An investigation has confirmed that the state of Mississippi has been using an anti-gang law to specifically target, arrest, and prosecute black residents in the state, in spite of the fact that records show that 53% of the gang members in Mississippi are actually white. This is systemic racism built into the law enforcement and judicial branch of government, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.
Transcript:
Many years ago the state of Mississippi enacted a series of new legislative items that made it easier to prosecute gang members in the state of Mississippi. They created this Mississippi Association of Gang Investigators whose job it was to go out, determine who was a gang member, what crimes they’ve committed, and prosecute them under these new special laws. It made it easier to prosecute. It made it easier to get convictions. It made it harder for them to get parole, and it encouraged longer sentences for these people.
Here’s the problem with this piece of legislation. It is 100% completely racist. A new report has come out showing that between the years of 2010 and 2017 100% of the people prosecuted under these anti-gang laws in Mississippi, 100% of them we black.
Meanwhile, the state’s own statistics, this little Association of Gang Investigators, their own statistics say that 53% of the gang members in the state of Mississippi are white. The majority of gang members that we have in the state of Mississippi are white people, yet 100% of the prosecutions through the last eight years have been black people.
Tell me what’s wrong with this scenario here. Is there something that I’m missing with these numbers because if there is I would like to know about it because on it’s face, and once you dig into the data, this really seems like this law was enacted so that white people in Mississippi could specifically target black people and send them to prison, send them to prison with fewer rights, send them to prison for longer times, send them to prison without hope of parole. That’s what this legislation does and it was designed that way to keep black people locked up.
This is by far one of the most racist pieces of legislation, one of the most racist initiatives that I have seen a state take on in modern times. They put together this initiative just so they could put more black people in prison, even though by their own admission white people are more dangerous in the state of Mississippi than black people.
