Here’s a perspective on the United States criminal justice system.
During the Jim Crow era, a person of color in the United States faced at least:
- Disenfranchisement
- Second class citizenship
- Barriers to voting
- Barriers to education
- Barriers to employment
- Barriers to housing
Then in the United States, we passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that said we can no longer discriminate based on skin color.
In 2021, who is still in the Jim Crow era? Convicted felons are the only people we allow to keep under the Jim Crow era.
Coincidence?
Do you believe it’s a coincidence that one in three African American males now carries the convicted felon label? As opposed to one in seventeen white males that carry the same label? If you answered yes to that question, then let’s look at what happened between the Jim Crow era and 2021.
There’s been a 700% increase in the United States prison population. It’s gone from 300,000 inmates in 1970 to 1.8 million today and as high as 2.3 million. So in spite of the crime rate dropping, our prison population skyrocketed. It was because we had the law and order agenda.
Law and Order
The law and order agenda increased police spending but decreased our education funding. And by doing so, we created the school-to-prison pipeline. We also started the War on Drugs, which we now know is a war on people.
In 1986, we passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. It differentiated between powder cocaine and hard cocaine. We now know that this disproportionately impacted people of color.
We also had a 1994 crime bill with the Truth and Sentencing Act. This led to higher incarceration rates and harsher sentences for people of color.
With that, the Jim Crow era never ended. Racism never ended. It just evolved into what we now have as the new Jim Crow. Modern-day slavery.
Keep these events in mind as we watch republican politicians and their white evangelical christian nationalist backers implement restrictive bills sweeping the country. As a reminder, what they are trying to do has nothing to do with Christianity, and has everything to do with controlling people how they want to.