News on Youtube Jan 24 2019

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>> Harrison Ungert: [microphone creaks] Hello.

Good evening. My name is Harrison Ungert and I represent

Ms. Pisano's - one of Ms. Pisano's LANG 120 class.

Yeah and today I'll be talking on mass incarceration

in the United States.

So, I'd like to start off by explaining you a little bit

about how this project came around.

Why I began to research mass incarceration.

Earlier in the semester, Ms. Pisano's class went to the

Burton Street Peace Garden, which is located

in West Asheville.

And it started in 2003 together with DeWayne Barton,

who we had the pleasure of meeting,

and Safi Mahaba and this was their way of peacefully

protesting the War in Iraq and the War on Drugs

here in the United States.

I love the Peace Garden because it was able to talk about - we

were able to see this uniqueness and talk about this uniqueness

and show the human condition in a very different

and original way.

First glance, you see a lot of things like the picture on the

left where they just take toys or other objects and they

repurpose it into artwork that was left to be interpreted.

So, I saw this piece on the left of an African-American babydoll

within an old TV frame and it kind of looks like a target.

It's like a stovetop.

My interpretation or my connection was immediately

to the piece on the right who was an artist.

She worked a lot during the Civil Rights Movement.

Her name is Elizabeth Catlett and it's called Target Practice.

And this piece for me created to show how the African-American

community, or African-American citizens here in the

United States, have been a target for injustice.

So the United States has one of the highest incarceration rates

in the world and is often seen as a very brutal,

racialized, and unfair system to minority groups or people

of lesser income.

Exact numbers change from year to year,

but the number of people in prison in the US remains around

700 out of 100,000 people.

There are more people in prison now than ever before.

Even as crime rates continue to drop down.

So both the people who study crime and the people who write

policies question if the social costs of incarceration exceeds

the social benefits especially for crimes that are non-violent.

So incarceration in the US is socially concentrated among

African-Americans.

At birth an African-American male has a 1 in 3 chance

of going to prison.

By comparison, a white male at birth has less than a 5% chance

of going to prison. And that's at birth.

From arrest to prosecution to incarceration,

African-Americans are singled out for increasing policing,

from profiling to the types of crimes that are highly enforced.

And black men are often charged and prosecuted differently than

their white counterparts and often cannot afford proper

defenses as well in court.

Out of 125,000 federal inmates, 97% have been sentenced for

non-violent crimes.

Prison sentences are also higher - also longer

than seem reasonable.

So there are 1.2 or 1 in 9 African-American children born -

or 1.2 million, excuse me, or 1 in 9 African-American children

born to parents who are in prison.

So research shows that these children,

especially males, have depression -

sorry, have decreased school achievement and higher rates of

behavioral problems and depression than their peers.

These male children often return to criminal activity themselves

making incarceration an inherited trait.

So these people become social outcastes because of their time

in prison.

As social outcastes they have limited access to good jobs,

credit, education, quality healthcare and other means

of improving their lot in life unlike everyone else in society.

In fact, according to a renowned sociologist,

that goes by the name of Bruce Western,

he argues that it is not just individuals being put in a jail,

but whole social groups.

We as a nation have created a deprivation of liberty for a

group of people who in the United States have never truly

been equally represented.

So, people are jailed for non-violent crimes and sentenced

for possession of small amount of drugs.

As I previously mentioned, out of 125,000 federal inmates,

97% have been sentenced for non-violent crimes.

Prison sentences are also longer than seem reasonable.

Here are a few stats.

So one of the big ones is the War on Drugs.

For example, federal law mandates - mandates excuse me,

a maximum sentence of 5 years without parole for possessing

5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin.

For less than 2 ounces of crack an offender can earn upwards of

10 years compared to 5 years for 500 grams of cocaine.

100 times the amount of drugs for half the sentence.

Perhaps no coincidence, but most cocaine users are white

and rich, and most crack users are minorities and poor.

This proves the claim that the War on Drugs was really just a

war on minority citizens in the US.

So, the contracting of workforce inmates in private prisons

creates the demand for more prisoners.

Money is made by the prison administrators and the corporate

stockholders who own shares of those prisons.

Companies are laying off regular workers to hire labor from

private prisons where they can pay workers a tiny fraction of

what they would normally have to pay.

So this drastically increases the profits that companies

can earn.

With the profits specifically from employing prison

labor tripling between 1980 and 1994.

In state run prisons inmates usually work for minimum wage

except in Colorado, excuse me, which allows pay as low

to $2 an hour.

