Black Boy Poems

by Tyson Amir

  Let's take a step back and discuss the modern day systems of policing, the criminal justice system, and the prison industrial complex. The numbers are well substantiated, which should lead an objective mind to clearly see beyond any shadow of a doubt that the criminal justice system, which includes law enforcement, courts, jails and prisons, is racist. The misapplication of justice and the intentional overemphasis of policing in poor black and brown neighborhoods is also well documented. I know not all cops are bad, and the same goes for judges or employees of jails and prisons. I refuse to paint individuals with a broad-brush stroke. It's simply not right to do that, and it's not accurate. I don't like being falsely stereotyped, and I refuse to do that to other groups. However, what is right and what is accurate and supported by volumes of empirical data is that all these individuals belong to much larger institutions that operate with racism as founding and guiding tenets.

  There are good individuals who seek to be just or change these institutions from the inside, which is commendable, but the institutional practices, as well as some individual practices of people who represent the Criminal Justice System (CJS), unequivocally demonstrate racial bias that largely affects the black community in America. I will not exhaust the reader with a long list of statistics, but there are some numbers that help to provide some context for my hatred and harsh criticism of the institutions of law enforcement and the CJS. This knowledge and experience is what drives the tone in the poem “Blue Devil.”

  If you are interested in a more comprehensive look at the CJS and its incarceration habits, then read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, and if you want to look at even more brutal incarceration history, then read Michael Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name, or A Brief History of Slavery by Dr. Victor Kappeler. Each have created works that shine bright lights on the CJS and PIC. Still, here are a few numbers and points that need to be discussed for the context of Blue Devil to make sense.

  Demographic Data

  Blacks are 12 percent to 13 percent of the American population.

  Whites are about 78 percent of the American population.

  Depending on how you define "black," you'll find blacks making up somewhere between 40 to 60 percent of the incarcerated population. This is according to the Bureau of Justice 2009 report. People who identify as two "races" are not counted among the black population. Law enforcement agents, in their liberal use of "probable cause" to stop someone who they believe appears "suspicious," do not first conduct an authentic "black" test to determine whether they should stop the person. The stops are largely subjective assessments heavily influenced by the color of one's skin. This means you might be black enough to be stopped by police but not "black" enough to be counted as part of the black jail/prison population. That is one reason why the percentage shift is so dramatic. Forty percent of all inmates in jails and prisons today are solely identified as black. Depending on your definition of black, when you compare that with the population of blacks in the U.S., you can see that blacks are either 300 percent to 500 percent over-represented in incarcerated facilities. That breaks down to an average of six times more likely to be incarcerated than their white counterparts.

  On the other side of the equation, whites constitute 78 percent of the American population but only comprise a little more than 30 percent of those incarcerated. Whereas, blacks are way over-represented in incarceration when contrasted with their total percentage of the American population, whites are under-represented to an incredible degree. What one would reasonably assume using scientific measurement as a standard in a just and fair society, is that incarceration numbers should correlate closely with the respective group's population percentages. Simple logic would dictate that if there are fewer blacks in America, then there should be fewer blacks in incarcerated populations. More whites in America should logically lead to incarceration rates closer to the total white percentage of population in America. But that is nowhere close to what we see when we analyze American incarceration data. This leads one to hypothesize that either blacks are inherently more prone to crime, which we know is false, or the system profiles a specific group of people as criminal. As the homies on the block who serve as street corner philosophers would say, “youngster, them numbers don’t lie.” I always liked that line, but we do know numbers can be manipulated. However, when it comes to who is incarcerated in America, those numbers are as true as can be.

  Police Contact

  This section details how people contact police. Most people arrested in the United States have been arrested for non-violent "crimes," mainly drug-related offenses. Empirical data tells us that all groups of people use drugs. No "ethnic" or "racial" group says no to drugs. Drugs can be found in any neighborhood, in every city or town in America. The actual group that statistically uses drugs more than any other group is whites. According to journalist Saki Knafo in an article citing findings from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Human Rights Watch and the BJS:

  “Nearly 20 percent of whites have used cocaine, compared with 10 percent of blacks and Latinos, according to a 2011 survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration—the most recent data available.

  Higher percentages of whites have also tried hallucinogens, marijuana, pain relievers like OxyContin, and stimulants like methamphetamine, according to the survey. Crack is more popular among blacks than whites, but not by much.

  Still, blacks are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites, according to a 2009 report from the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

  Of the 225,242 people who were serving time in state prisons for drug offenses in 2011, blacks made up 45 percent and whites comprised just 30 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.”

