Good afternoon.
Thank you, thank you so much
for having me here today.
It's really an honor to be here.
And I'm thrilled to
see so many of you
here, eager to join in
meaningful dialogue,
meaningful conversation
about this system
of mass incarceration
in the United States--
a system that has decimated
so many of our communities,
destroyed so many
families, and literally
turned back the clock on racial
progress in the United States.
It seems fitting that this
dialogue would be taking place
during Black History Month, a
time when many Americans pause
to consider-- if only
briefly-- our nation's
racial history,
our racial present,
and our collective future.
And this year marks
the 150th anniversary
of the Emancipation
Proclamation.
[BRIEF APPLAUSE]
And so it seems more than
appropriate to reflect
on the meaning of that
proclamation, indeed
the meaning of emancipation in
this era of mass incarceration.
And this year also marks the
50th anniversary of the March
on Washington.
50 years have passed since
Dr. King delivered his soaring
"I Have a Dream"
speech. "I have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted
in the American dream."
And so, in reflecting
on where we stand today,
150 years after the Emancipation
Proclamation and 50 years
after the March
on Washington, I'm
going to take Martin
Luther King Jr.'s advice
and tell it straight.
As Dr. King put it quite bluntly
just months before his death.
After the Civil Rights
victories had already
been won, after the Civil Rights
bills had already been passed,
he said, quote, "I do
not see how we will ever
solve the turbulent
problem of race confronting
our nation until there is an
honest confrontation with it
and a willing
search for the truth
and a willingness to admit the
truth when we discover it."
And so, in that vein,
I'm going to do my best
to tell the truth, the whole
truth about race in America
today.
It is a truth that many
Americans will deny,
just as they were eager to
deny the truth about slavery
and Jim Crow in their days.
But the truth is this-- we as a
nation have taken a wrong turn
in our stride toward freedom.
We've betrayed Dr. King's dream.
And perhaps nowhere is it
more obvious than right
here in the city of Chicago.
In this great city-- President
Barack Obama's hometown--
a vast new racial
undercast has emerged,
though their plight is rarely
mentioned on the evening news.
Occasionally, we hear about
the homicide rate, the violence
that has been spinning out
of control-- not everywhere,
but in certain spaces,
certain places,
certain communities defined
largely by race and class.
108 young people were killed
in this city last year alone.
Hundreds more were
killed with scarcely
any notice in the media, just
another black man gunned down,
another body in the street.
When Hadiya
Pendleton was killed,
though, the national media took
notice, at least for a moment.
She was a 15-year-old
girl in the wrong place
at the wrong time,
according to the police.
The killing of Hadiya Pendleton,
an honor student shot dead
just days after she performed at
President Obama's inauguration
became a symbol of the city's
stubbornly high homicide rate
and something of a pawn.
She became something of a
pawn in the national debate
over gun control.
Now, I am very grateful that
we are having a national debate
about gun control.
And for the moment, at least,
politicians in the media
are paying attention
to the deaths
of black and brown
school children,
not just white children killed
by deranged mass murderers.
But I am deeply disturbed
that, in this national debate
about violence and
gun control, there
is little honest
discussion of why--
truly why-- some communities are
war zones while others are not.
For while I support gun
control and background checks
and all the rest-- let me be
very clear about that-- I think
we have got to admit that the
reason that some communities
are war zones and some
are not is not, at bottom,
about the number of guns
in those communities.
After all, I live
in a community where
I have come to learn that many
of my white neighbors own guns.
But my neighborhood is safe.
At bottom, what makes
a community safe is not
the number of guns but the
number of good schools,
the number of good
jobs, the number
of educational
opportunities, the number
of opportunities people have
for living a decent life.
[APPLAUSE]
Those are the numbers
that matter most
when it comes to violence.
And, in Chicago, as in
so many other cities
and communities across America,
a choice has been made.
It is a deliberate choice.
And it is a choice
that has been made
over and over and over again.
Rather than good
schools, we have
been willing to build
high-tech prisons.
Rather than create jobs and
invest in the communities that
need it most, we have embarked
on an unprecedented race
to incarcerate that
has left millions
of Americans permanently
locked up or locked out.
William Julius Wilson has
written an excellent book
about the changes
that have occurred
in Chicago and other communities
around the country entitled,
When Work Disappears.
And in that book he cites
statistics showing that,
when you control
for joblessness,
the racial disparities in
violent crime disappear.
In other words, if you
compare white jobless men
with black jobless men,
rates of violent crime
are roughly the same.
Men who are jobless--
particularly chronically
jobless-- are more
likely to be violent.
Now, joblessness does not
excuse violence by any means.
Most people who are jobless
do not resort to violence.
But what we know, and
what is no secret,
is that communities
that are plagued
by exceedingly high
levels of joblessness
are likely to be violent.
But a shift occurred here in
Chicago and in communities
across America-- urban
communities-- beginning in
the late '50s, early
'60s, into the 1970s,
where work disappeared.
It used to be that
factories would
be located in urban areas, near
segregated black communities
so those factories could
have quick and easy access
to cheap black labor.
In fact, as late as
1970, more than 70%
of all African Americans
working in the Chicago area
held blue-collar
jobs, factory jobs.
Almost overnight,
those jobs vanished.
By 1987, the industrial
employment of black men
had plummeted to 28% due
to deindustrialization,
globalization, technological
advancement, factories closing
down, jobs moving overseas.
Hundreds of thousands of
people-- overwhelmingly
black men-- found
themselves suddenly jobless,
trapped in racially-segregated,
jobless communities-- trapped.
Economic collapse occurred in
urban areas across the country.
Now, we could have
responded to this crisis,
to this literal
depression occurring
in cities like
Chicago and Baltimore
and Philadelphia and
Detroit and beyond.
We could have responded to this
crisis, this economic collapse,
this literal depression
with an outpouring of care,
compassion, and concern.
We could have responded
with bailout packages,
economic stimulus programs.
We could have provided
job training, particularly
to young people coming
up in these communities
so they could make
the rough transition
from an industrial economy
to a service-based economy.
