Incarceration: 'It's Not a War on Drugs, It's a War on the Blacks'

Anyone that reads at all is aware that the US incarcerates more people than any other country.  Incarceration and the prison industrial complex is a very lucrative business for any budding entrepreneur.  Over 50 percent of the people in the US gulag are people of color.

"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on the blacks. It started as war on the blacks and it's now spread to Hispanics and poor whites. It was designed to take that energy that was coming out of the civil rights movement and destroy it," says Ed Burns, the co-creator of the TV series The Wire.

For the ruling class in this country, incarceration is a means of keeping the revolutionary potential of the young and dispossessed under their watchful guards, it does not want them to become politicized. The crisis in these communities is one of continuous economic depression. 

The solution to the crime, drug abuse and poverty is not incarceration, it is a massive social infusion of money and resources.  We have these resources but the allocation of society's wealth is not in our hands but in the hands of the few thousand unelected people who determine policy.  Trillions of dollars are spent on foreign wars fought by young workers that capitalism has no profitable use for. It is a highly inefficient. wasteful and violent system.

The justice system in any country is biased against workers and the poor because in class society, the laws are written to protect the interests of the class that rules.

The US justice system is among the most racist and brutal. We execute children and the mentally impaired.  War criminals like Henry Kissinger, Rumsfeld or George W Bush can live prosperous lives while more than two million languish in the US gulag. 

Obviously, any society needs to protect the public for truly harful or sick people who will do harm to others no matter what. But US "correctional centers" are anything but correctional facilities.  The racist US incarceration system is simply the warehousing of human beings.

I will say no more about this but urge readers to watch this video and read Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow".  She is also in the video from al Jazeera. http://aje.me/NelfLx