My dad, Muhammad Ali, won his bout, but so many fall to mass incarceration
Nobel laureate economist and noted conservative Milton Friedman said,
“If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.”
In 1967, my father, Muhammad Ali, was sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War.
At the time, there were about 200,000 people behind bars in the United States. Now our prisons and jails overflow with almost 2 million.
The United States has only 4% of the world’s population but 20% of its incarcerated. Who bears the brunt over this obsession to lock up its citizens? People of color.
Black people are incarcerated roughly five times the rate of white people. According to an alarming report by the Aspen Institute, the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its Black population “than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”
But it’s not just people of color. Women are also being imprisoned at an unnerving speed. They have become its fastest-growing segment.
Many incarcerated women have histories of abuse and mental illness, and the majority are serving time for nonviolent crimes. These women are primary caregivers, mothers, wives, sisters. The pernicious effect of imprisoning so many of our women spreads to shores we dare not imagine.
Are we Americans inherently more evil, more dangerous than the rest of the world? How did we get here?
More are incarcerated for drugs now than total in prison in 1980
In large part, it has been the “war on drugs.” Nobel laureate economist and noted conservative Milton Friedman said, “If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.”
Friedman was not wrong. We have more people imprisoned for drugs now than we had in total in prison in 1980. Local police cage almost as many people each year for drugs than all of “violent crime” combined.
And when it comes to marijuana, the FBI has discovered that almost 90% of arrests are for possession only. All this even though recreational marijuana is now legal in 21 states and enjoys popularity that arguably exceeds ice cream and Girl Scout cookies.
So how as a country should we react when Bernard Noble is sentenced to 13 years of hard labor for possessing less than a 10th of an ounce of marijuana? At some point, we have to admit that the “war on drugs” has just been a “war on people.”
A war on us.
What mass incarceration is costing us – fiscally and morally
But to think that mass incarceration is simply a drug problem wouldn’t be accurate:
Willie Simmons has spent the past four decades in an Alabama prison for stealing $9.
Curtis Wilkerson was sentenced to life in a California prison for shoplifting a pair of white tube socks.
Sharnalle Mitchell was handcuffed in front of her 1- and 4-year-old children and sentenced to two months in jail. Her crime? Unpaid parking tickets.
These imprisonments aren’t costless. At Rikers Island in New York City, to incarcerate someone now costs $556,539 per person per year. That’s over $1,500 each day. It would be much cheaper to house someone at the Ritz Carlton on Central Park South.
It has been said that a city’s budget is a moral document. But it’s also an IQ test. Fiscally, we can not continue down this reckless path to ruin.
I know the problem seems too massive, too complicated.
The question my co-author Jason Flom and I are most often asked when we travel the country preaching for commonsense reform is, “We’re just regular people. How could my friends and I ever make a difference?”
Even though my father was sentenced to five years in prison, it would surprise many to learn he never served a night behind bars.
Tom Krattenmaker, a modest, selfdescribed “humble, little clerk,” convinced Supreme Court Justice John Harlan that perhaps Muhammad Ali was indeed a conscientious objector as his religion prevented him from fighting in any war not declared by God himself.
This persuaded Justice Harlan to reverse his opinion, which swayed the court to change its 5-3 vote against my father to 8-0 in his favor.
One person had one persistent thought. It ended up redirecting not only my father’s life but all of my siblings’ lives, and perhaps millions more.
As anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Khaliah Ali is an activist and humanitarian dedicated to issues such as child hunger, education, animal welfare and environmental injustice. She serves on the board of the Juvenile Law Center, the National Public Housing Museum, Street Soccer USA and Help USA.
Jason Flom, the founder of “Lava for Good” podcasts, serves on the board of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Legal Action Center and the Drug Policy Alliance. And he is the founding board member of the Innocence Project.