Reforms Won’t Save Us
By: Shelagh Brown
Tags: Racism, School To Prison Pipeline, Prison Industrial Complex, Criminal Justice Reform, Police Brutality

Reformist reforms operate to maintain the status quo and do not address systems fueled by capitalism and white supremacy that does not value all life equally or even at all. The majority of policies implemented in the United States government on a federal, state, county, and local level, whether conservative or liberal, fall under the umbrella of reformist reform. These types of reforms barely scratch the surface of the necessary changes that need to be implemented to address the needs of all people, often leaving those who are already the most vulnerable in a much worse position than before said reforms are implemented. Reformist reforms are often supported by those outside of the affected communities, these methods are quite a lot like trying to heal a gunshot wound with gauze, they do not a deep wound and scarring that capitalist systems have resulted in and allowing the infection to continue to spread, while those who create policy pat themselves on the back for a job well done, and little tangible and sustainable positive change is seen in peoples lived realities. This article addresses several methods of reformist reforms related to gun violence suggested by policymakers and will outline why these methods do not actually address the root cause of gun violence or any social inequities in this nation.

The privatization of prisons has resulted in making the incarceration of humans a lucrative, multi-billion dollar industry, now referred to as the prison industrial complex. The War on Drugs and the positioning of those from under-resourced neighborhoods, usually Black, indigenous, Latinx, immigrant, and poor, as hypervisible and criminalized even though white people commit crimes at around the same rates, laid the foundations for the concept of “superpredators,”, a term used by Hillary Clinton in a now-infamous 1996 speech, to describe inner city mostly Black, mostly young people surviving conditions with little opportunity as a choice. This is a concept that heavily relies on centuries-old racist tropes of savage black men coming for white women and children, which played directly into the deeply conditioned, generationally ingrained fears that white Americans have had for Black people since the founding of this nation. This speech played a significant and foundational role in shaping the current trend towards highly militarized police forces being used to terrorize and criminalize urban communities of color. It also laid the foundation for the zero-tolerance policies that have led to the school-to-prison pipeline, which punishes children in under-resourced communities, instead of investing in their communities to provide adequate education, access to quality healthcare, mental health, social and other services, and support, rather than punishment. Instead, they are corralled into the juvenile and criminal justice systems and criminalized for behaviors that white and socioeconomically privileged children rarely are.

So why would those who profit off of the War on Drugs, which continues devastating communities across the nation with enhanced police militarization and operations, and resulting in the school to prison pipeline in primarily black communities, ever want to stop any of this? Well, they do not, and that is why reformist reforms exist. Rather than address the historical and current economic, and sociopolitical policies that have shaped many urban and other under-resourced communities today, that are subject to continual state violence and disenfranchisement, reform is used as a tool to placate citizens while no substantial or lasting change that betters communities is implemented. As Kay Whitlock writes in the article Endgame: How Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform Institutionalizes a Right-Wing, Neoliberal Agenda, “about 60 percent of those incarcerated are people of color, mostly Black, Latinx, and Indigenous. The rate of growth for the incarceration of women, particularly Black women, has outpaced that of men. At the intersections of race and class, LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming people, and people with disabilities and mental illness are heavily policed and incarcerated.” (Whitlock) The United States has quickly become one of the most heavily incarcerated nations in the entire world, and when prisons become overpopulated, the solution is more prisons, rather than addressing the complex social, economic and racial issues that are responsible for the rise in prison and incarceration numbers (Ifill 2018). In 2010 Michelle Alexander released the groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and bringing awareness of the epidemic of imprisonment and the predatory nature of the prison industrial complex out of political, academic, and activist circles and into the mainstream public spotlight. Alexander details specifically how private prisons not only profit on the mere incarceration of people, particularly Black people, but how they also utilize those who are incarcerated to provide cheap, nearly free labor for the mass production of products. A new Jim Crow, as she calls it. Many have referred to it as a new version of slavery, as well.

