By Kaliyah Pour-Khorshid (Vernon)
There has been an uptick in discussions on criminal justice reform, police reform, prison reform, and the elimination of the prison industrial complex following the police shooting murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. It’s important to look at the big picture of policing history and assess how racially biased the American police force is before diving into either of these discussions. The American policing system is undeniably unfair and corrupt; nevertheless, in order to address these systemic problems, it is essential to understand who has been most directly impacted by these abuses, both in the past and the present. Abolition is the only way to guarantee freedom when people’s lives are on the line; reform will not cut it. The four I’s of oppression are Ideological, Institutional, Interpersonal, and Internalized. As a people, Black and Brown people are disproportionately abused by the criminal justice system compared to white folks, and these attitudes can change their life. Despite having only 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s convicts, this nation boasts the greatest incarceration rate (“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet”). Of the total number of inmates, 32% are Black or Brown, and 56% are male (“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet”). The lives of people, especially Black and Brown people are at stake.
Looking back at the American police force history reveals that it all started in 1757, when “Georgia’s colonial assembly required white landowners and residents to serve as slave patrols” (Hadden, “Slave Patrols”). If a white individual had more money, they could pay other white men, who were poorer, to guard their property. This meant that white landowners or their agents could ride along the roads, stop any slave they saw, and make them show a pass that identified their owner and the times and places they could leave the plantation; a warrant was not necessary for this operation. Prior to slavery being “abolished” in 1861–1865, slave patrols were in operation (Hadde, “Slave Patrols”). Notably, white men were required to participate in this activity because those who chose not to patrol were punished. By the time “it became necessary to pay people to perform what had been voluntary unpaid service,” the early nineteenth century had passed. (Hadden, “Slave Patrols “). Returning fugitive slaves was financially and morally rewarding for slave patrols. Slave patrols had the legal authority to show up at any events attended by slaves, even in the absence of a warrant. In 1791, following the slave revolt in Saint Domingue, Savannah was so afraid that “no slaves could meet for religious services without a white preacher present” (Hadde, “Slave Patrols”). This same dread of slave revolt led white Georgians to increase the supervision of slaves through the use of patrols and home militia organizations following the Civil War in 1861. City officials and patrols forbade Black people from congregating after 9 p.m. regardless of whether a pass was present or not, and they would arrest them for doing so after the Emancipation Proclamation went into force in 1863. (Hadden, “Slave Patrols”). American policing, along with other white supremacist practices, hate groups, legislation, and institutions, had its roots in slave patrols.
Following slave patrols were lynch laws and vigilante policing, in which civilians enforced the law without official authorization. The “lynch law” was enacted by these vigilantes—so called because it was named after Charles Lynch, a planter from Virginia during the Revolutionary Era who, with a gang of men, sought out and executed criminals according to their own standards. Anarchists who aspired to Charles Lynch’s model of retributive justice used what was known as “Lynch Law” as a kind of police enforcement. Because it was used to implement white supremacy through terror, lynching became another type of social control and policing. A white supremacist hate group known as the Ku Klux Klan was born during Reconstruction and had tight ties to law enforcement (Wells).
In an effort to monitor and regulate the “freed” Black population, the initial Black Codes were enacted in South Carolina and Mississippi. White police and state militias implemented the black codes. According to the “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” Black individuals can face arrest in the event of a code violation.
Black people were disproportionately enrolled in the prison system, which is essentially a rebranding of slavery, due to the early arrival of police. Loans and Black codes kept the system in place. Sharecropping and convict leasing followed this. Slavery was, in essence, made legal. Inmates who broke the black codes were forced to work for free in a practice known as convict leasing. Another loophole that led to debt was sharecropping, in which a landowner would let a tenant grow crops on their property in exchange for a portion of the harvest (13th, DuVernay). Although prisons were established and utilized, they were primarily employed to exploit Black individuals for the sake of economic resurgence following the Civil War. This practice, known as convict leasing and sharecropping, essentially marked the beginning of mass incarceration inside the prison system. on the thirteenth
The Black Codes were repealed with the ratification of the 14th amendment in 1868. However, the Jim Crow laws that followed soon after ended racial segregation and threatened the civil liberties of African Americans. It was the job of the police to enforce the Jim Crow laws that made it a crime to be Black. Up until the 1960s, Jim Crow laws persisted; after that, the War on Drugs and modern-day mass incarceration came into being.
As you can see from all the data I’ve given, the widespread belief that the criminal justice system is free of racism is completely unfounded. The disproportionate incarceration of Black people and other communities of color compared to white people can be explained by the fact that prisons are essentially a legalized form of slavery according to the 13th amendment. This disparity in policing and prisons dates back to the time when Africans were taken as slaves by American colonizers.
