Rep. Adam Schiff (D, Calif.) is set to introduce HR 3547, a piece of “anti-gang” legislation. If passed, it will broaden the legal definition of “gang-related” activities and toughen the sentences meted out for such convictions. Among its most horrendous provisions, the bill will allow federal courts to sentence minors as young as 13-years-old to life in prison without parole.
Of the 2,200 minors who have been convicted of life without parole in the world, all but 12 are in the United States.
The bill’s primary backers come from the Democratic Party. House Leader Nancy Pelosi has supported the bill, which has already passed the Senate by a unanimous “voice vote.” In other words, not one Senator objected to the bill.
This anti-gang legislation, like the “war on crime” before it, would disproportionately repress young people of color. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, between 60 to 75 percent of individuals convicted under current gang-related statutes are Black, Latino or Asian.
Rep. Robert C. Scott, an opponent of the legislation, has correctly declared that the bill would “nationalize the Jena 6.” The recent string of noose-hangings—from the Deep South to Southern California and New York, from police station locker rooms to the Ivy League—has revealed that the racism in Jena is indeed a nationwide phenomenon already.
Even if we didn’t have the Jena 6 case as an example, we would still have Hurricane Katrina. During the disaster, young Black men and women, who heroically rescued their neighbors while the government did nothing, were treated as criminal “looters” and fired on by the New Orleans Police Department.
We would still have 15-year-old Shaquanda Cotton, imprisoned for shoving a hall monitor. We would still have 17-year-old Genarlow Wilson, sentenced 10 years for consensual sex.
In September, unarmed 14-year-old Deonte Rawlings was shot in the back of the head by an off-duty Washington, D.C. police officer. The issue here is the armed forces of the state’s license to kill Black youth. In California, a security guard broke the wrist of 16-year-old Pleajhai Mervin when she dropped a piece of cake and did not pick it up as he wanted.
These trends—of the anonymous nooses to the institutional violence against youth—go hand in hand, each feeding off of the other.
In the course of two decades, millions of poor youth, primarily Black and Latino, have been run through the system. HR 3547 is just another expression of institutionalized violence against young people of color, another way to lock them up and throw away the key.
The prison boom began in the late 1970s as a way to deal with the growing number of unemployed when manufacturing industries began to move their operations abroad. Only low-paid, non-union service jobs remained for urban communities. Those too have been increasingly shifted to immigrants who can be super-exploited because of legal status issues.
Over the last 30 years, the prison population has jumped from 200,000 to 2.2 million, while another 5 million are on probation or parole. Forty-five percent of all inmates are Black, although only 12 percent of the U.S. population is Black. Between 1980 and 1999, the incarceration rate for African Americans nearly tripled.
Entire cities have been plunged into destitution. Those communities picked for “urban renewal” (gentrification) have been subjected to mass displacement and heavy policing to preside over the forced dislocation.
The anti-gang legislation will only intensify these trends. It will not resolve (or even acknowledge) any of the social and economic root causes behind urban violence. These problems cannot be overcome under capitalism, a system that thrives off of division, inequality, national oppression and bigotry.
The mass frustration in the cities—that everlasting spirit of rebellion—is reaching a boiling point. The struggle to free the Jena 6 is already starting to bubble over.
Last year, we saw the immigrant community awaken to defeat a particularly odious House bill that would have made it easier for the state to criminalize immigrants. It is only a matter of time before the criminalization of urban youth provokes a similar explosion—and when it comes it will be not a moment too soon.