A complete overhaul of the criminal justice system and all systems is necessary. Many policies enacted under the notion of reform resulted in the increase of surveillance in overpoliced communities that are already the primary target of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Police shootings of unarmed Black civilians have historically been brushed off as a bi-product of high crime rates. The onus of belief has always laid upon the officer, but in recent years, thanks to camera phones, the documentation of police interactions in Black communities has brought to light to society at large, the different police strategies implemented in marginalized communities versus white and more economically resourced communities. By now, all of white America has watched camera phone footage of police murdering numerous Black people who were not armed and posed zero threat. Police violence against Black people has become a form of entertainment for white America, deemed trauma porn by many, it has become fodder for intellectual debate, while no change that ends this state sanctioned violence occurs. Even with camera evidence, the benefit of the doubt is still given to the officer, and any past transgressions of the victims are dug up to convince the American public of why they deserved to die. Black death, pain, sorrow, and trauma is still and has always been entertainment to white America. Much like the lynching parties of the early 20th century, people can now stream these murders right into their phones and homes. Videos of police violence against black people have attained some of the highest views on Youtube and other platforms. But the murders persist, and in the last few weeks we have seen nationwide uprisings around the nation after a wave of more Black death at the hands of law enforcement and white America, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade, all murdered this year, and entire communities have risen up to say, enough. The general lack of trust that Black communities have for law enforcement dates back centuries, with policing being rooted in slavery, but modern day police militarization has taken police brutality and lack of accountability and transparency to a new level.

Advocacy groups such as the ACLU and NAACP, call for police to now be outfitted with body cameras in the field, purporting that it is a method that will promote trust in police officers from those in communities, as well as implement accountability and transparency. The argument is that when monitored, police are more thoughtful in their actions and that less abuse and misuse of their power will occur. There is a great lack of evidence supporting these claims. There are mountains of footage from cases throughout the nation where even with video evidence, from the dash, body cam, or a bystander, police are still not being held accountable for their inhumane actions, one example is the murder of Philando Castille in Minnesota in 2016. Even with video footage, the officer who killed him was acquitted. There are cases all over the nation where officers are not even charged for murdering Black people, even with video evidence. The benefit of the doubt is always given to the officer, and the victims are always criminalized by the media to justify their murder. Adding body cams to the equation will not reduce violence, the only way forward is to create a new system that is holistic in nature and treats all people with compassion and humanity, utilizing a team care approach that includes mental health and addiction specialists, social workers, healthcare, cultural, and spiritual workers help heal, rather than further criminalize communities. Adding more surveillance to already targeted communities will only further fuel the prison industrial complex, it will not protect communities. Instead of further monitoring under-resourced communities that have been subject to generations of racist policies, the goal should be instead to address the social and economic inequities that lead to higher crime rates. The desired goal should be healing and upliftment for communities devastated from generational oppression and violence, not more police, and certainly not more surveillance. The entire system and culture of policing must be dismantled. Officers of the law should act to deescalate, protect and serve, but currently, they act with violence first, then as questions later. This should be a great concern to the public, but we have seen little reform implemented within policing methods at all, and given the communities most impacted by police violence are predominantly low-income communities of color, there isn’t a sense of public urgency that there would be were this impacting white communities at the same rates. These words were written over a year ago, and as I edit and update this article, I am writing from a much different world. One of global pandemic and uprising. There are no excuses anymore, now the whole world knows.

Another topic that ties into this discussion is gun violence in schools. Gun violence in schools has been at the forefront of many political platforms since the shooting at Columbine 20 years ago. We have only seen an upswing in school shootings since. According to the Center for Homeland Security and Defense K-12 Shooting Database, gun violence in schools has been increasing since the late 1980s, in 1987 there were 97 injured or killed due to gun violence in schools, and throughout the 1990s, there have been around 20–70 people injured or killed by gun violence in schools annually. 2017 had the most injured or killed by gun violence since 1997, with 78, and last year there were 165. So in 2019 when this article was written, 31 people had been injured or killed due to gun violence in schools. Tuesday, May 7, 2019, there was yet another school shooting in Colorado (Yan 2019). It is important to note, that while gun violence has been an issue in this nation for decades, the focus has been concentrated on mostly low-income communities of color, even though school shootings have been primarily white students in white communities. Homicides from guns are primarily in cities, with half of all the gun deaths in the US taking place in just 127 cities, and are more prevalent in racially segregated communities, particularly those in economic and social distress. The majority of people killed by gun violence in the US are Black, as Black people are 10 times more likely to be killed by gun violence than white people, with Black men 15 times more likely to be victims of gun violence than white men (Gun Violence in America 2019).

