Early in the afternoon Saturday, April 24, men, women and children began a march down Fredrick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, chanting and singing the phrase “Jail ain’t no good!” accompanied by a small police escort. The event titled the Jail Ain’t No Good Walkathon was called for by Masjid Malcolm Shabazz, a Harlem-based Muslim temple founded by the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad in 1956. The participants in the march walked while holding large signs displaying various slogans and individual political affiliations. Many of the participants wore replica prison uniforms with plastic chains around their necks.
Yousef Hassan, who walked at the very front of the march wearing a white, screen-printed sweatshirt boasting the title of the event and a kufi cap, stated, “The march was a call to the community to take a look at an issue that’s been plaguing the Black community for years.” Although such events, in which African-Americans and community officials such as Rep. Charles Rangel, who made an appearance on a large float with chains on its side, are more common in Harlem than in other neighborhoods, they serve as reminders of the persistent issues of urban life.
Reports from the National Research Council, such as “The Growth of Incarceration in the United States,” written by Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western and Steven Redburn in 2014, have revealed the startling growth of the American prison system’s population after the 1970s. These reports and books such as Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” have also shown us that the bulk of this increase in the prison population is the result of convictions for drug offenses in the African-American and Latino communities, beginning with the Nixon administration’s “war on drugs,” which was later extensively funded by the Clinton administration.
Although Barack Obama has been working to reduce the sentences for low-level drug offenses in the last years of his presidency, even going so far as to commute the sentences of 22 prisoners on March 31 of 2015, there are still millions of Black and Latino Americans trapped in what the protesters of Saturday’s march called the “prison industrial complex.”
At the walkathon were some of the associates of State Sen. Bill Perkins, who could be seen holding signs, chanting with the rest of the movement and wearing prison uniforms. Perkins, whose district is one of the most diverse in all of New York, comprising Manhattan Heights, Central Harlem and Spanish Harlem, is a member of the Crime Victims, Crime and Corrections committee in the State Senate and is especially affected by the strict drug policy.
Even with these new developments, millions of African-American and Latino families remain stigmatized and unable to make ends meet because of their complicated and arguably discriminatory relationship with the American prison system.
For more community events sponsored by Masjid Malcolm Shabazz, visit their website http://www.masjidmalcolmshabazz.com.