Mass incarceration of african american in the united states: the specific case of male juvenile delinquents

Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3

Etudes Britanniques, Nord-Américaines et Postcoloniales

Master 1 Etudes Internationales Civilisation américaine

Mass Incarceration of African American in the United States:

The Specific Case of Male Juvenile Delinquents

Madani Bah

Sous la direction de Madame Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (Septembre 2016)

Table of Contents

Introduction................................................................................3

I - Mass Incarceration

a) A Brief History....................................................................8

b) An Entire Racial Biased Justice System......................................9

II - What Happens in Juvenile Detention and Jail?

a) InhumaneTreatment...........................................................19

b) The Hole...........................................................................24

c) Sexual Abuse.....................................................................27

III - Once They Are Released...

a) The Prison Label: A Burden..................................................29

b) Struggle and Trauma After Prison..........................................32

c) Reform of the Justice System: Some Signs of Hope?...........................34

Conclusion................................................................................37

Appendices................................................................................41

List of References........................................................................59

Introduction

When looking at incarceration rates, what should be noted is that the US population represents only 5% of the world inhabitants and yet, it has 25% of the world's prisoners^1(*). Moreover, many of those prisoners are from ethno-racial minority groups, especially from the African American community. The US also has a high rate of young people incarcerated. To try to understand what is currently happening, we need to look back at how African Americans have been treated by White people in the United States ever since they won their independence over the British. From Slavery and the Jim Crow era to the Mass Incarceration of nowadays, it seems that African Americans have been stuck in a system that has been oppressing them for several centuries now.

The problem of mass incarceration in the United States, which is mainly due to the War on Drugs - as I will develop later - I will give a few numbers first as they tell much about the story of black incarceration: there are 2.2 million people incarcerated in the United States, and out of those 2.2 million, 1 million are Black. One in four black men born since the late 1970s has spent time in prison.^2(*)It is also estimated that three out of four young black men will spend time in jail at some point in Washington, D.C. and other black communities in the USA.^3(*) To see what these numbers represent, we need to compare them with other countries and that is when we see how astonishing they are: The USA has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; even countries such as Russia, China and Iran, where the justice system is known as particularly harsh, do not have the same rate, which is 750 people in prison for every 100,000 adults and children, while in Germany, it's 93.^4(*)

When it comes to juvenile detention, the numbers are staggering as well: 66,332 American youths were confined because of juvenile detention according to Nell Bernstein in his book Burning Down the House in 2014.^5(*) Police arrest nearly 2 million juveniles every year, and if this trend continues, one in three American schoolchildren will be arrested by the time they reach their twenty-third anniversary. In contrast, just like I did before, we can compare the numbers with other countries: the USA incarcerates more of their population than any other industrialized nation - seven times the rate of Great Britain, and eighteen times that of France. The closest in term of numbers, South Africa, incarcerates its children at one-fifth of the rate of the USA.^6(*) Nell Bernstein noted that young people of color face a different reality. They account for 38 percent of the youth population, but 72 percent of incarcerated juveniles. This reveal that they face a different treatment at every level of the juvenile system: The legislation, the policing, the sentencing and the condition of the facilities. They are held in secure facilities at rates as high as four and a half times their percentage of the population; African Americans youths are five times more likely than white youths to be incarcerated.^7(*)

In both cases, for prison and juvenile detention, Michelle Alexander and Nell Bernstein - the two authors of the two main books that I have chosen to use for my paper - have highlighted how both juvenile incarceration and mass incarceration show racial injustice and disparities. Again here, we have a frightening number, which is the rate of black teenagers that are locked up: It is five times the rate for the whites, when white kids are as likely, if not more, to commit the same «crimes» than their black counterparts.^8(*) Although all these numbers are scary, they are only the numbers of people behind bars. As of 2016, the US justice system controls more than 7 million people, with 3.8 million on Probation and 820,000 on Parole.^9(*) People behind bars are actually there for non-violent offenses, which is what makes Michelle Alexander say in the title of her book that Mass Incarceration is The New Jim Crow. Angela Davis, an American politic activist and author said more or less the same thing in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? when she argues that what she calls US super incarceration is closer to a new age of slavery than a system of criminal justice.^10(*)

It's important to try to understand how many people are locked up in the USA and the type of «crime» they have committed. The two charts below are very telling of the current situation. They are from the website Prison Policy: http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html

With these charts, there is no denial of the issues the USA is facing. A significant number of people are sent to juvenile detention or to jail/prison for what are, in most cases, relatively minor offenses; and most of the time these are related to drugs. It makes us wonder why there are so many people behind bars for this reason in particular. We should go back about 2 decades before on order to do this: drugs became a «problem» for the country in the Seventies when Nixon made drug abuse the public enemy of the United States. But it wasn't until 1982 that the War on Drugs started under the presidency of Reagan, allocating a significant budget to federal law enforcement for the matter.^11(*) More and more money was used for the War on Drugs: in 1986, the House passed a law allowing $2 billion to the anti-drug crusade, and harsher penalties were proposed, such as mandatory minimum incarceration for the distribution of cocaine.^12(*)Something should be stressed here: as Michelle Alexander wrote, when the War on Drug was launched, illegal drug use was actually declining in the USA.^13(*)Moreover, it is clear that mass incarceration has also not helped reduce crime rates.^14(*)So what exactly is the point of incarcerating so many people? One could say that it proves the point some activists make, which is that the War on Drugs was a new way to «control» minorities, especially African Americans. Moreover, another aspect of the problem of mass incarceration needs to be considered, the fact that, nowadays, the privatization of prisons, which appeared in the Eighties, has had a huge impact on keeping things as they stand: private companies make billions of profits with the help of the State, by incarcerating as many people as possible, most of the time under dire circumstances for inmates.^15(*)

Another interesting figure to take into account - one that really puts things in perspective in relation with the history of the United States, is what part of the country has the most prisoners. Although each state has its own different criminal codes, there is a pattern in the states that put the most people in prison: 8 out of the top ten are southern states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, and Arkansas. The states of Delaware and Alaska are the only exceptions. All the others are southern states.^16(*) Southern states have always been very tough in terms of punishment and incarceration compared to the rest of the country. This is very much related to the history of slavery, the Civil War and the period of Jim Crow and also to racial relations there as a white-dominated society there made it possible to punish African Americans harshly and to take away from them their legal and civil rights.

Another dimension must be taken in consideration, the effect of incarceration on inmates. Nell Bernstein and Michelle Alexander have both stated in the introduction to their book that, the impact on the level for those behind bars, whether adults or juveniles, is absolutely horrific. The conditions and the environment in which they live, the isolation, and the sentiment of despair are life-changing for these people who might be scarred for the rest of their lives.

