There are more black men in US prisons today than there were slaves in 1840, and they are being used for the same purpose; working for private corporations at 16 to 20 cents an hour. Half the states have private, for-profit prisons whose lobbyists are demanding longer mandatory-minimum prison sentences. Indeed, American blacks are incarcerated at nearly eight times the level of South African blacks during the height of apartheid.

That’s from an incredible op-ed in Saturday’s Boston Globe by Jack A. Cole, the Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Amazing, courageous, timely, truthful — is it any wonder this isn’t even an issue in the presidential campaign?

Please, please, please – don’t let the assassin’s bullets silence the voice of compassion and righteousness:

This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Dr. King’s topic was “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”  He was speaking at the Riverside Church in Manhattan on April 30, 1967, almost a year before he was martyred on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

May he rest in peace, and may the rest of us draw courage and strength from his example.

The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we’re always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American people.

I encourage you to listen to the whole speech, or to read the transcript.

Also… take a listen to Curtis Mayfield – Right On For The Darkness – Toshi’s MLK Mix, which Toshi produced for his 2002 compilation “Peace of My Mind, Vol. II.”

Gotta love Japan-Stevie!

If you look at more than just the current incarceration rate and look at the chance of an American man having spent time in prison you’ll find even more horrifying statistics.  From http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0818/p02s01-usju.html:

If current trends continue, it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it’s 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17.

Those numbers seem to be more conservative than ones I’ve seen during my days debating where I’d see statistics that said half of black men have been to prison and 1 in 7 males.  Here’s something partially corroborate those numbers from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990’s and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20’s who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30’s, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison. In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

How do you like those numbers, guys?  How do you like the feeling of living in a country where you have a good chance of spending time in prison?  How do you like the feeling of knowing that virtually everywhere you go you are around people who have been affected by a prison experience?  And, prison isn’t pretty.  You have a pretty good chance of getting sick.  From: http://hab.hrsa.gov/tools/openingdoors/

In the United States, 20 to 26 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), 29 to 43 percent of those infected with the hepatitis C virus, and 40 percent of those who have TB passed through correctional facilities during 1997.

Prison is a cesspool of disease where any skills, money, dignity and resources a prisoner might have are quickly erroded by a environment which doesn’t prepare you for the outside world.  That would explain the recidivism rates.

Well folks, it’s official:

The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world, including the far more populous nation of China. At the start of the new year, the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates, according to the latest available figures.

Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry, outpacing nations like South Africa and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the U.S, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.

More than 1 in 100 adults is now locked up in America

1 in 9 black men ages 20-34 is currently behind bars.

Cambridge just elected its second consecutive black, openly gay mayor! Denise Simmons succeeds Ken Reeves.

Sure wish I lived in Cambridge… *sigh*

Wandering around the blogs, I came across this post by Undercover Black Man (a.k.a. television writer David Mills). He details an upcoming episode of the Boondocks, which rips into Black Entertainment Television (BET):It’s especially timely, given that BET founder Robert Johnson has waded into the Clinton/Obama dustup this week, coming down squarely (and nastily) on the side of Hillary… to the chagrin of many.

Color Lines magazine publishes a very interesting article on transgendered people of color who have transitioned from female to male bodies:

Trans people of color are finding that they have an extremely different relationship to gender transition than white people. London Dexter Ward, an LAPD cop who transitioned in 2004, sums it up this way: a white person who transitions to a male body “just became a man.” By contrast, he says, “I became a Black man. I became the enemy.”