CAMRY DEAN
Staff Writer
Last Thursday, Michael Durfee of Niagara University presented his research on the history of race and the dramatic rise of the carceral state in America in a presentation titled “Race, Space and the Making of Mass Incarceration.”
Durfee, who is a professor of history, earned his Ph.D. from the State University of Buffalo in 2015. The title of his dissertation was “Crack Era Reform: A Brief History of Crack and the Rise of the Carceral State, 1985-1992.”
“[Durfee’s] work analyzes grassroots activism preceding and following the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, engaging the politics of respectability, media at the height of the crack era, antagonisms between police and Bronx residents, as well as the troubling rise of mass incarceration,” said history professor Ellen Litwicki.
In 1980, there were 40,900 incarcerated in the U.S. on drug charges. By 2014, that number had increased tenfold, and our jails and prisons homed 488,400 on drug charges.
Using these statistics, Durfee opened his lecture with what he hoped to be a rhetorical question for the audience.
“Are we, as a people, inherently more criminal than any other people in any other place in the history of the world?” Durfee said. “Or, does much of this explanation lay in another narrative, the narrative of drug and crime policy in the United States over the course of the 20th century, particularly in the post-Civil Rights Era?
“As a nation, as a society, we incarcerate more citizens per capita than any other industrialized society in the history of the world,” Durfee said. “That’s staggering, and that should be a pause for concern.”
Throughout his lecture, Durfee stated that he believes the increase in mass incarceration has to do with policies, not people.
“For a long time, the standard narrative was a conservative project meant to socially control non-white citizens in the advent of civil rights,” Durfee said. “This was how we responded to the passage of civil rights and the Civil Rights Movement in the same way that perhaps Jim Crow and a convict leasing system is a response to gains made under [the Reconstruction Era].
“In 1968, The Law Enforcement Assistance Act [LEAA] was passed by Lyndon B. Johnson, whose administration created the biggest crime fighting bureaucracy the U.S. has ever seen,” Durfee continued.
According to Durfee, the passing of the LEAA gave more rights and latitude to law enforcement and, in turn, took some of those liberties and rights away from citizens. In addition, it poured incredible amounts of financial aid into these law enforcement agencies.
Upon signing the bill, Johnson said that the bill was going to battle crime in “the local neighborhood and on the city street.”
“He’s doing something there,” Durfee said. “He’s locating where we’re supposed to assume the crime happens: on the city street. He’s pretty explicit about that.
“We know, with respect to drug crimes, that this stuff is happening across socioeconomic lines, so it seems like maybe we’re just policing certain areas and not policing it as aggressively in other areas. And there’s our president, laying out where the problem is and where we ought to go.”
In 1968, stop-and-frisk was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court in the case Terry v. Ohio and paved the way for racial bias within law enforcement, according to Durfee.
Starting in 1970, two years after the passing of the LEAA, the imprisoned population in the U.S. steadily increased from almost 200,000 to 1.5 million incarcerated.
“Non-white citizens are 40 times more likely to serve time than white citizens,” Durfee said. “It’s not just about race. It’s also about space and the difference in how we police different spaces. Urban districts are policed a lot differently than suburban or rural districts.”
In a 1995 study, a diverse group of individuals were asked to close their eyes and picture a criminal or drug dealer. 95 percent, including black participants, pictured a young, black man.
Durfee went on to describe the differences in policing urban and rural spaces starting in the 1980s. In urban spaces, policing became about “volume” and number of arrests, while policing in rural areas became about lack of arrests and “safety.”
For individuals born in 2001 in the U.S., the likelihood to be imprisoned as a black man is 1 in 3, compared to 1 in 6 Latino men and 1 in 17 white men. For women, 1 in 18 black women, 1 in 45 Latina women and 1 in 111 white women can expect to face jail-time at some point in their lives.
Not only is mass incarceration targeting a specific demographic and disrupting the ecology of different communities, it’s setting non-violent drug offenders up for failure.
Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” argues that stamping people with a “felony” for the rest of their lives has a huge effect on how they’ll adapt to society after prison.
“Folks have only begun to start paying the penalties of their crimes when they get out of prison,” Durfee said. “We told them they’ve served their debt to society, but the pain is just getting started.”
“This is creating crime incapacitation,” Durfee said. “In other words, you’re creating inability in these felons to successfully function in our economy and/or our society.”