Growing up it was far from uncommon to see people posting on social media saying “Free him, till they free him” and variations of the statement whenever their friend got arrested. It was also not uncommon for there to be a string of names added behind the first one. After a while, one would get numb to seeing these posts, unless of course a name they recognized was included. This is the reality of growing up black and Latino in NYC.
There’s an old narrative about inner-city neighborhoods having high crime rates, so it’s not always shocking when someone from the hood gets locked up. What no one talks about (except maybe Black and Latinos in the hood) is that these inner-city neighborhoods produce higher crime rates partially because they are more heavily policed than areas with lighter and wealthier residents. Studies have shown that when the police are less active crime rates actually decrease.
Once Ronald Reagan declared War on Drugs, politicians began taking a “tough on crime stance” (an stance previously promoted by President Nixon) and the number of people in prison in the United States grew dramatically. As a result, prisons became a huge business sector. The need for more facilities to house the ever-increasing number of imprisoned people lead to the increase of number of private (for-profit) prisons as well. The war was started under the guise of combatting the crack epidemic, but a large portion of the drug arrests made since have been black people with small non-violent crimes like possessing small amounts of marijuana — a substance less harmful than legal substances like tobacco and alcohol, for instance. According to a statistic in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, black people were five times more likely to be ‘stopped and frisked’ than white people, specifically between the years 1997 and 2006. She also explains how today’s criminal justice system serves as a means to strip black people of their freedom, just as similar systems of oppression have in the past.
The 13th amendment which “abolished” slavery, actually allows the enslavement of people who commit crimes. In fact, shortly after the end of slavery, black men were arrested for breaking “Black Codes”, special laws specifically for black people, and were forced to work back on plantations as prisoners. Today, the United States and numerous American corporations continue to generate profit off of virtually free prison labor, paying incarcerated people way below the minimum wage. The prison industrial complex also makes profits off of incarcerating thousands of Blacks and Latinos, and spends fortunes lobbying for strict crime laws to ensure their cells are filled.
This country has preyed on black bodies since before it was even founded and our hoods are suffering the consequences. We are not free while our men are in shackles. Our communities are crippled by the lack of strong male figures. Children deserve their fathers, parents deserve their children, people deserve their partners, THEY deserve freedom. End mass incarceration. Free them!
Forever Thugnacious 