Mass incarceration functions as a new slavery targeting Black drug offenders

Evidence

Davis continued her innovative integrative scholarship on Black women and remained focused on reviving the abolitionist movement as the new millennium arrived. “The two millionth prisoner entered the system in America on February 15, 2000 and half of those prisoners are Black,” she said in early 2000 at the University of Colorado. Davis knew that most of these prisoners had been convicted of drug crimes. She also knew that Whites were found to be more likely to sell drugs than Blacks, as Human Rights Watch was reporting. Therefore, Davis was crossing the country and directing the attention of Americans to the unjust criminal justice system, which she viewed as the new slavery. Davis offered the natural abolitionist solution a few years later, asking the antiracist question of the age in 2003 in her new book title: Are Prisons Obsolete? She imagined “a world without prisons” in the 115-page manifesto for prison abolition. “Because of the persistent power of racism, ‘criminals’ and ‘evildoers’ are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color,” Davis wrote. And “the prison” relieved America “of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1167

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s criminal justice knowledge and the drug-war framing from other sources on mass incarceration’s race skew.