In this paper research, I will focus on why mass incarceration has become so problematic as a result of specific racial and political issues, but most of all, I will try to see how much the people trapped in juvenile facilities and/or prison go through emotionally, their perspective from the inside, and whether they really think they can have a future in the United States, considering what happened to them. I am going to mention several interviews of former inmates, which will provide a glimpse of what it must be like to be in a juvenile facility. I will also try to understand why the criminal justice system is racially biased and deprives young African Americans from a positive future and denies their basic rights from the time of their arrests until the rest of their lives with this current system.

In the first part, I will see how mass incarceration came to be and I will examine some of the laws that made it possible to target a part of the US population in particular. I will also analyze how and why Blacks are arrested so much and given such harsh sentences. In the second part, I will focus much more on what happens behind the walls: the psychological torture, the violence, the humiliation, all of this through the voices of these people in interviews they have given. Last, I am going to focus on life after incarceration and see whether a future a really possible after a person is released from jail and has to adapt to a new world: one in which he is often considered with a prison label and one in which he has to re-adapt to the US society. I am going to demonstrate that young Blacks in particular are the victims of this system which is still very much racially based in spite of the major improvements in the life of African Americans since the 1960s, and that it still has a regional component.

I - Mass Incarceration

A) A Brief History

After decades of slavery, the abolition of slaves became central to the political debate in the United States and led to the Civil War (1861-1865), won by the North. The Thirteen Amendment abolishing slavery was passed in 1864 and took effect a year later.^17(*) White southern planters feared losing everything and also the reaction of black men now that they were free. It resulted in black codes and vagrancy laws which led the way to the Jim Crow system.^18(*)

The birth of the Jim Crow Laws started with the Convict Lease system, which enabled white companies (in mining for example) in the Southern states to use black convicts as free laborers for the duration of their sentence. This system was extremely harsh and was in many ways reminiscent of slavery, sometimes even harder than slavery when we look at it. The death rates were higher during that period than during slavery.^19(*) Politically, The Populists in the 18XX, represented an alliance between poor whites and African Americans in the South.^20(*)But as soon as the elites saw that it became dangerous, white supremacy prevailed and it was the beginning of the Jim Crow Laws and of segregation, accepted by the Supreme Court through the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896, which made official the doctrine of separate and equal.^21(*)

This unjust and racist system ended thanks to black mobilization starting in the early decades of the 20^th century and up to the Civil Rights Movement. The 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision played its part as it officially ended segregation as the Supreme Court of the US decided that it was unconstitutional to have separate schools for white and black students., The Jim Crow system was already facing resistance before this, when African American veterans saw how they were treated in Europe during World War II, which was radically different than their treatment at home.^22(*) In spite of strong resistance by southern Whites, African Americans were now legally allowed to vote (thanks to the Voting Rights Act of 1965), and their children could play wherever they wanted. The number of Interracial marriages climbed during that period as well. Little by little equality in front of the law was put into effect. Despite the fact that African Americans had a major breakthrough in the Fifties and Sixties, a new way to discriminate black and brown people would find its place with the birth of mass incarceration.

B) An Entire Racial Biased Justice System: The Different Policies and Whom It Targets: The War on Drugs, Tough On Crime, And The Super-Predators

Mass Incarceration came to be thanks to rhetoric such as «law and order» and «tough on crimes», which were used in the late 1950s as Michelle Alexander points out in the first chapter in her book.^23(*) When the crime rates rose in the country for about ten years, white conservatives jumped on the occasion to link this to the Civil Rights Movement and to migration. There were also some riots in the summer of 1964, and a series of uprisings after Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, all of which worsened the situation.^24(*) It's at this time of uprising that the public debate shifted from segregation to crime. But in both case, it was again a matter of White vs Black even though it became a bit problematic to express race issues as openly as before due to the improvements that the Civil Rights Movement brought. It was seen during Nixon's presidential campaign: his aim was to get the votes of white conservatives who feared Black people, and in order to do so, he created a particular polarized political environment by using «subliminal appeal to anti-black voter» as John Ehrlichman said of Nixon's strategy during the 1968's campaign.^25(*) Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family in 1965 also played its part helping the argument that poverty was caused by black culture.^26(*) The report, which focused on the deep root of poverty, was met with criticism because of Moynihan's omission of policy recommendation, his depiction of black women and in most cases single mothers, as well as the fact that the report felt like it put the blame on the victim, William Ryan a psychologist pointed out.^27(*)By using the unrest after the Civil Rights Movement and link this to a problem of «law and order» in his speeches and ads, Nixon got into the Oval office by using the fear of conservative voters.^28(*)

This type of policy increased again, with much impact, in 1980 when Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, was elected President. During the election campaign, he called for what would be the now famous «war on drugs». As Michelle Alexander says, Reagan excelled in the excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse.^29(*)Indeed, Reagan used what is called a «colorblind» rhetoric on crime, welfare etc., but one that was actually not race-neutral at all. In October 1982 that Reagan launched the War on Drugs, despite the fact that it was not a major preoccupation for many Americans at the time.^30(*)A major budget was given in order for this war to be as effective as possible: the FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million between 1980 and 1984. In 1991, the Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million the decade before to $1,042 million at the time. Yet, somehow the budget for the agencies that could help drugs problems - treatment, prevention and education - was reduced: from $274 million to $57 million between 1981 and 1984 and the Department of Education saw a budget a cut from $14 million to $3 million.^31(*) One of the reasons why it was easy to «target» this particular group of people, that it to say black men and men from other minorities, is because of the unemployment that hit the poor black and brown ghettos, and of the wide and easy availability of crack on the streets, which had devastating outcomes for people.

Reagan succeeded because he launched a media campaign to make sure that the War on Drugs was promoted and well received. In magazines, on the news, etc., Americans could see black crack whores on the street and crack babies. In 1986, the crack «epidemics» was declared the biggest story since the Vietnam War and Watergate.^32(*) It is very telling of the impact it has had moving forward. It also gave the opportunity for the Conservatives to «attack the enemy»: it was no longer possible to «attack» black people as it had been before, but now, because knowing that the enemies were «technically colorblind» drug dealers and addicts, the drug issue became of way to criticize the black community without attacking it openly.

