proposal 2: criminal justice reform
By: Cody Uhls
Tags: America, Criminal Justice, Prison, Politics, Democracy

In a Michigan Law Review article written in 1980, the author explains the criminal justice system “has never fully embodied the dispassionate rule of law to which we aspire. A rule of law implies fairness and consistency, but ‘popular justice’ has often produced violence and discrimination.”

Most police forces were there to protect merchants from thieves. Others, however, primarily in the South, were created to prevent slaves from fleeing or preventing slave revolts.

(There are multiple issues in the current police forces, however, this article is not about the problems of modern-day policing. An article about police reform will come in the future.)

The prison system in America has never been about rehabilitation from a criminal record, rather a system dedicated to keeping inmates in prison for as long as possible and making as much money off their labor as possible.

The use of private prisons in America plays a large role in the exploitation of the incarcerated, like CoreCivic. Although private prisons are not necessarily the issue, as we see the use of privatized prisons in Australia and New Zealand where they are incentivized to rehabilitate prisoners and help them find work after their sentence, and they would actually lose their contracts with the government if inmates return to prison after their sentences.

The problem, of course, is the overall prison system in the United States. Focusing on prison labor and how to profit off each inmate rather than rehabilitation and training inmates in particular trades creates a system where it is more profitable to keep inmates in prison and creates a necessity to arrest or sentence more people to prison for longer times.

But again, there’s more history involved in the American prison system, and yes, it’s about race.

After slavery was abolished, the 13th Amendment was added to the United States Constitution, which states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

So, since slavery was abolished, the strategy hatched to prevent Black Americans from growing as citizens — arrest them. Charge them with crimes such as rape of a white woman, or theft, and put them right back in slavery.

The Equal Justice Initiative states:

Initially, states passed discriminatory laws to arrest and imprison large numbers of Black people, then leased prisoners to private individuals and corporations in a system of convict leasing that resulted in dangerous conditions, abuse, and death. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, hazardous, and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of Black people were forced into a brutal system that historians have called “worse than slavery.”

During this period, shortly after the abolishment of slavery, Americans saw the first prison boom which led to Black Americans being almost exclusively targeted and imprisoned. According to the Vera Institute for Justice, “All across the South, Black Codes were passed that outlawed behaviors common to black people, such as ‘walking without a purpose’ or ‘walking at night,’ hunting on Sundays, or settling on public or private land.”

This disparity still looms over the criminal justice system today, where a ratio of 1-in-9 black men aged 18 and older are in prison. Compare that to white men? One-in-106.

According to a study from the ACLU about Marijuana crime, black men were roughly eight times more likely to be arrested than white men, even though the usage of marijuana is roughly the same.

Do black people simply commit more crime? No, especially at the rate above.

So why do black people disproportionately populate the prison system?

Racism.

So how do we reform the criminal justice system?