Crime & Punishment...And Capitalism

by Li Onesto with Carl Dix

Heather Mac Donald is a high-powered “authority” on criminal justice and crime. She has clerked for federal judges, written editorials in major newspapers, and testified before Congress. She has ties to former New York City Mayor, now Republican presidential frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani, and her ideological and political views back his agenda. Mac Donald is a frequent “expert” commentator on Fox News and CNN.

In the wake of the historic Free the Jena 6 protest in Jena, LA on September 20, Mac Donald wrote “The Jena Dodge,” an intellectualization of the backlash that was unleashed in the wake of the Jena protests, arguing that even if the Jena 6 were victims of racist and unequal “justice,” the problem in America is not the criminalization of Black people, but out-of-control Black criminals. This article in the City Journal (9/25/07) is posted on FrontPage—the website of David Horowitz, who is leading a reactionary assault on critical thinking in academia.

Unequal “Justice” and Criminalization

Mac Donald targets what she calls an “army of racial victimologists and their media enablers,” saying Jena 6 supporters are dodging the real problem facing Black people—crime and specifically the criminal element among Black people. She says:

“But even if the worst possible interpretation of these events (surrounding the case of the Jena 6) is merited, the massive international attention to this tiny town would seem vastly disproportionate to the cause, unless Jena stands for a more widespread problem. The idea behind the protests and the politicians’ exploitation of them is that just as these five youths were overcharged, the hundreds of thousands of blacks in prison are also the victims of systemic abuse. But for institutional racism, the black prison population would be much smaller.”

Mac Donald then claims, “This is an old complaint, for which no proof has ever been offered.”

But in fact, proof has been offered. Over and over. To take one example that Mac Donald herself cites (after claiming there is no proof of institutional racism in law enforcement): “The usual evidence in support of the charge that the criminal laws discriminate against blacks is the far stiffer sentences for selling and possessing crack cocaine compared with powdered cocaine.”

Studies do show that people arrested for crack—usually poor and Black—are convicted more often and do much more time than those arrested for powder cocaine use—usually better-off white people. But while this is clearly an example of racial discrimination, Mac Donald says this is because the system cares more about Black people (!!)—that such unequal sentencing is “a heartfelt effort to protect the overwhelmingly black victims of crack, not to penalize them.” Not penalize them!!! The system’s racist “war on drugs” is a big reason so many Black people are in prison. More Blacks are sent to state prison for drug offenses (38 percent) than for crimes of violence (27 percent). (Human Rights Watch, 2003)

And numerous studies show that systematic discrimination and racism do in fact result in an “unequal justice” of harsher sentences, higher incarceration rates, and rampant police harassment, brutality, and murder. To cite a few examples:

* A study in Pennsylvania found when factors like severity of offense and criminal record were similar, “white men aged 18-29 were 38% less likely to be sentenced to prison than Black men of the same age group.” (The Sentencing Project, “Racial Disparity in Sentencing: A review of the literature,” 2005)

* African Americans constitute 13 percent of all monthly drug users, but 35 percent of arrests for drug possession, 55 percent of convictions, and 74 percent of prison sentences. (The Sentencing Project, “Drug Policy and the Criminal Justice System,” April 2001)

* Black youth are four times more likely than white youth to be incarcerated for the same offense. For drug offenses, Black youth are 48 times more likely and Latino youth nine times more likely than white youth to get locked up. (See: “America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline,” Children’s Defense Fund report)

And what about the systematic CRIMINALIZATION of Black youth, which Mac Donald doesn’t even address? Police profiling of Black youth—stopping and harassing them routinely for simply being out on the street with their friends. DWB (Driving While Black) stops as a daily condition of life for millions of Black people. Schools turned into prisons where youth are constantly treated like suspects and perps. Three strikes laws that unjustly send youth to prison for decades, sometimes the rest of their lives.

