The Dysfunctional and the Disappearing: Democracy, Race and Imprisonment

Without attempting to deŽne democracy, we can note its signiŽcant characteristics: elected political leadership; a natural equality among the citizenry; the right to political dissent; the right to private property (in a bourgeois democracy); and a degree of personal individuality and individual rights which do not conict with or inict harm on the collective good. (Of course, Social Darwinism and the capitalist ethos make this somewhat of an oxymoron.) We should also note its absence in certain sectors of US society; and where democracy does not exist, or exists only in part, the contradictions and crises that mark a diminished freedom invariably are accompanied by human rights abuses. Three key phenomena undermine US democracy: the denial of community in attempts to further racial/ethnic segregation; the denial of political rights (including in some states the vote) to racially conŽgured peoples because of economic and racial bias in policing and sentencing prisoners and felons who are disproportionately poor people and people of colour; and the institutionalisation of torture, abuse, and repression in the US penal system. Since its inception, the United States has quested for a democracy complicit in, conicted with, and in almost every sense tormented, if not crippled, by racial inequality and racist demagoguery. The history of US racism is intricately linked to its economic system and acquisition of material wealth. John Locke’s The Second Treatise on Civil Government extols the virtues of private property as an inherent right in a democracy (Locke, 1986). Written in the late seventeenth century, it would inuence the ideology of eighteenth-century founding fathers and provide a rationale for slavery property rights as integral to a edging democracy. In the nineteenth century, the Civil War, fought in part for economic reasons, allegedly vanquished the great antithesis of democracy — slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution theoretically freed the slaves, however, it codiŽed slavery by legalising ‘involuntary