Clarence Moses-El and his family will be celebrating the holidays with more joy than most of us can even imagine. Their story is a story that must be known in America because it is not just one story, but one repeated thousands of times for black women and men in America, and that is a story of injustice. In the last few years we have seen, again and again, the news of often young, black men and women being killed in this country without justification and often by the police who are supposed to be protecting them and their communities. This is nothing new in America, but what is new is the ability to record these encounters and the growing public outrage that is making it more difficult for mainstream media to ignore the events so that finally these stories are in the news and in newspapers. Tragically for every story that makes it to the news there are many that don’t.
Today, December 24, 2015, Clarence Moses-El walked out of jail after 28 years for a crime he was convicted of based on a dream the victim had. Yes, I did write based on a dream. It is a shocking story and sadly also one that is not uncommon – there are so many black prisoners convicted on the shakiest of evidence and they are part of the story of mass incarceration in this country. Did you know that America has more people in jail per capita than any other country in the world, including Russia and China? “While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners, as of October 2013.”
The war on drugs has been a significant contributor for the skyrocketing prison population. “In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the United States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more than two million. Between 1986 and 1991, African-American women’s incarceration in state prisons for drug offenses increased by 828 percent. By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans.” It is quite common for African Americans to serve time for crimes that whites rarely serve time for or they receive a lesser sentence.
And did you know that private prisons are a growth industry in the United States? They are exceedingly profitable and they have their own lobbyists in Washington DC working hard to be sure that those prison populations keep on growing, and that tax payers keep footing the bill. Up until the 1980s, private prisons did not even exist in the US! A 2013 Bloomberg report states that in the past decade the number of inmates in for-profit prisons throughout the U.S. rose 44 percent. And if you can imagine “prison companies also sign contracts with states that guarantee at least 90 percent of prison beds be filled. If these “lockup quotas” aren’t met, the state must reimburse the prison company for the unused beds. Prison companies use the profits to expand and put pressure on lawmakers to incarcerate a certain number of people.”
That can all add up to pressure on law enforcement to keep arrest numbers rising, stricter laws to be enacted and enforced, and it’s easier to go after an already vulnerable part of society, the poor. Add on top of that the ugly face of racism that still exists in this country, yes, even with a black president. Michelle Alexander wrote an excellent book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that is certainly worth reading to learn more about this unfair system that is destroying lives and wreaking havoc in communities across the country. More and more school children are now being disciplined by police rather than at school and thus begins an even younger pipeline of minority children into the prison system. This cannot continue if America is to call herself a democracy where, liberty and justice for all, actually means something.
Just as we as a nation are finally beginning to come to terms with the dangers of being black in America, something black communities have always known, we also need to take a look at our justice system, which is beyond broken. You can read about Clarence Moses-El here at Democracy Now and also here in The Guardian. Just imagining what a celebration Clarence Moses-El and his family are having is an amazing start to the holidays. Merry Christmas Clarence and your family!
May 2016 be the beginning of a new face and new heart of America where we realize that we are all in this together whether we are talking about our families, our neighborhoods, states, the entire nation or the entire planet. What happens to those around us impacts all of us and the sooner we all realize this the sooner we can really know peace in our hearts and in the world around us. We are now global citizens and we need to realize that this one planet is all of our homes and we need to care for it and all of its inhabitants like good neighbors. In the very wise words of Martin Luther King Jr. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” May we wake up to this deep truth.
Happy holidays and a very joyous 2016 to you.