'When candidates say they’re 'tough on crime,' what they really mean is “we’ll put more Black people in prison.”
As the election looms closer, it’s easy not to think of people in prison at all, except maybe as statistics. Those in prison are easy to dismiss. Yet it would surprise most people that the people in here are very politically astute. There is a reason for that: it’s because elected officials’ politics disproportionately impact marginalized communities. Perhaps more than any other demographic, their policies directly affect our lives.
The census counts incarcerated people as residents of the prison in which they are housed, which are most often in rural areas, rather than residents of their permanent, pre-incarceration communities. “Residents in Chicago are actually having their political power deflated,” Kasey Henricks told Medill Reports in 2019. Henricks, a professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee, co-authored a 2017 report on racial inequality in Chicago that found the political power of predominantly white downstate communities is “artificially inflated” at the expense of predominantly Black and Brown districts that are impacted by mass incarceration.
Tough-on-crime doesn’t lead to a crackdown on embezzlement. It doesn’t lead to more police in predominantly white and affluent neighborhoods. It means “we’ll keep those poor Black people out of your neighborhoods.” What poor and Black and Brown communities need is further economic investment and development, jobs and opportunities. These communities are already overwhelmed with institutionalized racist and classist oppression. They don’t need to be cracked down upon. They need to be lifted up.
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