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E-PrinceThe sound quality was poor, but the voice on the other end of the line was unmistakable: Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death row inmate, author and cultural icon, was phoning in from Greene State Correctional Institution in Waynesburg, Pa., to speak ...
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Not only does the US have the highest rate of incarceration on the planet, but the racial disparity of arrests, convictions and imprisonment have become grossly pronounced. Nationwide Afro-Americans are arrested, convicted and imprisoned disproportionately. Thirty-seven percent of drug-offense arrests are Afro-Americans, 53 percent of convictions are of Afro-Americans, and 67 percent -- two-thirds of all people imprisoned for drug offenses -- are Afro-Americans. This is depute the fact that Afro-Americans do not use drugs at a perceivable higher rate than white Americans. - 8.2% of whites and 10.1% of blacks use illicit drugs.
Much of the voting rights & victories won by the civil rights movement during the 1960s have effectively been eroded. Nearly 5 million people are now barred from voting because of felony disenfranchisement laws. The United States is the only industrial democracy that does this.
Drug prohibition has become a successor system to Jim Crow laws in targeting black citizens, removing them from civil society and then barring them from the right to vote. If harsh sentences deterred illicit drug use, America would be "drug-free" by now. But that is not the case, and never will be. The drug war has given the "former land of the free" the highest incarceration rate in the world and disenfranchised millions of citizens. It is a cure worse than the disease.
Anyone else find it offensive that this event was kicked off with a phone call from a convicted cop killer?
Will Scharf '08, I'm looking forward to the D.V.D. release of IN PRISON MY WHOLE LIFE, a documentary on the Mumia Abu-Jamal controversy. Add it to your NETFLIX list!
I mean, Will, you do understand Abu-Jamal maintains he did not murder anyone, don't you? You do understand the United States has executed wrongly-convicted prisoners, right?
Read Michelle Alexander's book THE NEW JIM CROW.
"an inestimable number of viewers, possibly in the low hundreds..."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I am "Rough," who posted at 9:11 a.m. - I accidentally typed the security word ("Rough") in the nickname box. As I don't hide behind screen names, I wanted to identify myself as autor of that comment.
Vote libertarian and this problem disappears.
Mumia should be released immediately and be forced to listen to a Cornel West speech. Within minutes, he would petition for a return to incarceration.
"I mean, Will, you do understand Abu-Jamal maintains he did not murder anyone, don't you?"
oh gee, because no convict has ever maintained THAT before!
Do these people just think that all the blacks in prison are innocent or something? Although blacks are often unfairly racial profiled, whites would have a much harder time "mass incarcerating" if blacks didn't commit crimes.
The fact that he is in jail for murder -- and, for that matter, they fact that he may be guilty -- does not make him human garbage.
Phil Ochs put it quite well in his song, "Paul Crump":
"But Paul Crump is alive today
He's a-sittin' in a cell, he's got somethin' to say
Every man has got something to give
And if a man can change, then a man should live."