As was said in the introduction, all of this resulted in harsher policies and bigger funding for the antidrug crusade: $2 billion were allocated in an effort to support the War on Drugs in September 1986. The death penalty could be sentenced for drug-related crimes, and illegally obtained evidence was admissible in trials.^33(*)The focus on crack was so great that the rest of the issues, such as unemployment, lack of good schools, police harassment, etc. were barely mentioned. In 1988, harsher policies were introduced: the new Anti-Drug Abuse Act gave the possibility to public housing authorities to evict any tenant who allowed any form of drug-related criminal activity, with also new imposed mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession of cocaine; even against first-time offenders. Of course, all of this targeted poor communities, which would happen to be overwhelmingly black. When President Bush Sr. was elected after Reagan's two mandates, he used the same tactics as his predecessor: racial appeals that would help to get him into the White House.^34(*) There was a similar pattern again: just like the Populists gave up under the political pressure of the Redeemers to put black people aside during the period of Reconstruction, the allies of African Americans, the poor and white middle class, were appealed by the government. That is why we have witnessed the prison population exploded during the 1980s and the 1990s, doubling the rates of incarceration of the 1970s.^35(*) During the 1990s, with the Sentencing Project, one quarter of young African American men were under the control of the criminal justice system.^36(*)

One would think that a democrat presidential candidate would be more inclined to back down on those issues, but 1992 candidate Bill Clinton actually worsened the situation because he wanted to appear as tough as any republican.^37(*)In these conditions, he went to Arkansas to witness the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired black man who was completely out of touch with reality; he asked for his last dessert to be saved until the morning. Bill Clinton said afterwards that «no one [could] say that [he was] soft on crime.»^38(*)When he was elected, he went farther than anyone else with his «three strikes and you're out» law in 1994, a law which was passed first in several States, including California. The bill generated new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for three-time offenders and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and expansion of state and local polices. The Justice Policy Institute has said of the Clinton Administration that its tough on crime policies «resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.^39(*)In 1996, the public housing budget suffered a $17 billion cut, and corrections fund went up to 171%, which made it easier to build prisons.^40(*)Thanks to this, the Clinton administration made it much easier toexclude anyone with a criminal history from public housing. As if this was not already enough, President Clinton implemented the «One Strike and You're Out» rule, which would basically leave many people homeless with that policy.Thus, mass incarceration policies were implemented with the huge impact of the War on Drugs, and it reflects on people who are in prison because of drug offenses: Ninety percent are black or Latino in this «colorblind» era as Michelle Alexander said.^41(*)

It will be interesting here to focus on the case of the juveniles as well. The increase in juvenile violent crime can be linked to the period when crack hit the cities in the 1980s and the early 1990s.^42(*)During this era of unrest with the war on drugs and youth violence, some used this particular context to add more fear and that is how John DiIulio, a political science professor talked about a new generation of «super predators»; «A new generation of street criminals, the youngest, biggest, baddest generation any society has ever known»^43(*)He also co-wrote a book in 1996 with William J. Bennett Body Count: Moral Poverty ... and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs, where they depict America's most recent nightmare: the children. They are portrayed as» kids from 13 to 16, mostly from inner-cities, who feel nothing as they kill, rob or rape.» The authors predicted (and they were wrong) a new crime wave driven by these kids would lead America to chaos.^44(*)In the same way that Ronald Reagan was able to use the media to promote the War on Drugs and link the «issue» to black and brown people, the authors of this book succeeded in making American believe their narrative: at the time, there were painting stories in magazines on the super-predator phenomenon with images of black teenagers. The politicians jumped on the bandwagon and passed legislation that increased penalties in juvenile court or allowed the growing numbers of youth to be transferred to adult court, where they could receive harsher sentences.^45(*) The media role had basically the same impact than it did during the years where the War on Drugs was the number one focus of the media in the country. As a result, in 1996, more than half of all local news stories about youth focused on violence in spite of the fact that adults committed 80% of USA's crime according to the Berkeley media Studies Group.^46(*)To say that the warnings of super-predators were racialized is an understatement. In a report to the U.S. attorney general, James Alan Fox, who is a professor at Northeastern University, warned about the projected growth of black teenage population when he warned that the nation faced a future juvenile violence problem that may make today's epidemic pale in comparison.^47(*)The U.S assisted at shift toward how to treat youth: it seemed okay now to treat youth as adults if they were «criminals». The myth of the super-predator opened the door to worse policies: more sanctions given; more kids transferred into adult prisons; a number of states revised their juvenile codes in order to make explicit their punitive intent, especially in Texas and Kansas, but they were not the only ones. It resulted in a rise of the number of cases heard each year in juvenile court: the number went up by 44%, from 1.2 million in 1989 to 1.8 million in 1999, despite a drop in juvenile violent crime.^48(*) Indeed, this era coincided ironically with an historic drop of juvenile crime: juvenile crime arrest peaked in 1994 with 500 juveniles per 100,000 but began to drop significantly to fewer than 300 per 100,000.^49(*)Not only was there an increase in jail population, there was as well much tougher laws and sentences for their children, some of whom could be judged in adult criminal courts.^50(*)More kids were arrested for minor offenses. Even when crime figures dropped, juvenile incarceration continued to grow, much like what happened for their adult counterparts. As said in Burning Down The House: The End Of Juvenile Detention, the super-predator ended up being a myth, but it still had an enormous impact on the youth who were treated as harshly as adults were, and are still suffering the consequences now. Juvenile centers, which at first were meant to rehabilitate the youth, were now places as bad as adult prison, a place that destroyed individuals and gave them no hope for better days ahead.

The criminal justice system played a major part in this change, especially concerning how they arrest most people. Since the beginning, drug-related offenses are one of the main reasons why so many people incarcerated as of today. Drug arrests have tripled since 1981, and as a result more than 31 million people have been arrested since the War on Drugs began.^51(*) That is how more than 7 million Americans are behind bars, on probation, or on parole.^52(*) Ever since the War on Drugs started, the Supreme Court has made it easy to facilitate this crusade by not respecting the Fourth Amendment - which gives protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by the police - anymore.^53(*) The way police would proceed during this war on drug was easy: the common tactic was that if you «suspected» someone, you «arrested» them first and you questioned them later. Except that, most of the time, this someone was a young person of color. What most of the people who were on the receiving end of this did not know was that they could say «no» to a police officer if he asked to search of their posessions. Again, the role of the Supreme Court in the War on Drugs should not be undermined. In the Florida v. Bostick case, Bostick was arrested in a bus when police officers searched his bag and found cocaine. He complied but the officers knew that virtually nobody would say «no» to an officer and that they had no reasonable reason to suspect that man. On appeal, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in Bostick's case that the police officer's conduct violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. The court also slammed the «bus sweeps» in the drug war comparing the methods to totalitarian regimes.^54(*)The Supreme Court then reversed itself; saying that the young man volunteered and that a reasonable person would have felt free to tell the officer: «No, you can't search my bag». The reality is that most people would definitely not say «no» to a police officer, even if they have not done anything wrong. This case was not the only case. The Supreme Court actually participated in these kinds of arrests a lot of time.

