Dillard lecturer sees parallels between mass incarceration and Jim Crow: Jarvis DeBerry [View all]

[Blue_Tires]

There were 1,300 people in my college freshman class, 45 of us black. I've lived in some mixed and mostly black neighborhoods since then, but it was there in college, surrounded by wealth and privilege, power and whiteness, that I witnessed the most people using drugs.

I don't remember any police raids. I don't remember flashing blue lights, people being led away in handcuffs, let alone anybody being sent to prison. We were in a no-arrest zone. Not so the weed smokers a few blocks away. It was open season on them because, as we all know, drugs are bad.

Drugs aren't as bad as the war the United States has declared on them. Most developed countries recognize drug abuse as a public health issue and emphasize treatment. But our country treats mere possession of drugs as a moral failing worthy of imprisonment. Consequently, the U.S. has imprisoned "a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid," law professor Michelle Alexander writes. Those who return from prison are essentially second class citizens.

This is the point of Alexander's book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." The war on drugs has greatly multiplied the number of black men sent to prison and then released them into a society that deprives them of meaningful opportunities to stay out. Those who've been convicted, sometimes for crimes that go ignored when committed by others, are often no better off than their grandfathers who couldn't vote or get decent jobs or housing, she says. Alexander, who teaches law at Ohio State University, will be giving Dillard University's Revius Ortique Lecture on Law and Society Wednesday at 7.

If you believe that sentences for drug offenders are too long, Alexander will say you don't fully appreciate the problem. Sentences are too long, she argues, but even those sentenced to probation for felonies wear a scarlet F the rest of their days.

http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/11/dillard_lecturer_sees_parallel.html