{"id":4497,"date":"2015-09-16T05:42:35","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T11:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/paperbacktheology\/?p=4497"},"modified":"2015-09-16T05:53:50","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T11:53:50","slug":"the-american-justice-system-isnt-broken-its-doing-exactly-what-its-designed-to-do-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/paperbacktheology\/2015\/09\/the-american-justice-system-isnt-broken-its-doing-exactly-what-its-designed-to-do-2.html","title":{"rendered":"The American Justice System Isn’t Broken – It’s Doing Exactly What It’s Designed to Do"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"TNC\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI think our criminal justice system is working as intended. It is only broken to the extent that our society is broken\u2026 the lens of criminal justice is the way this country has traditionally regarded black people. I don\u2019t know that\u00a0anything is broken at all. The deeper question is: are we okay with something on the order of 4,000 African American males per 100,000 being in jail \u2026are we okay with there being a 1 in 3 chance for every African American male born in this generation eventually doing some sort of time in prisons and in jails? And that goes to the deeper question of, are we alright with black people in the position that they are in our society or do we have some sort of long term commitment to justice?\u201d \u2013 Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the\u00a0most talked about,\u00a0best selling, and provocative writers of the past year\u00a0(Between the World and Me<\/em><\/a>). Coates has written a new cover story for\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>\u00a0called, \u201cThe Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing:\u00a0Whether or not you care about race, whether or not you care about the injustices facing minorities in our society, whether or not you want to\u2026 you need to read this article.<\/em>\u00a0The piece is jarring to say the least. The quote above is from one of the short videos produced to accompany the online form of the essay.<\/p>\n

Coates has become a singular contemporary figure among black Americans, and the go to sound-byte slash Twitter quote provider on all things race. As Carlos Lozada wrote in the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em><\/a>: \u201c\u201cDid you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece?\u201d is shorthand for \u201cHave you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality?\u201d If you don\u2019t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.\u201d<\/p>\n

As one would expect, Coates is not without his detractors. Rich Lowry, who is as conservative as they come, wrote a scorching\u00a0critique for\u00a0Politico<\/em>\u00a0titled, \u201cThe Toxic World-View of Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/a>.\u201d David Brooks wrote a less biting response for\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, \u201cListening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White<\/a>.\u201d Both attempt the same general counter-testimony. Brooks\u2019 version is better. Written as a letter to Coates, Brooks says, \u201cI think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There\u2019s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children\u2019s Zone for every K.K.K. \u2014 and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fair enough. But this kind of sentimentality isn\u2019t really engagement. The larger point Coates is making has yet to be countered in\u00a0any substantive way. The reason Coates\u2019 argument has not been so countered is, I think, because there\u2019s far too much truth to what he\u2019s saying.<\/p>\n

Racism is so deeply woven into the DNA of American culture that\u2013when it is exposed so artfully and accurately in the way Ta-Nehisi Coates does\u2026 which is to say more effectively and plane better than any other writer of his generation\u2013it\u2019s such a raw slap in the face that folks like Lowry and Brooks seem to be in blatant denial.<\/p>\n

In this most recent piece for\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>, one point that is sticking with\u00a0me personally is Coates\u2019 insistence that incarceration should be viewed like a social program, like welfare or medicare.<\/p>\n

Incarceration is our society\u2019s way of dealing with black men in poverty.<\/p>\n

Through the 1960s and 1970s crime was on the rise worldwide. The American solution through the 1980s and 1990s was to lock people up. We now have more actual people in jail than either China or Russia. Crime went down\u2026 problem solved, right? Coates answers:<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory has not been kind to this conclusion. The rise and fall in crime in the late 20th century was an international phenomenon. Crime rates rose and fell in the United States and Canada at roughly the same clip\u2014but in Canada, imprisonment rates held steady. \u201cIf greatly increased severity of punishment and higher imprisonment rates caused American crime rates to fall after 1990,\u201d the researchers Michael Tonry and David P. Farrington have written, then \u201cwhat caused the Canadian rates to fall?\u201d The riddle is not particular to North America. In the latter half of the 20th century, crime rose and then fell in Nordic countries as well. During the period of rising crime, incarceration rates held steady in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden\u2014but declined in Finland. \u201cIf punishment affects crime, Finland\u2019s crime rate should have shot up,\u201d Tonry and Farrington write, but it did not.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those picked to go to prison are not taken at random. By far the largest\u00a0risk factor for spending time in jail is to be male, black, and uneducated. \u201cFully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not,\u201d Coates wrote in\u00a0BTW&M<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0article argues effectively for the fact that, as a strategy for dealing with social issues facing the lower class in our society, the \u201ctough on crime\u201d attitude and accompanying incarceration strategy has been a dismal failure.<\/p>\n

What Coates is able to demonstrate\u2013using both cold hard facts, and well told narratives\u2013is that the mechanism of racism feeds both sides of the issue. The present issues facing both blacks and whites in our society\u00a0are but the distant children of the mother of all sins.<\/p>\n

\u201cMass incarceration is, ultimately, a problem of troublesome entanglements. To war seriously against the disparity in unfreedom requires a war against a disparity in resources. And to war against a disparity in resources is to confront a history in which both the plunder and the mass incarceration of blacks are accepted commonplaces. Our current debate over criminal-justice reform pretends that it is possible to disentangle ourselves without significantly disturbing the other aspects of our lives, that one can extract the thread of mass incarceration from the larger tapestry of racist American policy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coates refuses to pretend. He refuses to allow the rest of us to pretend. This is why you need to read his work. It\u2019s going to make you mad. It\u2019s going to make you sad. It\u2019s going to make you feel helpless & trapped. It\u2019s going to make you fearful and disgusted\u2026 in other words, it\u2019s going to make you feel the way the African American community has been feeling\u00a0since they were forced onto slave ships and carted to America.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI think our criminal justice system is working as intended. It is only broken to the extent that our society is broken\u2026 the lens of criminal justice is the way this country has traditionally regarded black people. I don\u2019t know that\u00a0anything is broken at all. The deeper question is: are we okay with something on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":4500,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1385,1384,1383,718,1110,1380,1382],"class_list":["post-4497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-between-the-world-and-me","tag-incarceration","tag-injustice","tag-poverty","tag-racism","tag-ta-nehisi-coates","tag-the-atlantic"],"yoast_head":"\nThe American Justice System Isn't Broken - It's Doing Exactly What It's Designed to Do<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""I think our criminal justice system is working as intended. 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