Tag Archives: Michelle Alexander

NAACP on MLK on War on Drugs

I hate to

repeat a preacher, but it’s Sunday, and
Robert Rooks wrote for NAACP 24 August 2011

U.S. Approach to War on Drugs Ignores Dr. King’s Lessons on Justice, Compassion.



After forty years of the war on drugs, America continues to have laws
that stratify society based on race and class and continues to ignore
Dr. King’s lessons on justice, compassion and love.

My favorite quote from Dr. King speaks to the heart of the problem with
America’s criminal justice system. “Power without love is reckless
and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power
at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at
its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

America’s criminal justice system is reckless and discriminate. America
has five percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the
world’s prisoners. Blacks are incarcerated at four to five times the
rate of whites for drug crimes, even though the majority of those who
use and sell drugs are white. The majority of those incarcerated are
people who have a history with mental health and substance abuse.

Not only does incarceration impact individuals but it undermines families,

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Prison slave labor

You, too, can end up as a 21st century slave in the U.S.A.!
For drugs, or debt, or especially for being black.

Rania Khalek wrote for AlterNet 21 July 2011,

21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor:
In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit.



There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that
corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival
those of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally
stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately
relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing,
violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to
no wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as
they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve
their circumstances or change their plight.

They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where
we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st
century.

And who are these prison slaves?

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“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began” –Michelle Alexander

Dick Price writes that

More Black Men Now in Prison System than Were Enslaved,



“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or
parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle
Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library
this past Wednesday, the first of many jarring points she made in a
riveting presentation.

She’s written a best-selling book,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness,
and she discusses the problem:

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