* In 1954, 98,000 Black people were locked up in prisons. 50 years later, in 2004, this figure is 910,000—nearly ten times as many.

* Over half a million people were stopped and frisked by the NYPD in 2006, more than 1300 a day. Reason most often given by police: “they were in a high crime area,” or “they fit the description of a suspect.” 55.2% of those stopped were Black, 30% were Latino. Less than 10% resulted in an arrest or summons. The police routinely stop Black youth for little or no reason at all—pulling them out of their cars, subjecting them to the cruel and humiliating ritual of “assuming the position,” getting down on their knees, and “kissing the pavement.” Such “routine stops” not only aim to demean and break people’s spirits—they can easily, in a second, lead to yet another case of police brutality and murder.

* From 1995 to 2000, there were almost 10,000 cases of police use of excessive force reported in the U.S.; African Americans made up 47.5 percent of them.

Mac Donald rationalizes and upholds discrimination and white supremacy by putting out the lie that America has “shed its racist past.” She says: “The opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not.”

But what does it show about the actual opportunities for Black youth to “roar ahead” in the economy when study after study shows discrimination in hiring practices? A Milwaukee study had Black and white applicants interview for the same jobs, reporting similar educational and employment backgrounds. Employers were twice as likely to call back white applicants with no criminal records as Black applicants with no criminal records. And they were MORE likely to call back whites who said they had criminal backgrounds than Blacks who reported no criminal records! In another study, two job applicants with comparable credentials, Greg Kelly and Jamal Jones, responded in writing to help wanted ads in Chicago and Boston. Jamal was 50% less likely to be given an initial interview because of his Black-sounding name.

And in just about every aspect of society—jobs, health care, housing, education, etc., study after study shows persistent and widening discrimination and inequalities. (For extensive examples of this, see The Covenant with Black America, edited by Tavis Smiley.)

Mac Donald’s Bad Methodology

But what about the heart of Mac Donald’s argument that “It is not racism that puts black men in jail, it’s their own behavior.”

The argument here is basically: There is high crime among Black people so the problem is the Black criminals who are committing this crime. This circular argument doesn’t explain or shed light on anything! It begs the question: WHY is crime so high among Black people? WHY are so many Black youth involved in crime? Mac Donald wants to start in the middle of the story. She refuses to look at the whole history of how and why things got to this point to begin with. She only looks at the effects and symptoms, not the reasons and causes.

To really understand “Black on Black crime”—and to really understand this problem, as well as the solution—we have to step back and get a materialist understanding of the bigger picture. What are the economic and social factors behind this phenomenon? The workings of the system impose all kinds of things on people, putting them in situations with a diminishing menu of bad and even worse choices. And then the system (and people like Bill Cosby) blames the people themselves for the conditions that the system has imposed on people to begin with.

It’s not that there are all these Black youth who are somehow “naturally” attracted to a life of crime and violence. We’re not talking about a community with HIGH rates of employment that are involved in criminal activity. No, there are huge economic and social factors that have made such a “choice”—which is really hardly a choice at all—the rational way to try and survive. Conservative writer Edward Luttwak, citing the fact that many Black youth will never find jobs throughout their lifetime, concluded that for many of these youth crime was a “rational choice”! (Turbo-Capitalism)

We have to look at the effects of the further and extreme globalization of the capitalist system over the last 50 years. The accumulation of capital, the ways in which capitalism exploits people, has gone through some big changes. And this has meant that the capitalist system doesn’t need Black proletarians in the same way it did in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. To the system, huge sections of poor Black people are now considered expendable. And all of this cannot be separated from, but in fact is the ground upon which “Black on Black crime” is a huge phenomenon.

Deindustrialization and Diminishing Options

Over the last couple of decades, there have been huge transformations in the way capitalists in the U.S. accumulate capital. Production and assembly is outsourced to factories all over the world. Technological developments mean many jobs require more training, education, and skills. And all kinds of jobs have just been wiped out by technological change.