We may start to see how completely absurd the idea that police are there to protect us is when we consider this racial analysis and how it relates to the overcriminalization, policing, and incarceration of Black and Brown bodies. In his article “The Police Are Not Here to Protect You,” Alex Vitale highlights a section from his book “The End of Policing,” in which he makes the case that there is no connection between the number of police officers and crime rates; in other words, having more police does not make us safer because they are unable to stop crime. The media is spreading this message to us, yet in practice, police officers spend the majority of their time receiving crime complaints, and the majority of investigated crimes remain unsolved. Since this order “rests on systems of exploitation — and when elites feel that this system is at risk, whether from slave revolts, general strikes, or crime and rioting in the streets, they rely on the police to control those activities,” Vitale emphasizes Mark Neocleous’ work and his theory that police exist to “fabricate social order.” Therefore, despite the belief held by some that the police are there to “protect and serve” our communities, they are actually perpetuating the oppression of impoverished, non-white communities of color. When you look at the history of American policing, you can see that while things “changed,” they simply became the same repressive practices with new names and subtleties.
After learning this, people may immediately support criminal justice reform because it seems more comfortable, but they may still be unsure about abolition or if it is the best way to address these problems. Julia Sudbury wrote an academic journal essay titled “Reform or Abolition? Sudbury makes a clear distinction between reform and abolition in his book Using Popular Mobilizations to Dismantle the “Prison Industrial Complex.” According to Sudbury, many who willingly participate in groups for criminal justice reform continue to believe that incarcerating people is still necessary, perhaps with some modifications to lessen its negative effects. Reformists continue to support a system that is fundamentally flawed and has never really been about doing “good” or “serving and protecting” our communities because they still trust in the criminal justice system’s ability to do these things. Abolitionists, on the other hand, believe that because prisons are cruel, violent, and racially biased, they ought to be eliminated as part of a broader campaign. The author also notes that reformers frequently work with nonprofit groups that do not respect the lived experiences of grassroots organizers and community members in the same manner as they would a hired expert on the topic who does not have the same testimony. Because it totally ignores the voices of already marginalized groups in the discussion that directly affects them, this is a tremendously troublesome issue. Sudbury highlights the deliberate decision activists made to identify as abolitionists. She claims that this resulted from equating the abolition of slavery and imprisonment since, in theory, individuals are still not really free because the 13th Amendment only formalized and renamed slavery. Additionally, Sudbury highlights what Angela Y. Davis refers to as “non-reformist reforms,” which are measures that aim to eliminate rather than strengthen the prison-industrial complex.
This brings me to the dichotomy between abolitionist and reformist changes, which are crucial in addressing the problems with the criminal justice system. While acknowledging short-term successes and improvements is vital, we also need to be critical of the reforms we are supporting since they will not be beneficial if they continue to support a system that is fundamentally flawed. Mirame Kaba developed a useful criteria that people may use when deciding which changes they should and shouldn’t support in her article “Police ‘Reforms’ You Should Always Oppose.” Regarding the reforms that people shouldn’t support, Kaba says that they shouldn’t increase police funding, use technology, enforce more community-based policing, or concentrate on specific individuals or instances of good or bad policing because these approaches avoid the main problem, which is that the criminal justice system as a whole is flawed. Kaba thinks that changes should instead focus on doing away with the police. Examples of “reforms” that we should support include disarming police officers, disbursing money to social goods instead of the police, providing restitution to victims of police violence, and promoting data transparency. Reforms should aim to permanently dismantle the police system rather than exacerbate the oppression that already exists inside it.
It is evident that the criminal justice system, including police and incarceration, is heavily racially biased and disproportionately affects the lives of Black and Brown individuals. Black and Brown people’s lives are in danger because of the police and prisons, so we need to support “reforms” that truly aim to destroy and eliminate the system as a whole. Analyzing the historical backgrounds of discussions we would wish to have is crucial because we must also be conscious of how our beliefs and assistance can influence changes in the lives of marginalized groups. The struggle for justice continues because history has demonstrated that slavery has not ended but has instead been legalized and rebranded.
Works Cited
“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.” NAACP, 10 July 2020, http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/.
Hadden, Sally E. “Slave Patrols.” New Georgia Encyclopedia. 02 August 2018. Web. 02 November 2020.
BlackPast. “(1900) Ida B. Wells, ‘Lynch Law in America.’” Welcome to Blackpast , 20 Sept. 2019, http://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1900-ida-b-wells-lynch-law-america/.
13th. Directed by Ava DuVernay, produced by Kandoo Films & Netflix, 2016
Vitale, Alex. The Police Are Not Here to Protect You, Vice, 1 June 2020, http://www.vice.com/en/article/7kpvnb/end-of-policing-book-extract.
Kaba, Mariame. “Police ‘Reforms’ You Should Always Oppose.” Truthout, Ziggy West Jeffery, 7 Dec. 2014, truthout.org/articles/police-reforms-you-should-always-oppose/.
Sudbury, Julia. “Reform or Abolition? Using Popular Mobilisations to Dismantle the ‘Prison Industrial Complex.’” Criminal Justice Matters., vol. 102, no. 1, 2015, pp. 17–19. Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 10.1080/09627250903139223.
Pan African Studies Encyclopedia 