CRIMINALIZATION AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

CRIMINALIZATION OF LATINOS

BY STUDENT

Imagine yourself walking in a cool winter night, you’re on way home after hanging out with your friends at the local soccer field. You’re wearing an all-black outfit because that’s your favorite color, and you decide hoodie up due to the weather. As you’re walking up the block, you hear police sirens behind you and somebody yelling “FREEIZE! HANDS UP!” Then officers slam your body against the wall to search your pockets and bag. As they’re emptying out my belonging, they start to ask questions like “Where you from?”, your name, your age, and start to mention the names of friends and neighbors from your block to see if you were associated with any of them which you were since you knew them your whole life. You keep asking them the reason of this search and they tell you to mind your business and answer their questions. After the search, the officer can’t find anything illegal on you and tell you to watch yourself because they are always watching you and your friends. You head home and tell your mother what happened, all she could do is give you a hug because she knows that isn’t going to be the last time that officers of the NYPD are going stop-and-frisk you. 

That’s what happened to me when I was fourteen years living in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, NY and it occurred six more times until the NYPD wasn’t allowed to stop-and-frisk due to the racial basis on who they conducted their unwarranted searches. Stop-and-frisk gave officers the right to search people of color under the basis of probable cause or suspicion which can mean anything. From the way people of color acted, looked, and even associated themselves with. In the academic article ‘Latinas/os and US Prison; Trends and Challenges’ the author, Jose Luis Morin states that “The formulation of public policy around crime and the fear of crime, like the role of the media in promoting fear and negative images, are both influential in producing high incarceration rates that unfavorably affect persons of color.” Meaning that the people of power can cause fear into their citizens to associate crime with people of color using the media to justify their high rates of incarceration and criminalization of Blacks and Latinos since that’s how the common person consume their information. Morin also mentions how “Latinas/os are subject to myths linking criminality to immigrant status” which plays a role on how Latinos are treated in today’s privatization of prisons in the United States

Criminalizing of Black and Latinos has made the privatization of prisons into a billion-dollar industry due policy makers creating harsher punishments for crimes to incarcerate people of color or people of low-income environments to increase the number of inmates for the private prisons. In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s ‘The Prison Fix’ explains that the “prison boom” started to help fix to the capitalist society by fixing the “surplus” spaces in the inner cities in California to fill the newly built prisons that were being built in the suburbs. Meaning that people in living in low-income spaces were being targeted and most likely to end up in these newly built prisons run by private institutions like the CCA (Corrections Corporation of America). Inmates in these prisons would work in jobs around the prison like in the kitchen, sweeping, or making underwear for the pennies an hour. An example is in the article “$800 Million in Taxpayer Money Went to Private Prisons Where Migrants Work for Pennies” written by Spencer Ackerman and Adam Rawnsley states that “work isn’t mandatory, but there’s nothing to inside” said by Yesica who’s an inmate of these private ICE prisons in Texas. She’s an immigrant from El Salvador but left her country due persecution by gangs due to her sexuality. She describes her experience in these prisons as “inhumane” and “It’s like a torture chamber.” The mistreatment of immigrants in these prisons has been on today’s news frequently due to the mass amounts of immigrants being taken away from their families and locked inside these private federal prisons that have poor living conditions. Immigrant children being separated from their families and locked up in cages to face deportation without legal representation. The Trump administration is finding new ways to criminalize Latinos, and they’re using the 2020 Census by adding a question that makes people state their legal status in the United States. This can cause millions of lost submissions due immigrants fear of deportation and criminalizing them in the process. The Census is meant to determine the amount of legal representation and funding each state gets from the government. If millions of submissions from immigrants are lost, then there won’t be enough representation or funding for the immigrant population or low-income individuals and that’s what the Trump administration wants to accomplish. To change social structure of the United States back to the white majority and not the Blacks and Latinos in the lower class of our society. 

Sources:

Adam Spencer Ackerman - https://www.thedailybeast.com/dollar800-million-in-taxpayer-money-went-to-private-prisons-where-migrants-work-for-pennies?ref=scroll

Latinas/os and Us Prisons: Trends and Challenges

José Morín - Latino Studies - 2008

Golden Gulag

Ruth Gilmore - University Of California Press.