AMERICA BEHIND BARS: but we will never see any of Obama’s criminal
bankster donors behind bars!
Through cuts to wages, benefits, and social programs, the ruling class
has overseen a massive transfer of wealth from the broad masses of workers into
the coffers of the financial aristocracy. The resulting growth of social misery
is handled with increasing brutality by police thugs and reactionary
prosecutors, judges, and probation officers.
Report: US targets poor and working
class with mass imprisonment
By
Eric London
26 May 2014
26 May 2014
A new report
from the National Academies Press titled “The Growth of Incarceration in the
United States” details the devastating impact of the American prison system on
increasingly wide sections of society.
The
report depicts a society in which nearly one percent of the adult population is
locked up in prison or jail, and where the immediate and residual effects of
mass incarceration mean that the most exploited sections of the population face
a relentless cycle of hunger, homelessness, disease, poverty and violence.
“In
communities of concentrated disadvantage—characterized by high rates of
poverty, violent crime, mental illness and drug addiction—the United States
embarked on a massive and unique intensification of criminal punishment” over
the past fifty years, the study explained. “Although many questions remain
unanswered, the greatest significance of the era of high incarceration rates
may lie in that simple descriptive fact.”
The facts
enumerated in the study are a damning indictment of the American ruling class, which
has no progressive role to play in society. Today, the American elite relies on
an elaborate network of gulags to keep large sections of the population
constantly moving through the turnstiles of the criminal system. The impact on
the population at large is devastating.
According
to the report, 2.1 million children—three percent of the total—had a father in
prison in 2000. The period of 1991 to 2007 saw a 77 percent increase in the
number of children with a father in prison. Over the same period, there was a
131 percent increase in the number of children with a mother in prison.
For the
first time in US history, male high school dropouts are almost more likely to
go to prison than not. One third of white male high school dropouts born in the
late 1970s have served time by their mid-30s. The figure rises to two thirds
for black men of the same background.
As the
report notes, “the pervasiveness of imprisonment among men with very little
schooling is historically unprecedented, emerging only in the past two
decades.”
The
American prison system is unmatched globally in terms of size. US prisons now
hold 2.2 million adults, and more than five million Americans are also on
parole or probation, putting the number of people under some form of state
punishment at over seven million.
The US
imprisons more people than any other country in the world, including countries
like China and India with much larger populations. Roughly a quarter of all
prisoners worldwide are kept in American prisons, this despite the fact that
the US accounts for only five percent of the world’s population.
The US
also has the dubious distinction of imprisoning a higher ratio of the general
population—707 per 100,000—than any other country. The ratio of Americans in
prison is 50 percent higher than the next worst country, Russia, with a ratio
of 474 per 100,000.
The
current state of the American prison system is the culmination of a
decades-long process whereby criminal codes, sentencing rules, and
constitutional guidelines have been rewritten to provide a legal cover for the
imprisonment of large swaths of the population, both juvenile and adult.
The
report explains that “across all branches and levels of government, criminal
processing and sentencing expanded the use of incarceration in a number of
ways: prison time was increasingly required for lesser offenses; time served
has significantly increased for violent crimes and for repeat offenders; and
drug crimes, particularly street dealing in urban areas, became more severely
policed and punished.”
During
the 1970s, “the numbers of arrests and court caseloads increased, and
prosecutors and judges became harsher in their charging and sentencing. In the
1980s, convicted defendants became more likely to serve prison time.”
Mandatory
minimum sentencing laws, “three strikes” laws mandating life sentences for a
third criminal offense, no matter how trivial, and “truth-in-sentencing” laws
requiring that offenders serve a minimum of 85 percent of their sentences, were
increasingly adopted by states and by Congress in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
The
development of harsher laws and policing is inextricably bound up with the
policies of social counterrevolution that have dominated the period from 1970
to the present day.
Over the
past decades, the growth in prison population has taken place alongside
deindustrialization, massive wage and benefit cuts, the slashing of programs
like welfare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other social services,
cuts to mental health programs, housing assistance programs, and unprecedented
hikes in the cost of living.
Neither
the growth of mass incarceration nor the intensified attacks on the rights and
living standards of the working class are accidental developments. Rather, both
are conscious policies of the ruling class: the mantras of “belt-tightening”
and “getting tough on crime” are different sides of the same coin.
Through
cuts to wages, benefits, and social programs, the ruling class has overseen a
massive transfer of wealth from the broad masses of workers into the coffers of
the financial aristocracy. The resulting growth of social misery is handled
with increasing brutality by police thugs and reactionary prosecutors, judges,
and probation officers.
The
report calls for “a systematic review” of penal policies in order to reduce
crime and prison populations. However, appeals to the American ruling class to
“review” their own prison system will prove as fruitless as asking Louis XVI to
“review” conditions in the Bastille. The needs of the millions whose lives are
impacted by mass incarceration can only be met through the development of a
mass revolutionary movement of the international working class aimed at
reorganizing society on a genuinely egalitarian basis.
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