Guest: Dr. Alice Green, former Executive Director of The Center for Law and Justice and past candidate for Lieutenant Governor on the Green Party line, talks about why our country's mass incarceration is racism. (prerecorded)
Dr. Green's talk is from the End the New Jim Crow workshop that was given in Poughkeepsie. While incarceration rates in America are astounding compared to other countries, there is even more going on. Mass incarceration is a moneymaker for private corporations, and we have seen how effective the weapons makers have been in pushing for endless wars. America is a corporate ruled state, so that policies about energy, foreign relations, healthcare, and media communications are all written by corporate lobbyists. Why would our prison system be any different? A chart of US wars in the last decade would look very much like the one above. So would the cost of healthcare and the percentage of our population denied health coverage.
There was a point in Dr. Green's presentation, however, that went beyond the terrible costs of America's corporatism. She told the audience that African Americans are considered two things by the white majority: mentally inferior and dangerous. So will the mass incarceration of black men end when the corporate state is democratized? Or is there an underlying racism in our society that must be addressed before all races and ethnic groups are given their equal rights?
