The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality

0:01 I think our criminal justice system is working as intended. It is only broken to the extent that our society is broken. If your intention is to jail massive numbers of people, if you believe that prison is an effective means of dealing with the myriad social needs of the African American community, then it's pretty effective. In fact, there's a long history in this country of dealing with problems in the African American community. through criminal justice system, criminalizing social problems in a way that we don't do in other communities. For instance, if you looked at the research, you would find that somewhere around 60 to 70 percent of the people in prisons and in jails are suffering some sort of mental health problem. Up as a 50 percent go in there dealing with some sort of chemical dependency. Viewed from another lens, these are public health problems.

0:51 One could look at the massive number of African-American men who are out of work and the intersection between that and prison. Or one could look at where prisons are located. And you would find that a lot of times prisons are located in rural regions where all other industries effectively shut down. And you might think of that as actually an employment problem and not a criminal justice problem. The enduring view of African-Americans in this country is as a race of people who are prone to criminality. I mean, literally, we have the notion of black people as, you know, criminals written into our Constitution. We have a fugitive slave clause, which effectively makes all the things that are normal for any other American in that period illegal for black people, you know, to pursue your own freedom was illegal. Slavery, you know, was enforced by the criminal

1:39 justice system, the slave laws. It made, you know, very, very ordinary things like learning to read effectively a criminal act. Frederick Douglass is an escaped slave. He's a criminal. He's stolen his body, as he says in one of his speeches. Harriet Tubman is running a massive criminal conspiracy, stealing people. I know we all love Martin Luther King today, but in his time by the highest powers in the American justice system, Martin Luther King was viewed as a criminal by J. Edgar Hoover, arguably perhaps by the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration. I say that because they signed off on the bugging you know, of his home and, you know, wherever he was. The lens of criminal justice is the way this country has traditionally regarded black people.

2:27 I don't know that anything is broken at all. The deeper question is, are we okay with something on the order of 4,000 African-American males per 100,000 being in jail? Are we okay with that? Are we okay with, you know, there being a one in three chance for every African-American male born in this generation, eventually during some sort of time in prisons and in jails. Are we all right with that? And that goes to the deeper question of are we all right with black people in the position that they are in our society? Or do we have some sort of long-term commitment to justice?