The Growth Engine Of The American Prison Gulag
By Glen Ford
26 February,2007
Black Agenda ReportThe U.S. prison system is projected to suck up 200,000 additional bodies between now and 2011, half of them African American. The burden of the Gulag, which has grown eightfold since 1970, is unbearable for Black America, whose institutions and dreams have for two generations been ravaged by a public policy of mass Black incarceration. The very existence of the American Gulag - the largest and most pervasive prison system in the history of mankind - presents a clear and present threat to U.S. society at-large, as the Bush men scheme to assassinate the Constitution in their bogus War on Terror. Over the past two decades, an infrastructure of social death has been constructed, that may ultimately become the tomb of American freedoms. It is past time to place a cap on any further expansion of the American Gulag, lest it swallow us all.
By 2011, the U.S. prison and jail population will have added nearly 200,000 inmates - a 13 percent overall increase and a 16 percent jump for women, according to a 50-state study by the Pew Charitable Trusts. About half these new inmates will be Blacks, whose mass confinement is the imperative that fuels the relentless growth of the largest and most pervasive Gulag in the history of mankind. The U.S. prison system is a horrific national monument to racism, that dwarfs and mocks the Statue of Liberty, revealing the United States as by far the planet's foremost Land of the Un-Free, Home of the Locked-Down - a rebuke to the authenticity of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The 200,000 new inmates projected for 2011 understates the huge presence of the Gulag in American society, especially African American life. The anticipated increase is for inmates serving sentences, currently about 1.5 million. The actual total currently behind prison and jail bars is about 2.2 million - again, half Black. This number would rise to just under 2.5 million in five years. However, more than seven million men and women are today under criminal justice system supervision, either prison, jail, parole or probation - a mass of humanity that would swell to nearly eight million by 2011, based on the Pew projections. That's roughly the population of New York City, or the combined populations of Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia. The number of new justice system-supervised persons, alone, will exceed the population of Detroit.
In 2005, seven percent of state and federal inmates were incarcerated in private facilities, a proportion of captives-for-profit that is certain to rise dramatically unless current political trends are reversed. (For a comprehensive breakdown of the various components of the American Gulag, see the Bureau of Justice Statistics' "Prisoners in 2005.")
Yet even the enormity of the gross incarceration numbers fails to express the grotesque intimacy with the Gulag that has been imposed on African American society. As Paul Street reports in this issue of BAR, "one in three black males will be sent to state or federal prison at some point in their lives compared to one in six Latino males and one in seventeen white males."
The poisons of the Gulag have leached into the very fabric of Black society, obliterating "prospects for progress in every arena of African American life," as stated in an "Urgent Petition to the Congressional Black Caucus" now circulating on the Internet.
Only a purposeful, conscious, unrelenting, systematically executed national public policy of Black mass incarceration in the United States - all 50 of them, and the federal government - can explain the Gulag's exponential growth over the last three and a half decades. The genesis of this public policy - which is arguably genocidal in its nature, dimensions, and impact - is equally clear: Mass Black incarceration is America's answer to the Black Freedom Movement of the Sixties and early Seventies.
Prison populations have ballooned eight-fold since 1970, and more than quadrupled since 1980. Tim Wise, the anti-racist activist and author, notes that:
"In 1964, 65% of all prison admits were white, while only 35% were people of color. By 1991, these figures had reversed. Did whites decide collectively to stop committing crimes in the intervening years, while Black and brown folks went nuts? Or was something else at work? According to FBI data, the percentage of crimes committed by African Americans has remained steady over the past 18 years, while the number of Blacks in prison has tripled and their rates of incarceration have skyrocketed."
The mass Black incarceration public policy that emerged as a reaction to the Black Freedom Movement, has long since taken on a life of its own - a Gulag that continues to spread like a pestilence across the land even in the absence of a Black movement and amid falling crime rates. Far from being satiated by the constant digestion of new Black bodies, the monster reaches back to the era of its birth, to snatch aging men who most exemplified the Gulag's reason-for-being: Black Panthers.
