Flypn’ Nygaz Lyke Ounces

[Dr. Alim Muhammed]
Let’s bring it up to date
Have you heard about the new slavemaster bill?
I ain’t talking about Clinton
They got a bill before Congress now called Three Strikes, You’re Out
I heard Reverend Jackson say that they should invest four thousand dollars in a college education
Instead of forty thousand dollars a year for incarceration
But what the Reverend Jackson doesn’t understand is
They would rather sell—pardon me, they would rather circulate forty thousand dollars in the economy through a prison system than only four thousand dollars a year in an education system
Because they create for their people more jobs with forty thousand dollars a year than they could ever create with four thousand dollars a year
And besides that, if you graduate the Black man and the Black woman with a college degree, then they become competitive in the economic market for jobs
Isn’t that right? *applause* Let’s look at it now
How many Black men are locked up in prison today?
They say it’s, uh, more than one million
Well now, if the economy generates forty thousand dollars for every inmate and you got one million inmates, how much is that?
That’s forty billion dollars a year
But now some of them are saying something’s wrong with prison, it’s like a revolving door
You let ‘em in the front end and you let ‘em out the back end
And the way they look at this thing, you’re letting my money out the back door
When you put ‘em in, don’t ever let ‘em out
So now, that’s where Three Strikes, You’re Out is coming from
Because it means that if a young Black man gets to the third strike, say, at age 25
And his life expectancy is to the age 65, meaning he’s going to spend 40 years behind bars
At forty thousand dollars a year, which equals 1.6 million dollars that he is worth to the economy of the United States
If you let that same Black man out in the present economy, he’s only going to earn a median income of 21 thousand dollars
So if he’s a free Black man, he earns 20 thousand a year, which is 800 thousand dollars in his lifetime
But if he’s locked down in a penitentiary, it’s twice as much
So where’s the economic incentive?
The economic incentive is to lock you up, brother
You’re worth more to them locked up than you are as a free man