Mass incarceration of Indigenous Americans still plaguing US prison system

The Supreme Court of the United States is hearing arguments in Brackeen v. Haaland to determine whether the Indian Child Welfare Act or ICWA violates the constitution by considering placement of Indigenous children solely based on race. Tribal nations are recognized by the federal government as political sovereigns, not a racial group.

Anyone believing that African-Americans, Latino-Americans, or American Indians are disproportionately imprisoned because they are more often criminals is wrong. In fact, white people per capita commit at least as many drug-related crimes than their non-white brethren o amigas.

A newly released report by the MacArthur Foundation shows that Native Americans are incarcerated at a rate 38 percent higher than the national average. The report, commissioned as a part of the MacArthur Foundation’s commissioned as part of its Safety and Justice Challenge, also found that Native Americans were overrepresented in the prison population in 19 states compared to any other race and ethnicity. [Native Americans are Incarcerated at the Highest Rate, New Report Reveals]

A plank of the Southern Strategy seeking to assuage poor white people in the wake of the civil rights movement, the so-called 'War on Drugs' declared by the Nixon White House, then institutionalized by the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, redefined caste in the United States becoming a policy tool for the mass incarceration of non-white men. 

In 2012, Professor Michelle Alexander reminded her audience at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in downtown Santa Fe that had Barry Obama been raised in the 'hood his chances would have been unremarkably grim.

It's estimated that the United States foster care industry supplies over eighty percent of sex-trafficked children. In South Dakota alone mass incarceration fuels the white foster home industry: a pet project of a Republican former governor's wife and the state's relations with tribal nations trapped there are at historic lows. 

South Dakota's school to prison pipeline accelerated in 1983 when Republican Governor Bill Janklow concocted a plan to convert the University of South Dakota at Springfield into a prison. Then the state killed Gina Score in a boot camp, ended environmental protection and accelerated the red moocher state's descent into the hellish chemical toilet it is today. 

Racism is endemic in South Dakota, especially in reservation border towns like Rapid City and with guidance from the Koch's American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC Republicans routinely pass legislation that disenfranchises Native voters.

New Mexico is far from blameless as schools in the state expel Indigenous kids at least four times more often than white students.

ip photo: a dancer joins in at the Santa Fe Indian Market.