Hood Politics

the prison system and how it's slavery.

Someone is going to bring up "black crime" statistics, so I'll help you get that out of the way. Black people commit less than 26% of the crimes in America [According to the FBI], yet make up 2/3 of the inmate population in prison. If you don't understand that; Although white people are doing the most crimes, they make up one of the smallest percentages of the prison population. Wow, so that means white people don't face the same persecution as black people? Interesting.

Moving on...

The 13th Amendment [Section One] says: 
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Slavery is conditional in the U.S., it never ended, it just gained a new name. If the judicial system can somehow falsely incriminate black people, they have an access to slaves that do work for the government. Prisoners are held captive their job options are minimal and the are paid (.08 in most cases) cents per hour. That means the labor is cheap, basically free, and the government gets the work of thousands of people.

The entire prison system began with slavery. Slave patrols were the original police officers. The Prison System began in 1865, which is conveniently the same year as the Emancipation Proclamation, which claims to "free slaves (it didn't)." Petty laws were made to the point where it was clear that black people were the target; looking a white women, being homeless, not having a job, etc. These crimes of course would imprison former black slaves as they left the watch of their masters. They were drove back into sharecropping (slavery all over again) or prison (slavery). There was no third option, no escaping the captivity of slavery. The Emancipation did absolutely nothing, as did the 13th Amendment.

The movie Birth of a Nation, the original, was responsible for the resurrection (not that it was dead) of the Klu Klux Klan. The movie depicts a black man who is a savage, pining after a white woman, raping her, and being an overall problem to society. This film, viewed by Woodrow Wilson him-damn-self is partially responsible for the incrimination of black men today. They are viewed as predators rather than humans, as they have been for generations. So if this short film can dehumanize black men and make them seem like savages at birth, why not create a system to keep those supposed savages away from the rest of functioning society? 

Fast forward to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Marijuana became illegal for the sole purpose of white men thinking that black men who consumed marijuana would become rowdy and pursue white women. They actually thought that a drug would make white women more attractive to black men ( such a wild concept). Furthermore, this act only added onto the imprisonment and incrimination of black men.

Although the Marijuana Act set the stage for modern day black imprisonment, President Nixon went out of his way to make sure that black people were seen as savages before imprisoning us. The use of heroin became popping during his election, which helped the criminalization of black people more than we've ever seen. Instead of using taxpayer money to establish treatments or rehabilitation centers, he used the money to implement his "Law and Order" proposal. The "Law and Order," yes the same thing Donald has said, single-handedly spiked Prison rates to the sky. He implemented more police officers into black communities, making it easy for them to arrest anyone they deemed suspicious, and gave them a pat on the back for arresting black people (guilty or not). But while he thought black people were the face of heroin, white America became the face of overusing prescription medicine. Prescription medicine, Percocet specifically, has the same rates of addiction as heroin. So why didn't Nixon choose to monitor this overuse of medicine that was easy to get rather than blame the black community for all of the crime rates? Why not have stricter laws for prescription drugs that caused more or the equivalence of problems as heroin?

Now to his best friend, Ronald Raegan (who was governor of California at the time of Nixon's presidency) or as I like to call him, The Devil. Once Ronald Raegan got into office, he piggybacked off of the "Law and Order" proposal and created "The War on Drugs," aka "The War on People of Color."

The War on Drugs was simply another way to imprison black people and make it look easy. Drugs were implemented in black neighborhoods by the FBI itself, more police officers were hired/trained, and more police officers filled black neighborhoods. The War on Drugs sounds like a good idea, but all it did was create the false narrative that black men had two positions: drug dealers and drug users.

Police officers arrested any and everybody, there was no "innocent until proven guilty," if you were black or Hispanic you were guilty. Period.

Ronald Wilson Raegan was nothing more than Satan in a dress suit. He also birthed the idea of the "Welfare Queen" depicted as black women to the point where black women, even today, are seen as willingly uneducated, poor, and lazy. In fact, he created the War on Drugs when drug use was declining. The prison population doubled under his presidency, and we can all guess what race(s) they just so happened to be.

In closing, the prison system is the home of racism, racial bias, and legalized slavery. It's a system of prejudice to keep black people from functioning with the rest of society, convicting blacknpeople as felons while denying the ability of those felons to vote [which is the responsibility of every citizen in the U.S.] The prison system is just another example of the systematic ways that black people are kept separate from the rest of society and used to keep black people from utilizing our voices. 

The prison industrial complex relies historically on the inheritances of slavery." - Angela Davis