PRISONS AND BLACK GENOCIDE

by Bonnie Kerness
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PRISONS AND BLACK GENOCIDE

The United States imprisons over 1.3 million people, a larger number than any other country in the world. Depending on geographic location, between 65 and 85 percent of those we imprison are people of color-those of Afrikan descent, latinos and the original people, Native Americans. On any given day, one out of four Black males is under some form of social control, which is a higher rate than in the once openly white supremacist country of South Africa. In other words, apartheid in America is even worse.

If you are a young male of Afrikan descent in this country, and if you are poor, should you get arrested your bail will be set so high you become an economic hostage. For you, the phrase "innocent until proven guilty" has little meaning. You will sit in a cell for up to two years without having been found guilty of anything. You will certainly not get a trial by a jury of your peers. You will be defended by a public defender who has a caseload so vast you cannot possibly be treated as a priority, and finally you will serve a sentence that is 30 percent longer than a Caucasian would receive for the same crime. If you have seen this same thing happen to your father, your uncles, your cousins, if you look around at the broader picture of what is happening to men, women, youth and children of your nationality, it is not hard to conclude that there is genocide being committed.

The definition of genocide, according to the United Nations, is: a) the killing of members of a racial or religious group, b) the causing of serious bodily harm to members of a particular group, c) deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and e) forcibly transferring children of that group to another group. 1

If we use this definition, it is not hard to see how the mass imprisonment that is occurring fits that definition. Coupled with data on high infant immortality, early death of the elderly of color, lack of the same medical treatment, opportunities and education that is afforded to whites, and the realization becomes more compelling.

-Bonnie Kerness


1. United Nations, Convention on the Prevention nnd Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2, Paris, 1948.




BONNIE KERNESS has been an organizer since the civil rights era when she lived in the South. After moving North in the 1970s, she was active with tenants' rights groups and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. She has worked, as a professional organizer, on gay rights and welfare rights campaigns, and obtained an MSW in community organizing. Kerness is currently Associate Director of the American Friends Service Committee Criminal Justice Program in New Jersey and National Coordinator of the National Campaign to Stop Control Unit Prisons.


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