NCJ Number
188979
Journal
Corrections Compendium Volume: 25 Issue: 9 Dated: September 2000 Pages: 6,8,10,28-29,30
Date Published
September 2000
Length
6 pages
Annotation
This review examines official statistics on race and imprisonment since the mid-19th century and firsthand accounts of the role of prisons in the life of the Black community and concludes that social control and racial oppression are important and enduring functions of prisons.
Abstract
The data revealed that ethnic minorities and, after the Civil War, racial minorities have always been overrepresented in the country’s prisons. In addition, no group in United States history has experienced such conditions of continuing deprivation and injustice as have African-Americans, including injustice under laws that explicitly allowed slavery and, later, racial segregation. Data starting in 1880 revealed a gradual but consistent increase in Black representation in prison, together with a gradual decline in their representation in the general population. The early penitentiaries held few Black persons, because most were essentially incarcerated on slave plantations with regimes of what have been euphemistically termed domestic discipline. Emancipation led to control strategies that featured violence or involved a variety of coercive labor regimes akin to slavery through arrests on minor derelictions. Plantation prisons and chain gangs were southern institutions; variations existed in some western States. Northern States had walled maximum-security prisons. Today a destructive and arguably unjust war on drugs ravages inner-city Black communities and brings high rates of arrest and incarceration. The analysis concludes that an authoritative history on prisons’ effects on African-Americans would likely highlight the destructive effect of this institution on both the individuals incarcerated and on the larger community drained of vital human resources by sentencing patterns that increasingly make the prison an extension of the inner city. 60 references