Private prisons favor young healthy men–
and with racist drug laws, that means young men of color.

AlterNet / By Aaron Cantú

Young men of color are disproportionately represented within all prisons in the United States, but even more so in privately owned facilities. In Arizona, Texas and California, three states with substantial prisoner populations, minorities in private prisons are overrepresented by about 8 percent relative to public ones.

Now, doctoral candidate Christopher Petrella from U.C. Berkeley may have uncovered why: young, healthy men who do not require much in the way of expensive health services are the most low cost–and therefore the most profitable–type of inmate for prison firms to house. By extension, it is young men of color who are most favored, because drug and sentencing laws instituted around 1980 swelled the number of black and Hispanic youth ensnared in the criminal justice system.

Petrella explains why the age (and therefore health) of prisoners can act as a proxy for race:

Most prisoners over 50 today were convicted and sentenced before the operationalization of the so-called “War on Drugs,” a skein of policies that disproportionately criminalized communities of color. By implication, the vast majority of those incarcerated prior to 1980–both in real numbers and on a percentage basis–was “Non-Hispanic, white.” Contrastingly, black individuals constituted 30 percent of state prison admits in 1950…and 42 percent by 1980.

The author also found that contractional provisions secured by prison firms–especially the two largest, CCA and GEO group–exempt them “from housing certain types of individuals whose health care needs and staffing costs disproportionately attenuate profit marigins.”  A 2012 ACLU study found that it costs $34,135 a year to house a non-geriatric prisoner and $68,270 for people over the age of 50.

In each of the nine states Petrella studied, non-whites were overrepresented in private prisons compared to public ones. Nationwide, this disparity is also evident in 30 out of 32 states that contract out carceral facilities to correctional firms.

In a conversation with BillMoyers.com, Petrella stressed that even policies that appear “colorblind” can produce problems that fall unevenly along racial lines: “One of the reasons I think the study’s important is that it continues to show how laws–and even contractual stipulations–that are, on the surface, race-neutral, continue to have a disproportionate and negative impact on communities of color.”

Although private prisons have been hugely profitable ventures over the last thirty years, some investors now believe that a shifting social and political climate against mass incarceration threatens the long-term revenue prospects of correctional firms. At the widely read investment analyst site Motley Fool, Bradley Seth McNew pointed to the 1.7% decline in the 2012 nationwide prison population as part of a wider trend that is reducing the number of inmates through policies like “marijuana legalization, relax[ation] of strict immigration laws, and relax[ation] of judicial punishment for nonviolent crime.”

Those changes do not arise from a want of trying on the part of prison corporations: CCA, the largest one, donated $1.9 million in political contributions from 2003 to 2012 to favorable candidates, and has spent about $17.4 million to oppose “the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices [and]…the decriminalizaiton of certain activities.” Last year, CCA sent a letter to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons in exchange for a 20 year managing contract in which states had to promise to keep their prisons 90 percent full.

AlterNet / by Chauncey DeVega

According to conservatives, the news media has a “liberal  bias”: this is a foundational tenet of the Right-wings propaganda and disinformation campaign against the American people.

Black youth are running amok in mass and attacking white people across the country in a bacchanal of violence known as “the knockout  game”.  But, if  there is a “liberal media”, why is the knockout game story being circulated by  such “liberal” news outlets like MSNBC, CNN, The NY Times, USA Today, and others? Why would the liberal media legitimate the knockout game narrative instead of suppressing or covering it  up?

The “liberal media” is a myth and a lie. There is no liberal media; there is only a corporate media. The knockout game is a moral panic wherein isolated incidents of random street crime are reframed as a nationwide plague upon innocent and vulnerable white people by deviant and naturally criminal blacks.

The sensational allure of the knockout game is drawn from the same racial and cultural imagination as D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist film Birth of a Nation. The cultural trope of the black brute, rapist, and thug, are as central to American memory as is George Washington, apple pie, and the myth of rugged individualism and American exceptionalism.

Consequently, the allure of the knockout game for white conservatives and the Right-wing media (in an era where racism and conservatism are one in the same) is irresistible and instinctive. The supposedly “liberal media” is influenced by similar forces.

Research in media studies, sociology, communications, and political science has repeatedly demonstrated that this supposedly “liberal” news media exaggerates and misrepresents the amount of crime in American society, emphasizes crimes committed by blacks against white people, underplays and does not report crimes committed by whites against black people (and or other white people), and actively reproduces white racist narratives that link African-Americans with crime and criminality.

