Treasure Thigpen
Staff Writer
For a genre of music that has built much of its history on telling stories of inner city struggles and triumphs, prison is not a new topic. In fact, many hip-hop artists have had run-ins with the law and transferred that experience to their music.
One of the latest additions to that list is Certified Platinum recording artist Robert “Meek Mill” Williams, who is working to change the current narrative.
Mill was arrested in 2007 after an officer with the Philadelphia Police Department said the rapper pointed a gun at him outside his home. Mill was sentenced in 2009 to 11 to 23 months in prison and 10 years of probation.
In an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish, Mill’s stated, “Every time I started fulfilling my life in the music industry, every year or two, there was always something that brought me back to ground zero because of probation. I always wondered what happened to the people in situations worse than mine.”
Mill says he and many other formerly incarcerated people are “trapped inside of a system that’s extremely hard for us to get out.”
“I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m here to speak for the ones who don’t have a voice. I didn’t ask to be the face of reform, but I want to bridge gaps and make the world a better place, especially for my culture,” said Mill.
The story of Meek Mill is one of many that have reignited the conversation of prison reform. Prison reform is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, establish a more effective penal system, and implement alternatives to incarceration. It also focuses on the reinstatement of those whose lives are impacted by crimes.
The American justice system has been under major scrutiny lately for many reasons. American prisons currently house more than 2 million individuals, with another 5 million released on parole or probation.
For every 31 adults, one will end up in jail. A higher likelihood than most countries in the world. America holds 5 percent of the world’s population yet over 25 percent of the world’s prison population, according to CriminalJusticePrograms.com. This growth continues even though crime rates have declined since the 1990s.
According to Hillary Clinton‘s website, the majority of those incarcerated are nonviolent offenders. A variety of issues have contributed to mass incarceration including unfair drug charges. The war on drugs led to stricter drug laws that caused the number of incarcerated drug offenders to soar 1,200 percent between 1980 and 2018.
At the core of the issue prison reform is the rate at which it disproportionately effects African Americans.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016 the racial demographics were as follows: African Americans represented 12% of the US population, but 33 percent of the prison population; Caucasians accounted for 64 percent of the population, but only 30 percent of those in prison; and Hispanics held 16% of the nation’s population, but over 23 percent of prison inmates.
African-Americans land in prison at more than five times the rate of white people. In states like New Jersey, Iowa, and Vermont where there are predominately white communities, this number jumped to a rate of ten to one. Oklahoma, which is the state with the highest black incarceration rate in the nation, holds more than one in every 15 black males over the age of 18 in prison.
New Jersey native, Nasir Salaam, a 29-year-old published author, is currently incarcerated for a crime committed at the age of 17.
‘Flaws of Perfection’ author, Salaam, who has served over ten years in a New Jersey State Prison, offers a statement on mass incarceration and prison reform. “The prison system is backed up because you have so many people doing time and getting denied parole. There’s a few guys I know personally with over forty years in, getting denied parole. There’s no excuse, we know the real reason why.”
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