Racist Congressman Says, ‘White Boys Go to Jail, and Black Men Get Out of Jail Free’

By Nicholas Stix

July 25, 2002
Toogood Reports/A Different Drummer

Time was, you had law-and-order legislators, and soft-on-crime legislators. But the times they are a changin,’ and a new type has emerged: The racist, black legislator who does everything he can to unjustly benefit blacks, and unjustly disadvantage whites. That includes changing the laws to diminish or eliminate jail time for crimes performed predominantly by black men, and introducing jail time – extremely long jail time, at that – for crimes, and even for acts that previously were not crimes, but that are predominantly carried out by white men. Meet Democrat Detroit Congressman John Conyers Jr.

As William Saletan notes in his July 19 Slate column, in 1995, Cong. Conyers fought to reduce the chances that drug dealers would do significant jail time, and sought to prevent “non-violent” drug dealers from doing any time at all. (I challenge you to find any “non-violent” drug dealers in the city of Detroit.) Conyers fought for safeguards that would make it harder for police to arrest, and for prosecutors to convict drug dealers. He demanded more flexibility in sentencing, and told the feds to keep their hands off such cases. (Federal involvement means longer sentences, no parole, and little wiggle room for the plea bargains that are the heart of urban “justice.”)

[In 1995,] Republicans wanted to build more jails and fill them with scoundrels. Conyers replied that punishments short of jail were more appropriate for “nonviolent” offenders. He questioned whether first-time drug offenders deserved five-year sentences. He dismissed prison as “a breeding ground for more serious crime.” He argued that public funds would be better spent on programs such as midnight basketball. “We cannot incarcerate ourselves out of crime,” he said. He dismissed the GOP’s theory that harsh penalties would deter lawbreakers.

So, in the face of demands to get tough on (non-violent) corporate criminals, Conyers must be seeking to protect their rights, too, right? Wrong. As Saletan suggests, Conyers’ attitude has been ‘lock ‘em up, and throw away the key!’

Three months ago, Conyers introduced the “Corporate and Criminal Fraud Accountability Act of 2002,” trumpeting its beefed-up sentences of five and 10 years for various offenses. The best way to deter securities fraud, he asserted, was to throw lawbreakers in the slammer. ‘Tougher penalties would make it far less likely that future Enrons would occur,’ said Conyers.”...

Saletan does well to expose “liberal” (read: socialist) hypocrisy, but his own liberal timidity restrains him from pointing out what is obvious to anyone who has followed John Conyers’ career: It’s all about race, stupid!

Urban drug dealers are predominantly black; corporate criminals are predominantly white. The racist Conyers wants to keep as many black men as possible OUT of jail, and put as many white men as possible IN jail. It’s as simple as that.

Recall that since the 1980s, Cong. Conyers has led the congressional charge for slavery reparations. In January, 1989, he introduced H.R. 40, the Commission to Study [wink, wink] Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. At his web site, the Congressman proudly observes, “I have re-introduced HR 40 every Congress since 1989, and will continue to do so until it’s passed into law.”

Cong. Conyers thinks that all whites should be paying all blacks ... forever. That’s another way of saying that he believes in slavery – as long as blacks are the slavemasters.

And considering that, excepting for major mobsters, or rich inside traders sentenced to Club Fed, a jail sentence for a white man is also a sentence to slavery and even death, through racial murder, or via AIDs through race-based rape, Conyers is betting on a prison-slavery-death-to-the-white-man trifecta.

But let us not give all the credit to Conyers; there’s enough to go around. William Saletan, in his timidity, turns a case of racism into one of liberal hypocrisy, and the Stupid Party (SP, aka GOP) has gone Conyers and Saletan one better. Rather than denounce Conyers as a racist and an anti-business opportunist, SP legislators have taken his proposal for a maximum ten-year sentence for corporate crooks, and doubled it to twenty years. With “opponents” like the SP, how can Conyers lose?