Troy Davis and Georgia's Brutal Legacy of Racial Injustice

Protest for the conviction of an innocent man named Troy Davis who is scheduled to executed 21 September 2011 in the State of Georgia. Up until press time, his clemency has been denied and he is scheduled to be killed by lethal injection this evening. ***Read about protest in New York here.****

When European officials are petitioning for the State of Georgia to repeal the death sentence and the good state of Georgia tells'em to fuck off, you know the situation we have here is code blue.

A state teeming in ignorant policies where ultra-right ignorant conservatives agitate and mobolize an uninformed republican base, and crush a docile democratic bloc, Georgia is the state where the G8 meet in the once black-owned islands off it's coast that were stolen several decades ago so the rich can play and plan their internal revolution.

Yes, Martin L. King is crying in his grave, but he is not shocked. The injustices he knew in Georgia made him, and others.

For those of you around the world who are trying to understand how Georgia, and ultimately, the United States, can allow the execution of Troy Davis, an innocent man, let me tell you all about good ole, Georgia and the national prison industrial complex.

When the International slave trade was abolished, it was illegal to transport African people across the Atlantic Ocean to be enslaved in the New World. However, the Brunswick Sea Port in Georgia snuck in boatloads of African people for decades to be absorbed into a brutal system that kick-started America, and several European economies.

Today, there still exists a silent slave system funneled through Georgia, and all of the US. It is the "Justice" System. Georgia, like many other states, continued to use a system of slavery in its prison and jail systems to illegally fund corporations and banks who are etched into the fabric of policy, politics and the economy in the U.S.

From this ..... Union Soldiers in the Civil War.

It is not these ignorant Tea Party people hooting and hollering about shit they've never read. They are just the puppets and political fodder for a bigger agenda of which they will never reap the rewards.

To this ... Prisoners building US railroad tracks, the real US stimulus.

This neo-slave system is called the prison industrial complex, an industry so HUGE that it is one of the top trading institutions at the New York Stock Exchange. Who needs green energy when you have people of color and poor people working for 5 cents an hour. And no, this is not Thailand, this is homegrown sweat shops all in the name of "crime.

In the US, incarceration is supposed to be a place for rehabilitation, or at the very least, for those committed to understand their crime as they "pay" for the offense. This tactic has been said to help quell the criminality of a person, yet, the criminal justice system criminalizes inmates, and promotes recidivism, instead of "rehabilitation".

In December 2010, black, white and Hispanic prisoners in Georgia prisons waged a strike to expose the corrupt and failed incarceration system in the State of Georgia with demands such as: decent living conditions, adequate medical care and nutrition, educational and self-improvement opportunities, just parole decisions, just parole decisions, an end to cruel and unusual punishments, and better access to their families.

However, their strike proved to be unsuccessful because no one wanted to stop the flow of making money off of people, who for the most part are in jail for non-violent crimes.

A disproportionate number US inmates are incarcerated are for drug crimes, especially rock-cocaine that is also known as crack.

Not murder or shooting shit, like the US media wants everyone to think.

Now, if these people are being locked up for non-violent crimes, you would hope that it would be incarceration of the small group of the country's population who were the main profiteers of corporate embezzlement, corporate greed, presidential warmongering, and tampering with evidence to "prove" that all these "terror factions" are out to get us like boogeyman to validate why the US needs to go to war with . . . damn near the whole world while babies are starving here and people are being displaced.

But it's not, the people who are in jail, don't have the money to be bailed out for cocaine binges in the White House, or turf wars in Libya over oil and water rites. These are people caught in a system akin to its predecessor, slavery.

The U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, but accounts for almost a quarter of its prisoners. Disgusting.

And here are some other dismal facts to understand why the greatest country in the world with all these liberties that everyone hates us for is all smoke and mirrors.

1. The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street.
2. Reports show that crime has actually decreased in the U.S.; however, the rate of incarceration has skyrocketed.
3. Georgia is the ninth most populous state, but has the fourth-largest prison system in the U.S.
4. As a black person, you are 8 times more likely to go to jail/prison in the state of Georgia.
5. From 1870 until 1910, in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black.
6. Georgia spends US $18,000 a year to warehouse each inmate, but US $3,800 each year for students in K-12 grades.
7. One in six black men have been incarcerated as of 2001.
8. About 10.4% of the black male population between the ages of 25-29 have been incarcerated.
9. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2.3% of all African Americans are incarcerated.
10. As of 2003, the population of incarcerated individuals exceeds 2,000,000.
11. African Americans are one eighth this nation’s population, but make up almost half the locked down, that is 1,000,000 black people currently incarcerated.
12. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, property and drug offenses account for 76.4% and 56.4% respectively of crimes by individuals admitted to Federal and State prison for the first time.
13. In the State of Georgia, 77% of the offenses leading to the first conviction and 79% of the offenses leading to a second drug conviction involved less than one gram of controlled substance.
14. Since 1981, the nation’s prison population increased more than 450%.
15. As of 2010, private corporations house over 99,000 inmates in 260 facilities nationwide, with the large majority of them held by Corrections Corp. of America exclusively.