Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence
And even if you get out of prison still living
Join the other 5 million under state supervision
This post is the first of a new series; every weekend, I'll throw up a song that I like that has interesting things to say about some aspect of the criminal justice system.
I don't have fully formed thoughts on this question yet, but listening to this song for the first time in years just after reading Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop (which I wrote about here) was powerful. Balko's book reminded me just how panicked the hysteria was around drugs and crime from the 1980's through the end of the 1990's. In this frenzy, politicians like Charlie Rangel from African-American districts were among the strongest advocates for punitive drug laws and policing tactics. At the same time, the constituents of these districts (mostly very young men of color, the same people the policies targeted) were making extraordinary music about the deleterious effects of these laws and tactics.
In the last decade or so, it has become a truism in elite institutions like the New York Times and ivy league universities that, yes, there are rappers out there with interesting politics. But it's worth remembering that on matters of police and prisons, these young men from rough neighborhoods didn't learn what is now the conventional wisdom from their elected representatives and the New York Times; they beat them to it by decades.
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