But no, we chose
a different road,
a road more familiar when
it comes to matters of race.
We chose the road of division,
punitiveness, and despair.
We, as a society, ended
the war on poverty
and declared the war on drugs.
Black men found themselves
suddenly disposable,
no longer necessary to the
functioning of the US economy,
precisely at the same moment
that a backlash was brewing
against the Civil Rights
movement, a backlash that
made it convenient
for politicians
to demonize black
men as criminals,
as shiftless, as
unwilling to work.
And so this war on
drugs was declared.
And black men found
that they were no longer
needed to work in the
fields, no longer needed
to labor in factories.
And they found
themselves scapegoats,
pawns in political games,
the enemy in a new war,
and were rounded
up by the millions,
locked up, and then
permanently locked out.
And now, decades later,
we stand back and say,
what's wrong with these people?
Why are they killing each other?
Why is there so much violence in
these communities that we have
abandoned, communities where
good schools cannot be found
but high-tech prisons
are a drive away?
What's wrong with them?
I think the deeper question--
the more profound question--
is, what is wrong with us?
[APPLAUSE]
Why have we been
silent for so long?
Well, I've been asked to share
with you the thesis of my book,
The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness.
And I think the
title of the book
pretty much speaks for itself.
[LAUGHTER]
I argue that, today,
in the so-called era
of colorblindness-- and, yes,
even in the age of Obama,
and even right here in
Obama's hometown-- something
akin to a caste system is
alive and well in America.
The mass incarceration of poor
people of color in the United
States is tantamount
to a new caste
system, one that
shuttles our children
from decrepit,
underfunded schools
to these brand new
high-tech prisons.
It is a system that locks
poor people-- overwhelmingly,
poor folks of color-- into a
permanent second-class status
nearly as effectively
as earlier systems
of racial and social
control once did.
In my view, this new system
is the moral equivalent
of Jim Crow.
Now I'm always
very willing, very
happy to admit that there was
a time that I didn't think
this way, that I rejected
this kind of talk out of hand,
a time when I viewed advocates
and activists who were calling
the drug war or mass
incarceration "the new Jim
Crow"-- I thought they
were exaggerating,
engaging in hyperbole.
In fact, there was a
time when I thought
that people who made
those kinds of claims
and those kinds of
comparisons were actually
doing more harm than
good to efforts to reform
our criminal justice system and
achieve greater racial equality
in the United States.
But I finally woke up.
And I woke up after years
of working as a civil rights
lawyer and advocate,
representing victims
of racial profiling
and police brutality
and investigating
patterns of drug law
enforcement in poor
communities of color,
and attempting to assist
people who had been released
from prison as they faced one
closed door after another-- one
legal barrier to their supposed
"reentry" after another,
trying to assist people
"reenter" into a society that
had never shown much use
for them in the first place.
I had a series of
experiences that
began what I call my awakening.
I began to awaken to the reality
that our criminal justice
system now functions
more like a system
of racial and social control
than a system of crime
prevention and control.
As I state in the
introduction, "what
has changed since the
collapse of Jim Crow
has less to do with the basic
structure of our society
than the language we
use to justify it.
In the era of colorblindness,
it is no longer
socially permissible
to use race explicitly
as a justification for
discrimination, exclusion,
and social contempt.
So we don't.
Rather than rely on race, we
use our criminal justice system
to label people
of color criminals
and then engage in
all the practices
that we supposedly left behind.
Today, it is perfectly legal to
discriminate against criminals
in nearly all the ways
in which it was once
legal to discriminate
against African Americans.
Once you're labeled a felon, the
old forms of discrimination--
employment discrimination,
housing discrimination, denial
of the right to vote,
exclusion from jury
service-- suddenly legal.
As a criminal, you have scarcely
more rights and arguably
less respect than a black
man living in Alabama
at the height of Jim Crow.
We have not ended
racial caste in America.
We have merely redesigned it."
But it took me a while
to get to that place.
And like a lot of people,
I was in deep denial.
Even as I was working
as a social justice
advocate-- as a
civil rights lawyer,
I thought I knew
what was going on.
I was disturbed, I
was even appalled
by the high numbers of
black men cycling in and out
of our prisons and jails.
But I thought, well,
that can be explained
by the high rates of
poverty and bad schools
and broken homes, the
legacy of inequality.
Somehow it didn't occur to
me that black folks have
been poor for a long,
long time and uneducated
for a long, long time.
But nothing like the system
of mass incarceration
had ever existed before.
Somehow, it was easy
for me to rationalize
what I saw because
of the prevailing
myths about the system
of mass incarceration
that are fed to us
in countless ways;
that I was fed, in many
respects, in law school;
and that we're fed
through the media.
But I had one
experience that finally
began to open my eyes,
that shook me to my core.
It involved a young
African American man
who was about 19 years old
who walked into my office
and forever changed
the way I viewed not
only our criminal justice
system but how I viewed myself
as a civil rights
lawyer and advocate.
And, at the time, I was
directing the Racial Justice
Project for the
ACLU in California.
And we had just launched
a major campaign
against racial
profiling by the police.
We called it the DWB campaign,
or the Driving While Black
or Brown campaign.
And we had created a
hotline number for people
to call if they believed they
had been stopped or targeted
by the police on
the basis of race.
And we put this hotline number
up on billboards in Oakland
and communities like
San Jose and Sacramento,
urging people to call the
hotline number if they believe
that they've been
stopped or targeted
by the police on
the basis of race.
And, in fact, within
the first few minutes
that we announced this hotline
number on the evening news,
we received thousands of calls.
Our system crashed temporarily.
We had to expand our capacity
to deal with the volume of calls
that we were receiving.
And so I was spending
my day interviewing
one young black or
brown man after another
who had called the hotline to
report discriminatory stops
or searches or
abuse by the police.
And it was very late in the
day and late in the afternoon.
And I was getting
tired, not eager
to go through yet another
round of interviews.
And this young man walks
in carrying a thick stack
of papers, about this thick.
He had taken detailed
notes of his encounters
with the police in Oakland
over about a nine-month period
of time.