  All that means the calculus is something like this: There are fewer blacks in America. Fact. There are blacks who use drugs. Fact. There are more whites in America than blacks and not just a little bit more; there are about 246 million white people in America. Fact. There's about 42 million blacks. Fact. Do the math. If you borrowed correctly, you'll see there are 204 million more white people than blacks in America. Fact. 200 million more whites. That's five times the number of whites than blacks. Understand that number. Whites constitute a greater percentage of America than blacks and are statistically speaking more likely to use drugs than blacks. Fact. But blacks, who are dwarfed in number by the population of whites, are more likely to be arrested and put in jail or prison for drugs than whites. Fact. That does not make any type of logical sense at all. The only way to attempt to make sense for these horrendous disparities is by accounting for the racist practices of the PIC and CJS.

  Some folks are arrested for violent crimes too, but most folks are in jail and prison as a result of drugs or other related non-violent crimes. Since no community has a monopoly on drug use, why is it that some communities are policed more in regards to drugs? Since we know that white communities tend to have and use more drugs than other communities, why is it that we see fewer white folks incarcerated for drug sales and possession? These are essential questions a person with a conscience must answer.

  A few things to consider

  - Depending on what locale you're in, blacks are somewhere between six to thirty times more likely to be arrested than whites. There are some instances where more black people are arrested than actually live in a city or town. Dearborn, Michigan is one example of such ludicrous policing. Dearborn has a majority white and Arab population, current census numbers state there are around 4,000 blacks in Dearborn. According to arrest records submitted to the FBI in a two year span of 2011-2012 the Dearborn police reported more than 4,500 arrests of blacks. That's 500 more than actually live in the city. Let's break this down, Dearborn PD arrested so many black people in those two years that they could've arrested every black man, woman and child once, and some twice. This insane statistical reality means that blacks are 26 more times likely to be arrested than whites or Arabs. Black
folks represent 4 to 5 percent of the total population in Dearborn but account for more than 50% of arrests. Sadly, this isn't the only extreme example in our nation.

  - I'm from San Jose, California. Blacks make up 2 percent to 3 percent of the San Jose population today. Blacks are virtually invisible in San Jose, which is quite telling because of San Jose's importance to the tech industry and the future of America, but that's for another discussion. When I was a kid, blacks constituted a greater percentage (6 to 8 percent) of San Jose but not by much. My parents literally stitched together a black community for my sister and me to grow up in. Despite our relative invisibility, the San Jose Police Department seems to see blacks fairly well because we are 10 percent of all those arrested. You actually have to look hard to find black people in San Jose, but cops seem to find them and arrest them one out of ten times a person is arrested. Now statistically speaking when a group is overly represented in a category, this tends to suggest a correlation of some sort. The correlation that I'm asserting is policing is biased along the lines of race. San Jose is around 35 percent Latino, 30 percent white, and 32 percent Asian. Pardon the generic descriptors, but that's how it's broken down. Both whites and Asians are far underrepresented in their arrest numbers when compared to their population totals. Whites were 19 percent of total arrests, and Asians were 14 percent of arrests. The other over-represented group was Latinos, who were 52 percent of total arrests. This is just police contact. This doesn't even account for how the contact happens or if force was used.

  - In Oakland, California, you have a greater concentration of blacks. Black folks make up about 28 percent to 30 percent of the population. Consequently, they are 62 percent of those stopped by police. Latinos were 17 percent of stops, whites 12 percent of stops, and Asians 6 percent. Total Oakland population: whites 35 percent, Asians 17 percent, and Latinos 25 percent. Every other group is under-represented regarding arrests according to race and their population numbers.

  - San Francisco, CA. This language is taken directly from a San Francisco city-commissioned study by the Reentry Council in conjunction with the W. Haywood Burns Institute: "Black people are 7.1 times more likely to be arrested in the city than white people, 11 times more likely to be booked into jail, and 10.3 times more likely to be convicted. Those convicted spend more time on probation or behind bars." Data is based on records through 2013. Demographics of San Francisco: whites 50 percent, Asians 30 percent, blacks 6 percent, Latinos 14 percent.

  - California is supposed to be a bastion of liberalism and inclusion. Even Berkeley, which is famous for its hippy culture and alternative politics, has similar statistical abnormalities, which are actually normalities in America. Blacks are 10 percent of Berkeley's population but account for 31 percent of people stopped by police. Whites are 60 percent of Berkeley's population but account for 36.7 percent of police stops. Of the two groups stopped, 66 percent of blacks were let go without being arrested or cited, and only 38.1 percent of whites were let go without being arrested or cited. So the Berkeley Police Department is telling me more blacks were stopped for no violation than whites. Sixty-six percent of all blacks stopped had to be let go because they had nothing on them or weren't doing anything they could be arrested for. While about 62 percent of the whites stopped were found to be in "violation" of some type of law necessitating arrest. Still, BPD wants to focus their efforts on a law-abiding black population and ignore a law-breaking majority white population. That is not "policing," that is targeting and hunting a specific group of people in hopes of making them look criminal.

