WRD

A Chronology of Topics and Themes in 13th

Time (min)

1-3 Incarceration numbers, 13th Amendment “loophole,” US “first prison boom” rebuilds the South with forced labor.

4 “mythology of black criminality”

5-7 Birth of a Nation, Klan terrorism, lynching,

8-9 Great Migration the result of “generational trauma”, Emmet Till

9 Jim Crow as a new kind of legal terrorism; “permanent second class status”

11-12 Civil rights activists as criminals; “defined a movement around getting arrested”

13-14 1960s: Civil Rights Act (1964) , Voting Rights Act (1965) and rising crime rates

14 1970s: the beginning of mass incarceration

15-16 “crime begins to stand in for race” “outcry for law and order”

16 Nixon: War on Drugs. “total war against the evils we see in our cities”

17 Southern Strategy

18L30 Ehrlichman – two enemies: antiwar movements and black people

19:30 1980s: Reagan

20:40 Rangel and “Just Say No’” to drugs; an educational program

22:10 Crack cocaine vs. powder

24:50 Rangel: “it may have seemed like a good idea at the time”

26:30 Lee Atwater

27-28 War on Drugs becomes part of popular culture – COPS on TV  Black men overrepresented on

news as criminals  “media . . . clichés that present mostly black and brown folks who seem like animals in cages, and then someone can turn off the TV thinking ‘it’s a good thing for prisons, because otherwise those crazy people would be walking on my block.’”

28-29 “Superpredators” “creating a context where people are afraid. And when you make people afraid, you can always justify putting people in the garbage can.”

29-30 “the degree to which black people bought into that.” “Many black communities began to actually support policies that criminalized their own children.” Central Park jogger case

31-34 Willie Horton, Bush v. Dukakis Cobb: “…a primitive American fear. Because Willie Horton was metaphorically the black male rapist that had been a staple of the white imagination since the time just after slavery. This idea . . . still had a great deal of political utility” .

35 “It became virtually impossible for a politician to run and appear soft on crime.”

36-40 1990s: Bill Clinton/1994 crime bill. 3-strikes, mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing, militarization of local police

37 Mandatory minimum sentencing

37-38 Glenn Martin: “we’ve taken away discretion from judges, arguably the most neutral party in the court, and given it over to prosecutors.” (95% of whom are white).

38 “Truth in sentencing” Keene: “We’ve done away with parole.” Stevenson: “We had parole in this country as a mechanism for getting people out of jails and prisons when it was clear that they were no longer a threat to public safety.”

39 $30 billion Federal Crime Bill of 1994 Small: “responsible for a massive expansion of the prison system. . . . and perverse incentives for law enforcement to do a lot things that we nowadays consider to be abusive.”

40 Muhammed: the bill gave money to build prisons and 100,000 new police DeRoche: “militarization all the way down to small, rural police departments”

Booker: “hyperincarceration . . . grinding into it our most vulnerable citizenry, and is overwhelmingly biased toward people of color.”

41 Bill Clinton: “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”

42 Hillary Clinton: “back then there was an outcry over the rising crime rate. And people from all communities were asking that action be taken.”

43 Cyril: “They forced millions of people who would not otherwise be in prison today, into prison. They forced families to be broken. They forced children to live without their parents.”

43 878,000 African Americans in priosn in 2001 Jones: “we should ask why is the black community so weak in our inability to defend ourselves? Let’s not forget . . . how many of our leaders had to leave the country or are in prison. You stripped out a whole generation of leadership.”

44 Jones: “the criminal justice system weaponizing black dissent. Dr. King, people forget, . . . was considered one of the most dangerous people in America”

45 Headline: “FBI Chief Calls Martin Luther King ‘The Most Notorious Liar in Country’” J. Edgar Hoover says Black Panthers “represent the greatest internal threat to the nation”

45 Gates: “The Panthers never were that big.. . .no one in their right mind could ever believe that the Black Panthers were ever going to bring down the greatest military force in the history of the world. The whole movement was criminalized and destroyed systematically by the government.”

45-46 Fred Hampton Jones: “They literally went and shot his whole house up . . . so afraid of a leader that could unite people.” Assata Shakur, Angela Davis Trayvon Martin and “stand your ground”

47-50 Davis: “I was represented by the FBI as being armed and dangerous. . . . the whole apparatus of the state was set up against me.”

50 Jones: “And when you strip out a whole generation of black leadership, running folk out the country, killing folk, framing folk, you will be vulnerable to Bill Clinton or anybody else. They’ll do to you what they will.”

51 Trayvon Martin killed by George Zimmerman

52 “Stand your ground” law “which says you can kill someone if you feel threatened.”

53-54 ALEC as sponsor of stand-your-ground laws.

56 Wal-Mart was ALEC member, and biggest seller of long guns and bullets Graves: “So it’s reasonable to think that Wal-Mart benefited from these stand your ground laws that ALEC pushed, that initially prevented the arrest of the killer of Trayvon Martin.”

57 Corrections Corp. of America “first private prison corporation in U.S.” longtime ALEC member

58 ALEC proposed 3-strikes laws, mandatory minimums

1:00 ALEC: “We want less people in prison.”

1:01 CCA contract to house detained immigrants ($11 million/month) “Crimmigration system” – “merger of immigration and law enforcement” SB 1070, sponsored by ALEC and CCA

1:03 Prison industry “knows that it’s dying” and “looking for the next thing”

American Bail Coalition (ALEC member) aiming to privatize probation and parole

1:05 GPS monitoring “incarcerating people in their own communities”

1:06 “Prison industrial complex”: “mass incarceraton and companies that profit from mass incarceration”

1:07 Prison labor

1:09 Kalief Browder, plea bargaining: “if everyone insisted on a trial, the entire system would shut

down.”

1:15 Not just “deprive you of your liberty,” “we want to punish you too”

1:17 “collateral consequences”: mental health, jobs, loans, businesses, the right to vote

30% of black men in Alabama have permanently lost the right to vote due to conviction

1:23 “Prison industrial complex relies historicall on the inheritances of slavery.”

1:24 “once you are convicted of a crime you are in essence a slave of the state”

1:24

1:26

13th Amendment “criminality clause as a tool” “systems of racial and social control that appear to die but are reborn and reform tailored to the constraints and needs of the time.” Slavery - convict leasing - Jim Crow - mass incarceration “the narrative of racial difference continued and it turned into this presumption of dangerousness and guilt that follows every black and brown person” Ferguson, Black Lives Matter

1:27 “this is the product of a centuries-long historical process”

1:30 Use of media to reveal violence: slave narratives, lynchings, Emmett Till dogs and fire hoses, cell phone video of police violence (Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sam DuBose, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Philando Castile)

1:33 Police violence “isn’t the problem in and of itself, it’s the reflection of a much larger, brutal system of racial and social control known as mass incarceration, which authorizes this kind of police violence.”