In privately run prisons, the inmates can earn as little as

$0.25 per hour for a 6 hour shift or about $20 a month.

So this amounts to little more than slavery when the fact that

most of the inmates are black is considered.

It begs the question: is this just a new justified form of

human bondage?

There is historical proof that this is true.

After the Civil War during Reconstruction,

many freed slaves were charged with petty offenses,

often never proven and then forced to work in cotton fields,

mines or to build railroads.

This continued prewar traditions when slaves were hired out by

owners to the state to work on municipal projects,

excuse me.

A quote by journalist Vicky Pelaez summarizes it perfectly:

"Profits are so good now that there is a new business.

Importing inmates with long sentences after a law signed by

Clinton in 1996 caused overcrowding and violent unsafe

conditions in federal prisons.

Private prison corporations in Texas began to contract other

states where prisons were overcrowded offering

rent-to-sell services."

A strong profit motive ensures the preservation

of the current system.

So as the prison industry complex keeps growing crime is

actually decreasing but there is no correlation between the first

trend and the second.

In fact, there are so many individuals locked up in the US

that the threat of prisons has actually diminished.

The possibility of getting caught and facing prison time

does not deter crime anymore or make us any safer.

Evidence shows that a would-be criminal doesn't really think

about the possibility of prison or getting caught.

Instead of discouraging crime, prisons actually tend to support

criminal activity.

The lack of proper rehabilitation, mental

healthcare, counseling, and job training make it harder

for society to actually reassimilate these people -

reassimilate prisoners.

And so, high recidivism rates ensue.

So recidivism rates also reflect the failure of this attitude.

The National Institute of Justice reports that in the US,

67.8% of prisoners were rearrested

within 3 years of release.

Within 5 years of release, that number goes up to

76.6% of released prisoners being rearrested.

Recidivism unfortunately is met with longer and harsher

sentencing, truly creating a scenario

of revolving door justice.

In the US, political advantage is given to those who promise to

be tough on crime.

It is a perennial winning campaign strategy and it fuels

the building of prisons.

Drug addicts and the mentally ill are locked up with hardened

criminals with little to no resources to help with their

treatment or rehabilitation or to make sure they do not

reenter prison.

Prisons have been given the mandate to punish and not to

treat and corporations are making money from an increasing

number of prisoners whose rights are lost in the system and whose

voices are not deemed worthy to hear.

The point of a business is to cut costs

and improve efficiencies.

When a business is run - when a business is running a prison,

excuse me, those costs, cuts, and efficiencies squeeze the

individuals that are locked up.

There's no business advantage to teaching prisoners to lead more

socially responsible lives.

Taking steps to preserve human dignity in such a setting

is costly.

In order to fix this, we need to start valuing the human being

instead of exploiting them.

That's all I have to say. Thank you.

[applause]

Are there any questions? Yes.

>> [audience member]: Did you come across any initiatives

being taken currently to try to solve this problem?

>> Harrison: Yeah!

So as of right now, I think one of the largest ways to solve

this problem is just going out and voting,

making sure you know your candidate as well and how they

stand on privatization of prisons and stuff.

Like I said, earlier - this - a lot - it's very politically

based with privatization of prisons - private prisons have a

lot to do with lobbying and, you know,

relationships between certain states and certain people.

And a lot of companies, big companies,

use or pay, you know, to use these private prisons: Macy's,

Boeing, IBM are just some of the ones off the top of my head

that I can think.

But yeah, also that's another point: really diving deeper into

what companies use private prisons and private prison labor

can also help, and boycotting them - are just some of the few

small steps that you can take.

Any other questions? Yeah.

>> [audience member]: In your research,

how far did you look into different presidential

administrations and what impacts they had on the past

incarceration rates.

>> Harrison: So in my research I actually watched a documentary

called The Thirteenth. It's on Netflix right now.

I don't know if any of you guys know it,

but it dives way into the history of mass incarceration.

Three that I can think of right now would be the

Nixon administration, the Reagan administration,

and the Clinton - they all had a pretty big part of this idea of

the War on Drugs and putting more and more people into

prisons, militarizing our police.

There - I think Bush was also another one that - he actually

won a campaign just because he was,

you know, this War on Drugs and, you know,

harsher prison sentencing.

There's a - yeah so that's - those people have had a lot to

do - another thing is this idea of a "super predator" that the

documentary also goes way into.

Just how we portrayed African Americans in society as being

inherently dangerous and stuff like that.

So that also didn't help with us putting more and more

African Americans in a prison.

Yeah, any other questions? No?

Alright, well thank you so much for your time.

Appreciate it.

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