He had descriptions
of every stop,
every frisk, every time his car
was pulled over and searched.
He had descriptions
of every encounter,
as well as names of witnesses.
Who was there who
could corroborate
what the police said
and what they did?
On top of that, he had names of
officers-- in some cases, even
badge numbers of officers.
He just had an
unbelievable amount
of documentation and
detail about this pattern
of stops, searches, harassment
he had been experiencing
by the Oakland police.
And the stories he was
telling were corroborated
by other stories we
had heard coming out
of his neighborhood about what
the police were doing there.
And so I started
to think to myself,
well, maybe he's the one.
Maybe he's the one.
Maybe he can be our named
plaintiff in the class action
we're planning to file
against the Oakland Police
Department alleging a pattern
or practice of profiling
and discrimination.
And so I started to get excited.
And I started asking a bunch
of questions, more questions
to get more details.
And I was like, yes.
He is a good looking young man.
He'll do well in the media.
The jury will like him.
He's well spoken.
He's the one!
And then he said something
that made me pause and say,
what did you say?
What did you say?
Did you just say
you're a drug felon?
We had actually been screening
people with felony records.
When people would call
our hotline number,
we would send a form
to them to fill out
asking them a bunch of questions
about their experiences
with the police,
including, have you ever
been convicted of a felony?
We believed we couldn't
represent someone
as a named plaintiff in
a racial profiling suit
if they had been
convicted of a felony
because we knew that, if we did,
law enforcement and the media
would be all over
us saying, well,
of course the police should
be keeping their eye on him.
He's a felon.
He's a criminal.
And we knew that we wouldn't
be able to put someone
with a felony
record on the stand
as a named plaintiff in
a racial profiling case
without them being
cross-examined
for an hour in front of the
jury about their prior criminal
history, thus distracting
the jury's attention away
from the law enforcement
conduct and turning it
into a trial about a young
man's prior criminal past.
And so we had been
screening people
with prior criminal records.
And he had not marked
it on his form,
checked the metaphorical box.
And so I'm sitting there,
looking at him, saying,
did you just say
you're a drug felon?
And he gets quiet.
And he says, finally, yeah.
You know, I'm a drug felon.
But let me tell you
what happened to me.
Let me tell you what happened.
The police planted drugs on me.
They set up me and my friend.
They beat us up.
They framed us.
He starts telling me
this long story about how
he'd been framed by the police.
And the police planted
drugs on them, beat them up.
And I'm just saying,
oh, I'm sorry.
I am sorry.
I'm not going to be
able to represent you
if you have a felony record.
And I tried to explain to
him why that was the case
and how I could understand why
it would seem unfair or wrong.
And he keeps trying to give me
more information, more details.
Now he's giving me the
names of those officers,
their badge numbers, who
can corroborate that story.
And I'm just like, I am sorry.
I am sorry.
I am not going to be
able to represent you.
Then he starts insisting
upon his innocence.
I'm innocent.
I'm telling you, I
just took the deal.
I just took the plea deal
because they told me,
if I just took the deal
that I could just walk.
I wouldn't have to do a day in
prison if I just took the deal.
I'd just get felony
probation, that's it.
It would just be felony
probation, and that's it.
I was innocent, but I
didn't want to do the time.
I was scared to go to prison.
I just I just took the deal.
But I'm telling
you, I didn't do it.
I'm telling you the truth.
I said, I am sorry.
I cannot represent you.
And then he becomes enraged.
And he says to me, you're
no better than the police.
You're no better
than the police.
The minute I tell you I'm a
felon, you just stop listening.
You just can't even
hear what I have to say.
He says, what's to become of me?
What's to become of me?
He says, I can't get a job
anywhere because of my felony
record-- anywhere.
He said, I can't
even get housing.
It's like, I can't
even get access
to public housing because
of my drug felony.
Where am I supposed to sleep?
He says, you know, I sleep
in my grandma's basement
at night because no where
else will take me in.
He says, how am I supposed to
take care of myself as a man?
He said, I can't
even get food stamps.
I can't even get food
stamps to feed myself.
What's to become of me?
He says, good luck finding
one young black man
in my neighborhood they
haven't gotten to yet.
They've gotten to
us all already.
And he snatches all
those papers up,
all those notes and just
starts ripping them up
into tiny little pieces.
He's throwing them in the air.
It's just snowing white
paper in my office.
And he walks out,
yelling at me, you're
no better than the police!
I can't believe I trusted you.
Well, several months after
that I'm doing a public access
television show that
was broadcasting
live out of his neighborhood.
I was doing public
access TV because we
were trying to organize several
thousand people to get on buses
and go to the state capitol to
protest the governor's refusal
to sign racial
profiling legislation.
And so we had been holding
town hall meetings up and down
the state and been doing
a big media campaign.
And it was just a couple of
days before the demonstration.
And I was doing public access
TV in his neighborhood,
trying to urge people
to get on the bus
and go to the demonstration.
Well, immediately after
that show goes off the air--
it was broadcasting live.
The minute it goes
off the air, he
comes bursting into
the studio carrying
this dirty potted plant.
And he comes rushing up to me.
And he's emotional,
on the verge of tears.
And he comes rushing
up to me, and he
thrusts this plant in my arms.
And he says, I'm just here
to tell you I'm sorry.
I'm just here to
tell you I'm sorry.
I've been seeing on the news.
I've been seeing you out there
trying to fight for people,
trying to do the right thing.
And I shouldn't have
treated you like that.
I shouldn't have spoken
to you like that.
He said, I would have
bought you some flowers,
but I still don't
have any money.
So I snatched this plant off
my grandma's front porch.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
He hands it to me.
And then he turns
around and takes off.
He goes running out
of the building.
And I go chasing after him.
He jumps into this broke-down
car and disappears.
Well, several months after
that I'm in my office.
I open up the newspaper.
And what's on the front page?
The Oakland Riders'
police scandal has broken.
It turns out that a
gang of police officers,
otherwise known as
a drug task force,
had been planting drugs on
suspects, beating folks up
in his neighborhood.
