Punishment
America loves to punish. It was part of the colonial DNA that white pilgrims brought to the “new land” from the old land of England. There was pillorying, burning at the stake, hanging, drawing, quartering, whippings, and a litany of other torturous punishments, sometimes for just pissing in public mud street.
After America became a full-fledged nation in 1791 with a ratified constitution, it began to experiment with both the need and purpose for such punishments. The pilgrims’ purposes for revenge and torture punishments had not worked too well in an expanding, land-grabbing nation, although these kinds of punishment were frequently inflicted on Native Americans, African-Americans, and immigrants from Ireland, China and Italy when they ventured out of their social class.
Thus, America, in many ways, was built not only on its ability to punish but in its innate willingness to inflict punishment.
By the 20th century as time changed societies, America had pretty much settled on five purposes for punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution and restitution.
Since 1900 under this five-purpose punishment-model, America has carried out nearly 9,000 executions and today has more than 200,000 people incarcerated in its prison system serving life sentences—that represents 83 percent of the people in the entire world serving life sentences, according to the Sentencing Project.
Of the life sentenced inmates, nearly 56,000 are serving their sentences without the benefit of parole. Plus, there are another 43,000 inmates serving what is known as “virtual life sentences”—sentences so long that they exceed life expectations.
Under the five-purpose punishment model, America now incarcerates roughly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although our nation represents only 5 percent of the world’s population
That is what the five-purpose punishment model has accomplished for America—the largest, most expensive, least effective, and one of the most brutal penal systems in the world.
There is one core fact about the America’s five-purpose punishment model—it has always disproportionately punished people of color, the economically disadvantaged, and the intellectually disenfranchised. This irrefutable fact demonstrates the historical systemic racism in this five-purpose punishment model—and I really don’t care how many “critical race theory” opponents would rather color this fact out of the history books.
Finally, here is the last example of the way the five-purpose punishment model works in real time:
On January 6, 2021, a white mob of insurrectionists—led by white supremacists groups the FBI has labeled “domestic terrorists“—stormed the nation’s Capitol Building. Many in that riotous mob had a specific intent to kill the Vice-President of the United States and its Speaker of the House of Representatives. Five people died as a result of the insurrection, four police officers committed suicide, hundreds of people were injured, dozens of Congressional members were either terrorized or traumatized, and millions of dollars in damage done to the Capitol Building.
Of the roughly 600 people arrested in the wake of the failed coup attempt, more than a dozen of them have been punished with probation, home detention, days of jail incarceration, and a couple with minor prison sentences, the longest being nearly 4 years.
Compare those punishments to the 4,000 life sentences imposed on drug offenders—two-third of whom are black or members of a minority ethnic group report the Sentencing Project—convicted in mostly minor drug deals that did not cause a loss of life or damage to property.
So, here we are: Kill a cop in an insurrection and get four years if you are white or sell a pound of weed and get a life sentence, sometimes without parole, if you are black.
The result: there are murderous white insurrectionists (through the “law of parties”) serving home detention while there are black petty criminals serving life sentences (under “three strikes”) for stealing a pizza.
There was a time in America during the Jim Crow era when a black man served more time in prison for killing a goat than a white man served for killing his wife.
The January 6 insurrection proves that America has once again embraced Jim Crow.