Past is Present
Last month's arrest of the Panther Eight in the killing of a San Francisco police officer in 1971 signals that the FBI is making good on former Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft's vow to take vengeance against all ex-Panthers. At 64, Ashcroft is of the same generation as the defendants, but the persecution of the Panther Eight, the flimsy evidence against whom is soaked in police torture and political vendetta, is anything but some kind of "blast from the past," a settling of scores among old men. Rather, the case is one among many indications that the American state is gearing up to launch a new level of repression - that the mass Black incarceration policy of the previous three and a half decades, although hugely successful in both mutilating the social fabric of Black America and acclimating white America to a pervasive prison and police surveillance apparatus, is nevertheless insufficient to the new tasks envisioned.
Yes, Cointelpro is back (as if it ever really left), but with a much more ambitious mission: to more firmly establish in law and practice the foundations for a centralized police-state regime that can respond quickly and massively to the domestic turmoil that must inevitably accompany a New International Order that George Bush had expected would be nearly achieved by now, if the first stage, the conquest of Iraq, had been successful. In this context, the arrest of the Panther Eight is just the closing of a 36-year-old loop, a connecting and bringing forward of older repressions - and ancient white hysterias - to buttress a New Domestic Order justified by the fictitious War on Terror. The Panther Eight are the specter of a permanent source of terror for white America: angry Black men.Civil libertarians of all ethnicities understand the broad outlines of the planned new regime, legally centered on presidential fiat in time of (current and endless) war. As the Washington Post reported on December 18, 2005, when the Bush men were defending wholesale surveillance of Americans:
"On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president's war-making powers in legal briefs as ‘plenary' - a term defined as ‘full,' ‘complete,' and ‘absolute.'"
But white Americans will not acquiesce to a police state that negates their civil liberties, or to inclusion in the corporate-refereed global "race to the bottom" - unless they are buffaloed by issues of race. It's the same old racial pattern, in which aging Panthers become useful to the state once again.
Immigrant "hordes" have joined Blacks as hysteria potions for white folks, allowing Bush to give Halliburton contracts to build "temporary" detention centers "for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs [emphasis ours] that require additional detention space," read the Washington Post on February 4 of last year. However, the Bush men know that arbitrary detention of masses of immigrant Mexicans would cause profound political crisis south of the border, and among American employers. Black people understand who is to be detained: the usual suspects in the event of any "new programs" - us. Once the practice is accepted as "necessary" to control chaotic Black populations, another Rubicon will have been crossed in the march to a corporate-state dictatorship that will encage white society, as well - just as mass Black incarceration inevitably resulted in numerically more whites going to prison than before, although in far lesser proportions than Blacks.
In the future, as in the past, the police state will be built on a foundation of millions of living Black bodies stacked and sorted in the American Gulag. For African Americans, the threat of constitutional negation and mass detention did not begin on September 11, 2001. It arrived in the late Sixties, and inexorably became an overarching reality that has largely destroyed our Freedom Movement dreams. We are now informed that 200,000 more bodies will be added to the penal system pile by 2011 - half of them ours.
African Americans will not accept this projected verdict as if written in stone. Point One of the Black Agenda Report/Congressional Black Caucus Monitor petition now in circulation demands that the CBC, "individually and collectively, take immediate action to: beginning with action to sunset or repeal all mandatory sentencing legislation, eliminate the differential in penalties for crack and powdered cocaine, and halt privatization of prisons and prison health services. America's prison population has multiplied eightfold since 1970. African Americans are one-eighth of this nation, but fully half of her prisons and jails. Mass Black incarceration is a national public policy that destroys the prospects for progress in every arena of African American life. With projections that the prison and jail population will increase by nearly 200,000 in the next four years, the CBC should demand an immediate cap on federal and state prison growth, the latter on penalty of loss of federal criminal justice funding to those states not in compliance."
For two generations, virtually every Black family has heard the tolling of the prison bell. In truth, it is tolling for the Constitution, as well. Black America can no longer bear the weight of mass incarceration, but the larger society - and those African Americans who mistakenly believe they have somehow sidestepped the juggernaut - must also recognize that the Gulag infrastructure is a Weapon of Mass Social Destruction. Defuse it, or perish.
BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford (at) BlackAgendaReport.com.
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