The prison system destroys the lives of black men and their families.
Last week, President Obama reduced the prison sentences of 61 drug-related offenders, 21 of whom were sentenced to life.
With Obama’s commutation, many of the 61 inmates will be released from prison on July 28, 2016.
They will dispose of their jumpsuits and reunite with their families once again. Some are calling Obama’s pardon a “second chance” for these nonviolent drug offenders.
But how much of a second chance are they actually receiving?
If I would’ve known about Obama’s recent commutation prior to reading Michelle Alexander’s, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” I would’ve also thought this pardon was their second chance.
I’m still working my way through the book, but I have grasped its concept. In “The New Jim Crow,” Alexander exposed the truth of the prison system.
The war on drugs specifically targets African-Americans.
According to the NAACP, “5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites.”
I’m not surprised.
Just last month, a 1994 interview was published with Pres. Richard Nixon’s top adviser, John Ehrlichman, who said the war on drugs was a political tactic to minimize the black community.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” Ehrlichman said.
He continued: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
This is the America we live in. You can’t make this up.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news,” he said. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
These words came out the actual mouth of one of Nixon’s top aides.
According to American Civil Liberties Union, “Black people in the city [Minneapolis] are 8.7 times more likely than white people to be arrested for low-level offenses, like trespassing, disorderly conduct, consuming in public, and lurking.”
Authority figures target the black community, but what happens after these authority figures — like the president — release them? Although Obama freed these men and women from their cells, society will still incarcerate them in other aspects.
As I’m sure you know, convicted felons lose many of their civil rights. They may no longer vote, travel abroad, bear arms, have certain social benefits hold certain job positions.
This is modern-day slavery.
It’s sickening how some Americans want to complain about the “brokenness” of black families, yet Nixon and many of his predecessors and successors are the ones who shattered these black families.
People believe that if black men pull their pants up, take their hoods off and stop pushing dope, they won’t have to deal with perceived dangers in their communities. But the real problem is the color of their skin.
Melanin is so intimidating that the former President of the United States of America and other leaders have implemented programs to destroy it.
Black communities have been and still are negatively targeted in America. You can deny it until you’re blue in the face, but it will still remain the sad disgusting truth.
Clarke Perkins is a 20-year-old political science sophomore from New Orleans, Louisiana.