The Criminalization of Race in America

Kimberle Crenshaw: Unlike before when someone owned you, driving you too hard was counter-productive because you would lose your investment. Convict leasing was different. You could get them cheaper and if you actually drove them to death, there was more where that came from. Khalil Gibran Muhammad (Harvard): In Alabama in 1850, 99% of people who were incarcerated were white. In Alabama by the 1880, 85% of the people incarcerated where Black. So we could have a debate, about how many of those black people were actually innocent, or we could have a conversation about the use of the criminal justice system to target both the innocent and the guity alike.   That continues all the way to the present. Where even today, about just under 40% of the nations prisoners are black, and yet the African American population is about 13%. They are snatching up bodies everywhere to fuel the system. In 2010, the Nation’s two largest private prison companies imprisoned more than 120,000 people and took in nearly $3 Billion in revenue. Jim Crow, Lynching and the Ku Klux Klan were a large part of the push-back against the freeing of Slave after the Civil War. But the larger...