Prison, racism & economics: An historical perspective

The economic recovery of the South [after the Civil War] depended on labor; thus, in the fall of 1865, the legislature of the State of Mississippi passed a series of acts known as the Black Codes. Their aim was to control the supply of labor and to ensure the position of white people in Southern life. ...

At the heart of the Black Codes was the "Vagrancy Act," which provided that all free Negroes over the age of 18 must have written proof of a job at the beginning of every year. The Mississippi Black Codes were copied by South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Texas. Lorentho Wooden, a retired Black priest of our diocese, told me that at age 12 he was arrested and imprisoned in Florida under the vagrancy act for simply being on the street without papers. ...

In the South, Black populations faced threats from white mobs and white courts. The criminal justice system became a dragnet for Black people. The local jails and state prisons would grow darker by the years and a phenomenon called "convict leasing" would emerge. Convict leasing was the system in which the state leased prisoners to private companies, which, in turn, would pay the state for the prisoner’s labor. ...

Like the Black Codes, convict leasing spread throughout the South. In the 1870s and 1880s, convicts laid most of the nearly 4,000 miles of railroad track in North Carolina. In Texas, convicts worked in coal mines. In Florida, they labored in desolate, disease-ridden forests in the turpentine industry.

In his book Worse than Slavery, author David Oshinsky writes, "The South’s economic development can be traced by the blood of prisoners." By 1890, convict leasing in Alabama had become a huge operation, supplying bodies like the slave trade of old: Black males age 12 and older went directly to the mines; black women, children and cripples were leased to lumber companies and to farms. (White men, Oshinsky noted, usually remained inside the penitentiary or local jail.)

The working conditions for these men, women and children were horrible, harsh and brutal. There were terrible injuries and beatings inflicted among them, and many, many deaths. Self-mutilation and suicide were routine events. The convict leasing system is aptly termed "worse than slavery." In slavery, owners had a vested interest in their "property." In convict leasing, convicts were no-cost tools to be used, discarded and replaced. Convict leasing was not about justice, or even revenge, or punishment. It was about economics – profits for the lessee and the state. The courts became a conveyor-belt for labor-starved employers. ...

There are today 2 million people in prison in the United States. Almost 80 percent of America’s prisoners are Black or Hispanic. In 1985, 500,000 were locked away; by 1990 one million; today, two million. Behind these startling numbers are draconian laws, Acts of Congress and the Executive branch, accompanied by political rhetoric that drives public fears: "War on crime!" "War on drugs!" "War on users!"

We have moved from President Lyndon Johnson’s "Omnibus Crime Bill" of 1968, to the "Anti-Drug Abuse Act" passed under President Reagan, to President Clinton’s pledge to put 100,000 police on the street, to successive and increasingly harsh Acts of Congress that eliminate parole and mandate long jail or prison sentences. Federal judges have been stripped of sentencing discretion and of the ability to exercise mercy. The power has now been placed in the hands of prosecutors.

Federal law currently mandates five and 10-year prison sentences for drug dealing. Under the provision of the law, one form of cocaine known as crack is treated far more harshly than the powdered form. Since crack cocaine is cheaper to produce than other forms, it found its way into the poorest American neighborhoods. Powdered cocaine became the drug of choice among middle-class Americans. Someone has termed these apartheid laws. These federal laws have had a devastating effect on Black Americans.

Meanwhile, at the municipal level, came the Zero Tolerance Revolution. We first heard it expressed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in New York City. The philosophy underlying zero tolerance is that if government aggressively addresses the small quality-of-life offenses, violent crime will diminish. One of New York City’s so-called "Squeegee people" was interviewed on TV. He said: "Let me understand this. If the police arrest me for washing car windshields, the heads of organized crime will start quaking and say, ‘We’d better get out of town, we’re next.’" The zero tolerance idea moved quickly across America’s cities.

Author Christian Parenti, in his book Lock Down America, writes, "Zero Tolerance is often selectively enforced against people of color and the visibly poor. Enough unpaid tickets and outstanding warrants leads to the criminal labeling of non-deviant populations."

This quote comes with a timeliness that I could not have imagined just days ago. Timothy Thomas, the 19-year-old young man who was shot and killed here in Cincinnati by a policeman April 7, was running. Why was he running? He was afraid.

Thomas had 14 outstanding warrants for such misdemeanor criminal acts as driving without a seat belt. He was faced with another violation, another ratchet up towards prison; not to mention the humiliation of arrest and worse, injury. As the Dean of our Cathedral said, "If I were an African-American male, I would be afraid, too." ...

It is extraordinary that despite America’s technological growth, our economic and military dominance, our supposed growing enlightenment, our support of liberation movements both within our country and around the world, the growth of prisons and prison populations continues upward. Two million people in prison, another three million are doing time outside, on probation or home detention, or on the invisible leash of electronic surveillance. There are millions on the other end who make their living from prisons, directly or indirectly. And prison conditions are in many ways worse than they were in the days of convict leasing and penal farms. ...

What about the economics of all this? We have been made aware that our country’s prisons are a growth industry. We have heard the term "Prison Industrial Complex." It is true: Prisons are big business. In 1996, contractors broke ground on 26 federal and 96 state prisons. It is estimated that prisons employ almost 600,000 people, more than and Fortune 500 company except General Motors. ...

Through the work of think tanks like the National Center for Policy Analysis, one learns we are embarking on a new era of prison-for-profit. Morgan Reynolds, Professor of Economics at Texas A&M and a director of the Center, sees wardens as marketers of labor and prisons as industrial parks with bars. ‘They should be built," he says, "not where the crime is, but where the jobs are. That is what the future is if we are going to grow prisons." This represents an intentional, conscious decision to grow prisons as if they were any other industry. Edwin Meese, a former Attorney General of the United States, is chairman of Enterprise Prison Institute, a for-profit group in McLean, Virginia that is pushing for greater access to prison labor. This is the place to which we have arrived – or worse, returned.

– Excerpted from Let My People Go: a Statement to Cincinnati and to the World, by Herbert Thompson, Jr., April 23, 2001