And who's identified as one
of the main officers charged
with planting drugs on
suspects and beating folks up?
Well, it was the officer
that he had identified
to me as planting drugs
on him and beating up
him and his friend.
And it really was only then--
I'm embarrassed to say,
but it was really only then
that the light bulb finally
started to go on for me.
And I thought to myself,
he's right about me.
I am no better than the police.
The minute he told
me he was a felon,
I just stopped listening.
I couldn't even hear
what he had to say.
that was the beginning
of me asking myself
some hard questions of myself
as a civil rights lawyer
and advocate.
How am I actually
replicating the very forms
of discrimination,
marginalization, exclusion
I'm supposedly fighting against?
And I also started
asking some questions
about the system itself.
Why was it that we
hadn't been able to find
a single black man from his
neighborhood they hadn't gotten
to yet?
What was really going on?
And that was the
beginning of my journey
of asking myself and others
a lot of hard questions,
doing an enormous
amount of research,
and listening more carefully
to the stories of those cycling
in and out of our prison system.
And what I learned
in that process
was that my great crime
wasn't in refusing
to represent an innocent man.
My great crime was in
imagining that there
was some path to racial
justice that did not include
those we view as guilty.
And I also learned some
facts that blew my mind.
I learned there are more
African American adults
under correctional control
today-- in prison or jail,
on probation or parole--
than were enslaved in 1850,
a decade before the
Civil War began.
I learned that, as of 2004, more
black men were disenfranchised
than in 1870, the year the
15th Amendment was ratified
prohibiting laws that explicitly
deny the right to vote
on the basis of race.
Now, of course, during
the Jim Crow era,
poll taxes and
literacy tests operated
to keep black folks
from the polls.
Well, today, in
some states, felon
disenfranchisement
laws accomplish
what poll taxes and literacy
tests ultimately could not.
A black child born
today has less
of a chance of being
raised by both parents
than a black child
born during slavery.
And this is due,
in no small part,
to the mass incarceration
of black men.
The first article to appear
in the mainstream press,
I believe, about this was in
The Economist magazine, entitled
"How the Mass Incarceration of
Black Men Harms Black Women."
And in the article,
it was explained
that the majority of
black women in the United
States-- including about 70%
of black professional women--
are unmarried and that
this is due largely
to the mass incarceration of
black men, which takes them out
of the dating pool
at the years they
would be most likely to commit
to a partner, to a family.
But what's worse is
that, by branding
them criminals and
felons at early ages--
often before they're
even old enough to vote--
they're rendered
permanently unemployable
in the legal job market
for the most part,
virtually guaranteeing
that most will
cycle in and out of
prison, sometimes
for the rest of their lives.
Now, this isn't
a phenomenon that
affects just some
small segment of
the African American community.
No, to the contrary, in major
urban areas in the United
States today, more than half
of working-age African American
men now have criminal
records and are thus
subject to legalized
discrimination
for the rest of their lives.
It was reported
a number of years
ago that right here
in Chicago, if you
take into account prisoners,
if you actually count them
as people-- and, of
course, prisoners
are excluded from poverty
statistics and unemployment
data.
You know, that's masking the
severity of racial inequality
in the United States.
But if you actually
count prisoners
as people in the
Chicago area, nearly 80%
of working-age African American
men have criminal records
and are thus subject to
legalized discrimination
for the rest of their lives.
These men are part of a growing
under caste-- not "class,"
"caste"-- a group of people
defined largely by race
relegated to a permanent
second-class status by law.
Now, I find that today,
when I tell people
that I now finally believe
that mass incarceration is
like the a Jim Crow-- a new
caste-like system-- people
react with this
shocked disbelief.
They say, how can you say that?
How can you saw that?
Our criminal
justice system isn't
a system of racial control.
It's a system of crime control.
And if black people just stop
running around, committing
so many crimes, they
won't have to worry
about being locked
up and then stripped
of their basic civil
and human rights.
But therein lies the greatest
myth about mass incarceration,
namely that it's
been driven simply
by crime and crime rates.
It's just not true.
Our prison population quintupled
within a 30-year period
of time-- not doubled or
tripled but quintupled.
Within a 30-year
period of time, we
went from a prison
population of roughly 300,000
to now having an
incarcerated population
of well over two million-- the
highest rate of incarceration
in the world.
But this can't be explained
simply by crime or crime rates.
During that 30
year period of time
when our incarceration
rates quintupled,
crime rates in the
United States fluctuated.
They went up.
They went down.
They went back up
again, went down again.
And today, as bad as crime rates
are in places like Chicago,
nationally crime rates
are at historical lows.
But incarceration rates
have consistently soared.
Most criminologists
and sociologists
today will acknowledge that
crime rates and incarceration
rates in the United States
have moved independently
of one another.
Incarceration rates-- especially
black incarceration rates--
have soared regardless
of whether crime
is going up or down in any
given community or the nation
as a whole.
So what explains the sudden
explosion in incarceration
rates, the birth of a prison
system unprecedented in world
history if not simply
crime and crime rates?
Well, the answer
is the war on drugs
and the get-tough
movement-- that wave
of punitiveness that washed
over the United States.
Drug convictions alone--
just drug convictions
alone-- accounted for
about 2/3 of the increase
in the federal prison
system and more than half
of the increase in the state
prison system between 1985
and 2000, the period of our
prison system's most dramatic
expansion.
Drug convictions have
increased more than 1,000%
since the drug war began.
I mean, to get a sense of how
large a contribution the drug
war has made to mass
incarceration, consider this.
There are more people
in prisons and jails
today just for drug offenses
than were incarcerated
for all reasons in 1980.
[CROWD MAKES DISAPPOINTED
 NOISES]
Now, most Americans violate
drug laws in their lifetime.
Most do-- you don't
have to raise your hand.
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
But the enemy in this war
has been racially defined.
Not by accident,
this drug war has
been waged almost exclusively
in poor communities of color
even though studies have
consistently shown now
for decades that, contrary to
popular belief, people of color
are no more likely to use or
sell illegal drugs than whites.
That's right, or sell.
Now, that defies our
basic racial stereotypes
about who a drug dealer is.