And while there has been a large public outcry for better gun control regulations, the election of Trump and the stance of his administration on this topic has greatly attributed to the lack of action in implementing better regulations. The fact that gun violence still primarily affects communities of color, can also be attributed as to why there has been no movement forward with policy in this respect. Even though the majority of school shootings are in primarily white neighborhoods, the reforms that have been implemented thus far haven’t been effective at reducing gun violence rates nationwide. One of the most troubling reforms that many conservatives have proposed is to arm teachers in the classroom, which is a terrifying thought to anyone with school-aged children, but this is especially concerning for the parents of Black and brown youth. As discussed earlier, behaviors that are often considered part of the coming of age of youth for white children, Black and brown youth are not given the same pass for, and are often punished and criminalized and then placed into the juvenile justice system. In a country where teachers do not approach the behavioral issues of Black and brown youth with the same compassion as they do white children, arming teachers, particularly in communities of color, is a terrifying and dangerous proposal. On May 5, 2019, Time published an article titled, “Black Children Will Be the Victims of Armed Teachers,” corroborating the fears and concerns many parents of Black and brown youth have when sending their youth to institutions of learning. In this article, they provide data from the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and the U.S. Department of Education to support the claim of the title. Black girls are suspended more than 5.5 times than white students, while 5% of white boys are handed out of school suspensions, compared to 18% of Black boys. These numbers are alarming. With a president in support of policies that arm teachers, who has spent his entire presidency inciting racist violence, inflaming racial tensions, and further emboldening violent racists, it would be a deadly type of reformist reform to arm teachers in classrooms.

In conclusion, it is not difficult to see the link between the rise in gun violence and the rise in general fear of white Americans, many of whom believe they are becoming a minority and that they actually experience some form of racial oppression themselves. On the flip side, many are still for the most part unbothered by the continued oppression, trauma, and slow genocide of marginalized people in the United States. A change in the old guard is needed and reformist reforms do nothing to actually uplift historically oppressed people, which is absolutely necessary if liberation and self-determination for oppressed people are to ever be achieved. Liberation, unlike equity, is rooted in the idea that the current systems in place cannot be reformed and must be subverted and completely dismantled, allowing for new non-hierarchal, non-hegemonic systems that are truly inclusive, where all life is valued, to arise. Self-determination is the right of all humans to determine their destiny and live in the ways they see fit as long as they are harming no others. This is the way forward. This is the only way a society that is safe, just, and healthy for all can ever truly be achieved. Reform doesn’t and has never led to the path of anyone’s liberation.

References

Gun Violence in America — EverytownResearch.org. (n.d.). Retrieved May 9, 2019, from https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/

(5) 1996: Hillary Clinton on "superpredators" (C-SPAN) — YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved May 4, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0uCrA7ePno

Ariel, B., Sutherland, A., Henstock, D., Young, J., Drover, P., Sykes, J., … Henderson, R. (2016). Report: increases in police use of force in the presence of body-worn cameras are driven by officer discretion: a protocol-based subgroup analysis of ten randomized experiments. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 12(3), 453–463. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-016-9261-3

Hedberg, E. C., Katz, C. M., & Choate, D. E. (2017). Body-Worn Cameras and Citizen Interactions with Police Officers: Estimating Plausible Effects Given Varying Compliance Levels. Justice Quarterly, 34(4), 627–651. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2016.1198825

Held, A. (2017). Authorities Release Dashcam Video From Shooting Of Philando Castile : The Two-Way : NPR. Retrieved May 6, 2019, from https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/20/533711841/authorities-release-dashcam-video-from-shooting-of-philando-castile

Ifill, S. (n.d.). Black Children Will Be the Victims of Armed Teachers | Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/5186040/sherrilyn-ifill-black-children-classroom/

Whitlock, K. (2017). Endgame: How “Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform” Institutionalizes a Right-Wing, Neoliberal Agenda | Political Research Associates. Retrieved April 29, 2019, from https://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/06/06/endgame-how-bipartisan-criminal-justice-reform-institutionalizes-a-right-wing-neoliberal-agenda/

Yan, H., & McLean, S. (2019). Suspects in Colorado school shooting make first court appearances — CNN. Retrieved May 9, 2019, from https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/08/us/denver-stem-school-shooting-wednesday/index.html