Another way that police officers search for drugs without any real evidence is on the road by using minor traffic violations. So just like consent searches, pretext stops are one of the main ways to operate in the War on Drugs. In these cases, again, the Supreme Court made it simple for the law enforcement to have virtually no boundaries.^55(*) Michelle Alexander's book provides a telling example: Whren and Brown, two African American men, were stopped by plainclothes officers in a vehicle in June 1993. The police admitted to stopping them because they wanted to investigate them for imagined drug crimes, even though they did not have reasonable suspicion. Because they lacked any real evidence, the officers decided to stop them by using a traffic violation. It was reported that the driver failed to use his turn signal and accelerated abruptly from a stop sign. With their «hunch» the officers searched the car and found a bag of cocaine. On appeal, Whren and Brown challenged their convictions that pretextual stops violate the Fourth Amendment. Allowing the police to use minor traffic violations as a pretext to search for drugs would permit them to single out anyone for a drug investigation without any evidence of illegal drug activity. The Supreme Court rejected their argument saying it does not matter why the police are stopping motorists as long as long as traffic violation gives them an excuse to do so. They can search even if there is no evidence of illegal drug activity.^56(*)The same thing happened a few months later but with the Ohio v. Robinette case: a police officer pulled over Robert Robinette, allegedly for speeding. After issuing a warning, the officer ordered Robinette out of the vehicle and turned on a camera in his car. He then asked for «consent» to search the vehicle for drugs. Robinette agreed. The officer found marijuana and a pill of methamphetamine. The Ohio Supreme Court was uncomfortable with this obvious fishing for drugs expedition. To offer some protections for motorists: at the very least, the justices said that they should know they have the right to refuse consent and to leave, if they choose to do so. The U.S. Supreme Court said this was «unrealistic».^57(*) It sent a clear message to the lower courts: The Fourth Amendment was insignificant when it came to the War on Drugs.This Amendment that was made to protect the American people from the English practice of arbitrary searches before the American Revolution was now «put on hold» for the war on drugs, and would target, of course, people of color in this new «colorblind» era. The War on Drugs slowly became an actual war, given the fact that SWAT teams and the military also got involved in this war.^58(*)A high number of their raids have resulted in death or have traumatized the people whose home has been destroyed. Indeed, there have been many incidents with people that ended up being killed but there has never been any conviction for the matter. Reagan triggered much of this with the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act in 1981.^59(*)The government gave military weapons to federal and local and state police. Bush and Clinton went further than this, and, as already mentioned, it resulted in the skyrocketing of drug arrests.

Numbers will highlight how much racial bias there is in the U.S. criminal justice system: despite the fact that the majority of illegal drug users and dealers on a national scale are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.^60(*) Several surveys suggest that white youth are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color: In 2000, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, crack cocaine at eight times the rates of black students, and heroin at seven times the rate of black students. Another survey, from 2000, by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported that white youth aged 12-17 are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.^61(*)Now, focusing on young black men, some statistics are truly shocking: one in 9 black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five was behind bars in 2006.^62(*)As Michelle Alexander writes in her book, violent crime is far from explaining mass incarceration; as homicide offenders account for 0.4 percent of the past decade's growth in federal prisons, while drug offenders account for nearly 61 percent of that expansion. In the state system, less than 3 percent of new court commitments to state prison involve people convicted of homicide. Only 7.9 percent of state prisoners were convicted of violent crimes.^63(*) The U.S. Supreme Court, just like it has helped for the War on Drugs, has made it impossible to challenge racial bias in the criminal justice system under the Fourteenth Amendment. So by giving no boundaries to law enforcement, and by making it impossible to contest the racial issues that those arrested faces it is clear that the American justice system specifically targets young people of color to fill the prisons.

To highlight how disproportionate some of the sentences during the War on Drugs are, some cases speak for themselves: Edward Clary for example. Two months after his eighteenth birthday, Clary was stopped and searched because he «looked like» a drug courier. At that time, he was returning home from visiting friends in California. One of them convinced him to take some drugs back home to St. Louis. Clary had never tried to deal drug before and had no criminal record. The police found crack cocaine on him and arrested him. He was convicted in federal court and sentenced under federal laws that punish crack offenses one hundred times more severely than offenses involving powder cocaine. A conviction of sale of five hundred grams of powder cocaine triggers a five-year mandatory sentence, while only five grams of crack triggers the same sentence. Unfortunately, Clary had more than fifty grams of crack, which meant the sentencing was going to be a minimum of ten years in federal prison for a first time offender.^64(*)Clary challenged the constitutionality of the hundred-to-one ratio. His lawyers argued that law is arbitrary and irrational, and it imposes too much different penalties on two forms of the same substance. They also argued that the law discriminates against African Americans. Clyde Cahill of the Federal District of Missouri, an African American judge assigned on Clary's case showed that courts are powerless to address issues regarding race discrimination. Indeed, he declared the hundred-to-one ratio racially discriminatory in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Judge Cahill believed that race plays a major part in crack sentencing laws and policies.He also argued that many people may not believe they are motivated by discriminatory attitudes but they all have internalized fear of young black men, because of the media imagery that has helped to create a national image of the young black man as a criminal. He added that «The 100-to-1 ratio, coupled with mandatory minimum sentencing provided by federal statute, has created a situation that reeks with inhumanity and injustice.... If young white males were being incarcerated at the same rate as young black males, the statute would have been amended long ago». Therefore, he sentenced Clary to four years in prison: as if Clary had been carrying powder cocaine.^65(*) The prosecution appealed Clary's case to the Eight Circuit Court of Appeal which reversed Judge Cahill finding that the case was not even close. The court remanded the case back to the district for resentencing. Clary, who was now married and a father, was ordered back to prison to complete his ten-year term.^66(*)

Even though Michelle Alexander's book does not deal specifically with the case of juveniles, she insists that the most comprehensive studies of racial bias involve:» the treatment of juvenile offenders. The studies show that youth of color are more likely to be arrested, detained, formally charged, transferred to adult court, and confined to secure residential facilities than white youths. The racial bias against African American youth is affecting decision making. Indeed, a review of juvenile sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black and white offenders differently. For Blacks, crimes were committed because of internal personality flaws whereas for Whites, it was because of external conditions such as family conflict.»^67(*)A perfect example is in the drug enforcement context: Whether a kid seems to be a dangerous drug-dealing thug or just experimenting drugs is subject to interpretation and racial bias by prosecutors. In the third chapter of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander mentions a former U.S. Attorney who said the following «I had an [assistant U.S. attorney who] wanted to drop the gun charge against the defendant [in a case in which] there were no extenuating circumstances. I asked, `Why do you want to drop the gun offense?' And he said, `He's a rural guy and grew up on a farm. The gun he had with him was a rifle. He's a good ol' boy, and all good ol' boys have rifles, and it's not like he was a gun-toting drug dealer.' But he was actually a gun-toting drug dealer, which shows how racially biased the system really is.»^68(*)

