“No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails,” the world’s most famous political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, has written. May 10 will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mandela’s landmark inauguration as president of South Africa, a country that imprisoned him for twenty-seven years for resisting apartheid.
While it may seem bombastic to invoke Nelson and use the word “apartheid” outside of South Africa, consider this: As of 2017, the United States had a black male incarceration rate of 2,283 for every 100,000 black adults. That’s nearly three times as high as for black men in South Africa in 1993, in the dying days of apartheid.
Wisconsin, the host of the 2020 Democratic convention, in fact, has a black male incarceration rate that not only leads the United states, but is today eight times that of apartheid South Africa in 1993.
A few years ago, the ACLU released a study showing that even though whites were slightly more likely to use marijuana than African Americans, whites were . . . drum roll please . . . far less likely than their African American counterparts to be arrested for using it.
This is especially true in Wisconsin, where if you are an African American, you are six times more likely than a white person to get arrested for marijuana possession. That’s 3.7 times the national average disparity. In the Milwaukee suburban county of Waukesha, a black person is a whopping thirteen times more likely to be arrested than a white person.
In fact, the basic structure of Wisconsin’s laws tend to be accommodating toward white people. For example, about 85 percent of white people have a driver’s license, while less less than 50 percent of African Americans in Milwaukee County do. Thus white people are far more likely to drive, and thus represent the largest proportion of the state’s population likely to drive drunk. Guess which is the only state in the country that doesn’t criminalize first offense drunk driving, despite also being the fourth most dangerous in the country when it comes to drunk driving?
This selective structure and enforcement of the laws is one reason why if you are are white male in Wisconsin, you’re slightly less likely than the national average to be incarcerated, but if you’re a black or Native American male, you’re more than twice the national average to be incarcerated—and this is in a country that leads the world in incarceration!
Wisconsin doesn’t just lap the national average in incarceration rates of black and Native American working age men, it’s ranked #1 worst. The state with the nearest rates—Oklahoma—isn’t close.
In the Badger state, one in eight working age black men are currently incarcerated and approximately half of all black men in their 30s and 40s have been incarcerated at one point in their lives.
Earlier this year, Columbia University’s Justice Lab released an extensive study that found that in addition to selective enforcement of laws, Wisconsin’s African Americans are much more likely to be trapped in perpetual cycles of being “on papers”—parole or probation—and being sent to prison not for breaking any law, but for breaking “community supervision” rules.
These rules also reflect a structured racial disparity: Black people are twice as likely as whites to have their probation or parole revoked for technical reasons. The Columbia researchers say this creates a situation where “Mass supervision has functioned as a net widener and a driver of mass incarceration, rather than serving as a true alternative to incarceration.”
Here’s the kicker: Most of the people on parole, aren’t really on parole, at least not in the traditional sense. In 1998, Wisconsin passed a not-so-truthfully-named bill known as the “Truth in Sentencing” law. It largely got rid of the old parole system where a person could be eligible after serving 25 percent of a sentence, and replaced it with, “people who are convicted must serve 100 percent of their prison sentences plus a period of extended supervision that must be at least 25 percent of the original prison sentence.”
In other words, in the old days if you were sentenced for five years, you were eligible for parole after a little over a year. Now you have to spend all five years in prison AND still have a full more year to serve on extended supervision.
The effects of this on the black population in Wisconsin are staggering: About one in seven of all voting age African American males (15 percent) are currently incarcerated or “on paper” for a felony conviction in Wisconsin, meaning they are not allowed to vote under Wisconsin law. This is no small detail.
The last presidential election in Wisconsin was decided by a little over 20,000 votes or roughly the number of African American men that are legally barred from voting right now in the state.
The last presidential election in Wisconsin was decided by a little over 20,000 votes or roughly the number of African American men that are legally barred from voting right now in the state.
To put up even more obstacles to the voting booth, the regime of former Governor Scott Walker made voting more difficult for all people of color. As mentioned, about 80 percent of white Wisconsinites have a driver’s license, compared to about half of African Americans in the state. Walker and company passed a law in 2012 requiring Wisconsin citizens to getting a driver’s license—or going through the same rigamarole of to get a state-sanctioned ID—before being able to vote.
But even if they make it to the voting booth, like all Wisconsinites, their vote doesn’t really matter for anything other than statewide offices, because the gerrymandering is among the worst in our nation’s history. In the last Wisconsin election, 54 percent of ballots cast went toward Democratic candidates in the state Assembly, yet Democrats emerged with only 36 percent of the seats.
And, as has been well documented by others, votes cast by African Americans in Wisconsin and other states with higher minority populations of people of color, don’t have the same value as white votes cast for Congress or the President and, indirectly, the U.S. Supreme Court.
Patrick Thornton of the Washingtonian points out that “by avoiding big diverse states, a candidate could win the U.S. presidency with just 23 percent of the popular vote.” He based that extreme, but possible, example on a candidate losing the eleven most populated (and racially diverse) states and winning the remaining thirty-nine states and mostly majority-white states—including Wisconsin.
This duck looks, and sounds, a lot like apartheid to me.