Introduction.

When I was a child I hated writing. Despised it, actually. I remember watching The Waltons (yeah, I was that kind of classy 10 year old...) and wondering why on earth John Boy was obsessed with the idea of becoming a writer. Yet somehow, over the past 15 years or so, I have come to find writing isn't that horrible. Sometimes I even find myself enjoying it (still not sure when that happened). It is almost a puzzle of sorts - you can see all the pieces at the beginning, and know what the end goal is supposed to be, and the work is figuring out how the pieces fit best to give you what you need for the picture to be the clearest when finished.


This blog for me is hopefully going to be a place where I can develop my writing - instead of having an assignment placed upon me by professors (even though I do enjoy those from time to time), I plan to use the awesome tool of StumbleUpon, perhaps links posted by friends, and other items I happen to come across on the great interwebs to inspire me to write something, hopefully once a day. It might be a paragraph, or a mini-novel, or somewhere in between; the main goal is just to get me writing and creating a (hopefully?) meaningful analysis of something related to the topic.

Topic for today:


"ProPublica review of pardons in past decade shows process heavily favored whites" is an article from The Washington Post that was published within the last few hours. The connotation of the article seems to be that of surprise. I'm not entirely sure how anyone who purports themselves to be educated about the criminal justice system this country uses can be surprised by this article.  Wait, wait...you mean to say that minorities, especially blacks, are not treated equally by policejudgeslawyersguardspresidentsetc? Of course I mean to say that, in fact I will argue that the entire American CJ system is attempting to incarcerate the entire population of young black males.

Firstly, how can we be surprised by this material? It has been proven that when people are asked to visualize what a "criminal" is inside their mind, the vast majority of the time they come up with a black male. 44% of the people in our prisons are black, when they make up only 13% of the overall population. 1 out of 9 black males between the ages of 20-35 is currently incarcerated. Problem? I think so.


The statistics go on forever. The fact that the indentured racism, that has gone hand in hand with the American criminal justice system since the days of the Restoratio, is now so glaringly obvious at the Presidential level has me personally wondering why this isn't front and center for Congress. Plain and simple, when it comes to arrests, diversions, adjudications, and convictions, and race, we're doing it wrong. So wrong, in fact, there is simply we no way we can keep the next several generations of minority youth from being gravely and drastically affected by the choices legislators, lawmakers, and law enforcers have made to keep as many black people as property as possible.


Because, truly, at the end of the day, that's what a prisoner is - property of the state. Their entire well-being and daily activities are dictated by actions and decisions not of their own, but of some "master." It is not too far of reach to conclude that America has not ended slavery - we just reformed it.



I would suggest to everyone that you read that article linked above, and look into The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindess by Michelle Alexander.