Something interesting as well is where police go when they look for drugs, and it is not a surprise that they go in ghettos and barrios. It would obviously be very difficult to go to white suburbs and do the same things that happen in the poor black and Latino communities. It is not really a big surprise if we consider how much easier it is to target these communities. As one former prosecutor said, «It's a lot easier to go out to the hood, so to speak, and pick somebody than to put your resources in an undercover [operation in a] community where there are potentially politically powerful people.»^69(*)Here again, we see how- for racial reasons, which often is linked with political reasons- one part of the population is targeted and segregated as well as why. Black and brown youth are the primary targets: young black teenagers who live in a ghetto community are often stopped, interrogated, and frisked a great number of times, several times a day for some. A law student who ventured into a community for the first time described that during her ride with Chicago police: «Each time we drove into a public housing project and stopped the car, every young black man in the area would almost reflexively place his hands up against the car and spread his legs to be searched. And the officers would search them. This repeated itself throughout the entire day. I couldn't believe it. This was nothing like we learned in law school. But it just seemed so normal - for the police and the young men.»^70(*) Here is the result of a stigmatized category of the society: a regular day in which they get controlled up to several times on a regular basis because they are considered potentially delinquents. By doing this, it creates a polarizing climax in which these young black teenagers end up feeling like this is the new normal instead of trying to turn their life around. It is kind of an infernal cycle that makes them feel like they are really criminals in the end. And it definitely has an impact when an individual - or even a large part of the population - behave in a certain way towards another: they end up doing the opposite of what they actually should be doing. The fact that in these communities, a lot of those teenagers may not have been raised by their father has a certain impact on what they may think and what they may do in their lives. Indeed, the mass incarceration of young black men has had a tremendous impact on the black family. It is reported that more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison in 2000.^71(*)

Thus, after an examination of the birth of mass incarceration, the policies put in place to target young men of color with the War on Drugs, and the justice system, which discriminates against young African American with disproportionate sentences and ludicrous ways to stop «them» on the streets, I am going to show in a second part what happens when these young men are behind bars and the tremendous impact it has on their lives, emotionally, morally and physically, especially for the teenagers who are locked in juvenile detention centers, which will be my main focus in this part.

II - What Happens in Juvenile Detention Centers and Jails?

A) Inhumane Treatment

In the many interviews I found about the experiences behind bars, with a strong focused on youth, it seems abundantly clear that they experience nothing less than torture behind these walls. Abuse in these facilities can take various forms: from verbal abuse, to physical abuse, psychological abuse, and sexual abuse. It is important to stress that incarceration, especially for the youth, seems so unnecessary today. Juvenile court was initially funded to rehabilitate the youth. But it does the opposite nowadays: putting youth behind bars^72(*) - mostly for non-violent offenses - drives them deeper into criminality and increase the likelihood that they will wind up behind bars. Not to mention as well that the juvenile system was created to keep youth out of adult prisons, which is not the case: these institutions feel very much like the adult correctional facilities out of which they were supposed to be kept. If we analyze the situation, many teenagers go through a phase and look for attention by doing things they should not do: it includes a lot of actions that go against best interests.The likelihood that these children, who are already insecure and vulnerable, respond well to being behind bars and «get it together» is close to none. It only deepens their issues. As soon as they arrive in those facilities, much of the same is told to them: the example of a young man in Burning Down The House: The End Of Juvenile Prison who recalls being told by a guard upon his arrival that «he wouldn't die»: «You'll get beat up, get unconscious, probably go to the hospital, get your tooth broke, nose broke, probably get a black eye, but you won't die. So don't sway it.» What a newly arrival to juvenile center must feel like when being told all of these things is a truly scary thing.

The conditions in which these youths live are disastrous to say the least. When young people describe the food inside the facilities, it is something that they struggle with. Will, a young boy who spent six years in juvenile prisons in California, said: «I don't know if you can call it a meal» [...] «They feed you enough not to starve, but never enough to satisfy you.» [...] «Young people are growing, and fourteen hours without a meal is not sufficient, you're hungry all the time.» Will is referring to the big break between dinner at five and breakfast at seven. He said that it was actually the best-case scenario. Indeed, in a maximum-security lockdown, there was no communal mealtime at all. It was sort of a humiliation according to Nell Berstein. In solitary confinement, it is even worse: bag meals consisting of bread, two slices of bologna, Kool-Aid, and a container of room-temperature milk.^73(*)

Will continued about hygiene, which, to him, was a mixed blessing. «I've never seen a group of guys so into their hygiene,» he said, «When guys go to jail, they really keep their bodies clean.» Yet, he said that: «Showering was one of the worsts parts of jail». Indeed, you have to get used to having guards keeping an eye on you when you only have three minutes to take a shower.

Many inmates suffer from the relationship with the guards, which is often violent. More than one-fourth of the youths in custody reported that staff used «some method of physical restraint on them - whether handcuffs, wristlets, a security belt, chains, or a restraint chair.» 7% also reported to have suffered from pepper spray, while 30% live on units where pepper spray is used.^74(*)Nell Berstein mentioned that: «A federal survey published in 2010 revealed widespread abuse and maltreatment in America's youth corrections facilities. More than a third of youth in secure correction facilities or camp programs reported that staff used force unnecessarily, and 30% said that staff placed youth into solitary confinement or locked them up alone as discipline. Fear was pervasive as well: 38% of youth feared being physically attacked by staff.»^75(*) In the fifth chapter of her book, she enumerated a couple of abuse inmates suffered from the guards:

· In Florida, a three-hundred-pound guard crushed a twelve-year-old boy with his body, suffocating the sixty-five-pound child to death. In California, groups of correctional officers slammed handcuffed boys face-first into walls or set attack dogs on them, often in full view of, security cameras.

· In Louisiana, guards assaulted sleeping children, or entertained themselves by pitting boys in fights against each other, leaving them with broken jaws, fractured eye sockets, and an array of other injuries.

· In Mississippi, guards ripped the clothing from suicidal girls, then hog-tied them, naked, and tossed them into solitary. They also shackled girls to poles and forced them to run in hot weather carrying logs. Those who threw up from the heat and the strain were forced to eat their own vomit.

