KAM Part 10- Bookings vs Votes or Police State vs Democracy

The Election Commission finally certified the election results and released election reports. I thought it would be interesting to compare the number of August 2012 votes to the number of 2010 bookings in a zip code. For those that may not know, when the police take a person to jail, the arrested person goes through the booking process. This is when law enforcement creates an official arrest record. The process generally entails photographing, fingerprinting, and otherwise recording identifying data from the suspect. I had suspected the ratio of votes to bookings to be high in certain areas of city, but I was shocked to see how many zip codes where bookings were 80% or higher of the vote count.

If you have been a reader of this blog, you know one of my central arguments is that there are 2 different Memphis's (Is the plural of Memphis "Memphi?"). There is a constant geographic pattern in various data reflecting the 2 Memphi, and it always links back to race and class. Educational attainment, poverty, health outcomes, employment rates, crime rates, types of employment, stray dogs, foreclosures, changes in property values, fires, environmental contamination, the list goes on and on. Now you can see the link between the criminal justice system and voting. Poor and working class people have lower voter turnout in general because A)as the list above illustrates, what's the fucking point or B) they don't have much free time to keep up with issues or get to the pols. Just in case the poor and working class did decide to turnout at higher rates, the status quo has the criminal justice system to take away a lot of their votes. This may come as stunning news to some folks so brace yourself. In Memphis & Shelby County, the government interacts with black males primarily two ways, the educational system and the criminal justice system, not the political system. Look, here is the percentage of voters who were female. Notice a geographic pattern?

Nothing will get better here if a very large section of society is continued to be economically and socially marginalized, and politically disenfranchised through the criminal justice system. Can you have a democracy in a socio-economic environment like this?

"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on the blacks. It started as war on the blacks and it's now spread to Hispanics and poor whites. It was designed to take that energy that was coming out of the civil rights movement and destroy it." - Ed Burns, the co-creator of the TV series The Wire Here is an interesting news story about mass incarceration in American cities.