Why not protest on the inside? I’m sure the boys in Rikers Island could use some fresh meat.
(WNYC) — Occupy Wall Street protesters gathered in Harlem Monday to protest what they call mass incarceration of minority men by a racist prison system.
Demonstrators dubbed criminal justice policies in the U.S. as the “new Jim Crow,” pointing to a prison population made up mostly of blacks and Latinos.
Much like the messages heard in the broader Occupy Wall Street movement, the chants outside Lincoln Correctional Facility on West 110th Street called for wide-ranging, all-encompassing change to the criminal justice system.
The crowd rallied against not only the racial disparities in the prison population, but also against immigrant detention, the use of solitary confinement in detention facilities, the NYPD’s high rate of marijuana arrests and stop-and-frisks, and the mass unemployment and disruption to families caused by imprisonment.
Prison abolitionists demanded eradication of the entire prison system, while others, like Sammy Crea, called for better rehabilitation programs for inmates.
“While incarcerated, I really had no education, coming into the prison system as a kid,” said Crea. “Because my education is limited, my jobs are limited.”
Crea, who called the prison system “modern day slavery,” said he was first arrested for selling drugs as a teenager and spent the next 16 years going in and out of the system until his last release when he was 32.