Van Fosson: America’s prison system is oppressive, and ISU is complicit

Kaleb Van Fosson
March 16, 2017

“Law and order”. We heard this slogan from president Trump several times during the 2016 election, accompanied by his promises to clean up crime ridden communities and crack down on gangs and cartels. But what is law and order? Is law and order, as many people appear to believe, a benevolent force that holds society together in order to prevent chaos and anarchy from atomizing civilization into oblivion? I do not believe so, and I contend that law and order is the slogan of a sinister criminal justice system that preys on the vulnerable and enslaves minorities and people of color. In America, rather than attempting to rehabilitate offenders we lock them up like animals in order to exploit their labor, and even respected institutions like Iowa State University are contributing to this for-profit system of oppression.

You don’t need to look carefully to see the racism in our prison system; it isn’t hiding, concealed or disguised. Just looking at easily available data reveals an obscene level of racism in Iowa’s “justice system”. In Iowa, there are roughly ten African Americans in prison for every white person in prison despite the fact that African Americans make up only 3 percent of Iowa’s population. According to the ACLU, African Americans in the US are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana, even though African Americans and whites use marijuana at roughly the same rate and African Americans make up only 12.3 percent of the population. Hispanic Americans are also targeted by this racist system, reflected by the fact that hispanic men are 2.3 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.

Not only does our prison system target racial minorities, it also targets people struggling with mental illnesses. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 1 out of every 5 prisoners is incarcerated for drug crimes.  Despite mental health exports reaching a consensus that addiction is a mental health issue, we still incarcerate people struggling with drug addiction and treat them like criminals. The problem of criminalizing mental illness has become so severe that studies have shown that ten times more individuals with serious mental illness are residing in state prisons and county jails today than in our nation’s state mental hospitals. Forget about treating mental illness and working to help people struggling with it to recover, it’s far more profitable to just lock people up and deprive them of their dignity and freedom. Private correctional facilities were a $4.8 billion dollar industry in 2014, with profits of $629 million dollars.

This corrupt and oppressive system of incarceration is used for the benefit of corporations and institutions that employ prisoners to work for unjustifiably low wages. In Iowa, prisoners who perform welding services are paid only between 10 and 25 cents an hour for their labor. This is unacceptable and if we are going to focus on rehabilitation then incarcerated individuals who work should be taught useful skills to help them find employment, and they should be paid dignified wages so that when they leave prison they are not thrown into society with no money and a criminal record that prevents them from finding employment. With the way prisoners are treated in America, it is no wonder that state prisons have a recidivism rate of 76.6 percent.

Here at Iowa State University we are contributing to this system of oppression and exploitation. Prisoners work on our campus moving furniture and equipment,  assembling dorm beds, desks, and cabinets for wages as low as 20 cents an hour. It is wrong that an institution of higher learning such as Iowa State contributes to a culture of injustice, and I find it troubling that the people in our schools administration are not voicing concern or opposition to the use of prison labor on Iowa State’s campus. Why are we not hearing members of the board of regents, or people like President Leath speaking out about this issue? I believe that as a leader here at ISU, President Leath has a particularly strong moral obligation to denounce the use of inhumane prison labor on our campus, but so far he has been silent. Recently Leath was accused of being a racist during a protest of his address at ISCORE. I don’t think I would call him a racist, but I have to wonder if his cushy $525,000 dollar a year salary and hunting trips with far right-wing extremists like Mike Pence(who supports anti-gay “conversion therapy”) might be blinding him from recognizing the institutionalized racism and injustice in our society.  

sources: 

  • “In Iowa, there are roughly ten African Americans in prison for every white person in prison despite the fact that African Americans make up only 3 percent of Iowa’s population”   – https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/IA.html

  • “According to the ACLU, African Americans in the US are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana, even though African Americans and whites use marijuana at roughly the same rate and African Americans make up only 12.3 percent of the population” – https://www.aclu.org/feature/war-marijuana-black-and-white

  • “Hispanic Americans are also targeted by this racist system, reflected by the fact that hispanic men are 2.3 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.”

– http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf

 

  • “According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 1 out of every 5 prisoners is incarcerated for drug crimes.” – https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html

  • “The problem of criminalizing mental illness has become so severe that studies have shown that ten times more individuals with serious mental illness are residing in state prisons and county jails today than in our nation’s state mental hospitals.”

– http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/storage/documents/treatment-behind-bars/treatment-behind-bars.pdf

 

 

 

 

  • “I don’t think I would call him a racist, but I have to wonder if his cushy 525,000 dollar a year salary and hunting trips with far right-wing extremists like Vice President Mike Pence(who favors anti-gay electro-shock therapy) might be blinding him from recognizing the institutionalized racism and injustice in our society.”