US Prison Population at Record High

Sisters freed on kidney donation promise 16 years for an armed robbery that netted them between $11 and $200 dollars

CBC.ca wrote:

The sisters' lawyer, Chokwe Lumumba, said the women hope to get government-funded Medicaid health insurance in Florida, and begin the needed steps to make the transplant happen.

As the toll in human suffering increases daily, Obama and his Wall Street advisers bail out the banks and the rich just as crucial social services for children are being cut back, unemployment is soaring into record numbers and more and more youth of color are disappearing into an abysmal pit of poverty, despair and hopelessness. Raised in a blood-drenched culture of violence mediated by an economic Darwinism that harbors a rabid disdain for the common good, poor minority kids appear to be completely off the radar of public concern and government compassion. And Obama, for all of his soaring poetic imagery of unity and justice, falls flat on his face by allowing his Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan to offer up reform policies that amount to nothing more than another version of Bush's No Child Left Behind with its anti-union ideology and obsessive investment in measurement and accountability schemes that strips any talk of educational reform of any viability while turning schools into nothing more than testing factories - policies that disproportionately punish brown and black youth. These racially exclusionary set of policies and institutions have become especially cruel since the beginning of the neoconservative revolution in the 1980s, and are not poised to disappear soon under the presidency of Barack Obama - in fact, given the current economic crisis, they may even get worse.

Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of "hiring out prisoners" was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else's land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery - which were almost never proven - and were then "hired out" for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of "hired-out" miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972....

... nearly half of all black adolescent males in the United States quit high school before earning a diploma.... Each year, Civic Enterprises reported in The Silent Epidemic, almost one-third of public school students and nearly one-half of youth of colour do not graduate high school with their class. The problem is particularly acute for African-Americans, who represent about 15 percent of those below the age of 18 but make up 14 percent of all school dropouts, 26 percent of all youths arrested, 46 percent of those detained in juvenile jails, and 58 percent of all juveniles sent to adult prisons. The school to prison pipeline is not an ideological claim; the numbers speak for themselves.