[lbo-talk] Glasser, Drug Busts=Jim Crow, and Election 2006 hysteria (was: Glasser and drug prohibition)

Aaron Shuman maruta_us at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 27 22:54:38 PDT 2006


Very important article. Does this say anything about the hypocrisy of white pot-smoking lib-to-Lefties who have been perfectly content and perfectly silent on the prevailing politics of drug war, so long as their doors aren't being broken down, their family members aren't getting busted on the corner, and their children aren't being fed into "gang association" profiling databases? Brings to mind an Angela Davis quote about a system that medicalizes drug abuse for white people and criminalizes it for people of color.

In addition to the stats on election results that Glasser mentions, Sasha Abramsky argues that felony disenfranchisement depresses political participation in communities of color at large in his new book, "Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House." Do people honestly believe the U.S. can lock up over two million people a year, drawn primarily from the communities that most consistently vote progressive, and still have a positive result in November? That's scary. (See Glasser's figure on Democrats and the Senate.)

If only black box electronic voting activists would focus on this "bug" in the machinery of voting...

aaron


>From mpollak at panix.com

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060710/glasser

July 10, 2006 issue The Nation

Drug Busts=Jim Crow

by IRA GLASSER

<snip>

According to

federal statistics gathered by the Sentencing Project, only 13 percent

of monthly drug users of all illegal drugs--defined as those who use a

drug at least once a month on a regular basis--are black, about their

proportion of the population. But 37 percent of drug-offense arrests

are black; 53 percent of convictions are black; and 67 percent of all

people imprisoned for drug offenses are black. Adding in Latinos,

about 22 percent of all monthly drug users are black or Latino, but 80

percent of people in prison for drug offenses are black or Latino.

Even in presumptively liberal New York State, 92 percent of all

inmates who are there for drug offenses are black or Latino.

The fact that so many people arrested, convicted and imprisoned for

drug offenses are black or Latino is not because they are mostly the

ones doing the crime; it is because they are mostly the ones being

targeted. This is not a phenomenon of the Deep South. It is

nationwide.

<snip>

Despite these patterns of racial targeting, it has not been

fashionable among liberals to see drug prohibition as a massive civil

rights problem of racial discrimination. Perhaps it would be easier if

we examined the way racially targeted drug-war incarceration has

damaged the right to vote, a right quintessentially part of the rights

we thought we had won in the 1960s with the demise of Jim Crow laws.

Until recently (there have been some changes in the past few years in

some states), every state but two barred felons from voting--some

permanently, some in a way that allowed, theoretically but often not

as a practical matter, for the restoration of voting rights. Because

of the explosion of incarceration driven by drug prohibition, more

than 5 million people are now barred from voting. The United States is

the only industrial democracy that does this. And the origin of most

of these laws--no surprise--is the post-Reconstruction period after

slavery was abolished. Felony disenfranchisement laws, like poll taxes

and literacy tests, were historically part of the system that arose

after slavery to bar blacks from exercising equal rights and, in

particular, equal voting rights. Felony disenfranchisement laws were,

to a large extent, part of a replacement system for subjugating blacks

after slavery was abolished.

If you want to contemplate what this means, consider the state of

Florida in the 2000 presidential election, where 200,000 black

Floridians were barred from voting because of prior felonies in an

election in which the presidency was determined by 537 disputed votes.

If even one-third of these people had actually voted--say, 70,000--and

if they voted in the usual proportions that blacks vote for the

Democratic candidate--say, 80 percent, probably a low estimate--those

70,000 voters would have produced a 42,000 net gain for Al Gore.

This is a dramatic example, but hardly unique. A 2002 study in the

American Sociological Review concluded that John Tower would never

have been elected to the US Senate from Texas in 1978 but for racially

disproportionate felony disenfranchisement; that John Warner for the

same reason wouldn't have been elected in 1978 from Virginia; and that

despite the apparent rise in conservative Republican voting, the

Senate would have remained under Democratic control every year between

1984 and 2003 if former felons had been allowed to vote. Indeed, if

the same degree of racially disparate felony disenfranchisement that

exists now had existed in 1960, Richard Nixon might well have defeated

John F. Kennedy.

The kicker for all this is that all these black citizens who were

disproportionately targeted for arrest and incarceration and then

barred from voting are nonetheless counted as citizens for the purpose

of determining how many Congressional seats and how many electoral

votes states have. During slavery, three-fifths of the number of

slaves were similarly counted by the slave states, even though slaves

were not in any way members of the civil polity. This is worse. In the

states of the Deep South, 30 percent of all black men are barred from

voting because of felony convictions, but all of them are counted to

determine Congressional representation and Electoral College votes. If

one wants to wonder why the South is so solidly white, Republican and

arch-conservative, one need look no further.

<end excerpt>

Michael

__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list