If you picture a drug dealer
in your mind, who do you see?
There was actually
a study conducted
on this subject in the mid
1990s, a national survey.
People were asked,
close your eyes.
And picture in your
mind a drug criminal.
More than 95% of respondents
pictured an African American.
Less than 5% pictured someone
of any other race or ethnicity.
So when Americans think of
drug crime and drug criminals,
they typically think
of black folks.
But the reality is that people
of all races and ethnicities
use and sell drugs.
In fact, where significant
differences in the data appear,
some studies suggest
that white youth
are more likely to engage
in illegal drug dealing
than black youths.
[APPLAUSE]
Drug markets are fairly
segregated by race.
Black folks tend
to sell to blacks.
Whites tend to
sell to each other.
Drug markets are even
segregated by class.
University students sell
to each other, right?
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
Drug dealing happens in all
communities of all colors.
But those who do
time for drug crime
are overwhelmingly
black and brown.
In some states, like
Illinois, 80% to 90%
of all drug offenders
sent to prison
have been one race--
African American.
Now, I know that many
people, when they actually
see the disparities-- see
the data-- will say, yeah,
that's a shame.
That's a shame, but, you know,
we need to get tough on them,
them in the hood
because that's where
the violent offenders are.
That's were the
drug kingpins are.
We need a war on them.
In fact, in my
experience, many people
seem to imagine that
the war on drugs
was declared in response to
the emergence of crack cocaine
in inner city communities
and the related violence.
In fact, for a long
time I believed that.
But it's just not true.
The current drug war was
declared by President Ronald
Reagan in 1982,
before crack began
to ravage inner city communities
and spawn a wave of violence.
President Richard Nixon
was the first to coin
the term "a war on drugs."
But President Ronald Reagan
turned that rhetorical war
into a literal one.
And at the time he
declared his drug war,
drug crime was actually on
the decline, not on the rise.
And less than 3% of
the American population
even identified drugs as the
nation's most pressing concern.
So why declare an
all-out war on drugs
when drug crime is actually
declining, not on the rise
and the American public isn't
too much concerned about it
at the moment?
Well, the answer
is, from the outset,
the war on drugs had
relatively little
to do with genuine concern
about drug addiction
or the harms of drug abuse
and much to do with politics--
racial politics.
Numerous historians and
political scientists
have now documented
that the war on drugs
was part of a grand Republican
Party strategy known
as the Southern
strategy of using
racially-coded, get-tough
appeals on issues of crime
and welfare to appeal to poor
and working-class whites,
particularly in
the South, who were
anxious about, resentful
of, fearful of many
of the gains of
African Americans
in the Civil Rights movement.
Now, I think, to
be fair, we have
to acknowledge that poor and
working-class whites really
had their world rocked by
the Civil Rights movement.
You know, wealthy whites
could send their kids
to private schools,
give their kids
all of the advantages
that wealth has to offer.
But poor and working-class
whites-- many of whom
were themselves struggling
for survival, many of whom
in the South were
themselves illiterate--
they faced a social demotion.
It was their kids
that might get bused
across town to go to
a school that they
believed was inferior.
It was their kids and
themselves who were suddenly
forced to compete on equal
terms for limited jobs
with this whole
new group of people
they'd been taught their
whole lives to believe
were inferior to them.
And then, to make matters
worse from their perspective,
affirmative action programs
created the perception
that black folks were now
leapfrogging over them
on their way to Stanford, Yale,
Harvard, University of Chicago.
[CHEERING]
And off to corporate America.
And this state of affairs
created an enormous amount
of fear, anger,
resentment, anxiety.
But it also created an
enormous political opportunity.
Pollsters and
political strategists
found that
thinly-veiled promises
to "get tough" on them, a group
not-so-subtly defined by race,
could be enormously
successful in persuading
poor and working-class whites to
defect from the Democratic New
Deal coalition and join the
Republican Party in droves.
It was part of the effort to
flip the South from blue to red
with coded racial
rhetoric and getting
tough on crime and welfare.
In the words of H.R. Haldeman,
President Richard Nixon's
former Chief of Staff,
he described the strategy
this way.
Quote, "the whole problem
is really the blacks.
The key is to devise a system
that recognizes this while
not appearing to."
Well, they did.
And a couple years after
the drug war was announced,
crack began to ravage
inner-city communities.
And the Reagan administration
seized on this development,
actually hiring
staff whose job it
was to publicize inner-city
crack babies, crack
dealers, the
so-called crack whores
and crack-related violence.
Many people in here may be too
young to remember that there
was a time when our television
sets were saturated with news
about crack babies and crack
dealers and images of black men
in handcuffs and orange
jumpsuits in court rooms
as communities were
swept and raided.
The "demon drug"
crack hit the news.
And as drug crime and blackness
became conflated in the media,
a wave of punitiveness swept
over the United States.
Legislators started passing
harsh, mandatory minimum
sentences for
minor drug crimes--
sentences harsher
than murderers receive
in many other
Western democracies.
And soon Democrats began
competing with Republicans
to prove they could be
even tougher on them
than their Republican
counterparts.
And so it was
President Bill Clinton
who escalated the drug
war far beyond what
his Republican predecessors
even dreamed possible.
And it was the
Clinton administration
that championed the laws
banning drug offenders
from federal financial
aid for schooling
upon release, banning
drug offenders
and people with criminal
records from public housing.
It was the Clinton
administration
that championed the federal law
denying food stamps to people
with drug felonies.
To a large extent, so many
of the rules, laws, policies,
and practices that constitute
the basic architecture
of this new caste
system were championed
by a Democratic administration
desperate to win back
those so-called
white swing voters,
folks who had defected from the
Democratic party in the wake
of the Civil Rights movement.
But of course, there were more
than a few black politicians
and black voices that were
saying "get tough," too.
The crack epidemic,
in particular,
had created violence that
was spinning out of control.
And fear was sweeping
many communities
about what this drug was doing.
And one thing that has
become abundantly clear
to poor communities of
color is that, if you
ask for good schools, you
aren't likely to get them.
