“This chapter examines the causes for imprisoning disproportionate numbers of African Americans from the inception of this nation’s penitentiaries. The Western world had only recently invented imprisonment for common law offenses and ostensibly for reforming the criminals. This reforming idea undergirded the penitentiary system of this new nation and signaled the beginning of the Western world’s modern prison system. In earlier societies, incarceration served as a revenge mechanism or for preventive detention of persons accused of a crime or awaiting the execution of a sentence.” “In the new United States, African Americans suffered under both approaches, the new and the old, and often found themselves imprisoned for no apparent or understandable reason. The conservative position of abolitionists consistently held African Americans accountable for their own oppression, for their impoverishment and unemployment which led to homelessness or in their terms vagrancy, an imprisonable offense. [George M.] Frederickson, in his analysis of Black imagery in the minds of White Americans, explained that to these reformers ‘a sin apparently remained a sin whether it was forced on the individual or not’… Propriety required the sinner to atone and be reformed.” “…He [an English chronicler of the early 19th century] inspected many prisons in the North and found that ‘unemployment, lack of education, and prejudiced witnesses and juries’ combined to insure the extraordinarily large African American inmate population.” Charshee C.L. McIntyre “Criminalizing a Race: Free Blacks During Slavery” Page 167
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 18:35:07 +0000
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