· In Arkansas, young people were left naked in solitary with the air-conditioning turned on high, or hog-tied and set outside at night in freezing weather.

All those «incidents» are outrageous and yet, it is the daily life that a lot of young inmates endure. Another big problem that is often mentioned is guards using hands to break up fights, but also to do minor infractions such as horseplay, talking in line, or simply talking back. One of the most dangerous methods is «prone restraint»: Some guards force a youth to the ground and lie on him or her, until they are convinced the youth is under control. This practice has resulted in people dying, which has prompted some states to ban the practice. All of this lead to a sense of degradation and humiliation for the individuals who «live» in such a way.

Searches that can be very intense also add to the daily humiliation faced by the juvenile inmates. Indeed, when guards search in a room, they can tear apart absolutely everything: letters received from loved ones; pictures, among others things. That is what a young man who spent four years in juvenile detention said:» Sometimes, it would happen twice a week. Once a week. It happens a lot.»^76(*) Nell Berstein summed it up best when she said: «Young prisoners learn in multiple ways that their bodies are no more their own than are the cells they maintain so carefully or the uniforms they wear.»

As if strip searches and supervised showers were not embarrassing and mentally enduring enough for these young people, they also have to deal with pat searches, which result in inadequate touching from guards. I will develop a part on sexual abuse later, but it is important to mention something first, taht the federal investigators of one Florida facility wrote that: «Many of the youths informed us that some [staff] were especially intrusive in conducting the searches.» «We heard a number of reports of youth being groped by [staff] during the searches. One youth noted, `some staff rub on your privates.' Another stated, staff `touch too much.'»^77(*) It is not a surprising that when any human being suffers from such treatment, let alone a kid, it does something that scar the individual for life. This is what Luis, a young man, said to N. Bernstein in an interview: «When you're in a place where you are segregated, ostracized-a physical environment that is corroding, that is black, that is dark, that is isolated - all these things do something to your brain, to your psyche, to your self-esteem. It is something that your body internalizes, and it is obviously negative. A place that is dark and eerie? This is something that no human being should adapt to. We are not made to. You are supposed to be out in the sun, for God's sake!»^78(*) He went further and said: «Prison makes you hate yourself. The way prison is developed is to keep you oppressed, and in a state where you cannot believe in yourself. Everyone looks down on you, instead of looking down at you and helping you up.»

When I compare the interviews that I found, they are all so different, but it seems that there is this one thing that is always mentioned, and it is the mental and psychological effect on the detainees. David, who is 18 and waiting for his sentence described his life behind bars in the following interview. This is just a part of the interview. The entire interview is in the appendices.

Was your life exciting before you came in here?

I was living in the fast lane and I didn't have no time to think. Since I been off drugs I noticed I'm a real good person. I just regret those "exciting days."
I think of me now as a man. I had to grow up early. It's sad I did that to myself but I did. But I can't look at the past. As far as me getting locked up, I'm happy. If I didn't get locked up I would have kept going, I would have lost all my years.

How are you preparing for adult prison?

You can't really predict it at all. I think prison is not a rehabilitation and it's just there for us to kill each other or to get that mentality that we're nothing. I can live through it. I gotta take it and roll with it.

Did your environment contribute to you being in here?

I carry my own weight. My surroundings had a lot to do with it. [But] it was me, my decision. Made the wrong one. I just need the opportunity to make the right one.

How are you preparing for adult prison?

Instead of you getting ready for them, how about them getting ready for you? Be confident in yourself. Be something different. You gotta be a man of your own path.
I got something to say. It's still itching in my brain. It bothers me when people say it's easy in here. I go through a lot of pain. I sit and think about the things I done, and I sit there and cry. For people who say this is easy, they don't know how much pain we go through. I heard people down the hall from where I sleep saying they rather die than go through this. Some people are stronger than others.

David is awaiting his sentence in Central Juvenile Hall.^79(*)

Another inmate, Jared, used a metaphor to describe the emotional impact of incarceration. Talking to Nell Berstein: «He said that after he was released, he went to the San Francisco Bay. Freedom, solitude, and motion got the best of him; he swam too far and panicked, almost drowning before he recovered enough to make it back to shore.» Jared described the sensation of near drowning: struggle for air, terror of the depths, fear of slipping past the point of no return. «That feeling almost drowning,» said Jared, «is the only thing I've ever experienced that even came close to being locked up.»^80(*)This is a testimony of what these children go through when they are locked up. There is a disastrous impact on them emotionally, even though it is not necessary to keep society safe, in spite of what was said during the super-predator era.

One person, Gladys Carrion, has been an advocate for these youths and has spoken out about the impact of severing relationships during the crucial passage that is adolescence. She is the head of New York State's Office of Children and Family Services, which runs that state's juvenile facilities. She is shutting down the juvenile prisons under her jurisdiction. «Kids are punished when they're removed from their home,» she explained. «We don't have to put them on the chain gang. They're removed. That is punishment. I keep reminding my staff, that is the punishment: removing the kids from their family from their school, and from their community. I don't think you could do anything worse in the formative years of a child, of a young person, than to remove them from their community. We are interrupting their developmental process. We don't need to punish them any further.»^81(*)Yet, this is what happens behind bars, and worse.

B) The Hole

It's difficult to think that there are worse things that what I have previously described. Still there are two more forms of abuse that completely break down these individuals in every way that there can be: solitary confinement and sexual abuse, as I will show in the last part of this chapter.

The Hole, as it's often called, may be one of the worst forms of torture any human being can endure, and even more so in the case of teenagers. Solitary confinement inside juvenile prisons are meant officially to protect a child for his or her own safety, or to protect him or her from others. It is also a way to evaluate him or her upon his or her arrival at the facility. Most of the time, it is said to be for punishment, because of gang concern among other things. There is only a room, a bunk, a metal toilet and a door. This practice has been called by the American Friends Service Committee a «no-touch torture... No one who has ever experienced more than the briefest time in solitary would call it anything else, because it was designed to destroy the mind and break the spirit.»^82(*)The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry is in line with what just said. In a 2012 policy statement, they wrote that: «the potential psychiatric consequences of prolonged solitary confinement are well recognized and include depression, anxiety, and psychosis. Due to their developmental vulnerability, juvenile offenders are at particular risk of such adverse reactions. Furthermore, the majority of suicides in juvenile correctional facilities occur when the individual is isolated or in solitary confinement.»^83(*) In Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Nell Bernstein recalls how Oscar Wilde, who served two years' hard labor in a British jail in the late nineteenth century was so appealed to witness children locked alone in empty cells that as soon as he was released he wrote to the Daily Chronicle.He wrote the following:

This terror that seizes and dominates the child, as it seizes the grown man also, is of course intensified beyond power of expression by the solitary cellular system of our prisons. Every child is confined to its cell for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. This is the appalling thing. To shut up a child in a dimly lit cell for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, is an example of the cruelty of stupidity. If an individual, parent or guardian did this to a child he would be severely punished. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children would take the matter up at once. There would be on all hands the utmost detestation of whomsoever had been guilty of such cruelty. A heavy sentence would, undoubtedly, follow conviction. But our own actual society does worse itself. The inhuman treatment of a child is always inhuman; by whomsoever it is inflicted. But inhuman treatment by society is to the child the more terrible because there can be no appeal.^84(*)

Nell Bernstein provides some state data that indicate that solitary confinement is frequent and routine.^85(*)

· Youth in Ohio facilities spent an average of fifty hours in solitary over the course of a single month.

