ANOTHER CASUALTY
IN THE LONGEST WAR
So the vast majority of the creative black minds in America who are males are locked up in prisons during their most productive years. In the years when most Euro-American males are present in universities, colleges, and training institutes, gaining the skills that are necessary to ensure that they can run the world the way that they have been running the world, our future leaders, future learners, future advocates, future directors can be found in the jails of America locked away, unable to think, under the daily watchful eye of sick minds who would rather see them dead than learning. Those who show the greatest promise of thinking, self-direction, understanding, comprehension are the least likely to ever get paroled. When they get paroled, they are stigmatized in such a way that they can never get the effectiveness in this society that they need to utilize what they know. They have been essentially removed, not by physical death, but by institutional death.
-Dr. Na'm Akbar, Ph.D, Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery (1984)
With dizzying, feverish frequency, African-American youth are being relegated to America's dungeons, at a rate, and in a proportion, that dwarfs other segments of this society. . . . This fact is a deep feature of U.S. public policy, one so bred in the bone that no figure, nor set of figures, no matter how startling, can now check or change that policy.
Arguments against the injustice of such a policy tend to fall on deaf ears, and the policy, christened by the blessings of what we call 'political reality', hardens into unquestioned custom.
Until, in common consciousness, the very visage of a black youth, buttressed by the negative projections of the majoritarian media, comes to connote an inherent criminality.
I thought of such things upon the prosecution and conviction of my son Jamal for weapons charges recently. A young man whose father has been in prison since he was a boy, Jamal had more than his share of hard and hellish times, making more than his share of foolish mistakes. As a man he grew to become a person who loved his family passionately. His weapons possession arrest had to be one that stretches the bounds of coincidence to the point to disbelief. Active since 1995 in his father's defense, Jamal's handsome, mustached face appeared on local and national TV and in newspapers from coast to coast. Yet the cops who stopped him (on an alleged traffic violation) claimed they had no idea who he was. Just a coincidental stop. Just a coincidental search. Just a coincidence that his case would be transferred from a city prosecution to a federal one.
One doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to see that Jamal was shadowed, stopped, busted and convicted because of who his father was, and because of his well-publicized efforts to secure a new trial for him. A bright, articulate, loving father and husband, convicted actually for the unpardonable offense of resistance, he joins too many of his contemporaries in America's latest concentration camps, yet another casualty in America's longest war against Black life.
Imprisonment of
the Mind
They endeavor to make you as much like Brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind - when they have embittered the sweet waters of life - when they have shut out the light which shines from the word of God, then and not till then, has American slavery done its perfect work.
p;Henry Highland Garnet, "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America." (1843)
American prisons are the linear descen-dants of American slave pens, socially con-structed institutions designed to dehumanize, exploit, and profit from the shackled. In both cases powerful social forces converge to protect the institution, to insure its continued existence. Prisons as metaphor for slavery are especially crystallized in the disproportionate percentage of African Americans who are cast into American Gulags, a reflection of social policies following media and political projections.
Another factor that mirrors the slave experience is the antebellum (or pre-Civil War) Black codes that outlawed education for slaves, under pain of death.
In March 1998, the Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections (DOC) announced that it would phase out all of its four and two-year college programs. That means roughly 400 of the state's 35,075 prisoners, men and women taking courses for a bachelor's or associate degrees in arts and sciences, will have to quit by June, 1998. The department, which already made it so difficult that it generally took approximately 10 years for a prisoner to complete courses for a degree, now offers GED (high school diploma) courses, and training in vocational fields like cooking or plumbing. While some may question the usefulness of college for prisoners, one long-term corrections expert found education to be the "most powerful" preventer of violence, both in and out of prison.
Massachusetts prison psychologist, Dr. James Gilligan, notes:
While several programs had worked, the most successful of all, and the only one that had been 100% effective in preventing recidivism was: receiving a college degree while in prison. Several hundred prisoners in Massachusetts had completed at least a bachelor's degree while in prison over a 25-year period, and not one of them had been returned to prison for a new crime. (Later I discovered that the state of Indiana, and Folsom prison in California, have also found that college degrees provided 100% immunity against recidivism among their "alumni.") Immediately after I announced this finding in a public lecture at Harvard and it made its way into the newspapers, our new governor, William Weld, who had not previously been aware that prison inmates could take college courses, gave a press conference on television in which he declared that Massachusetts would rescind that "privilege,' or else the poor would start committing crimes in order to be sent to prison so they could get a free college education!
-"Pictures of Pain," From Behind the Razor Wire: Portrait of a Contemporary American Prison System, p. 34 (by M. Jacobson-Hardy).
Clearly, then, what motivates prison administrators isn't what works, but the political imperatives of a system that seeks to continue the deadly cycle of recidivism. The more bodies they can capture, the more they can keep.
Anything that can break the chains of mental slavery is justified. Knowledge is the beginning, so let us begin.