Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Le vittorie elettorali Repubblicane e l'esclusione dei neri dal voto

"A 2002 study in the American Sociological
Review concluded that John Tower would never have been elected to the
US
Senate from Texas in 1978 but for racially disproportionate felony
disenfranchisement; that John Warner for the same reason wouldn't have
been elected in 1978 from Virginia; and that despite the apparent rise
in
conservative Republican voting, the Senate would have remained under
Democratic control every year between 1984 and 2003 if former felons
had
been allowed to vote. Indeed, if the same degree of racially disparate
felony disenfranchisement that exists now had existed in 1960, Richard
Nixon might well have defeated John F. Kennedy."
 
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060710/glasser
            Drug Busts=Jim Crow
            by IRA GLASSER
            [from the July 10, 2006 issue]
            I was born in 1938, grew up on the working-class,
            immigrant streets of East Flatbush in Brooklyn
            during World War II, and came to political
            consciousness during the postwar years. As
            children, we were told that World War II was a
            war fought against racism, against the idea that
            a whole class of people could be separated,
            subjugated and even murdered because of their
            race or religion. But back home in the United
            States, racial separation and subjugation
            remained entrenched by law in the Deep South and
            by custom nearly everywhere else.
            This moral contradiction between what America
            said it stood for and the way it was actually
            organized was largely unrecognized by the
            American public as World War II drew to a close.
            The first major postwar event that challenged
            this contradiction and made it unavoidable was
            the coming of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn
            Dodgers in 1947. It engaged people, including
            children, in a drama of racial integration, and
            it created what may have been the first racially
            integrated public accommodation--at Ebbets Field,
            where the Dodgers played. The following year
            President Harry Truman issued an executive order
            desegregating the armed forces. In 1950 Brown v.
            Board of Education was filed, signaling the start
            of the modern civil rights era. Four years later
            a surprisingly unanimous Supreme Court struck
            down legally enforced racial separation in public
            schools, and seventeen months after that, Rosa
            Parks refused to give her seat to a white man on
            a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Nine years later,
            after countless protests, marches, sit-ins and
            freedom rides, as well as murders and beatings of
            civil rights workers, the Civil Rights Act of
            1964 was passed, outlawing racial discrimination
            in public accommodations, employment and
            education. A year later the Voting Rights Act of
            1965 outlawed racial discrimination in voting,
            and three years after that, the Fair Housing Act
            of 1968 outlawed racial discrimination in the
            purchase and rental of homes. By 1968 the legal
            infrastructure of Jim Crow subjugation had been
            destroyed and a new legal infrastructure of
            federal civil rights enforcement was erected in
            its place. America had, for the first time,
            abolished legalized racial discrimination and
            replaced it with a system of formal legal
            equality.
            As it turned out, actual equality of opportunity
            did not follow automatically, easily or quickly
            from legal equality. But over the succeeding
            decades it has been assumed that at the very
            least, no legalized racial discrimination
            remains, and certainly no new forms of legalized
            skin-color subjugation have arisen. This is true,
            with one substantial exception: the system of
            drug prohibition and its enforcement, which is
            the major, and still insufficiently recognized,
            civil rights issue of our day.
            In the late 1960s, at the peak of the civil
            rights movement, there were fewer than 200,000
            people in state and federal prisons for all
            criminal offenses; by 2004 there were over 1.4
            million. Another 700,000-plus in local jails
            brought the total to 2.2 million. This explosion
            of incarceration has been heavily due to
            nonviolent drug offenses--mostly possession and
            petty sales, not involving guns or
            violence--resulting from the exponential
            escalation of the "war on drugs," beginning in
            1968 and accelerating again after 1980.
            Since 1980 drug arrests have tripled, to 1.6
            million annually--nearly half for marijuana, 88
            percent of those for possession, not sale or
            manufacture. Since 1980 the proportion of all
            state prisoners who are in for drug offenses
            increased from 6 percent to 21 percent. Since
            1980 the proportion of all federal prisoners who
            are in for drug offenses increased from 25
            percent to 57 percent.
            At the same time, the racial disparity of
            arrests, convictions and imprisonment for these
            offenses has become pronounced. According to
            federal statistics gathered by the Sentencing
            Project, only 13 percent of monthly drug users of
            all illegal drugs--defined as those who use a
            drug at least once a month on a regular
            basis--are black, about their proportion of the
            population. But 37 percent of drug-offense
            arrests are black; 53 percent of convictions are
            black; and 67 percent of all people imprisoned
            for drug offenses are black. Adding in Latinos,
            about 22 percent of all monthly drug users are
            black or Latino, but 80 percent of people in
            prison for drug offenses are black or Latino.
            Even in presumptively liberal New York State, 92
            percent of all inmates who are there for drug
            offenses are black or Latino.
            The fact that so many people arrested, convicted
            and imprisoned for drug offenses are black or
            Latino is not because they are mostly the ones
            doing the crime; it is because they are mostly
            the ones being targeted. This is not a phenomenon
            of the Deep South. It is nationwide. And it is
            not accidental. As the racial profiling scandals
            a few years ago showed, blacks are
            disproportionately targeted while driving cars on
            the highway; for example, in a lawsuit