If you ask for jobs or
economic investment,
you won't get that either.
But what we've learned
is that the one thing
poor folks of color can ask for
and get are police and prisons.
[APPLAUSE]
But it seems we got more
than we bargained for.
For now, here we are decades
later with millions of people
cycling in and out of prison,
trapped in a perpetual
under caste.
Now, I find that,
still, many people
who are familiar with
this racial history
will say, well,
that's a shame, too.
But we still need to get tough
on them, declare a war on them
because that is where
the violent offenders are
and the drug kingpins.
What people don't realize is
that this drug war has never
been focused primarily
on rooting out
the violent offenders
or the drug kingpins.
Federal funding in this war has
flowed to those state and local
law enforcement agencies that
have boosted the sheer numbers
of drug arrests.
It's become a numbers game.
State and local law
enforcement agencies
have been rewarded in
cash through programs
like the Edward Byrne
Memorial Grant Program
for the sheer numbers of people
arrested for drug offenses,
virtually guaranteeing that
law enforcement will go out
looking for the so-called
low-hanging fruit-- stopping,
frisking, searching as
many people as possible
to boost their numbers up.
And there results
have been predictable.
The overwhelming majority of
people arrested in the drug war
have been arrested for
nonviolent, relatively-minor
offenses.
In fact, in the
1990s-- the period
of the greatest escalation
in the drug war-- nearly 80%
of the increase in drug arrests
are for marijuana possession,
a drug less harmful than
alcohol or tobacco and at least,
if not more, prevalent in
middle-class white communities
and on college campuses,
as it is in the hood.
[APPLAUSE]
But by waging this drug war
almost exclusively in the hood,
we've managed to create
a vast new racial
under caste in an astonishingly
short period of time.
Now, where is the US Supreme
Court been in all of this?
Well, far from resisting the
rise of mass incarceration,
the US Supreme Court has
eviscerated Fourth Amendment
protections against unreasonable
searches and seizures.
The US Supreme Court has
granted the police license
to stop, frisk, search just
about anyone anywhere as
long as they get "consent."
And what is consent?
Well, consent is when a
police officer walks up
to a young man.
The officer has one hand
on his gun and says,
son, will you put your arms up
in the air so I can frisk you,
see if you've got
anything on you?
Kids says, mhmm.
That's consent.
And that young man just
waved his Fourth Amendment
protections against unreasonable
searches and seizures.
The police do not have to
have a shred of evidence,
no reasonable suspicion,
no probable cause, nothing
to engage in that search,
in that encounter.
And while that may seem
like no big deal, just
an inconvenience, momentary
humiliation, that gets
played out over and over
and over and over again.
The New York Police
Department reported
that, in one year
alone-- one year alone--
they stopped and frisked
more than 600,000 people,
in one year alone,
overwhelmingly
black and brown men.
But the US Supreme Court,
through a series of decisions--
beginning with McCleskey versus
Kemp and then Armstrong versus
United States-- has ruled
that we cannot challenge these
racial disparities,
now, in a court of law.
The court has ruled
that it does not
matter how overwhelming the
statistical evidence might
be of discrimination.
The court has ruled
explicitly that it does not
matter how severe the
racial disparities are.
Unless you can offer proof of
conscious, intentional bias
tantamount to an admission
by an officer they acted
with discriminatory
intent, you can't even
state a claim for
race discrimination
in our criminal
justice system today.
So many of the racial
profiling cases
that I was bringing
10 years ago or more
can't even be filed today.
The court has closed
the courthouse doors
to claims of racial
bias at every stage
of the criminal justice
process from stops and searches
to plea bargaining
and sentencing.
This has made it
virtually impossible
to challenge bias
in our system today
because, after all,
in this so-called era
of colorblindness,
most officers-- like
the rest of us-- know
better than to state
our racial biases out loud.
Most police officers know
better than to say, well, yes,
your honor.
I stopped him, I frisked
him because he was black.
[LAUGHTER]
Most police officers
know better than to state
their stereotypes
or their biases
or their racial
motivations out loud.
But, more importantly, so many
of the biases and stereotypes
that drive law enforcement
decision making today
operate on such an
unconscious level
that many well-meaning,
well-intentioned officers
can't even admit to
themselves their biases.
A well-meaning officer trying
to do right, do his job,
sees a group of young black
kids walking down the street.
Their pants are
sagging a little bit.
Officer thinks to
himself, I'm going
to jump out, frisk them, see if
they've got anything on them.
They're thinking
they're doing their job.
The same officers see a
group of young white kids
walking down the street
in their neighborhood.
It would never occur of them
to jump out, frisk them, have
them lying spread eagle
up against the wall--
never occur to them.
Now, that officer
may not be meaning
those black kids any harm.
But those discretionary biased
decisions play themselves out
over and over again, hundreds
of thousands of times,
guaranteeing huge racial
disparities in our system,
which the US Supreme Court has
ruled we cannot even challenge
in a court of law.
But of course, being
swept into the system
with little hope of challenging
the bias that got you there
is only just the beginning
of the odyssey for so many
because, once you're branded
a criminal or a felon,
you're ushered into a parallel
social universe in which many
of the basic civil
and human rights
supposedly won in the
Civil Rights movement
no longer apply to you.
Discrimination is
legal, countless aspects
of your daily life.
For the rest of
your life, you've
got to check that box on
employment applications asking,
"have you ever been
convicted of a felony?"
It doesn't matter how long ago
that felony may have happened.
It doesn't matter if it was
weeks, years, decades ago.
For the rest of
your life, you've
got to check that box,
knowing your application
is likely going
straight to the trash.
Many people say, oh, you're
making excuses for people.
You're making excuses.
I mean, when you get out
of prison, it may be hard.
It may be tough.
But if you really apply
yourself, you just hustle,
get out there look for a
job, you can find a good job.
I mean, you could get a job
at McDonald's or something.
Well, getting a job at
McDonald's is no easy feat
if you have a felony record.
And in so many of
the communities
to which people who are
branded felonies return,
there are no jobs to be found
in McDonald's or elsewhere.
