• of a Generation
In 2014 nearly 2.5 million people
are locked up in U.S. prisons.
• That is 25% of all people imprisoned in the world!
60% of those prisoners are Black and Latino,
among them, hundreds of thousands of women.
Growth of the prison population
• From 300,000 in the 1970s
– it’s about 1000% higher
today.
• The numbers of women in
prison have increased
800% in the past 30 years.
• Along with this the
epidemic of police
brutality and murder.
• This is the criminalization
of youth!
2.5 million in prison + 7.0 million
on probation or parole + millions
of families members =
The outrageous math of
MASS INCARCERATION
32% of Black men 20 to 29 years
old are in prison, on parole or on
probation on any given day!
Millions of immigrants have been detained and
deported – including young children
Black and Latino youth of
this country have a target
on their backs.
Mass incarceration, police terror,
criminalization = a slow genocide.
Stolen Lives – 1000s killed by police
HOW DID WE
GET HERE?
The struggle of
Black people for
Civil Rights and
liberation in the
1960s
Awoke the country,
especially the youth and
put resistance and
revolution in the hearts
of millions.
It was the catalyst for powerful
movements of . . .
Women
Students and Veterans
Black Liberation
Chicano youth
Farmworkers
Anti-war soldiers
The response of the Nixon regime was to find a way to
crush the resistance of the Black community without
appearing too obvious about it. Thus began
the “war
on drugs” . . .
Under Reagan the “War on Drugs”
was fully implemented. Mass
incarceration did not arise from an
epidemic of crime – it has grown
beside the militarization of police and
the criminalization of whole peoples.
In the 1980s and
1990s factories in
the U.S. were shut
down and
production moved
to other, low wage
countries. Millions
of people in the
inner city were left
with no jobs, no
future except . . .
• What we now know as the
New Jim Crow:
• Mass incarceration
• Police terror
• Criminalization
School cutbacks, privatization of education, children
treated as criminals – even tried in adult courts =
school as a pipeline to prison.
School spending
Prison spending
10s of thousands of U.S.
prisoners are kept,
sometimes for years, in
conditions the United
Nations describes as
TORTURE.
The construction of
super max prisons, the
so-called Special
Housing Units (SHU) and
long periods of solitary
confinement.
Obama has earned the
title “Deporter-in-Chief
having deported 2 million
immigrants, including
children from Central
America put on a fast track
to deportation.
Immigration detention in
the U.S. has grown fast. In
2011, the Department of
Homeland Security held
429,000 immigrants in
over 250 facilities across
the country
Militarization: Police & the Border
Border Patrol agents have
increased in number from
9,800 in 2001 to 21,400 in
2012
In 2014 the United States army
gave away 13,000 armored
trucks to the Department of
Homeland Security which then
gave them to local police forces
across the U.S.
• Many of the conditions for genocide –
isolation & demonization of certain groups,
brutality & criminalization & massive
incarceration – already exist.
• Genocide does not require a master plan but a
build up of oppression and brutality that goes
unchallenged.
• A slow Genocide could become a fast one.
• The slide toward such horrors must be
stopped with RESISTANCE!
RESISTANCE!
• Two major hunger
strikes in 2011 and
2013 led by
prisoners in the
Special Housing Unit
at Pelican Bay prison
in California were
joined by more than
30,000 prisoners
around the state and
country
• Powerful protests to STOP “Stop & Frisk”
mobilized thousands in New York, forcing the
government to take a step back. RESISTANCE!
Important outbreaks of struggle in
the wake
. of the murders of Oscar
Grant in Oakland, Trayvon Martin in
Florida and Andy Lopez in Santa
Rosa, California.
RESISTANCE!
Struggles have broken out in response to the
police murders of --Eric Garner, New York
Alejandro Nieto, San Francisco
Omar Obrego, Los Angeles
Ezell Ford, Los Angeles
Carlos Mejia, Salinas, California
Yanira Serrano, Half Moon Bay, California
James Boyd, Albuquerque, New Mexico
And many more police murders across the
country -
RESISTANCE!
FERGUSON!
Justice for Michael Brown!
Taking Resistance to a new level.
Carl Dix and Cornel West helped initiate
the Stop Mass Incarceration Network
Carl Dix: A revolutionary
Communist
Cornel West: A revolutionary
Christian activist.
And the October
Month of Resistance
to Mass Incarceration,
Police Terror,
Repression and the
Criminalization of a
Generation:
“The October Month of Resistance
must be like a giant STOP sign
stuck right in the face of American
society, day after day, so that it
can’t be
covered up,
whited out,
or ignored,
or neutralized
or suppressed”.”
IF you’re treated like a suspect, a gang banger or drug
dealer just because of the color of your skin,
IF you’ve had a friend or loved one killed by police,
IF you, or a loved one, is one of 2.4 million locked up, or in
the clutches of the criminal “Injustice” system,
IF you, or your family are targeted, detained or deported
cuz you came from “Somewhere Else”,
OR, IF YOU JUST HATE how other people are treated and
want it to STOP,
Then . . .
YOU must ACT!
Spread the Stop Mass Incarceration
Pledge of Resistance:
Today we pledge:
Black lives matter. Latino lives matter. All lives matter.
• Mass incarceration: WE SAY NO MORE!
• Police murder: WE SAY NO MORE!
• Torture in the prisons: WE SAY NO MORE!
• Criminalization of generations: WE SAY NO MORE!
• Attacks on immigrants: WE SAY NO MORE!
We will NOT be silent. We WILL resist!
Until these shameful horrors really are... NO MORE
Links to STOP MASS INCARCERATION materials
Stop Mass Incarceration website:
Stopmassincarceration.net
Stop Mass Incarceration pledge of resistance poster
Videos of Cornel West and Carl Dix
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7l3W4-Xs0U&authuser=0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCy-t-c-5lI&authuser=0
Alice Walker’s poem “Gather”
Alice Walker's Garden
Revolution newspaper