· In New York City, nearly 15% of adolescents between the ages of sixteen and eighteen spend at least part of their pretrial detention in solitary confinement.

· A survey undertaken at the Texas State facility at Giddings in March 2012- well into a major statewide reform effort- found that 87% of youth surveyed had been «confined to [their] room as punishment,» 45% on ten or more occasions.

When asked to describe what solitary confinement was like, Martin, who was 15 when he was arrested and sent to a Massachusetts Department of Youth Services facility said: «They put you in a dark room. It is a cell, but no lights are on, or they keep you in your cell and they take everything in there out. They would leave you there for a whole day. You would sleep on the metal, plain metal.»^86(*)

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a member of Yale Law School, J.D. Class of 2016. When he was younger, he spent some time in prison, and has spoken out about what it is like to be in confinement (the entire interview is in the appendices):

«In 1996, when I was sixteen, a fifteen-year-old friend and I carjacked a man in Virginia. Shortly after being arrested, I confessed. Back then, I did not know what it meant to be transferred to criminal court. But I would learn. [...] It should not have been a surprise to anyone that part of what I got out of my time in prison was nearly a year and a half of solitary confinement.

For a time, I called cells in the solitary units of the Fairfax County Jail, Southampton Correctional Center, Red Onion State Prison, Sussex 1 State Prison, and Coffeewood Correctional Center home. Inside those cells, I counted everything: days, weeks, months, birthdays, and frequently the tiny markings on the wall. All told, I spent more than fourteen months in isolation at these various institutions. Author Jack Abbott, reflecting on his time spent in solitary confinement, wrote that it could «alter the ontological makeup of a stone.» I know that what it does to men and women is far worse.»^87(*)

Jared and Curtis, two former juvenile detainees, used similar words to describe their mental state in confinement. Jared said he had to «split who [he was] and create a part of [him] that was able to cope with being isolated.» Curtis said he was «fragmented». He felt like he was cut into pieces.^88(*)

The most appealing thing is that many youths who are placed in solitary confinement are already survivors of abuse and other trauma. And being there only add to their existing problems and actually leaves them unfit for social interaction due to the mental damages from which they suffer.Yet, even though the majority of researchers agree that this solitary confinement is torture, this does not seem to lead to any breakthrough about changing this broken system as Betts has said inTime: «President Obama's op-ed reinforces the need to dramatically curb the use in confinement, but there are broader reforms around the treatment of juveniles and adults in state and federal prisons that have yet to become a part of the larger public conversation.»^89(*)

C) Sexual Abuse

It seems banal to say that a sexual assault is traumatic for anyone, but even more for children, who are more prone to suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome and other lasting effects. The authors of the report «Defending Childhood: Children Exposed to Violence», which was launched by the Attorney General of the Department of Justice in 2010, state that victims of sexual abuse may end up «detach[ing] physically and psychologically leading to symptoms of psychological dissociation.»^90(*)

The figures about sexual abuses are horrifying: a 2010 survey of the Department of Justice's Review Panel on Prison Rape found that 12% of the juvenile prisoners had been sexually abused at least once over the previous year. In some facilities, as many as 30% of the wards had been abused within that time frame. About one fifth of the youths in the study reported being sexually abused by other youths. One in ten had been abused by a member of the staff. Sexual rates are higher in juvenile than in adult prisons, according to the report, because of the frequency in which guards assault their young charges.^91(*) The study also found that the rate of sexual assault was more than seven times higher than reported in a 2008 Justice Department investigation based on sexual abused claims filed with facility administrators.

The youths more likely to be sexually assaulted are the ones who have been sexually abused prior to their arrest. Indeed, nearly 25% of young people who had been sexually assaulted before their incarceration were abused again while in custody. 65% of those who had been sexually abused at a previous correctional facility were targeted again at their next destination. The numbers actually get worse: 88% of those who had been abused, were abused, repeatedly: 27% had been assaulted more than ten times and 33% by more than one employee.^92(*)

Again, some others interviews give a proper idea about what is going on behind bars. Roland, who spent nearly seven years in various California State facilities said that the staff» let it happen... They turn their back. Too much paperwork. Too much questioning.» He was referring to ward-on-ward assault here.^93(*) When he talked about abuse by guards, he said: «I know some people that got sexually abused by other wards. If you are about fourteen, you got guys who are about two hundred pounds, no fat, nothing but muscle, and they grab you and are like, `Ey, you about to do this and that,' and you're like, `No', and they are like, `You gotta do it'...» He left the rest unspoken. It speaks volumes already about what may be going on and how it, somehow, seems normal to endure sexual abuse in prison.

How does the sexual contact between wards and staff happen? According to Roland, it is primarily «transactional»: youths traded sexual acts or access for various forms of contraband, from a T-shirt to a burrito. As a former ward said: «Other staff be seeing it and they write a report and she don't come to work no more. Then you happen to see her while you're at visiting and she's in another job duty, and you ask what happened.» To him, the female guard was transferred because she was under investigation. «A lot of the female staff go under investigation for sexual contact with a ward.» Roland said. But usually, nothing much happens to the sexual offenders, except for a transfer.^94(*) The horror in what Roland is describing is that he does not even seem to be aware that this is illegal as Nell Bersntein points out in her book. That is the problem with prison: much of what we have said in this part - the sexual abuse, the physical abuse, the hole, the humiliations- are somehow rationalized. The system literally implies the survival at the fittest

These children are not helped by the view of the Department of Justice, which considers that most of the staff's sexual abuse of juveniles is not violent as Lovisa Stannow, executive director of Just Detention International points out. As she said:» Every act of sexual contact between a staff member and a detainee, under any circumstance, is a crime in all 50 states. If the detainee is a minor, it is also child abuse. The panel failed to acknowledge these basic legal facts in its report.»^95(*)The panel she is referring to is the Department of Justice's Review Panel on Prison Rape, which basically tried to justify sexual relationships between staff and ward, and to add to the insult, put the blame on the kids: «young males who are victims of sexual abuse at the hands of female guards are characterized either as smooth operators who take advantage of «vulnerable» young women (who just happen to control their every movement), or as hard-up, perpetually horny boys-will-be-boys who are «only too ready» to service their captors. Female guards in this portrait are either helpless, easily manipulated creatures unable to resist their «sophisticated» young charges or desperate spinsters who cunningly pursue a career in juvenile corrections because they are sexually unfulfilled.»^96(*)

It seems to be in line with what most victims tend to be told, implicitly or explicitly: this is your fault. It has unforeseen consequences on every victim, but even more on children and teenagers who end up with permanent damage.

