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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Going Downstate: Prisons and the New American Racism |
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by Paul Street
(No verified email address) |
10 Sep 2001
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Here is an excerpt of a very thoughtful article that examines systematic racism's persistence in certain institutions two generations after the end of legal discrimination. The local significance couldn't be greater, with the U of I and Hoopeston's quest for a prison to revive its economy figuring prominently in the argument. Although the Matt Hales of the world are easy to pick out, racism persists in ways that are much more difficult to root out. When we begin addressing these issues, we can make progress; when we put our heads in the sand and think racism is over except for the likes of Matt Hale, we fool ourselves and sell our community short. ML |
The excerpt:
"Going Downstate"
Corrections, indeed. Nowhere, perhaps, is the persistence and even resurgence of racism more evident than in America's burgeoning "correctional" system. At the turn of the twentieth century, blacks are 12.3 percent of U.S. population, but they make up fully half of the roughly two million Americans currently behind bars. On any given day, 30 percent of African-American males ages twenty to twenty-nine are "under correctional supervision"-either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. And according to a chilling statistical model used by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a young black man age sixteen in 1996 faces a 29 percent chance of spending time in prison during his life. The corresponding statistic for white men in the same age group is 4 percent. The remarkable number and percentage of persons locked up by the state or otherwise under the watchful eye of criminal justice authorities in the United States-far beyond those of the rest of the industrialized world-is black to an extraordinary degree.
This harsh reality gives rise to extreme racial dichotomies. Take, for example, the different meanings of the phrase "going downstate" for youths of different skin colors in the Chicago metropolitan area. For many white teens, those words evoke the image of a trip with Mom and Dad to begin academic careers at the prestigious University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or at one of the state's many other public universities. But for younger Chicago-area blacks, especially males (just 6 percent of the state's prisoners are female), "going downstate" more likely connotes a trip under armed guard to begin prison careers at one of the state's numerous maximum- or medium-security prisons. Indeed, Illinois has 149,525 more persons enrolled in its four-year public universities than in its prisons. When it comes to blacks, who make up 12.25 percent of the public university population, it has 5,500 more prisoners, making blacks 66 percent of the state's prisoners. For every African-American enrolled in those universities, at least two are in prison or on parole in Illinois.
Follow this link for the entire article: |
See also:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/archive/su01/street.shtml
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