[The D’Alliance] Rosa Parks (1913-2005)
I truly believe that there’s a little bit of Rosa Parks in all Americans who have the courage to say enough is enough and stand up for what they believe in. — New York Congressman Charles Rangel.
As America remembers the legacy of a civil rights icon, our national reflection should keep the following in mind: our government’s War on Drugs ensures that a disproportionate number of African-Americans will call federal and state prisons “home” for a long time coming. Our national crusade to rid society of vice tears real human families apart in order to feed the pernicious, insatiable American appetite for the punishment of others.
Politicians gain sordid currency from the appearance of being “tough on crime,” and they have little incentive to remedy those injustices placed before them. To wit, the 100-1 quantity ratio between powder cocaine and crack cocaine under federal sentencing law. Despite specific findings and recommendations by the United States Sentencing Commission that it is grossly unjust and in desperate need of reform, Congress and President Clinton specifically rebuked it in its entirety. It was the first time that Congress did not follow the recommendations of the Commission.
The state of California ups the penal ante with its notorious Three Strikes law, which mocks our constitutional prohibition against government administering cruel and unusual punishments. One need not have committed any violent crime in order to obtain a sentence of 25 years to life. It remains another political sacred cow that should be sent to the slaughterhouse.
Even for those of us disinclined toward broadly invoking the specter of racism, a rough appraisal of sentencing law and prison population statistics finds that it permeates our criminal justice system. That specific discriminatory intent cannot be hung around the necks of our so-called leaders makes them marginally less blameworthy, for they have all the notice necessary to prompt humane reform.
Today’s African-Americans don’t need permission to sit at the front of the incarceration bus, which is already teeming with people of all shades. Politicians, prosecutors and judges, listening to the roar of approval from an angst-ridden populace, are all too happy to underwrite their tickets to the human stockyards.
For some, enough will never be enough.
Posted by Nikos Leverenz.
Read More…
