If you are caught with 500 grams of powder you can get probation, because it is not mandatory. What's wrong with this picture? You strike a match to powder it becomes crack. Ninety-four percent of those in jail for the $5.00 high are young black and brown males. Fifty-five percent of the crack users are white.
The US Sentencing Commission has said that the crime does not correspond with the time, and that it is racist and there is disparity. And yet, this Justice Department has not moved to change the ratio.
By 1998, the prison labor force will be making $9 billion worth of products, supplanting 400,000 private jobs. In Illinois alone prisoners are making 280 products. How can we see the chip in the eye of the Chinese and protest prison labor, while we have a log in our own eye? We must protest prison labor and chain gangs. Our youth are being locked up for sport and industry... It is called the jail industrial complex. And now as they privatize the jails, the new investors are Smith Barney, American Express, GE, Prudential Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Goldman-Sachs. Maybe the follow-up march should be on Wall-Street. Many of the same firms that we had to picket out of South Africa now see the jail industrial complex as attractive. Blacks who work in those firms should meet and address those indignities."