I try to stay out of academic debates about social issues. This is mostly because I usually find them tedious, boring and useless. Over the past few years, there have been discussions in academia about whether it is appropriate to use the term “prison industrial complex” as opposed to “carceral state” or something else to describe the current incarceration epidemic in the U.S. Others have been taking issue with using the term “mass incarceration” finding it more accurate to describe the hundreds of thousands of people who we imprison as experiencing “hyper incarceration.” Currently we have academics like James Forman suggesting that Michelle Alexander’s characterization of mass incarceration as the “New Jim Crow” is analytically limited. Read a short version of his overall argument here.

There’s a lot I don’t care about and even more that I don’t know. But here’s what I do know for sure from my admittedly limited knowledge of American history: black bodies are and have always been synonymous with criminality and disposability. Therefore black people have always been systematically criminalized and systematically disposed of (whether we were being worked to death, lynched, or now warehoused). I have maintained in the past that:

“One cannot understand the current manifestation of the prison industrial complex without interrogating the notions of blackness that naturalize state violence against black and brown people.”

So this brings me to the actual point of this post today. I wanted to share this piece from the New York Times in 1936 which illustrates (in my opinion) the centrality of racism (specifically against black people) in the historical foundations of the American criminal legal system. I then leave it up to you to decide whether comparisons to Jim Crow make analytical sense to you in considering our current incarceration epidemic.

This is a precursor to our current mandatory minimum laws which have swelled the ranks of prisoners in the U.S. Here’s a PDF version of the article for your archives.