Written by Linn Washington Jr.
Herman Garner doesn’t dispute the drug charge that slammed him in
prison for nine years.
Garner does dispute the damning circumstance that doing the time for
his crime still leaves him penalized despite his being free from the
penal system.
Garner carries the former felon stain, a status that slams employment
doors shut in his face despite his having a MBA degree and two years of
law school.
“I’ve applied for jobs at thousands of places in person and on the
internet but I’m unable to get a job,” said Garner, a Cleveland, Ohio
resident who recently published a book about his prison/life experiences
entitled
“Wavering Between Extremes.”
Last Friday Garner joined hundreds of people attending a day-long
conference at Princeton University entitled “Imprisonment of a Race”
that featured presentations by scholars and experts on the devastating
impact of mass incarceration in America.
America imprisons more people per capita than any country on earth —
accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prisoners despite having just
five percent of the world’s population.
More than 60 percent of the two-million-plus people in American
prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.
“The U.S. imprisons more than South Africa did under Apartheid. A
nation that promotes democracy has a racial caste in its prisons. We
must break that caste system,” said the special guest speaker at the
“Imprisonment” conference, Pa. death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who
telephoned from prison.
Racism is written all over the economically/socially debilitating
practice of mass incarceration.
African Americans are 13 percent of America’s population and 14
percent of the nation’s drug users, but are 37 percent of persons
arrested for drugs and 56 percent of the people in state prisons for
drug offenses noted the 2009 congressional testimony of Marc Mauer,
executive director of the Sentencing Project and a conference panelist.
A University of Wisconsin study found that 17 percent of white
ex-cons job seekers received interviews compared to only five percent of
Black ex-con job seekers — a race-based disparity impacting people like
Garner.
 |
| Michelle Alexander |
Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, featured
speaker at that Princeton conference streamed live on the Internet, said
a major reason why imprisonment rates soared during the past four
decades despite decreases in crime rates is anti-crime policies craftily
manipulated by conservative Republicans for political purposes.
Pennsylvania’s prison population, for example, soared from 8,243 in
1980 to 51,487 in 2010 stated a report released in January 2011 by Pa.’s
Auditor General that noted Pa. now spends $32,059 annually to imprison
one person — a cost that exceeds the annual $20,074 tuition for the MBA
degree program at Penn State University.
Harsh anti-crimes policies were largely a “punitive backlash” to
advances of the Civil Rights Movement said Alexander, author of the
hugely popular 2010 book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
Age of Colorblindness.”
America’s corrosive War on Drugs — that basically ignores drug
kingpins — has devastated Black families, Alexander said.
“A Black child today is less likely to be raised in a two parent
household than during slavery,” she said.
“In major urban areas almost one-half of Black men have criminal
records thus they face a lifetime of legalized discrimination” —
encompassing exclusions from employment and financial assistance
required to secure a viable quality of life.
 |
| Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr |
Interestingly both Herman Garner and Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of
Princeton’s Center for African American Studies, which facilitated the
conference, expressed similar views on the impacts of mass
incarceration.
Dr. Glaude said mass incarceration is a “moral crisis with political
and social consequences for America’s future” during his opening remarks
at the conference.
Garner, in an interview, described the prison system as the “biggest
problem” in the Black community.
While politicians pushing punitive policies help drive mass
incarceration its budget busting persistence implicates the blind-eye of
society said one conference panelist, history professor Dr. Khalil
Gibran Muhammad, the new director of the fabled Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture in New York City.
“Middle-class whites and Blacks in the U.S. are a new kind of ‘Silent
Majority’ regarding mass incarceration,” Dr. Muhammad said. “This
‘Silent Majority’ supports unjust policies of increased law enforcement
and incarceration as the only way to address crime” ignoring proven
approaches like “jobs, education and ending societal inequities.”
 |
| Dr. Cornell West |
Famed Princeton professor Dr. Cornell West criticized both the Black
middle class and Black leadership for inaction on mass incarceration
which consumes over $50-billion annually across America — money better
spent on creating jobs and improving education.
“The new Black middle class and Black leadership are not attuned to
the suffering in poor Black communities,” West said during the
conference’s Keynote Conversation between him and Professor Alexander.
“We need more middle class people with genuine respect for the poor.
This is more than serving as role model mentors.”
Author Alexander said ending the “mind boggling scale” of mass
incarceration requires “a major social movement.”
One who attended the conference, Daryl Mikell Brooks, an activist in
Trenton, N.J. who operates the popular
“Today’s News N.J.” blog, backs
Alexander’s suggestion.
“To fix this problem we need mass boycotts. America only understands
money and violence. We need to shutdown businesses like during the 60s,”
said Brooks, who spent
three-years in prison for a conviction he says
was false, aimed at crushing his activism.
“Blacks leaders allowed this incarceration to happen by doing too
little to challenge this repression.”
Linn Washington Jr. is an award-winning writer who and a graduate
of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship.
