the 1980s the Reagan era budget and social program

cutbacks crippled opportunities within the Black Community. This created drops in home

ownership; loss of healthcare coverage, housing quality, and housing availability;

reduced life expectancy; increased infant mortality rates, and reduced college education

opportunities.

70

Drugs were then allowed to flood our community with the rise of crack cocaine

and racist criminal justice policies that were enacted to supposedly stem this invasion

instead brought street sweeps, curfews, neighborhood barricades, raids on inner city

public housing projects, bulldozing of homes, racially targeted traffic and license checks,

resulting in the mass incarceration that has escalated in the 90’s through this current era.

The collateral damage of this injustice affects friends and family members who

are left with the psychological burden of witnessing violence and having the family

structure torn apart. When young people live in neighborhoods plagued by violence, even

when they don’t directly suffer violence, they are considerably more likely to suffer from

post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety, and are more prone to behavioral problems

and academic underachievement.

Just as the slave markets of old were abolished and the peonage system and Jim

Crow segregation at long last found unconstitutional, so must this current institution of

Black American oppression be ended. If we continue to allow such a disproportionate

number of poor and minority citizens to be locked up, released without rehabilitation, and

locked up again, this modern day slavery will continue to thrive and do untold damage to

our communities and further generations of Black youth.

Our criminal justice system will continue to exploit and use Black men and

women who are guilty of non-violent and largely drug-related crimes to further their

profits and fill their prison institutions, which will further their control and influence over

our democracy. Utilizing the courts alone to change the policies of the War on Drugs and

mass incarceration is likely to be ineffective.

71

Remedying this injustice will require a large-scale social movement that seeks to

attack each level of discrimination and exploitation that is happening within correctional

policies. A new social movement needs to be created with our youth on the front line

leading the charge to create a new social movement. The policies that allow for mass

incarceration and the prison industrial complex need to be changed by removing the

draconian drug laws that have been erected since the Reagan era that has created such

injustice.

This is not only a legal but also a moral obligation to the citizens of this country.

We need the youth in our communities to mobilize into action. We need the youth of our

communities to put pressure on businesses that invest in these institutions, pressure on

politicians who are seeking our vote, and put pressure on our Black leaders to take a

stand. We need these youth to march, protest, sit in, utilize social media to spread the

word, mobilize others who are advocates for injustice to engage with them, and shut

office and government buildings down if need be to have their voices heard. It is now

time for us to realize that there will be no savior for the problems that plague our

community. It is now time for our flag to be picked up again. This Manifesto is a call to

action for the creation of a new movement with our Youth at the forefront.

72

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