Jim Crow 3.0: Denial, Human Rights, and American Racialised Mass Incarceration

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‘[W]e will not end mass incarceration without a recommitment to the movementbuilding work that was begun in the 1950's and 1960's and left unfinished. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch. If we fail to rise to the challenge, and push past the politics of momentary interest convergence, future generations will judge us harshly.’ INTRODUCTION Denial can be powerfully toxic on the social and political soul of a nation and its people. Right now, the United States of America is lost in a thick fog of denial regarding the uncomfortable truths about racialised mass incarceration. The United States has only ‘5% of the world's population, but houses 25% of the world's prisoners.’ Among that 25%, ‘blacks and Hispanics, together account for about two thirds of the state prison population’, and this figure does not even include those in local jails, and federal prisons. Considering the total number of the nation's incarcerated, blacks alone account for, ‘more than 40% of the current prison population, while making up only 12% of the U.S. population.’ It is clear that the practice of racialised mass incarceration has dramatically changed ‘the racial and economic caste of the prison population.’ Something is wrong with this picture; and America is ‘just beginning to reflect upon the political and cultural meaning of this new [prison] institution, upon what it means for America to be a mass imprisonment society.’ The issues of race, mass incarceration, and human rights in the United States, is beginning to get some academic attention, as it should. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute concluded that, in America, ‘[t]he disproportionate incarceration rate of minorities in general, and blacks in particular, is one of the most pressing civil rights issues of our time.’ Thus, it is clear to many scholars that racialised mass incarceration in the American criminal justice system has become a debilitating ‘modern plague’ on the social, political, and economic fabric of America. But the plague of mass incarceration is not simply about putting large numbers of people behind bars, but rather, ‘it's about law enforcement using the power of criminal sanctions to target, isolate, demonize, and oppress an entire group of people and their communities based simply on race.