The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.
[...]Ta-Nehisi's post is just beautiful. Everyone should read it. Even better, it leads us in a much more important and serious direction. Injustice in America is broad and systematic. Its malfunction is emblematic of flaws existing throughout American society today. It shows up in the shooting of teenagers, in pop culture conceptions of black crime, and most importantly, in the mass incarceration of young black men. The scale of this, intentionally silent form of oppression is shocking. Adam Gopnik provides the statistics in The New Yorker:
We have spent much of this year outlining the ways in which American policy has placed black people outside of the law. We are now being told that after having pursued such policies for 200 years, after codifying violence in slavery, after a people conceived in mass rape, after permitting the disenfranchisement of black people through violence, after Draft riots, after white-lines, white leagues, and red shirts, after terrorism, after standing aside for the better reduction of Rosewood and the improvement of Tulsa, after the coup d'etat in Wilmington, after Airport Homes and Cicero, after Ossian Sweet, after Arthur Lee McDuffie, after Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpers, after Kathryn Johnston and the Danziger Bridge, that there are no ill effects, that we are pure, that we are just, that we are clean. Our sense of self is incredible. We believe ourselves to have inherited all of Jefferson's love of freedom, but none of his affection for white supremacy.
You should not be troubled that George Zimmerman "got away" with the killing of Trayvon Martin, you should be troubled that you live in a country that ensures that Trayvon Martin will happen. Trayvon Martin is happening again in Florida. Right now.
More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.If we wish to better understand these problems, the best place to turn is William Stuntz's posthumously published masterpiece, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Stuntz forcefully explains that the fundamental problem with the criminal justice system is that it is no longer democratic. Policing and jurisprudence have become entirely divorced from the communities that actually need these services. This is why you have Stop Snitching campaigns and the like, since the relationship is fully adversarial. People from one community are exercising their political/social power over another, to the detriment of all involved. You fix this problem by getting the community more involved with its own criminal justice system and external actors more involved with the community.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
I do understand that drive for national unity, but it's important to recognize diversity too. No one says a white person from the suburbs can't be a cop. But who are we kidding? A deficit of white police officers, white lawyers and white judges from the suburbs is not exactly a problem facing urban/ ethnic communities.
The opposite is true. We have people who act like police work is like soldiering because they come from outside the community with hostile attitudes. Even worse, they're entering these communities with military style tactics and weaponry to engage in some bizarre form of urban warfare. And we see the effects. Black people, usually from urban areas, are punished, brutally, at rates astronomically higher than whites that commit similar crimes. No doubt that it's easier from a white cop to empathize with a drunk white teenager than a black one found in a similar situation.
Justice Stevens talks about the effectiveness of community-driven police work in his review of Stuntz's book, where he compares the different policing provided to European immigrants as opposed to those received by African Americans moving north.
Stuntz believes that two enormous migrations that led to crime waves largely define the history of crime and punishment in the United States. The first occurred during the seventy years preceding World War I when over 30 million Europeans came to America and settled primarily in cities in the industrial Northeast. The second occurred during the first two thirds of the twentieth century when seven million blacks left the rural South and moved into the same cities. To put simply Stuntz’s description of the central difference between those two migrations: during the European migration, urban politics soon produced local police forces made up of officers who were similar to and resided among the residents of the areas they were protecting—Irish-Americans trusted Irish cops from the neighborhood to treat them fairly—whereas during the black migration, the white majorities living in suburban areas selected the prosecutors and police officers who enforced the law in black urban neighborhoods.
During the Gilded Age, crime was not controlled chiefly through punishment, but rather through local democracy and the network of relationships that supported it:
Police officers sometimes lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled, and had political ties to those neighborhoods through the ward bosses who represented their cities’ political machines. Those patrols happened on foot: officers, those whom they targeted, and those whom they served knew one another. Cops, crime victims, criminals, and the jurors who judged them—these were not wholly distinct communities; they overlapped, and the overlaps could be large.
Going back to these more democratic forms of justice will be difficult, but its not impossible. There are already movement in place with a strong determination to return democracy back to the lives of ordinary Americans. Like most movements, we won't see results right away, but efforts over the last two years have seen the formation of grassroots institution like Occupy matched with an unheralded distaste for American government.
Even better, we already have good evidence of how effective community-driven policing can become, thanks to New York. While there are still serious problems with things like stop and frisk, New York's increased police presence throughout the city have led to the largest drop in crime in American history. This has been accomplished without particularly meaningful changes in social or economic factors. New York's racial composition, poverty and even drug use has not changed substantially over the last twenty years, yet the city is now as safe as just about any other place in America. Most importantly, New York's incarceration rate has not really changed at all over the last twenty years. Prevention has meant focusing on misdemeanors instead of felonies, and it's doing a great job of keeping people out of prisons.
The most important lesson from Trayvon Martin's murder is that it does not have to be this way. We do not have to live in a society where state violence is the norm. America is unique both in its level of violent crime and its level of incarceration. It seems odd to think that stronger democratic institutions can address these issues simultaneously, but evidence from places like Jersey in the Channel Islands show that this is actually the case. Almost all of America's major public institutions are due for a good shaking. We know the way forward, the only job now is to act.