* ¹ Ta-Nehisi Coates, «The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration». http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/

* ² Idem.

* ³Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 6.

* ⁴ Idem.

* ⁵ Nell Bernstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 7

* ⁶ Idem. Page 13.

* ⁷ Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 59

* ⁸ Idem.

* ⁹ Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy. «Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2016». http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html

* ¹⁰ Angela Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete?

* ¹¹ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 49

* ¹² Idem. Page 53.

* ¹³ Idem. Page 6.

* ¹⁴ Eleanor Goldberg. «Here's Proof Mass Incarceration Doesn't Reduce Crime». http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/proof-mass-incarceration-doesnt-reduce-crime_us_56255cfbe4b08589ef489a3d

* ¹⁵ «Private Jails in the United States». http://civilrights.findlaw.com/other-constitutional-rights/private-jails-in-the-united-states.html

* ¹⁶ Alex Silady. «Which States Put the Most People in Prison?». https://smartasset.com/insights/which-states-put-the-most-people-in-prison

* ¹⁷ Wiki

* ¹⁸ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 30.

* ¹⁹ Idem. Page 31.

* ²⁰ Idem. Page 34.

* ²¹ Idem. Page 34.

* ²² Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 36.

* ²³ Idem. Page 40.

* ²⁴ Idem. Page 41.

* ²⁵ Idem. Page 44.

* ²⁶ Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, De l'esclave au président : discours sur les familles noires aux Etats-Unis, part III, Chapter 1.

* ²⁷William Ryan, Blaming the Victim. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.

* ²⁸ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.Page 47.

* ²⁹Idem. Page 48.

* ³⁰ Idem. Page 49.

* ³¹ Idem. Page 50.

* ³² Idem. Page 52.

* ³³ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 53.

* ³⁴ Idem. Page 54.

* ³⁵ Ta-Nehisi Coates, «The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration». http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/

* ³⁶Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 56.

* ³⁷ Idem. Page 56.

* ³⁸ «10 Reasons to Oppose "3 Strikes, You're Out"»https://www.aclu.org/10-reasons-oppose-3-strikes-youre-out

* ³⁹Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of ColorblindnessPage 56.

* ⁴⁰Idem. Page 57.

* ⁴¹ Idem. Page 58.

* ⁴² Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 72.

* ⁴³Idem. Page 72.

* ⁴⁴ Ta-Nehisi Coates, «The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration». http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/

* ⁴⁵ Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison.Page 73.

* ⁴⁶Berkeley Media Studies Group, http://www.bmsg.org/. Citing in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 74.

* ⁴⁷Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness.

* ⁴⁸ Idem. Page 75.

* ⁴⁹ Idem. Page 78.

* ⁵⁰ Idem. Page 75.

* ⁵¹Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 60.

* ⁵² Idem. Page 60.

* ⁵³ Idem. Page 61.

* ⁵⁴ Idem. Page 65.

* ⁵⁵Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 67.

* ⁵⁶«War on Drugs Policing and Police Brutality», http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4800748/

* ⁵⁷ Idem.

* ⁵⁸Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of ColorblindnessPage 74.

* ⁵⁹ Idem. Page 77.

* ⁶⁰Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of ColorblindnessPage 98.

* ⁶¹National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, https://nsduhweb.rti.org/respweb/homepage.cfm. Citing in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness

* ⁶² Idem. Page 100.

* ⁶³ Idem. Page 101.

* ⁶⁴Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 112.

* ⁶⁵Idem. Page 113

* ⁶⁶Idem. Page 114.

* ⁶⁷ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness. Page 118.

* ⁶⁸Idem.

* ⁶⁹Idem. Page 124.

* ⁷⁰Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness, Page 125.

* ⁷¹Ta-Nehisi Coates, «The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration». http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/

* ⁷²Nell Berstein, «Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 7.

* ⁷³Idem.

* ⁷⁴Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 31.

* ⁷⁵Idem. Page 83.

* ⁷⁶Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 32.

* ⁷⁷Idem. Page 33.

* ⁷⁸Idem. Page 34.

* ⁷⁹«Behind bars: Four teens in prison tell their stories», http://www.layouth.com/behind-bars-four-teens-in-prison-tell-their-stories/

* ⁸⁰Nell Berstein, «Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 37

* ⁸¹Idem. Page 36.

* ⁸²Nell Berstein, «Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 131.

* ⁸³Solitary Confinement of Juvenile Offenders. http://www.aacap.org/aacap/policy_statements/2012/Solitary_Confinement_of_Juvenile_Offenders.aspx Also seen in Nell Bersntein, «Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison.

* ⁸⁴Prisoner 4099 - Oscar Wilde's letter - The National Archives, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/prisoner4099/historical-background/transcript-letter.htm. Also seen in Nell Berstein, «Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison.

* ⁸⁵Nell Berstein, «Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 133.

* ⁸⁶Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile PrisonPage 135.

* ⁸⁷Reginald Dwayne Betts, «Only Once I Thought About Suicide». http://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/only-once-i-thought-about-suicide

* ⁸⁸ Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison.Page 144.

* ⁸⁹ Reginald Dwayne Betts, «I Spent My Teen Years in Solitary Confinement and This Is What I Learned» http://time.com/4196656/juveniles-criminal-justice-reform/

* ⁹⁰ DEFENDING CHILDHOOD, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/defendingchildhood/legacy/2012/12/12/cev-executive-sum.pdf

Also seen in Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison.

* ⁹¹ Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Page 104.

* ⁹²Nell Bersntein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 106.

* ⁹³Idem. Page 107.

* ⁹⁴Idem. Page 117.

* ⁹⁵Nell Bersntein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Page 119.

* ⁹⁶Review Panel on Prison Rape, http://ojp.gov/reviewpanel/pdfs/panel_report_prea_apr2016.pdf. Also seen in Nell Berstein, Burning Down The House: The End of Juvenile Prison.