>From Troy Davis to Occupy Wall Street: How the Prison System Destroys the
>American Dream
The people of Occupy Wall Street are protesting our
country's growing inequality--and nowhere is this inequality more
acutely felt than the makeup of our prison population.
October 3, 2011 |
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The world watched when the State of Georgia -- with too
many peoples' acquiescence to list here -- murdered Troy Anthony Davis.
His funeral was held on October 1 in Georgia.
At his funeral on Saturday, a recorded message by Davis was
reportedly played in the church: "Everything we do today will clear the
way for a better tomorrow. We can correct all the wrongs if we band
together. Don't give up the fight."
On the same day as his funeral, miles away in New York, hundreds of
peaceful protesters with Occupy Wall Street were arrested as they
marched through the streets.
The movement for Troy Davis was for the "99 percent" -- the two
million people whose names we don't know, who sit in prison,
disenfranchised, mocked and vilified.
The people of Occupy Wall Street are protesting our country's growing
inequality, the staggering rise of the rich and the economic fall of
just about everyone else, the divestment in education and a
social safety net. Nowhere is this gap and these austerity measures more
acutely felt than by those in our prisons (whether guilty or
innocent), than by the families of those incarcerated, and by the
formerly incarcerated who are engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to create
a life on the outside.
It should be no surprise that the person who attacked our country's
labor movement and welfare system, the man who helped create the 1
percent as it is today is the same person who helped usher in
tough-on-crime policies, the war on drugs and the exploding prison
system: President Ronald Reagan. Over the last 30 years, as the
rich got richer, the poor got poorer and found themselves increasingly
tangled in the criminal justice system.
Most inmates were poor when they went in and poorer while they're
inside. Incarcerated people are paid as little as 23 cents an hour for
their work, according to AlterNet. Many are still poor when they get
out, as it's legal for employers to
discriminate against someone with a record. Those convicted of a sex
offense have even more legalized discrimination to contend with, thanks
to the patchwork of archaic and absurd rules aimed at where they can or can't
live.
Our prison system, from arrest to conviction, is disproportionately
populated by black men, resulting in the following shameful statistics:
one in every eight black men in their 20s is in prison or jail
and three-fourths of those incarcerated for a drug offense is a person
of color. And because many states tie voting rights to criminal records, an
estimated 13 percent of black men are banned from voting, according
to the Sentencing Project.
In many states, those with a drug conviction are prohibited from
receiving food stamps, thanks to the 1996 welfare reform law. Public
housing agencies can and do deny housing to those convicted of a crime
and even those who were not convicted but only arrested.
In a study published in the MIT journal Daedelus in 2010, titled "Incarceration
and Social Inequality," the authors write: "The inequality [of
imprisonment] is cumulative because the
social and economic penalties that flow from incarceration are accrued
by those who already have the weakest economic opportunities."
The numbers in their study narrate the story of race, class and destruction:
* From 1980 to 2008, the U.S. incarceration rate went from 221 to
762 per 100,000. (The US has more people in prison than any other
nation.)
* About 70 percent of state prisoners did not graduate high school.
* In 1980, around 10 percent of young black men who dropped out of high
school were in prison or jail. By 2008, it was 37 percent.
* Serving time in prison is associated with a 40 percent reduction in
earnings and with reduced job tenure, reduced hourly wages, and
higher unemployment.
Recently at a city council meeting in my home of Jersey City, a
46-year-old formerly incarcerated man told the council, as reported in
the Jersey City Independent: "I've served 16 years in prison. I came
home three years ago and tried
everything possible you can do. I got my high school diploma and a
driver's license...The job system failed me."
When I went to Occupy Wall Street, my friend carried a sign that read: "Troy
Davis would still be alive if he had been rich and white." We had attended a
protest earlier that month, when Davis was
still alive, where signs and demonstrators proclaimed, "We are Troy
Davis."
We are Troy Davis. We are the 99 percent.
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg is a case analyst for the Innocence Project. She is
the author of "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" (New Press,
May 2006). The views expressed here are hers alone.
http://www.alternet.org/story/152607/from_troy_davis_to_occupy_wall_street%3A_how_the_prison_system_destroys_the_american_dream?page=entire
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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