The disenfranchisement of the urban communities began with the war between the newly formed gangs and the local revolutionary organisation that served these communities. The drug trade played a major role in creating the conflict between the revolutionary organisations and the gangs dividing a once unified community. It was immediately evident that drugs were a destructive force in these communities and those that sold drugs quickly became the enemies of those who were crusading for the people and feuding commenced because of a difference in opinion on what was needed to bring about a progressive community. This feuding diverted the revolutionary organizations attention from the battle it was already waging against the government and began what is now known as black-on-black crime. The government quickly monopolized on this sudden divide and used the media to depict this feud in a negative light and the people involved in this feuding as criminals. Organizations like the Black Panthers who were already under attack by the government now had a new foe to deal with and this one was not only within the communities they promised to serve, it consisted of people from these communities. Because of this new war between the gangs and the revolutionary organizations, the founders and others associated with these organisations, began to desert these communities, and the work they were performing within them having become tired of fighting what was becoming a thug war in which all the casualties looked the same. So instead of participating in this hypocritical war in an effort to end the drug trade in the communities, they chose instead to leave the revolutionary organisations. The gangs grew tight along with the drug trade, and the government quickly took up where the revolutionary organisations left off. Only they waged a war on the whole community under the false pretense of combating the drug epidemic. People in these communities began being arrested at an astronomical rate. Enormous numbers of people are in prison simply because their communities have been criminalised. This newly waged war headed by the police did more damage to communities than addressing the problem. In 2010, police made 1,717,064 drug arrests in the United States. Because of mass incarceration, many broken homes were created, the poverty level grew, and more people sought escape through the use of the same drugs that were the cause of the problem.
Today, drugs and gangs still plague our communities, as well as the police and more and more youth are gravitating to the drug trade in hopes of becoming financially prosperous and freeing themselves from the state of poverty in which they live. With this comes the growth of drug related arrests and the prison population.
I am not bringing this up to say that we as a nation are unaware of this problem. I am bringing this up because we as communities have not been taking the necessary measures to combat this problem on our own and to take measures to protect ourselves from remaining the victims of mass incarceration. There are over 2 million people in United States prisons and more than 5 million people are on probation, parole, or post release supervision. That means there is over I million people in the United States who are constricted by the department of corrections. That amount of people is close to the total population of the state of New York which is 8 million people.
Most of the people who now form the United States prison population were targeted for arrests due to stereotyping and stigmatization. Once a man has been arrested and convicted of a criminal offence that creates a criminal record for that person which from then on will restrict that person from obtaining a government job or a job where they can earn enough to support themselves and their families.
I’m not one for involving the government in my family issues and that’s what a community is, a family. Thus far the government’s involvement in our problems has only led to more incarceration and no real solutions. The act of imprisonment is more linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and the media’s representations of crime. The judicial system is more than the courts, jails and prisons in this country. It’s a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guard unions, and legislative and court agendas.
I have learned that the only way to show you care is by caring not only in words, but also by going about doing things that show we care. That’s why I propose we begin forming legal assistance and paralegal groups in these communities, so that these people, our family, will have available legal representation to investigate and litigate on their behalf’s because the legal aid society has been failing us as people and this misrepresentation has been the cause of thousands of peoples wrongful convictions, some faced as serious a sentence as the death penalty.
We need to know the laws that are being used to incarcerate us and our children. According to the United States Constitution, a person has the right to counsel and that right is not restricted to those people with college degrees who are registered with the American Bar Association. The right to counsel extends to the counsel of your choosing. So, if we, as a community, form a pro bono team of legal representatives with the knowledge of the laws and the filing of legal documents, we can be hired to represent or assist in the representation of those who get arrested in our communities and begin to battle against mass incarceration.
There has been a large percentage of innocent or wrongly convicted men and women who end up serving prison terms in the double digits of years before finally getting their convictions overturned. Then we have those who have suffered from false arrest, set ups, and other forms of stereotyping used to justify kidnapping people and forcefully placing them in these institutions. Prison and the judicial system have wreaked havoc on our lives, the lives of our children, and our communities for too long.
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