Empowering Black America through Holistic Engagement
 
The Odyssey Project

Reduced Recidivism

Reduced Recidivism through Revolutionary Strategy

Reduced Recidivism through Revolutionary Strategy

To really understand the dynamics of contemporary mass incarceration and the role of the Private Prison Industrial Complex, you must have at least a functional perspicacity of postbellum reactions to the eradication of slavery in the South.

The emancipation of slaves created an existential crisis for systematic racism in the South. It meant an open job market in which Blacks would be competing for jobs with Whites. What may have been even more frightening for the White male power structure is that Black men would also be competing for the attention of White women.

The way that many postbellum southern states like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas and more, solved this problem was to manufacture criminals. For instance, Blacks who were unable to find jobs were labeled vagrants, which was made a jailable offense. Once they were in jail, they were leased as cheap labor to the very people who had once enslaved them.

While vagrancy laws were colorblind, they were enforced almost exclusively against Blacks. This is how many entities in the South were able to restabilize volatile local economies after the Civil War, and this practice of Criminalizing non-criminal behavior to target Blacks for the sake of profit is still alive today. Not only does it fuel the mass incarceration of African Americans (Note: African American women are currently the fastest growing prison population in the U.S.), but it is the primary force behind policing for profit. So, we must see this act as not only an act of hatred, but as an economic device to further widen the wealth gap. We must combat this be reducing African American recidivism — it is an absolute imperative! ~ Rick Wallace, Ph.D., Psy.D.

This is an initiative that we plan to launch in the next 3 to 6 months, and have fully scaled in the next 3 to 4 years. With well over 700,000 Black men currently incarcerated in America, we must stop the cycle of recidivism if we are to restore the equilibrium to what was once the Black community.

To get your copy of Dr. Wallace’s latest book, The Mis-education of Black Youth in America Click Here!

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