Skip to main content

The 13th Amendment




Just finished watching the 13th on Netflix by Ava DuVernay


With only 5% of the world population the US has 25% of the world incarcerated.

One in 4 out of the people in prison anywhere in the world is an America.

South Africa's apartheid was taken from the US segregation laws, then mass incarceration.

The "I am not a crook" Nixon used the Southern Strategy and the "War on Drugs".

Then Ronald Reagan continued the war on drugs and harsher sentences placed on crack than on cocaine. 
Minorities, especially African Americans, were disproportionately incarcerated. More that 80 percent of federal prisons serving crack cocaine sentences were black. In August 2010 President Barack Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 to “restore fairness to Federal cocaine sentencing“ laws. 

The war on drugs was like a war on blacks and I used to like Reagan. And these like other terms are codes for "war on blacks" like "state rights", "forced-bussing", "cutting-taxes", “law and order” etc the end product is that black communities are hurt more than white. Then next time step was during the Clinton era with 3 Strikes, Mandatory Minimums, Truth in Sentencing, etc there was a massive expansion in the prison system with an over-representation in the Africa-America communities. With the 1994 Crime Bill which had a $30 billion budget crime does pay if you a private security contractor.
Then there is the "crimmigration", where the immigration is taken over by Prison Services hence making immigrants – criminals.

Black men make up 6.5% of the population of the US but make up 40% of the population of US Prisons.

The Prison Industrial Complex is a system put in place to profit from incarceration and would do everything in their power to increase prison numbers because it is their profit. Then there are the companies and their suppliers who profit from it and will do everything in their power to keep it that way. The system has been heavily monetized, and they make money from the volume and the prison labour, which big companies are investing in.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The seedling of doubt - Merchants of Doubt

Doubt is the product What this book says, and the film elucidates is there is a selective specific group of "scientists" who have a particular playbook to discredit, confuse and "muddy the waters" against scientific research for their sponsors. What these group of people or interest groups have learned from the days of dealing with the tobacco industry, is that they need not concern themselves with trying to prove anything or to disprove the scientists. All they need is to seed doubt and confusion in the market of public opinion, their main motto is "Doubt is our product". As, when people are confused and the policies are difficult to interpret because they are complicated, ambiguous, inconclusive, etc then there will be great difficulty in organizing widespread opposition to it. They deliberately frustrate governments into inaction, blocking them by using their lobbyist and "experts" and hence stop all ways of finding effective solutions...

The end of a massive killer - The Malaria vaccine story

  A program on BBC iPlayer tells the story of the search for the first Malaria vaccine. T his is an exciting story. It has everything, from an exciting detective story to romance, horror, thriller, and finance. The individuals involved go from country to country, from London, Oxford, and New York to Villages in Africa and India. It involves multi-million organisations and sole individuals working against the system. It is recorded that one child dies every minute from Malaria, and it is a significant killer in a large number of countries. This program tells the story of how the Oxford University Team, the same team that developed the COVID-19 vaccine AstraZencetra as part of the Academic Vaccine Development Program. They had produced about 3 billion doses and had been used in 170 countries. This was also helped by a grant from the EU. Malaria was endemic throughout the Western world. It got its name from Rome.  The "bad air" ( Medival Latin' mala aria' ) surrounding ...

Further explaination of the universe

  Stephen Hawking, a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author, has always tried to explain complex astrophysical phenomena in simple language that everyone can understand. The subtitle of this book is "a further explanation of a science classic made more accessible". To his surprise, his book A Brief History of Time was a bestseller and was on the top ten list for 237 weeks and sold one copy for every 750 people on Earth. The book was a remarkable success for a modern physics book. Many people were asking for a sequel to the book. A Brief History of Time explained how Newtonian Astrophysics described the laws that control planets and stars' movement. This book takes into consideration the most recent theoretical and observational results. How light speed is finite and constant at 299,792,458 m/s. Since the speed of light is constant, to explain the different observations for different observers, time must be relative. Producing the twin paradox, i.e., time slows d...