The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-incarceration

A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance

A. Mikulich, L. Cassidy, M. Pfeil

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349433995, 9781137002860
• eBook ISBN: 9781137032447
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Criminal Law

The Scandal of White Complicity and US Hyper-incarceration is a groundbreaking exploration of the moral role of white people in the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos in the United States.

PART I

STRUCTURE

CHAPTER 1

HYPER-INCARCERATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS AND LATINOS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Alex Mikulich

When we lock up so many people—especially so many poor people and minorities—and then treat them like garbage, we tell on ourselves.

Paul Butler¹

This book represents a journey into our past, present, and future. My journey took a critical turn 12 years ago when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. It was a fairly mundane commute on the Chicago El (the short term Chicagoans use for the elevated metropolitan train system) from my home in the far North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park to Olive Harvey College on the far South Side. I was attending a black scholars conference on the economic empowerment of Chicago’s South Side African American neighborhoods. For starters, a critical piece of this story that I will relate in Chapter 2 is my own fear of going to the South side. I feel ashamed to admit this fear because I had already experienced the profound welcome of African Americans at parishes and when working with social activists in Washington DC, Boston, and San Francisco. In fact, it was their welcome and stories that drew me to Olive Harvey College.

The conference was extraordinary in the way it included academics, social activists, parents, teens, and those who were formerly incarcerated. There were intensive debates about how to contend with the “cradle to prison” pipeline strangling South Side Chicago neighborhoods. These debates involved parents and children, including members of gangs, who desired nothing more or less than a stable relationship with their loved ones, free of prison and violence. As I listened, I was struck by the gap between the prevalence of thinly veiled media stereotypes and the humanity of the conference participants. I was also struck by the absence of white folks—I was one of a few who attended the weekend conference—there were no leaders of the archdiocese, no white religious leaders of any tradition, no white leaders of social justice and peace organizations, and no representatives from the Mayor’s office, as far as I could discern. Recalling the numerous times I had heard whites rely upon stereotypical characterizations of African Americans and remembering the general absence of African American voices in Roman Catholic theological discourse, I began to understand a modicum of the pain that W. E. B. Du Bois must have felt as he experienced “double-consciousness,”² of realizing that whites did not recognize his humanity or their own inhumanity.

There I began to learn how conference participants were telling on me.

Or, as the former prosecutor Paul Butler puts it more incisively in the epigraph above, what we as a society do to the incarcerated is a way “we tell on ourselves.” Good white people tell on ourselves every day when we consciously and unconsciously accept disproportionate advantages for ourselves while simultaneously contributing to pervasive and persistent disadvantages for people of color in every sphere of life including health, wealth, income, education, housing, and the incarceration system.³ A sign of our times is that good white people, including those who claim to be paragons of antiracism, are formed by, participate in, benefit from, and contribute to a white-dominated racial hierarchy structured into every institution and permeating culture.⁴

By white domination—or white supremacy—I do not mean only or primarily the overt racism of white supremacist individuals or groups such as the KKK. Rather, my emphasis is on a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and nonwhite subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.⁵

Hyper-incarceration is not simply one issue among others. Hyper-incarceration is the latest reincarnation of the relationship between white domination and subordination of people of color in the United States. Put in the broadest perspective, the historical relationship between white domination and subordination of people of color has never been fundamentally dismantled. I argue, in Chapters 1 and 2, that hyper-incarceration is a new form of a very old relationship. The impoverished urban ghetto and its twin—hyper-incarceration of poor people of color—find parentage in historical processes of white domination nurtured within the culture and structures of white hypersegregation.

Hyper-incarceration reveals the soul of white America.⁶ The story of white complicity in hyper-incarceration cuts deeply into the historical wound of racism in America. Any claim that we live in a so-called postracial society would be laughable if the consequences of racism were not so deadly. Whatever story whites might like to tell about individual merit, achievement, and racial innocence, the enduring history of white superiority and racial oppression goes to the soul of white identity.

I do not use the term “complicity” loosely or lightly. By “complicity” I mean the ways that whites benefit from, consciously and unconsciously participate in, and contribute to the policies, laws, institutions, and social structures that create, sustain, and perpetuate hyper-incarceration. These structures are sinful because they violate the Imago Dei and constitute “a dishonor to the Creator.”⁷

As Blessed Pope John Paul II explained in his encyclical letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, sinful social structures do not arise out of nowhere; rather, there are at least four ways that individuals remain responsible for sinful structures, including as (1) creators, supporters, or exploiters; (2) accessories through complicity or indifference; (3) accessories through fatalistic violence; and, (4) accessories through consecration of the status quo.⁸

In his introduction to “Letters to a White Liberal,” Thomas Merton called attention to the universal vocation of the Church, monks, and of all people of faith to become responsible for history by witnessing to Christ in how we treat every brother and sister now, especially those most denigrated in society. The measure of our faithfulness is not found in our “reassuring” assumption that God sees “our sincerity,” but in the actual condition of freedom of African Americans. Merton quotes Pope Paul VI’s comments opening Vatican Council II that it is the obligation of the Church “to manifest Christ to the world” within history. The opening words of Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, make this historical responsibility to manifest Christ evident:

The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well.⁹

In this theological, spiritual, and moral context, we must ask, “To what extent is ‘the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of incarcerated men and women and their families’ ‘the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ in America today’?” We may miss the import of the question if we fail to grasp the way history shapes us individually and collectively. I believe that James Baldwin’s enduring spiritual, moral, and practical wisdom concerning the presence of our past is a critical starting point for the work of engaging white complicity in hyper-incarceration:

White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this.¹⁰

We will not understand ourselves until white Americans collectively contend with our role in the enduring legacy of slavery. It will be difficult because it means contending with the “pain and terror” that historically enslaved and brutalized people of color have endured since the “founding” of the Americas. If white people are to address this reality responsibly, we will need to gain critical insight into the ways that the US incarceration system carries the past in the present. In particular, this chapter explores the ways hyper-incarceration finds historical roots in four ways: (1) how US law defines whiteness as the power to own and exclude; (2) through the enduring “cultural logic” of lynching; (3) through the emergence of the “New Jim Crow” in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and (4) through the expanding use of convict labor and prison privatization.

VITAL PRISON STATISTICS

The United States incarcerates more people than does any country in the world, including China. Whereas Canada imprisons 116 people for every 100,000 adults and children and Russia 628 per 100,000, the United States incarcerates 750 people per 100,000. In 2007, nearly 2.3 million people were housed in US prisons and jails, and more than 7.3 million were in the criminal justice system.¹¹ This means that as of 2007, 1 of every 31 US adults is either in prison or in jail or under probation or parole in the correctional system. By comparison, Wal-Mart’s global workforce totals 1.8 million people, just ahead of McDonalds, with the most employees of any firm in the world. Comprising only 6 percent of the global population, the United States holds 25 percent of all the world’s prisoners. In 1923, the United States had 61 state and federal prisons. By 1974, that number was 592; and by the year 2000 it exceeded 1,000.

If we look back at any point in the period between 1925 and 1975, the United States incarcerated only one-tenth or 1 percent of the US population or about 100 Americans out of every 100,000. ¹² Beginning in the 1970s, however, both state and federal prison populations boomed. The number of inmates in state prisons grew 708 percent between 1972 and 2008 before dropping in 2009.¹³ There is no indication that the decreases in 26 states constitute the beginning of a long-term trend. At the same time, there were also signifi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Invisibility of White Complicity in Hyper-incarceration
• Part I: Structure
• Part II: Culture
• Part III: Spirituality
• Index