There is the further and extreme globalization of production—where the constant chase for higher profits encompasses a global labor market. Black unskilled workers looking for jobs are now up against the fact that the capitalists can super-exploit immigrants or take their whole operation overseas. The system pits Black workers against immigrants in a “competition” over who will be exploited. And companies looking for cheaper and more “obedient” workers hire immigrants who, because of their desperate and precarious situation, accept extremely low wages and horrendous work conditions.

At the lower end of the U.S. workforce you have a situation where there is extreme competition for low-paying, high turnover jobs—jobs that are dead-end and offer no prospects of any advancement. For millions of Black workers, this has meant drastically diminishing job opportunities. And for a huge section of Black people, especially the youth, the doors to any kind of job—and any kind of decent future—have been simply slammed shut.

U.S. cities have been deindustrialized—jobs have shifted out of urban areas to the suburbs or to other parts of the world. Three million factory jobs have been lost in the U.S. since the end of 2000. And this has had a profound impact on inner-city Black neighborhoods. In the decades after World War 2, millions of Black people migrated from the South to cities around the country where they were able to get industrial jobs. For example, in the auto industry, 550,000 workers produced 3 million cars in 1947 and 750,000 workers turned out 8 million cars a year in 1972. By 1970 about one-fifth of all Detroit auto plant employees were Black, most of them young and male. There was blatant discrimination—just about all superintendents, foremen, and skilled tradesmen were white. But the auto industry, as well as other industries, did provide Black workers with jobs and a certain entry level ladder which could mean a certain level of job stability, training, and even mobility to higher paid positions.

Such jobs have basically disappeared from the cities. And what has this meant for millions of Black people? Think about what the options are for a 20-year-old Black man in Chicago or Detroit. There are hardly any decent paying jobs for low-skilled workers. Inner-city schools don’t provide real job training. If you’ve ever been locked-up, there’s a good chance you’ll be locked-out of the job market. There are some manufacturing jobs in the suburbs. But housing discrimination makes it hard for Black people to move to these communities. There is no good public transportation to get to these jobs, even if you could get one. And if you try to drive to such a job, you’d constantly get stopped by the cops for DWB and being in a white neighborhood. A lot of jobs are just gone—factories that used to be in U.S. cities have moved to other countries where they can pay workers incredibly low wages.

And there is another factor in this picture of employers not wanting to hire Black people. There’s a certain rebelliousness and defiance that’s developed historically among Black people. And a lot of racist employers won’t hire what they consider to be potential “Black troublemakers.” It’s not that people don’t want to work. But they don’t want to work for chump change. They don’t want to take a lot of racist and demeaning shit from the boss, other workers, or customers. Thomas Rush, an airline skycap, put it this way: “I look at everybody at eye level. I neither look down nor up. The day of the shuffle is gone.” A 1989-90 study of hiring in Chicago found that many employers “dismissed young black job seekers as too poor, uneducated and temperamentally ill suited for the rigors of modern office work.” (Rush quote and Chicago study cited in American Work—Four Centuries of Black and White Labor by Jacqueline Jones)

Job opportunities for Black youth today are worse than they were two generations ago. The jobs available to this 20-year-old are more likely to be at a fast food restaurant, a parking lot, or the Wal-Mart—jobs that are unstable, minimum wage, with no prospects of training or advancement. The boss treats you like you’re expendable. Such jobs are not only demeaning, but no one can survive on them. And they are certainly not a “way out” of poverty. This is what is meant by “crime is a rational choice.”

