it is just wonderful to be here surrounded by so many people with open minds and open hearts people who are willing to imagine that there is more to this world than meets our own eyes and I want to share with you how my own eyes have been opened and how I have learned to care more about a group of people were supposed to despise people were supposed to hate people are supposed to fear people we are taught are unworthy fundamentally unworthy of our care compassion and concern I'm here to talk about criminals and I'm here to talk about our criminal justice system a system of mass incarceration a penal system unprecedented in world history millions of people are locked up in the United States today overwhelmingly poor people and people of color locked in literal cages often treated worse than animals and then upon their release they're stripped of the basic civil and human rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement like the right to vote the right to serve on juries and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment housing access to education and basic public benefits so many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you've been branded a felon that's why I now believe we have not truly ended racial caste in America we've merely redesigned it now I want to just admit at the outset that there was a time when I rejected this kind of talk out of hand there was a time when I rejected comparisons between mass incarceration and slavery or mass incarceration in Jim Crow and believed that people who made those kinds of claims and those kinds of comparisons were actually doing more harm than good to efforts to reform our criminal justice system or achieve greater racial equality in the United States in fact the first time I encountered the idea that our criminal justice system might be functioning like a caste system I was living in Oakland California and I was rushing to catch the bus and as I was hurrying down the street there was this bright orange poster stapled to a telephone pole that caught my eye and on it it said in large bold print the drug war is the new Jim Crow and I paused for a minute and scanned the text of the flyer and I saw that some radical community group was holding a meeting several blocks away and they were organizing to protest the new three strikes law in California the expansion of this prison system the drug war racial profiling police brutality the list went on and on and I stood there looking at the flier thinking to myself yeah our criminal justice system may be biased in a lot of ways but does it help to make such absurd comparisons to Jim Crow people just think you're crazy and then I cross the street hopped on the bus headed to my new job as director of the racial justice project for the ACLU well when I join the ACLU I assume that our criminal justice system had problems of racial bias much in the same way that all institutions in our society are infected to some degree or another with problems associated with conscious or unconscious bias and stereotyping and so I assume that it was my job to join together with other advocates to try to root out racial bias wherever and whenever it might rear its ugly head in the criminal justice system but by the time I left the ACLU I had come to realize that I was just dead wrong about our criminal justice system it's not just another institution in our society infected with some degree of bias but a different beast entirely the activist that posted that sign on the telephone pole weren't crazy nor were the smattering of lawyers and activists around the country that we're beginning to connect the dots between mass incarceration and earlier forms of racial and social control quite belatedly I came to see that our criminal justice system now does function much more like a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention and control millions of children in the United States today grow up believing that they too one day will go to jail in our most segregated ghettoize communities in the United States young people are shuttled from decrepit underfunded schools to these brand-new hi-tech prisons they're targeted at young ages often before they're old enough to vote stopped Fritz searched interrogated about who they are where they're going if they headed home with nothing but skittles in their hand stop frizz search and when they're arrested they're typically arrested for a relatively minor nonviolent often drug-related offense the very sorts of crimes that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle-class white communities or on college campuses but go largely ignored they're arrested swept in branded criminals and felons and then ushered into a permanent second class status a status from which they will never escape and this is happening to people by the millions in this country today there are more African American adults under correctional control in prison or jail on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began as of 2004 more black men were denied the right to vote than in 1870 the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race now of course during the Jim Crow era poll taxes and literacy tests operated to keep black folks from the polls well today felon disenfranchisement laws in many states now accomplish what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not now this isn't a phenomenon that just affects some small segment of the African American community to the contrary in many large urban areas today more than half of working-age African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives these men are part of a growing under caste not class caste a group of people defined largely by race relegated to a permanent second-class status by law now I find that these days when I tell people that I now believe that our system of mass incarceration is like a new Jim Crow a new caste like system people typically react with shock disbelief they say how can you say that how can you say that our criminal justice system isn't a system of racial control as a system of crime control and if black folks would stop running around committing so many crimes they wouldn't have to worry about being locked up and then stripped of their basic civil and human rights but therein lies the greatest myth about mass incarceration namely that it's been driven simply by crime in crime rates it's not true it's just not true during a 30-year period of time our nation's prison population quintupled not doubled or tripled quintupled we went from having a prison population in the 1970s about 300,000 people today we have an incarcerated population of over 2 million we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia or China or Iran but during this 30-year period of time when our prison population exploded crime rates fluctuated they went up went down went back up again went down again went up and then down down down and today as bad as crime rates are in some parts of the country crime rates nationally are at historical lows but incarceration rates have consistently soared most criminologist and sociologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the United States have moved independently of one another incarceration rates especially black incarceration rates have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or going down in any given community or the nation as a whole so what explains the sudden and presidented explosion incarceration if not simply crime in crime rates well it turns out that the activists who posted that sign on the telephone pole were right the war on drugs and the get tough movement the wave of punitive Nastasha over the United States on the heels of the civil rights movement drug convictions alone just drug convictions account counted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000 the period of our prison systems most dramatic expansion drug convictions have increased more than a thousand percent since the drug war began I mean to get a sense of how large a contribution the drug war has made to mass incarceration think of it this way there are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses then we're incarcerated for all reasons in 1980 now most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime most do you don't have to raise your hand most do but the enemy in this war has been racially defined even though studies have now consistently shown for decades that contrary to popular belief people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites this drug war has been waged almost exclusively on black and brown communities in fact where significant differences and the data can be found it frequently suggests that white youth are more likely to