"For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm. Enslavement
lasted for nearly 250 years. The 150 years that followed have
encompassed debt peonage, convict lease-labor, and mass incarceration—a
period that overlapped with Jim Crow. This provides a telling geographic
comparison. Under Jim Crow, blacks in the South lived in a police
state. Rates of incarceration were not that high—they didn’t need to be,
because state social control of blacks was nearly total. Then, as
African Americans migrated north, a police state grew up around them
there, too... By
1900, the black incarceration rate in the North was about 600 per
100,000—slightly lower than the national incarceration rate today.
That
early-20th-century rates of black imprisonment were lower in the South
than in the North reveals how the carceral state functions as a system
of control. Jim Crow applied the control in the South. Mass
incarceration did it in the North. After the civil-rights movement
triumphed in the 1960s and toppled Jim Crow laws, the South adopted the
tactics of the North, and its rates of imprisonment surged far past the
North’s. Mass incarceration became the national model of social control.
Indeed, while the Gray Wastes have expanded their population, their
most significant characteristic remains unchanged: In 1900, the black-white incarceration disparity in the North was seven to one —roughly the same disparity that exists today on a national scale."
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
The Atlantic
October, 2015
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