  - We can go on and on. In almost every locale where black people reside in America, you'll find these over-representations with police contacts. If you control for gender, you'll find similar data for black women when compared to white women and other groups of women. Law enforcement agencies want to brush the data aside with various innovative uses of cognitive dissonance. They cite problems with interpreting data. They might say the statistics don't fully represent the picture. They'll use buzzwords like high crime areas to explain why they concentrate resources in certain places. People are mainly being arrested for drugs, not robberies, murders, rape, burglaries, or larceny. Drugs. Blacks aren't the only people with drugs; whites are the folks with more drugs than any other group, and there's 200 million more whites in America. Yet and still, we see "policing" of black and brown communities more than any other group of people.

  Incarceration

  - You have to have been contacted by the police somewhere to end up in jail or prison. Once that happens, you enter the criminal justice system, and the empirical data demonstrate once again that this institution is skewed heavily due to race. We'll refresh the numbers: Blacks are 12 percent to 13 percent of the nation’s population, but, depending on how black is defined by "authorities," we are 40 percent to 60 percent of the incarcerated population. So basically four to six out of every ten people locked up in jails and prisons are black. In some areas, the numbers for all black men living within a jurisdiction who are incarcerated are one out of three black men in the total adult male population. In other places it is two out of five of the total adult male population. This means if you were to take all the black men in a city and line them up, one out of three or two out of five would be in department of corrections uniforms. In Washington, D.C., four out of five folks arrested are black even though they make up 47 percent of the population. Since blacks are the majority arrested, they are the overwhelming majority in D.C. jails. It is a statement of fact that D.C. jails are almost completely black.

  - It is a statement of fact that there isn't one state in the Union where rates of incarceration for blacks are ever equal to or less than incarceration rates for whites. Nor is there a state where blacks are incarcerated equal to their percentage of the population. Hawaii is the state where black incarceration rates are the lowest in the country, but even in Hawaii blacks are more likely to be locked up than whites. According to census data, we are 2.5 times more likely to be in jail or prison than whites. This is the lowest rate in the country. The corresponding highest rate is found in Iowa, where we are eleven times more likely to be in jail and prisons than whites. And this is only one small piece of the puzzle. We can talk about sentencing and solitary confinement as well as death row. We can discuss parole and probation terms. All of it can be viewed through a color lens, and what you'll constantly see is that disparities emerge when you examine how black men and women are treated by the CJS.

  “Blue Devil” is the justifiable angry response to America's criminal justice practices. For many blacks in America, law enforcement and the CJS have served as institutions of terror. Just recently, we've had a number of politicians come forward and apologize for the decisions they made to lock up more people for nonviolent offenses. Former President Bill Clinton has apologized for laws that he helped pass while he was president that led to more men and women in jails and prisons. Clinton admitted in a speech delivered at the 2015 NAACP annual meeting in Philadelphia that his signature on a crime bill made the problems worse. Clinton was referring to the Omnibus Crime Bill he signed that led to federal three-strikes laws that mandated life sentences for convictions after two or more prior convictions that could either be violent or nonviolent. The Reagan and Bush administrations before him passed laws that helped create the PIC as well. Clinton's apology is noteworthy but in his apology he still attempted to justify why he did it using his presidential cognitive dissonance. He blamed the necessity of the law on rising crime from the previous decade. At one moment he attempted to tell a story about rampant gang warfare and how little children were being killed in drive-bys. Clinton's apology is negated by his passionate pleas to justify why the law was needed at that time.

  There is no doubt that crack changed the inner city, but crack and the high-powered weaponry that accompanied the drug trade didn't magically appear in the hood. Those things were imported into the hood with the aid of government agents. This is no conspiracy theory. The Contra conf
lict was funded by profits from cocaine sales throughout the West Coast in the ’80s. The Central Intelligence Agency helped facilitate the sale of cocaine to inner cities largely populated by black and brown folks in exchange for millions of dollars to fight to overthrow a Communist regime that white business people and politicians didn't like in Nicaragua. Secretary of Defense John Kerry published a report in 1989 while he was a senator detailing the CIA's dealings with drug traffickers.