PRINCETON, N.J. – A group of high-profile academics gathered at Princeton University recently to address one of the nation’s most vexing problems: the mass incarceration of Blacks and other minorities. Sponsored by Princeton’s Center for African American Studies, the day-long conference, titled “Imprisonment of a Race,” trained a spotlight on the prison system through the lens of race.
The conference’s keynote speakers were Dr. Cornel West, the Class of 1943 Professor at Princeton University, and Ohio State University Associate Professor of Law Michelle Alexander, author of the recently published book “A New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
They were joined by scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, including Drs. Khalil Gibran Muhammad of Indiana University, Khalilah Brown-Dean of Yale University, and Carla Shedd of Columbia University, who all support a major overhaul of the nation’s current prison system.
The conference, the first of its kind at Princeton, was conceived by Brandon Bell, a Princeton senior who found himself the victim of racial profiling in his hometown of Englewood, Calif.
Bell, an aspiring doctor, says he was alarmed by the number of young Black men who found themselves in prison. Of the 2.3 million people currently housed in America’s prisons, almost 1 million are Black. The numbers have caught the attention of civil rights leaders, community activists and political leaders.
“If this was happening to upper middle-class White kids, we’d be having a conference like this every day,” said West, specifically pointing out the racially disparate ramifications of mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug convictions.
“This is not a good use of public funds to deal with problems of substance abuse,” added Marc Mauer, the executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national organization that advocates for reforms in sentencing law and alternatives to incarceration.
