Why are California blacks so much more likely than whites and Latinos to be locked up? The San Francisco Chronicle reported on August 9 that the economy is one factor.

"Part of it is that blacks, as a population, have tended to be on the fringes of the mainstream economy, and those who end up in the criminal justice system tend to be those on the fringes," Dan Macallair said. He is an associate director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a research group based in S.F.

Well, why does the division of labor make black workers disproportionately needless in the economy?

Perhaps a partial explanation of the link between black occupations and incarceration is the 1990s decline of California’s high-wage military jobs. The state saw dozens of military base closures that cut stable, well-paying work last decade. Three military bases closed since 1993 in my hometown of Sacramento. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has announced that he wants to close additional military bases nationwide.

Crucially for some black workers, the military has been an equal opportunity employer. A number of black workers and their families, for example, migrated to California from the South during World War II. They were attracted to cities such as Los Angeles, Long Beach, Sacramento and San Francisco by the high wages of military employment.

Immiseration breeds incarceration. Neither is a natural condition of human beings of any skin color. Immiseration was spurred by Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform. It knocked down a key peg of FDR’s New Deal legislation by eliminating the federal guarantee of cash assistance to society's poorest people, half of whom are children. Up to 700,000 former welfare recipients were expected to be forced to enter a California job market that created only 400,000 new jobs during a 12-month period that ended in June 1997, the London Economist reported. How many jobless black workers ended up in the state’s jails and prisons?

For most blacks most of the time, employment in the U.S. between 1619 and 1865 took the form of chattel slavery. Today all Americans work for wages—if they can find a job. Indeed, one could surmise that in California’s “new economy” of networked computers and “24/7” workers, employers have a weak demand for black labor. Prisons and jails appear to be a way to contain this surplus population of California black workers.

Other factors spurring the overrepresentation of African Americans in California’s jails and prisons are easy to find.

Take the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1998. This federal legislation states that possession of a little as five grams of crack cocaine carries a mandatory five-year prison sentence without the possibility of parole, but possession of a hundred times that amount of cocaine powder (the drug preferred by middle- and upper-income white users) has no mandatory sentence. At every step in the criminal justice system—from arrest to charging to convicting and sentencing—the data shows that blacks and Latinos are treated much more severely than whites.

In addition, the pharmacological data shows that liquid cocaine—and not crack or powder cocaine—is the most addictive form of the drug. Clarence Lusane details this in Pipe Dream Blues: Racism in the War on Drugs. The “crack is more addictive” claim is a fraud which has been used by politicians and pundits to justify harsher sentences for those low-income blacks who use and sell crack cocaine.

To be sure, there is an illegal drug use epidemic in California. The state’s crisis of black incarceration is proof of that. Doesn’t this mean that now rather than later is the time to discuss the treatment of such drug use as a health rather than a criminal issue?

Seth Sandronsky (ssandron@hotmail.com) is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive newspaper.

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