engage in illegal drug use drug abuse and drug dealing than black youth but that's not what you would guess by taking a peek inside our nation's prisons and jails which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders he and Rights Watch reported at the peak of the drug war that in some states eighty to ninety percent of all drug offenders sent to prison one race African American now I find that many people when they see this data they say oh you know that's a shame that's a shame but you know we need a war on them them in the hood because that's where the violent offenders can be found that's where the drug kingpins can be found but when many people don't realize is this drug war has never been focused primarily on rooting out the violent offenders or the drug kingpins federal funding in this war has flowed to those state and local law enforcement agencies that boost the sheer numbers of drug arrests it's been a numbers game law enforcement agencies have been rewarded in cash by the millions for the sheer numbers of people swept in for drug offenses virtually guaranteeing that law enforcement goes out looking for the so-called low-hanging fruit stopping frisking searching as many people as possible to get their numbers up and federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use up to eighty percent of the cash cars homes seized from suspected drug offenders you don't have to be convicted just suspected of a drug offense and law enforcement can seize the cash out of your pocket out of your home take your car sell it keep the proceeds thus giving law enforcement a direct monetary interest not in ending drug abuse or drug addiction or drug related harm but in the longevity of this war itself and the US Supreme Court far from resisting the rise of mass incarceration and the targeting of poor communities of color far from resisting it it has facilitated the drug war at every turn the US Supreme Court has eviscerated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures giving the police license to stop frist search just about anyone anywhere without a shred of evidence of any criminal activity as long as they get consent which is really just compliance and for those who want to challenge the bias that is unfold display in the drug war the US Supreme Court has closed the courthouse doors the cases that I was bringing challenging patters and practices of profiling by the police can't even be filed in a court of law today in a series of cases beginning with McCleskey vs. Kemp and Armstrong versus the United States the US Supreme Court has ruled explicitly that it does not matter how overwhelming your statistical evidence is it does not matter how severe the racial disparities are unless you have proof of conscious intentional bias tantamount to an admission by a law enforcement official of bias you can't even state a claim for race discrimination in the criminal justice system today in this way the US Supreme Court is effectively immunized the system of mass incarceration from judicial scrutiny for racial bias much in the same way that it once rallied to the defense of slavery and Jim Crow in their days but of course being swept into the system at a young age with little hope of challenging the tactics or the bias that got you there is just the beginning of the Odyssey for so many because once you're swept in you're ushered into a parallel social universe in which the basic civil and human rights that apply to others no longer apply to you for the rest of your life you've got to check that box on employment applications asking the dreaded question have you ever been convicted of a felony doesn't matter how long ago that felony may have occurred months ago weeks ago or 35 years ago for the rest of your life you've got to check that box knowing full well your applications going straight to the trash housing discrimination perfectly legal by like landlords and private housing landlords and officials public benefits are off-limits to people who have been convicted of felony like food stamps under federal law you can't even get food stamps if you've been convicted of a felony what are people released from prison supposed to do can't get a job barred from public housing private housing even food stamps may be off-limits to you well apparently what we expect them to do is to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees fines court costs accumulated back child support and paying back all these fees fines and court costs can be a condition of your probation or parole and then get this if you're one of the lucky few who actually manages to get a job following release from prison up to one hundred percent of your wages can be garnished to pay back all those fees fines court costs and accumulated back child support what do we expect folks released from prison to do I say when we take a step back and view the system as a whole how it operates practically from cradle to grave in some communities have to ask yourself what does it seem designed to do seems designed in my view to keep sending folks right back to prison and that is what in fact happens the vast majority of times about 70% of people released from prison nationwide return within a few years and the majority of those who return in some states do so in a matter of months because the challenges of mere survival on the outside are so immense so what do we do what do we do well my own view is that nothing short of a major social movement has any hope of ending mass incarceration in the United States and if you imagine that surely something less could do somehow we could tinker with this machine and get it right consider the sheer scale the system if we were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s before the war on drugs and the get tough movement kicked off we would have to release four out of five people who are in prison today four out of five more than a million people employed by the criminal justice system would need to find a new line of work private prison companies now listed on the New York Stock Exchange in doing quite well even during times of economic recession those companies would be forced into bankruptcy this system is now so deeply rooted in our social political and economic structure it's not going to just fade away or downsize out of sight without a major upheaval a fairly radical shift in our public consciousness now I know that there's many people today who say well there's just no hope of ending mass incarceration in America just as many people were resigned to the old Jim Crow in the South would say oh yeah it's a shame but that's just the way that it is I find that so many people of all colors view the million cycling in and out of our prisons and jails is just an unfortunate but basically in alterable fact of American life well I am confident that Martin Luther King jr. and Rosa Parks and Ella Baker and Ann Braden and all those young people who risked their lives getting on buses and taking Freedom Rides to the south to end the old Jim Crow they would not be so easily deterred so I believe we have got to pick up where they left off and do the hard work of movement building on behalf of poor people of all colors in 1968 dr. King told advocates that the time had come to shift from a civil rights movement to a human rights movement meaningful equality he said could not be achieved through civil rights alone without basic human rights right to work the right to equality education right to housing without basic human rights he said civil rights are an empty promise so in honor of dr. King and all those who labored to end earlier systems of racial or social control I hope we will commit ourselves to building a human rights movement and mass incarceration a movement for education not incarceration a movement for jobs not jails and a movement to end all those forms of legal discrimination against people released from prison discrimination denying them basic human rights to work to shelter into food but before this movement can truly get underway a Great Awakening is required we've got to awaken from this colorblind slumber we've been in to the realities of race and America and we've got to be willing to embrace those labeled criminals not necessarily all their behavior but them their humaneness for it has been the refusal and failure to recognize the dignity and humanity of all people that has been the sturdy foundation for every caste like system that has ever existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world it's our task I firmly believe and not just mass incarceration not just the war on drugs but to end this history in cycle of creating cast like systems in America thank you so much for having me here thank you you