Thread by @pdacosta

THREAD—"The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth... Central to understanding this practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery." nytimes.com/interactive/20… #1619Project

"We represent 4 percent of the planet’s population but 22 percent of its imprisoned. In the early 1970s, our prisons held fewer than 300,000 people; since then, that number has grown to more than 2.2 million, with 4.5 million more on probation or parole."

"The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes. After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human 'slaves,' were seen as less than fully human 'criminals.'

"The provisional governor of South Carolina declared in 1865 that they had to be 'restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime.' Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people—making criminal justice central to of racial control."

"It’s not just that this history fostered a view of black people as presumptively criminal. It also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality in response.

"In 1904, in Mississippi, a black man was accused of shooting a white landowner who had attacked him.

"A white mob captured him and the woman with him, cut off their ears and fingers, drilled corkscrews into their flesh and then burned them alive — while hundreds of white spectators enjoyed deviled eggs and lemonade.

"The landowner’s brother, Woods Eastland, presided over the violence; he was later elected district attorney of Scott County, Miss., a position that allowed his son James Eastland, an avowed white supremacist, to serve six terms as a US senator.

"This appetite for harsh punishment has echoed across the decades. Late in the 20th century, amid protests over civil rights and inequality, a new politics of fear and anger would emerge.

"Nixon’s war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, 'broken windows' policing — these policies were not as expressly racialized as the Black Codes, but their implementation has been essentially the same.

"It is black and brown people who are disproportionately targeted, stopped, suspected, incarcerated and shot by the police."

"Hundreds of years after the arrival of enslaved Africans, a presumption of danger and criminality still follows black people everywhere."

"In schools, black kids are suspended and expelled at rates that vastly exceed the punishment of white children for the same behavior.

"Inside courtrooms, the problem gets worse. Racial disparities in sentencing are found in almost every crime category. Children as young as 13, almost all black, are sentenced to life imprisonment for nonhomicide offenses.

"Black defendants are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty for crimes whose victims are white, rather than black — a type of bias the Supreme Court has declared 'inevitable.'

"The smog created by our history of racial injustice is suffocating and toxic. We are too practiced in ignoring the victimization of any black people tagged as criminal;

"... too many Americans are willing spectators to horrifying acts, as long as we’re assured they’re in the interest of maintaining order.

This cannot be the end of the story."