BLACK MEN

             "Cellblocks or Classrooms." The funding of Higher Education and corrections and its impact on African American men makes perfectly clearly the society's investment priority's producer commensurate results. During the 1980s and 1990s state spending on higher education. Between 1980 and 2000, corrections share of state and local spending grew by 104 percent while higher educations share of state and local spending declined by 21 percent African Americans comprises about half of that total. One third of young black men are under some form of penal surveillance. Speaking before a packed auditorium in mid November, scholar and activist Angela Davis argued that rising black incarceration rates can be understood only in the context of a hundred-year-old link between crime and race and class and oppression. Immediately following the civil war, Black codes created a list of crimes punishable only when committed by black people. Mississippi made it a crime for African Americans to be unemployed or drunk, or to have run away, neglected children, or handled money carelessly. The convict lease system farmed black and a few white prisoners out to work in factories, mines, and fields that built the New south. Through a gaping loophole in the 13th Amendment, politicians replaced slavery with a penal system designed to control black labor. Fredrick Douglass claimed that many white criminals escaped punishment by blacking their faces during a robbery or a murder. Police always found an innocent black man to blame for the crime since, as Douglass pointed out, all Negroes look alike. Douglass claim sounds like a case about a year ago in which a white Boston man claimed a black man had killed his wife and children. A black man suspect was discovered and found guilty by a jury before the white man's brother came forward with the truth: the white man had killed his own family. .
             Davis pointed out that crime has not increased since the 1970s, and that the vast majority of prisoners are serving sentences for nonviolent, often self-destructive crimes.