And some people say
to me, well, people
could start their own
businesses or something,
become entrepreneurs.
[LAUGHTER]
I say, well, most people
coming out of prison
don't have a whole lot of money
to invest in a new business.
But even if they did, hundreds
of professional licenses
are off limits to people who
have been branded felons.
In my state-- in
Ohio, you can't even
get a license to be
a barber if you've
been convicted of a felony.
Housing discrimination,
perfectly legal--
public housing may
be off limits to you.
Private landlords routinely
discriminate against people
with criminal records.
As I mentioned,
under federal law,
you're deemed ineligible
for food stamps
for the rest of your
life if you've been
convicted of a drug felony.
Fortunately, many
states have opted out
of this federal
ban on food stamps.
But it remains the case
that thousands of people
can't even get food stamps to
survive because they were once
caught with drugs.
What are folks are released
from prison expected to do?
You're release your
prison, can't get a job.
You're barred from housing.
Even food stamps-- food--
may be off limits to you.
What do we expect them to do?
Well, apparently, what
we expect them to do
is to pay hundreds or
thousands of dollars
in fees, fines, court
costs, accumulated back
child support, which
continues to accrue
while you're in prison.
And then, in a growing
number of states,
you're expected to
actually pay back
the cost of your imprisonment.
And if that isn't
enough, well, get this.
If you're one of the
lucky few-- the very few--
who actually manages to get
a job straight out of prison,
up to 100% of your
wages can be garnished
to pay back all those
fees, fines, court costs,
cumulative back child support.
What are folks expected to do?
I say, when we step back and
take a look at the system
as a whole, what's it
seem designed to do?
It seems designed, in my
view, to send folks right back
to prison, which is
what in fact happens
the vast majority of the time.
About 70% of people
released from prison return
within a few years.
And the majority of those
who return, in some states,
do so in a matter of months
because the challenges
associated with mere survival
on the outside are so immense.
Now, most of the types of crimes
that land people back in prison
following their release
are crimes of survival
or, even less, infractions on
their parole or probation--
failure to pee in the cup,
to meet with your probation
officer on schedule.
That can land you back in
prison, or crimes of survival,
like theft, shoplifting,
passing bad checks, or crimes
of despair like drug
addiction and drug abuse.
But, of course, some people
who are released from prison
also commit crimes of violence.
Now, we claim to care a
whole lot about violence.
And yet we have created a
system that virtually guarantees
that millions of people
will be unable to work,
will be locked out of
the legal economy, that
will be set adrift.
We create masses of jobless
people stuck in a perpetual
under caste.
And nowhere is that more obvious
than right here in Chicago.
Chicago has been ground
zero in the drug war.
It was recently reported
that more than 70%
of all criminal cases in
Chicago involve a class D felony
drug possession charge,
the lowest-level felony.
To put the situation here in
Chicago in some perspective--
and to put the violence here in
Chicago in some perspective--
consider this.
The parents of the young men
who are members of gangs today--
the parents of those
young men were themselves
targets of the drug war in
the 1980s and into the 1990s.
In 1999, only 992 black men
received a bachelor's degree
from Illinois state universities
while roughly 7,000 black men
were released from
state prison that year
just for drug offenses alone.
They are the parents
of the young men who
now find themselves
trapped in the under caste,
too often venting their rage
and frustration on one another.
A 50-year-old
African American man
told me, recently, a story
about when he was in prison.
He was in federal prison.
He had been sentenced to 18
years for a crack offense.
And when he left, when he
left home he had young sons.
And just as he was
preparing for a release
for his federal
prison term, his sons
began to join him behind bars.
And it wasn't just his sons
but the neighbor's sons.
All the boys on the block
were coming in, too.
The generational cycle had
begun as father and son
found themselves trapped,
cycling in out of the system.
Now, we have millions
of people trapped
in the system, estimated
more than 60 million people
with criminal records
in the United States
today, cycling in and out.
What do we do?
Where do we go from here?
Now, my own view is that, if we
are serious about ending this--
if we are serious about
dismantling mass incarceration,
dismantling this entire
caste-like system that
views people as disposable--
if we're serious about this,
nothing less than a major
social movement will do.
And if you're
tempted to believe--
[APPLAUSE]
Yes.
[APPLAUSE CONTINUES]
If you're tempted to believe
that something less will do--
that we can tinker
with this machine
somehow and get it
right, a few reforms
here are a few reforms there and
get this machine humming back
on track again-- consider this.
If we were to return to
the rates of incarceration
we had in the 1970s
or early 1980s
before the war on drugs and the
get-tough movement kicked off,
we'd have to release four out
of five people who are in prison
today-- four out of five.
More than a million
people employed
by the criminal justice
system would lose their jobs.
Most new prison
construction has occurred
in predominately white rural
communities, communities
that are quite
vulnerable economically.
Now, many of these
communities have
been sold on prisons as an
answer to their economic woes.
And, very often, the
benefits that prisons
provide these communities
are grossly exaggerated.
In some communities,
prisons have turned out
to be a net loss.
But nonetheless, communities
across the America
have now come to believe
that their economy depends
on prisons.
They need the jobs.
Those prisons across America
would have to close down.
Private prison companies now
list on the New York Stock
Exchange, doing quite well.
They would be forced
into bankruptcy.
This system is now
so deeply rooted
in our social, political,
and economic structure
that it's not going
to just fade away.
It's not going to
just downsize out
of sight without a major shift
in our public consciousness,
an upheaval, a fairly
radical shift on our part.
Now, I know there's many people
who say this is just dreaming,
pie in the sky.
There is no hope of ending
mass incarceration in America,
just as many people
were resigned
to Jim Crow in the South and
said, yeah, it's a shame.
But that's just
the way that it is.
I find that many
people of all colors
view the millions cycling in
and out of our prisons and jails
is just an unfortunate
but unalterable fact
of American life.
Well, I am quite certain that
Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker,
Dr. King, Malcolm, and
the many others who
risked their lives
to end earlier
systems of racial
social control would not
be so easily deterred.
