ABSTRACT
The justice parameters of Islam’s challenge to American penology is based on the notion that the American penitentiaries have structurally and procedurally evolved as oppressive institutions that dehumanize mostly socioeconomically disenfranchised inner-city petty criminals and drug users and pushers. These negative aspects of incarceration deprive Black America from its ability to compete with other racial and ethnic minorities and especially with White America. The Nation of Islam, representing a segment of the African-American community, has published its ten-point Muslim Program that, as discussed in Chapter 6, gives the reader an idea about its deep-seated negative view of the American race and ethnic relationships1 notwithstanding some of the important reforms and positive developments that have taken place in this important arena. In a segment of The Muslim Program titled “What We Believe,” the Nation of Islam has rejected integration stating that:
From the standpoint of the Nation of Islam, the main remedial challenge facing African-American community is not reintegration into mainstream American economy and society, but total segregation from it. Thus, Black Islam’s challenge to American penology is philosophically permeated on the notion that it is through segregation that true justice would prevail. Integration with White America is but a “ploy” by those who want to keep African-Americans in bondage. The battle cry of the Nation of Islam is to liberate Black America from this bondage whose one, among a multitude of other penalizing instruments, is the penal institutions that every year unjustly and disproportionately incarcerates hundreds of thousands of black males. The fact that American justice system is unjust in dispensing penal justice is not coincidental; it is part of a grand conspiracy. And here is the crux of the problem: American criminal justice system dispenses penal justice not on the
basis of conspiratorial agendas deliberately designed to keep minorities in bondage, but upon legal as well as socioeconomic priorities and proclivities of the American Justice Market, an integral part of the much larger American socioeconomic and legal system. American penal justice has become, mutatis mutandis, a tangible legal product with different degrees of fairness to its articulation that can be procured rather than served to all and on equal footing regardless of race, gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic differences of those who get entangled with crime. In modern and globalized free-market economies, of which the United States is a major constituent, much lip service is regularly given to the notion that justice is blind served upon those who deserve it as a matter of legal justice. The thrust of this book is that that in modern and globalized free-market economies, justice is procured with different degrees of fairness to its application. It is also a central premise of this book that the Nation of Islam’s challenge to American penology should be directed to engendering a positive and crime free lifestyle in American penitentiaries, rather than promoting racial discord and segregation. In fact, segregation from mainstream America is no longer a viable alternative now that the President, is a black man who has won the 2008 US Presidential Election running against Senator John McCain, a white prominent Senator from the State of Arizona with a long list of accomplishments in the United States Senate, the main power base of the American white political establishment. The President, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama, would hardly agree with the above cited demand of the Nation of Islam; however, he perhaps would agree with the thrust of the Nation of Islam’s demand for comprehensive justice.