Ultimately, the moral panic about the knockout game has little to do with crime and public safety. The knockout game meme is a byproduct of a white cultural obsession with black criminals, and a reflection of a political environment where insecurity about changing racial demographics, and the election of the United States’ first black president, have combined to create cognitive and emotional upset for a good number of white Americans. These racial fears, resentments, and anxieties are catered to and nourished by a Right-wing media that birthed and rapaciously disseminated the knockout game narrative.

It is important to note that crime is at record lows in the United States. Most crime is intraracial. A person is more likely to be victimized by someone they know and who looks like them than by a stranger.

Perhaps, the appeal of the knockout game narrative lies in its randomness? Maybe the knockout game is especially pernicious and salacious in that regard? If that is the case, there are many other crimes in the United States that should be given at least the same amount of attention by the news media as has been received by the knockout game.

There is no equivalent moral panic about the mass shootings committed by white men, in which dozens, if not hundreds of people, have been killed and injured. Likewise, there is no mass hysteria about the record growth in the number of white hate groups and militias with the expressed intent of overthrowing the United States government and of waging a war on people of color.

The moral panic, by design, exaggerates isolated incidents into a plague and epidemic that is a threat to all “good” people in “normal” society.

Applying that logic beyond the knockout game, why is there not a moral panic about white female teachers who have been repeatedly caught having sex with their underage students? There is an epidemic of drug use by white folks. Yet, there is no moral panic.

There have been unconscionable crimes committed by white young people against blacks–such as the case in Joliet, Illinois where four white teenagers killed two African-American men, dismembered the bodies, and then had sex on top of the corpses.

Blacks and other people of color are disproportionately the victims of white hate crimes, but there is relative silence by the mass media about that fact. White men are over represented among serial killers. They are also more likely to be child rapists, consume child pornography, commit treason, and participate in domestic terrorism. White men in the finance and banking industries committed criminal acts which destroyed the United States’ and worlds’ economies.

Again, there is no moral panic. White leaders are not called upon to denounce the criminals and thugs in their communities; by contrast, the demand by white folks, conservatives in particular, that black people apologize and “take responsibility” for “black crime”, is a ritual of American civic and public life.

There is no discussion of “white crime” in the United States news media.

When white people commit crimes, they are not represented as a collective reflection of white people. White privilege demands that the ill deeds of white people are framed as individual acts that reveal nothing about white people in mass. Black people are almost uniquely identified with crime, and thus subjected to group stigma because of it.

The link between black people and criminality in American society is so mnipresent that it has been the basis of political campaigns (see the infamous Willie Horton ad and the Republican Party’s decades-long Southern Strategy) and influences racial attitudes on a subconscious level as measured by implicit bias tests, and public opinion as revealed by the impact of symbolic racism on white Americans’ political values and beliefs.

Ironically, the knockout game is more proof that there is no “liberal media”. A liberal media would not–with those few exceptions of responsible reporting that exposed the knockout game epidemic as a moral panic and lie–circulate a narrative born from white supremacist websites, and other fringe, even by contemporary conservatism’s low standards, sources such as WorldNetDaily and the American Thinker.

The phrase “if it bleeds it leads” has been used to describe how the news media frames its stories and coverage. I would suggest that the above language should be modified in the following way: “if it bleeds it leads, especially if the ‘victims’ are white and the ‘perpetrators’ are black”. The “liberal media” and its Right-wing equivalent both abide by this mantra.

The moral panic around black young people and the knockout game is an object lesson in how the “liberal” and “conservative” media may be more alike than different when it comes to their shared obsession with “black crime”.

(AP Photo/Dave Martin)

For full article click the picture

As Rethinking Schools began to explore the school-to-prison pipeline, we searched for a construct that would help us understand how the criminalization of youth fits into the larger social picture. At just that moment, we discovered The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander.

    Alexander poses a thought-provoking and insightful thesis: Mass incarceration, justified and organized around the war on drugs, has become the new face of racial discrimination in the United States. Since 1970, the number of people behind bars in this country has increased 600 percent.

    What is most striking about these numbers is the racial dimension. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, DC, for example, it is estimated that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.

    Equally disturbing is Alexander’s description of the lifelong civil and human rights implications of being arrested and serving time in prison, and the implications for what many call our “post-racial” society. As she explains in her introduction:

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

The full interview can viewed by clicking:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org//cmshandler.asp?archive/26_02/26_02_sokolower.shtml