American Prisons and the African-American Experience: A History of Social Control and Racial Oppression.
Corrections Compendium › Vol. 25 Nbr. 9, September 2000
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American Prisons and the African-American Experience: A History of Social Control and Racial Oppression.
The history of American prisons one of growth that has occurred largely on the backs of minorities. This pattern of growth holds from the earliest days in which reasonably comprehensive statistics have been kept on American prisons. Today, this trend applies most obviously to African-Americans, particularly in the context of our war on drugs, and is more apparent than ever. Statistics on the uses of prisons for minorities, when read together with firsthand accounts of the role of prisons in the life of the African-American community since emancipation, point to social control and racial oppression as important and enduring functions of American prisons.
The use of prison as a criminal sanction has grown steadily in the modern era, beginning with the advent of the penitentiary, the first modern prison, which emerged at the turn of the 19th century. Today more than ever, the prison has come to dominate criminal justice. Indeed, for most Americans, crime and prison go hand-in-hand. No punishment other than prison comes readily to the modern American mind (Hawkins, 1976; Johnson, 1996). We now hold more than 2 million men and women in our state and federal prisons, a remarkable figure by international standards. The idea of race also is a modern notion, one that has taken hold and expanded in importance during the same period that has brought the prison to cultural dominance as an instrument of punishment. (Before this time, "the term `race' was used very much in the way `culture' is used today" and did not encompass biological factors such as skin color; Gilroy, 1993:8.) Our modern understandings of race and of imprisonment may be related, and may reinforce and validate each other. The behavior of persons who appear "alien" or "strange" -- due in some measure to observable physical differences -- may be readily seen as criminal and, hence, deserving of banishment to the prison, where the...See the full content of this document
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