Look at the example of the Black community of Camden, New Jersey in the mid 1990s. It lost the Philadelphia Navy Yard, the Campbell Soup factory and a number of electronics companies. The jobless rate rose to 20 percent, and two-thirds of the residents were on public assistance. In 1995 the city had the highest murder rate in any urban area in New Jersey. Lonnie Watkins, a Camden resident, noted: “Long as there’s no jobs, people going to deal drugs. And if that’s how you make your living, then you protect your business any way you can, know what I mean?” (American Work)

People want to work—just look at the fact that whenever one of these big box stores opens in a city or some big hotel announces job openings, thousands and thousands of Black people line up to apply. Recently in Newark, New Jersey the Prudential Center Arena advertised 1200 jobs available—janitors, bartenders, cooks and other, mostly part-time positions that don’t include any benefits. The first day, September 6, over 3,000 people, overwhelmingly Black people, lined up for blocks, looking for a job.

The “prison-ization” of the Black community also contributes to “Black on Black” crime. The huge numbers of Black people going into, and then in some cases coming out of a prison system where guards and administrators set up “gladiator” type fights between inmates, and where a culture of do or die is enforced by the prison system that then sends people back into the cities inculcated with that system mentality, resulting in people shooting each other over nothing—which is an expression of what the system has done to them. And then there are instances of the police themselves promoting “Black on Black crime” and sabotaging efforts to stop it. One organizer of the gang truces after the 1992 L.A. Rebellion told an interviewer, “They’re always hollerin’ about ‘We need to stop all this violence,’ and then all these young people start joinin’ the gang truce and the first thing the police do is attack. The establishment attacks the truce…’ ”

And there are other intersecting social factors that enter into this whole picture. Government cutbacks of all kinds of social services. The deterioration of schools. The lack of recreational centers and after school programs. The persistence of highly segregated and unequal communities. All of this is NOT something of people’s own doing and NOT an aspect of life that Black people “choose.” These things are part of a whole economic and social structure that limits the actual options and choices that Black people have. And this all contributes to a situation where crime is a “rational choice.”

This is no “choice” at all for millions of Black youth. The system puts millions of Black youth in a hopeless, worsening situation where they are pushed to the edge by daily desperation and humiliation—which explodes in misplaced rage against one another and against other people in the Black community.

And then the media, schools, politicians, and churches constantly dog, degrade, and dehumanize Black youth—sending them a message that they aren’t worth anything and that society has no place for them.

Transforming the World and the People

Mac Donald refuses to acknowledge the fact that “Black on Black crime” is a horrendous crime generated by the workings of the system itself. She refuses to discuss the deeper structural causes behind crime in the Black community. She refuses to talk about how millions of Black youth are locked out of any kind of jobs, stuck in segregated, deteriorating neighborhoods where social services, if they existed at all, have disappeared, where police murder and brutality run rampant, where prison-like schools send youth the message that they are hopeless and have no future.

It is messed up and maddening that so many Black youth are in a situation where they are forced to prey on each other. But Heather Mac Donald could care less about that—she is only interested in defending, continuing, and reinforcing the very system that consigns and constrains these youth to such a hopeless future. And like others who blame the masses for the horrors of this system—or who apologize for it—she has no answer either.

In a socialist society, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the masses of people will be fully involved in figuring out and working through in an all-round way, how to revolutionize every aspect of society. All the exploitative and degrading economic and social relations and ideas under capitalism—including everything that produces “Black on Black crime”—will be dug up, struggled against and gotten rid of. And it is in this process of emancipating all of humanity—that the masses of people will be able to revolutionize and transform the world and themselves. This is a society and a life worth living and dying for. That is the “positive” answer to this horrendous thing of “Black on Black crime.”

And this is the challenge that has to be presented to the youth who face this horrible situation—to get out of preying on each other and get into fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution. The massive march to free the Jena 6 was an opening to challenge people in just this kind of way. This is one reason people like Heather Mac Donald attack it so viciously. And this is also a reason why those who want real and fundamental change should go further in fighting this battle and linking it to the struggle for revolution.

References:

American Work—Four Centuries of Black and White Labor by Jacqueline Jones (1999)

The Covenant with Black America, edited by Tavis Smiley (2006)

Black Picket Fences—Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class by Mary Pattillo-McCoy (2000)

When Work Disappears—The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson (1997)

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.