Michelle Alexander to speak at UW-River Falls
February 17, 2012 at 6:29 am in River Falls Journal
Longtime civil rights advocate and litigator Michelle Alexander is coming to the UW-River Falls on Wednesday, Feb. 29 to speak about her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Continue Reading
You’ll need the tin foil hat for this one. Despite the fact more whites than blacks are incarcerated for drug crimes (think meth) Ms Alexander’s thesis is drug laws have been disproportionately enforced against blacks to create an apartheid system of racial caste. We’re not talking about the conventional wisdom of guilty white liberals that racism is endemic to societal institutions; the criminal justice system has been intentionally structured in a comprehensive but well-disguised manner to incarcerate large numbers of black men, brand them felons and treat them as second class citizens who can be deliberately discriminated against.
This is the sort of cloud cuckoo land conspiracy theory that only someone in academia or the racial grievance industry could suppose postulate. Her evidence includes the fact that the prison population of blacks has quintupled over the past 30 years suggesting this was a direct result of the republican southern strategy rather than the implosion of the black family attributable to great society programs or the ravages of crack cocaine in the minority community. It is blame the victim writ large; as if the violent criminal who deals drugs is on the same moral plane as someone denied their civil rights.
The only thing we can agree on is that filling our prisons with people for possession or use of marijuana is a sad waste of resources. Legalize it, let Philip Morris and the feds get rich selling and taxing packs of joints at $5.00 each. We’ll still have all the problems we do with alcohol and tobacco but at least the drug dealers will go out bankrupt, our prisons will be half-full and we can put the resources into treatment and rehabilitation.
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