J. R. Woodgates
Tag Archives: disenfranchisement
Our lazy American culture of single parenting, sloppy schooling, and a preoccupation with non-stop entertainment, sports, video games and self-gratification has produced an unprecedented number of young men unfit for work, marriage, the military or much else. Fattening frogs for snakes.
New York’s Seventies-era “Rockefeller Drug Laws” were among the most punitive anti-crime, anti-drug legislation ever passed.
Today in many parts of the USA, civil rights advocates condemn overly-aggressive practices used by police to enforce similar laws, saying they too often target poor and inner-city blacks for punishment.
In his book, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, political scientist Michael Javen Fortner uncovers the inconvenient truth that the impetus behind the adoption of those harsh Rockefeller laws came mostly from black residents, themselves, in Harlem and other black and minority inner-city neighborhoods where rehabilitation-oriented policies of the day were often seen as being too soft on drug pushers and other neighborhood criminals.
Fortner…is hoping to complicate the story that the Rockefeller laws, and others like them, were foisted on black people by white people.
The Colson Task Force was established by Congressional mandate in 2014 as a nine‐person, bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel charged with developing practical, data-driven recommendations to enhance public safety by creating a more just and efficient federal corrections system.
Black defendants are 15% more likely than white defendants to be imprisoned for misdemeanor offenses and drug offenses, and 14% more likely than their white counterparts to be imprisoned for felony drug offenses, according to a July 2014 study.
New York City’s police chief says so many young blacks have arrest records, it’s hard to find qualified recruits for the NYPD. Others fault the chief’s own stop-and-frisk procedures that criminalized harmless behavior:
There are more African-American men in prison and in jail or on parole and probation today than were enslaved in 1850 – a decade before the start of the Civil War.
In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that minority (especially black) men are being deliberately targeted for disenfranchisement via America’s criminal justice system.