Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

    The subject of imprisonment as the new slavery now takes up a whole shelf in the sociology section of the bookstore. For those of you who read The New Jim Crow, the author mentions it in the introduction as a jumping off place, and unlike the former, Rethinking Incarceration is a bit more progressive; it offers workable solutions.

Dominique DuBois Gillard blames mass incarceration on the War on Drugs. He argues, convincingly that the media pushed the image of the dangerous, menacing Black criminal, while ignoring the White Americans involved. At the same time, he blames Black politicians for supporting harsh anti-drug laws. For example, 14 members of the Congressional Black Caucus supported Bill Clinton’s 1994 anti-crime law. However, I don’t agree with his argument that the churches were responsible for the harsh laws. Whether it was Falwell and Graham on the right, or the Black churches on the left, I can’t see any blame being put on them. The churches only played a tiny part in the War on Drugs, even during the conservative Reagan era.

Another issue in this book is the heavy-handed tactic used in drug enforcement, especially the excessive use of SWAT in the raids. He uses the Catherine Johnson case in Atlanta as an example, involving no-knock warrants, lying cops, and unnecessary shootings. Unfortunately, he ignores the Whites (usually poor ones) who suffer at the hands of corrupt, dishonest, overzealous, or mean-spirited police. By making it an issue of color, he’s likely to make the reader question his argument. Using the Old South’s Black Codes is unnecessary, because they ended over a hundred years ago. The Black Codes have nothing to do with today’s mass imprisonment. Then he discusses mental illness and how people end up in jail when they should be getting mental health care. He’s right about that one, states are shutting down mental hospitals, and dumping the patients out with a week’s supply of Thorazine. So why not write more about this?

Gillard makes good arguments on the economics of prisons, and the ways that private businesses can use them for profit. The Kids-For-Cash scandal is mentioned as an example, though I think that’s a little extreme. He also ignores the fact that the kids in Pennsylvania’s famous scandal were mostly Caucasian. He misses an opportunity to go into how the prison pipeline is in fact pan-racial, and that is something that has to be publicized in order to get broader support. I also wonder if the Kids-For-Cash scandal was entirely the result of greed, or was it feeding into the public’s desperation for a solution to crime? The police usually couldn’t care any less about a kid who throws a lamb chop at her stepfather, or a kid who mocks the school principal on Myspace. So why did the police arrest the kids in the first place? This is where the author’s argument can gain steam. If the police decide to breach their own limits and arrest kids for being rude, does that open up the justice system to corrupt bullies? Will private prison tycoons, or even bribe-taking judges, smell an opportunity to make money? Maya Angelou once said, “Don’t go telling everyone about your troubles, it lets the bullies know there’s a victim in the neighborhood.”

It isn’t just the prisons themselves where you can see the mass incarceration, but in the schools as well, and yes, he writes about the school-to-prison pipeline. I’ve seen troubles schools, Black and White, but it’s the Black students who are suspended more. However, the author misses something that I’ve observed in how Black and White kids are disciplined differently. Black schools often use intimidation to keep the kids in line, while White schools (even wretched trailer-trash) use regular school management. Even the supposedly “good” charter schools in New York have a Black Dean of Students who is scary, nasty-looking, uses “mad dog” looks when he (or she) wants something, and gets in the kids’ faces for anything. As an example, I’ll cite the Vice documentary Expelled From Every Other School (available on Youtube) where a big, nasty staff member barges into a class, gets in the kid’s face, and bullies him into taking his coat off. It’s the same way in the homes of Black children, where the parents use either the “drill sergeant” method of parenting, or they use the same street-thug attitude seen in the jail. I have to wonder, would a Black teacher get away with talking that way to a White kid? I’ve seen public schools with a separate dean for Black and White kids, so I really have to wonder.