Under Lock and Key RAIL Radio Program for March 5, 1999

Drop in illegal murder rates fuels police state hype;
but the growth of police and prisons is not responsible for the
drop in murder rates

William Kunstler talks about the real criminals in the government
2:32
Mumia Abu Jamal says crime policy is "Acting Like Life's a
Ballgame" 4:16

New prison data shows effects of the anti-parole trend:
Black prisoners do more time than whites

Welcome to Under Lock and Key, news and commentary about prisons
from the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League. The U.$.
incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other
country. The rate for imprisonment of Blacks is 4 times that of
apartheid South Africa, and the U.$. sends more Black men to
prison than college. The purpose of this program is to educate
about, and inspire activism against, the Amerikan lockdown.

Drop in illegal murder rates fuels police state hype;
but the growth of police and prisons is not responsible for drop
in murder rates

The drop in the U.$. illegal murder rate has some people praising
the police state again. In the six years since 1991 the official
murder rate dropped by almost a third. In some cities the drop in
illegal murders in 1998 was drastic in that one year alone. New
York City had a 20% drop in murder last year, and Los Angeles had
27% fewer murders last year.(2)

In places like New York City, the police are busy taking credit
for the decline of illegal murders. And the mayor has proposed
completely eliminating parole for all people convicted of felonies
(4), as if skyrocketing imprisonment was the cause of the drop in
crime. In New York, the police have increased arrests of people
for petty crimes, on the theory that they are stopping other
crimes by busting people randomly. Their strategy has received a
lot of attention, and because of the drop in illegal murders,
people say it is working.

However, Washington, D.C. provides counter evidence. In D.C. the
number of illegal murders fell 14% in 1998, and they have
decreased a total of almost 50% since 1991. The greatest decrease
was in the rate of people younger than 25 being killed illegally.
So the trend in D.C. is like the trend in New York.

But no one can say this big drop in D.C. murders is because of
"good" police work. The D.C. police department has been in chaos
all through the 1990s, starting the decade by hiring hundreds of
untrained recruits, and subsequently going through five police
chiefs and seven commanders of the homicide division. The
percentage of homicides for which a suspect is convicted or shot
down in the streets is called the "closure rate". In D.C. over the
last seven years, the closure rate has fallen from 54% to 39.
Across Amerika the closure rate is 66%.

In fact, the number of people in jail and prison in D.C. dropped
6% over 7 years, making it one of the few places that has not kept
up with constant increases, mostly because the state apparatus was
too disorganized to do its repressive work effectively.(8)

So why is the murder rate going down right now? In our opinion, it
involves and upward swing in the economy and perhaps a decline in
the crack trade, which is a tribute to the inner city masses who
are increasingly rejecting the white man's crack industry.(6)

In Washington, crack came on the scene in the late 1980s, right
when the murder rate shot up, which was also the case in other
cities. Because crack was illegal and the industry was highly
competitive at the local level, violence was an important part of
gaining and controlling market share. The violence associated with
the trade spread into other areas, for example leading other
people to carry guns to protect themselves, which increased the
chance that fights would be fatal.

By the 1990s, members of the oppressed nations, who were being
most victimized by crack-related violence, began turning against
it, and improvements in the economy made it more possible to get
other jobs. In D.C., where they drug test people who are arrested,
the police report a large drop in the number of young people
arrested who test positive for cocaine.(5)

Our point is not that the imperialist economy will solve the
problems of the oppressed nations as it is primarily responsible
for those problems. Nor are we suggesting that the imperialists
and their profiteer allies are giving up on the illicit drug
trade. Rather, we simply want to emphasize that the downturn in
illegal murders is not due  to more cops and more prisons.

Of course, proponents of the police state don't want to give up
the credit.

"I'd like to believe our policing is part of it, too,"

said the public safety director of the D.C. housing authority.(5)

But there is no evidence that it did. In fact, a simple look at
some evidence makes it look like the economy is the most important
factor in the illegal murder rate. The incarceration rate keeps on
going up over the decades while the murder rate goes up and down.
But while murder rates has nothing to do with the number of
prisoners, something else does. A report in the February 1st MIM
Notes explains that the rise and fall of the teen unemployment
rate since 1950 shows a close resemblance to the changes in the
murder rate. But the incarceration rate bears no resemblance to
the murder rate over time.

So it does look like the economy, and possibly the economic
situation of young people, is pretty tied up with the murder rate.

The people who clamor for the police state don't care about the
murder rate. They have their own reasons for wanting to imprison
ever greater numbers of members of the oppressed nations in North
America. They want social control of rebellious youth, they want
slave labor, and they want to keep the white nation politically
united in opposition to the nations it oppresses. The crack boom
was great for the police state, because it helped all these
purposes. Now that the murder rate is going down, they'll say it's
because they lock so many people up. And when the murder rate goes
up again, they'll say they need to lock even more people up.

RAIL does its best to expose these real crimes against the people,
the imprisonment of almost 2 million people being chief among
them.  We do this work to help the oppressed nations unite in
their opposition to the system that commits these crimes and then
lies about them to cover their tracks.

All things censored CD
William Kunstler introduction 2:32
William Kunstler reading MAJ on "Acting Like Life's a
Ballgame" 4:16

New prison data shows effects of the anti-parole trend:
Black prisoners do more time than whites

As of this year, 15 states have eliminated parole. New York
Governor Pataki is proposing eliminating parole in his state, too.
And many other states are cracking down on granting parole. Texas,
for example, paroled just 20% of eligible prisoners in 1998, down
from 57% ten years ago.(1)

The trend toward denying parole, or even eliminating parole, is
contributing to the boom in the fascistic explosion of Amerikan
imprisonment. Some new data released by the Injustice Department
demonstrates this.

A big part of the growth in prison populations is because people
are serving longer portions of their sentences. State prison
populations increased 57% in the seven years since 1990, but
admissions only increased 17% in that time. So the population is
increasing partly because more people are being locked up, but
also because fewer people are being released. In 1990, 37% of
state prisoners were released, but in 1996 it was only 31%. The
release rate for people convicted of murder fell from 10% to 5% in
that time -- meaning in 1996 one-in-20 people convicted of murder
was released.  For people convicted for rape, the rate fell from
24% to 15%.

There is a big difference between time served for rape between
Black prisoners and white. Among people released from state
prisons in 1996, Blacks convicted of rape had done an average of
70 months in prison, compared to 56 months for whites. This means
that Blacks sentenced for rape served 25% longer sentences than
whites sentenced for the same offense. Black prisoners also served
20% longer sentences for assault. (For murder, however, the time
served was about the same). For all types of convictions, Black
prisoners released in 1996 did an average of 26 months, compared
to 24 months for whites.(2)

The publications of the Maoist Internationalist Movement have
previously explained that Black men are much more likely to be
arrested for rape than white men. This new data shows that they
also do longer prison terms on rape convictions. Rape is endemic
in patriarchal society. Who gets arrested and jailed for rape is a
political decision made by the imperialist patriarchy. The prison
system is a social control mechanism for national oppression, as
both arrest and prison term figures show.

It is for this reason that RAIL calls all prisoners political
prisoners. This system has no moral authority to say who is a
criminal and who is not. Whether you are convicted, the length of
your sentence and whether you make parole has less to do with what
you did than with who you are.

This has been Under Lock and Key, a weekly Revolutionary Anti-
Imperialist League program about prisons. For more information,
contact: RAIL PO Box 712 Amherst MA 01004, or email
RAILRadio@mim.org.