            challenging this practice, it was revealed that
            although only 17 percent of drivers on a stretch
            of I-95 in Maryland were black, 73 percent of all
            the cars stopped and searched for drugs were
            driven by blacks. Nor was this an isolated
            example. In Florida blacks were seventy-five
            times more likely than whites to be stopped and
            searched for drugs while driving. And it turned
            out that these racially targeted stops were the
            explicit result of a Drug Enforcement
            Administration program begun in 1986, called
            Operation Pipeline, that "trained" 27,000 state
            troopers in forty-eight states to spot cars that
            might contain drugs. Most of the cars spotted
            were driven by blacks. And this happened even
            though three-quarters of monthly drug users are
            white!
            Similar statistics show that blacks and Latinos
            are also disproportionately stopped and frisked
            on the street and disproportionately singled out
            for body searches at customs points--two-thirds
            in both cases. The huge majority of these
            searches are fruitless. In New York City during
            the late 1990s, eight of nine recorded street
            frisks did not result in a conviction; in the
            customs searches, during the same period, 96
            percent of the body searches turned up
            nothing.This shows two things: first, that there
            was no evidentiary basis for the stops and,
            second, that there is a comprehensive practice,
            if not policy, of selecting targets by skin
            color.
            Despite these patterns of racial targeting, it
            has not been fashionable among liberals to see
            drug prohibition as a massive civil rights
            problem of racial discrimination. Perhaps it
            would be easier if we examined the way racially
            targeted drug-war incarceration has damaged the
            right to vote, a right quintessentially part of
            the rights we thought we had won in the 1960s
            with the demise of Jim Crow laws.
            Until recently (there have been some changes in
            the past few years in some states), every state
            but two barred felons from voting--some
            permanently, some in a way that allowed,
            theoretically but often not as a practical
            matter, for the restoration of voting rights.
            Because of the explosion of incarceration driven
            by drug prohibition, more than 5 million people
            are now barred from voting. The United States is
            the only industrial democracy that does this. And
            the origin of most of these laws--no surprise--is
            the post-Reconstruction period after slavery was
            abolished. Felony disenfranchisement laws, like
            poll taxes and literacy tests, were historically
            part of the system that arose after slavery to
            bar blacks from exercising equal rights and, in
            particular, equal voting rights. Felony
            disenfranchisement laws were, to a large extent,
            part of a replacement system for subjugating
            blacks after slavery was abolished.
            If you want to contemplate what this means,
            consider the state of Florida in the 2000
            presidential election, where 200,000 black
            Floridians were barred from voting because of
            prior felonies in an election in which the
            presidency was determined by 537 disputed votes.
            If even one-third of these people had actually
            voted--say, 70,000--and if they voted in the
            usual proportions that blacks vote for the
            Democratic candidate--say, 80 percent, probably a
            low estimate--those 70,000 voters would have
            produced a 42,000 net gain for Al Gore.
            This is a dramatic example, but hardly unique. A
            2002 study in the American Sociological Review
            concluded that John Tower would never have been
            elected to the US Senate from Texas in 1978 but
            for racially disproportionate felony
            disenfranchisement; that John Warner for the same
            reason wouldn't have been elected in 1978 from
            Virginia; and that despite the apparent rise in
            conservative Republican voting, the Senate would
            have remained under Democratic control every year
            between 1984 and 2003 if former felons had been
            allowed to vote. Indeed, if the same degree of
            racially disparate felony disenfranchisement that
            exists now had existed in 1960, Richard Nixon
            might well have defeated John F. Kennedy.
            The kicker for all this is that all these black
            citizens who were disproportionately targeted for
            arrest and incarceration and then barred from
            voting are nonetheless counted as citizens for
            the purpose of determining how many Congressional
            seats and how many electoral votes states have.
            During slavery, three-fifths of the number of
            slaves were similarly counted by the slave
            states, even though slaves were not in any way
            members of the civil polity. This is worse. In
            the states of the Deep South, 30 percent of all
            black men are barred from voting because of
            felony convictions, but all of them are counted
            to determine Congressional representation and
            Electoral College votes. If one wants to wonder
            why the South is so solidly white, Republican and
            arch-conservative, one need look no further.
            The fact is, just as Jim Crow laws were a
            successor system to slavery, so drug prohibition
            has been a successor to Jim Crow laws in
            targeting blacks, removing them from civil
            society and then denying them the right to vote
            while using their bodies to enhance white
            political power. Drug prohibition is now the last
            significant instance of legalized racial
            discrimination in America.
            That many liberals have been at best timid in
            opposing the drug war and at worst accomplices to
            its continued escalation is, in light of the
            racial politics of drug prohibition, a special
            outrage. It is also politically self-destructive,
            serving to keep in power white conservatives
            opposed to everything liberals stand for.
            Liberals especially, therefore, need to consider
            attacking the premises upon which this edifice of
            racial subjugation is based. If they do not, who
            will?
      ((GLASSER IS RETIRED HEAD OF THE ACLU & IS NOW BOARD PREZ OF
      THE DRUG POLICY ALLIANCE))

 "A 2002 study in the American Sociological
*ROTFL*
-Stefano