Hip Hop

Hip Hop and the Prison Industrial Complex

In large part a result of harsh new sentencing laws against drugs, prison populations have grown exponentially in the United States since the 1980s. Hip hop culture, particularly in its music, has lent a “bullhorn” to the prison experience that has become part of the life of so many young women and men of color. Many hip hop artists began to tell prison stories in their music, write prison poetry, wear prison “fashion,” and adopt a mentality that embraced incarceration as a right of passage rather than as an experience that should avoided at all costs. When “gangster”/“reality” hip hop (typified by harsh, misogynist lyrics and tales of violence and victimization) began to gain momentum as the dominant expression of anger and resentment among disenfranchised urban youths in the late 1980s, their forms of expression, as well as that of the communities they spoke for, evoked punitive responses from the criminal justice system.

For example, in 2001, California passed Proposition 21, officially titled the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act, which supported more juveniles being tried in adult court, required that certain youths be confined in local detention and in state correctional facilities, restricted the types of probation available to youths, increased existing penalties by requiring longer periods of confinement, and broadened existing three-strikes categories. On the ballot, Proposition 21 used crime data from the early 1990s and omitted the more recent crime statistics published at the time by the California Department of Justice in 1999, which showed significant declines in juvenile crime and delinquency. In addition to Proposition 21's use of outdated and misleading statistics, its implementation disproportionately affected the number of youth of color subjected to being processed in an adult court, with potentially more severe court sanctions than their white counterparts.

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