Black Male HS Dropout is Six Times More Likely to go to Prison than in 1980

Is America’s emerging prison state a revival or an extension of slavery? Is it “a New Jim Crow”? Or is it something arising out of those experiences, but significantly different, a brand new phase in the history of African America? Historian Loic Wacquant here argues that America’s reliance upon prison as the principal way of dealing with the black poor marks a qualitatively new stage in the Black experience. First, he says, there was slavery, then Southern rural segregation, followed by the enclosure of the northern ghetto, which has now been succeeded by the world’s first carceral state. Like slavery, Jim Crow and the ghetto, prison has come to define for many of us what it is to be Black in America.

From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, the Role of Prisons in American Society

by Loïc Wacquant

Originally published, with extensive footnotes and additional material in New Left Review, January-February 2002.

Not one but several ‘peculiar institutions’ have successively operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States. The first is chattel slavery, the pivot of the plantation economy.

The second is the Jim Crow system of legally enforced discrimination and segregation from cradle to grave that anchored the predominantly agrarian society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition.

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2 Responses to Black Male HS Dropout is Six Times More Likely to go to Prison than in 1980

WIL-LIE Reply

October 7, 2012 at 1:15 pm

THE REAL PROBLEM…..UNORGANIZE TO PUT MONEY TOGETHER TO CREATE JOBS AND TALK ABOUT HOW TO KEEP THAT MONEY IN THE COMMUNITY….HOW TO CREATE BILLIONAIRES…BUT HAVE ENUFF COMMUNICATION TO EACH OTHER SO THE BILLIONAIRE WILL NO HIS ROLE…..AND HE THE MAIN ROLE PLAYER OF ALL BEING THE CARE TAKER OF THE MONEY LIKE INVESTMNET BANKER….SO THE IS THE PROBLEM KNOWING WHAT MONEY IS AND WHERE IN COMES FROM…..”ALL RESTAURANTS ARE LAND BASE JOB” MILLIONS OF CHICKEN…MILLIONS OF COWS…MILLION OF HOGS….MILLION OF TURKEYS AND HOW TO BREED THEM FOR GROWTH…MILLIONS OF JOBS….PICKING UP TRASH AND TAKING EVERY THING WITH IT TODAY….YOUR PACKAGING SYSTEM….EVERY SHELL OF EVERY PRODUCT…EXCEPT FOR ALUMINUM THIS CAN BE MADE INTO WHAT EVERY YOU CAN MAKE FROM IT…COPPER….10 OF MILLIONS OF JOBS ON THE WORLD MARKET AND AT HOME AND EVERY THING IS FOR THE STABLE GROWTH FOR AFRICAN COMMUNITY…..SO WE GOT TO UNDERSTAND HOW TO PAY EACH OTHER WITH OUT GREED….AT LEAST A COST OF LIVING….LIKE 10 THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEARS AND 1 THOUSAND FOR TAXES….AND 500 DOLLARS FOR INSURNCE….
WIL-LIE Reply

October 7, 2012 at 1:17 pm

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Black Male HS Dropout is Six Times More Likely to go to Prison than in 1980

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