Tired of it Being "Just-US" In the "Justice" System

Its easy to assume that Americans live in different worlds. For most people of color the realities of the corporate prison industrial complex is a real problem that persists despite the what the corporate media would like us to believe about the "post racial" America we are approaching. And while the problem of over-incarceration is as much an income-inequality problem as as it is a racial one, it still is disproportionately true that a young man of color are more likely to "look like" a criminal than a young white male. This problem persists in almost complete invisibility from the media and the elite political society. One of the best observations exemplifying this was that "White Americans think the justice system by in large is fair, People of Color know it isn't." This difference seems to be why there is a lack of urgency in addressing the crisis of "The New Jim Crow," as it is being called. * There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. * As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race. * If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits -- much as their grandparents and great-grandparents once were during the Jim Crow era. ...The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who have defied the odds and achieved great power, wealth and fame. But what if Obama, who has admitted to violating our nation's drug laws, had been treated like a common criminal...? Most likely, he would be cycling in and out of prison, trapped in the parallel social universe that exists for those labeled felons. Far from being president of the United States, he might be denied the right to vote. He would be subject to many of the same forms of discrimination, stigma, and social exclusion that we supposedly left behind. How many black men and boys are trapped in this undercaste who might have been president of the United States? We will never know. Make no mistake this is the reality a 3rd or more of young men of color are dealing with. The apathy about the immorality and fundamentally illegal about the way the JUST-US system functions is that "Black people just commit more crimes." Are Youth of Color more likely to be criminals? Thankfully Racewire writes a full explanation of the data that was recently released on the subject. ...advocates have uncovered massive racial disparities in the frequency and the nature of these encounters, confirming perceptions of the NYPD as menacing presence in communities of color. 2009 saw an intensification in the disproportionate targeting of Blacks and Latinos compared with whites. The Center reports, “In 2009, a record 575,304 people were stopped, 87 percent of whom were Black and Hispanic, while from 2005 to 2008, approximately 80 percent of total stops made were of Blacks and Latinos, who comprise approximately 25 percent and 28 percent of New York City’s total population, respectively.” The Center's previous research on about 1.6 million stop-and-frisk encounters since 2005 shows that the disparate impact on Blacks and Latinos has virtually no justification on a purely law-enforcement basis....And if you want to get technical about it, "stops made of Whites prove to be slightly more likely to yield contraband," This mirrors findings across the country, almost the same day the St. Louis Courier Journal found that Louisville Metro Police of illegally making up reasons to arrest innocent people. During the past two years, a Louisville Metro police detective has accused at least a dozen defendants — many of them juveniles — of crimes they did not commit. Some...accused spent days or even months in jail before they were exonerated. Every poor community in this country and increasing middle income families have similar stories. Its an epidemic that needs address. But besides stories on the corners like this, and one Sen. Webb of Virginia it is completely invisible.