[APPLAUSE]
So if we are going
to honor them,
we have got to be
willing to pick up
where they left off and do
the hard work of movement
building, the hard work
of movement building.
Movement building,
I believe, must
be on behalf of poor
people of all colors.
In 1968--
[APPLAUSE]
--Dr. King told
advocates that the time
had come to shift from
a Civil Rights movement
to a human rights movement.
He said meaningful equality
cannot be achieved through
civil rights alone.
Without basic human
rights-- the right to work,
the right to housing,
the right to quality
education-- without basic
human rights, he said,
civil rights are
an empty promise.
So in honor of all
those who labored
to end earlier systems of
racial and social control,
I hope that we will
dedicate ourselves
to building a human
rights movement to end
mass incarceration; a
movement for education, not
incarceration; for jobs, not
jails; a movement that will end
all these forms of
legal discrimination
against people labeled
criminals, discrimination that
denies them their basic
human rights to work,
to shelter, and to food.
Now, what do we need to do to
build this movement, to build
upon the work that
is already being
done in so many communities,
including here in Chicago?
Well, I think we have got
to insist upon telling
the truth, the whole truth.
We've got to be willing to admit
out loud that we, as a nation,
have managed to rebirth
a caste-like system
in this country.
And we've got to
be willing to tell
this truth in our
churches, in our schools,
in prisons, in reentry centers.
We've got to be willing
to tell this truth so
that a great awakening can occur
because, unlike the old Jim
Crow, there are no
signs alerting you
to the existence of
this new caste system.
[APPLAUSE]
The whites-only signs are gone.
The whites-only signs are gone.
But there's new signs
that have popped up
on employment applications,
housing applications, letting
you know who the unwanted,
who the untouchables now are.
But that lack of signs,
the lack of visibility
poses a real problem for
us in movement building
because prisons are out
of sight, out of mind.
If you aren't directly
impacted by this system--
if you don't have a
loved one behind bars,
if you're middle class,
live in a good neighborhood,
you're white-- you can
live your whole life
and have no idea of
what is really going on.
I lived my life, as a civil
rights lawyer, not fully
understanding what was going on.
So if we are going to
engage in movement building,
we have got to make visible
what is hidden in plain sight.
We have got to pull
back the curtain
and help others to
see what we have been
willingly blind to for so long.
And that means
consciousness raising.
It means having difficult
conversations in churches,
in schools, in all kinds
of settings, forcing people
to deal with, reckon with what
we as a nation have done again.
But of course, just a lot of
talk isn't going to be enough.
We've got to be
willing to get to work.
And, in my view,
that means being
willing to build an Underground
Railroad for people released
from prison, an
Underground Railroad
for those who are trying
to make a genuine break
for real freedom--
opening our schools,
opening our doors of
employment, opening our homes,
opening our hearts to people
who need-- desperately
need-- not just support finding
work and housing and food--
and they need
that-- but who also
need love, who also
need acceptance,
who need to know that
we believe in them
and are willing
to stand with them
as they make a genuine
break for real freedom.
But of course, just building
an Underground Railroad
is not going to
be enough either.
Shuttling a few to
freedom one by one--
just as in the
days of slavery, it
wasn't enough to just build
an Underground Railroad
and usher a few to freedom.
You had to be willing
to work for abolition.
I believe that,
today, we have got
to be willing to work
for the abolition
of this system of mass
incarceration as a whole.
[APPLAUSE]
And that means ending the war
on drugs once and for all.
Just end it.
We have spent a
trillion dollars now,
waging this drug war since it
began-- a trillion dollars!
We're constantly being told
we don't have enough money
to pay our teachers.
We don't have enough
money for job programs,
for economic investment in the
communities that need it most.
But apparently we had a
trillion dollars to blow.
And we spent it locking
people up rather than
investing in the communities
that needed it most.
So it's time to shift
to a public health model
for dealing with drug
addiction and drug abuse
and stop criminalizing what
is ultimately a public health
problem for some.
[APPLAUSE]
And we've also got to
end all these forms
of legal discrimination
against people released
from prison,
discrimination that denies
them basic human rights to
work, to shelter, and to food.
But last but not
least, we have got
to shift from a purely
punitive approach to dealing
with violence and violent
crime in our communities
to a more rehabilitative
and restorative approach.
[APPLAUSE]
Yes, one that takes
seriously the interests
of the victim, the offender,
and the community as a whole.
So we have got a
lot of work to do.
And if it feels like too much
and it feels like it just
can't possibly all
be done, I think
we've got to keep in mind
that all of these rules, laws,
policies, and practices that
comprise the system of mass
incarceration, they all
rest upon one core belief.
And it is the same core belief
that sustained Jim Crow.
It is the belief that
some of us are not
worthy of genuine care,
compassion, or concern.
And when we effectively
challenge that core belief,
all of this begins to
fall like dominoes.
A multi-racial, multi-ethnic
human rights movement
must be born, one that
takes seriously the dignity
and humanity of all people.
And it's got to be
multi-racial and multi-ethnic
because, although
this war on drugs
was clearly born with
black folks in mind,
it is a war that has
destroyed the lives of people
in communities of all colors.
And the same racially
divisive get-tough politics
and rhetoric that helped
to birth this drug war
is now leading to another
prison-building boom,
this time aimed at suspected
"illegal immigrants."
So we have got to
connect these dots
and build a multi-racial,
multi-ethnic movement on behalf
of all of us.
But before this movement
can truly get under way,
I believe a great
awakening is required.
We have got to
collectively awaken
from this colorblind
slumber that we've
been in to the realities
of race in America.
And we've got to be
willing to embrace
those labeled criminals--
not necessarily
all their behavior but
them, their humanness.
For it has been the
refusal and failure
to recognize the dignity and
humanity of all people that
has been the sturdy foundation
of every caste system that
has ever existed in
the United States
or anywhere else in the world.
It's our task, I
firmly believe, to end
not just the war on drugs,
not just mass incarceration,
not just any one
policy or practice
but to end this history
and cycle of creating
caste-like systems in America.
Thank you so much for
having me tonight.
And I'm happy to
take any questions.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
