King's Legacy Demands Criminal Justice System Reforms

For the last three years, I've celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Ryan Correctional Facility, a guest of prison members of the NAACP. It seems right to commemorate the holiday with some of the 2.3 million Americans locked up.

If King were alive, he would understand, as Malcolm X certainly would, that mass incarceration has become an economic, social and human rights problem the nation can ignore no longer. This year, Monday's event at the east-side Detroit prison took on deeper meaning. Even inside the walls, President-elect Barack Obama has sparked hope and joy. "People around the world are rejoicing," inmate Kenneth Foster-Bey, 55 and serving a life sentence, told nearly 100 other prisoners during a program of singing and speeches. "They can't wait until tomorrow." A nation where millions of African Americans couldn't vote 50 years ago has elected its first black president and embraced the change he represents. Still, King's dream of racial equality remains unfulfilled.

The world's most powerful democracy is also its leading incarcerator. African Americans -- 13% of the population -- make up nearly half of all those in jail or prison. The nation that elected its first black president also has 1 million black men behind bars. America's criminal justice system is a political land mine, but Obama will have some cover if he dares to step across it.

U.S. Sen. James Webb, D-Va., a decorated Marine who served as Navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan, plans to push national prison reform. He has spoken with surprising candor about class, race and the criminal justice system, and the soft-on-crime tag won't work on him. With government budgets busting at all levels, the time is right. The country cannot afford a $60-billion growth industry that has ripped urban communities and failed to make us safe. Michigan now spends more on prisons -- $2 billion a year -- than on higher education.

U.S. prison populations have increased nearly eightfold over the past 35 years, while crime rates, like gas prices, have gone up and down. Recent crime rates are similar to what they were in 1970, before the prison-building boom started. Harsh drug sentences that have hit African Americans especially hard have fueled much of the race to incarcerate. One study showed that African Americans make up an estimated 13% of drug users, while accounting for 74% of all prison sentences for drug possession. More than one in 100 Americans are now locked up, and more than 95% of them will get out.

Mass incarceration actually increases crime by severing social networks, leaving one in 14 black children with a parent in prison, and creating lifelong barriers to employment. The collateral consequences of criminal convictions affect a big chunk of the population. In Michigan, one out of every six adults is a felon.

Even so, mainstream civil rights organizations remain relatively quiet about the human and economic costs of a criminal justice system that affects mainly poor people. "I think it is a class issue," ex-inmate Joseph Williams told me. "A lot of these leaders are more focused on the middle class." Williams, 55, earned two college degrees after getting out of prison in 1975 and now runs prisoner re-entry and other programs as the CEO of New Creations Community Outreach. When I think of Williams and other ex-inmates I've written about, like Raphael B. Johnson, 33, who spent 12 years in prison for second-degree murder, I understand why we shouldn't give up on people. After his release from prison 3 1/2 years ago, Johnson earned a master's degree, started a family and a business, and gained national attention for his work with ex-prisoners and young people.

No doubt, we need prisons. But when too many young men grow up in neighborhoods where most of their peers go to prison or jail, it's time to consider where the get-tough policies of the last 35 years have taken us. Getting the number of incarcerated to a rational level will take more than re-entry and training programs. It will take serious reforms in sentencing. Figuring out who should go to prison -- and for how long -- and who should not, must become part of a new urban and civil rights agenda, backed by the nation's leader. Obama's election tapped the pride and hope of millions of Americans. We've come a long way. But with one in nine young black men behind bars, we've got a long way to go.

BY JEFF GERRITT FREE PRESS EDITORIAL WRITER
JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer.
Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.