BY LARRY JONES

What kind of country do we want to live in? Thank goodness we live in a country with a Bill of Rights, guaranteeing to all freedom from abuses by authorities. Or do we?

In New York recently, William Blake, a former professional tennis star, was attacked without warning, thrown to the ground and arrested by an undercover policeman. Blake, who is bi-racial, was innocent of any crime. The arresting officer and the NYPD Commissioner both claimed that race was not, could not possibly be, a factor in the arrest.

This past summer, Sandra Bland, an African American woman from Chicago moved to Texas to start a new job. Before her first day at work, she was stopped by a local policeman for changing lanes without signaling. The officer eventually dragged Bland from her car, threw her to the ground and arrested her. Before Bland could be released on bail, she was found hanging in her cell. Local authorities claimed her death was a suicide.

Earlier this year two Albuquerque officers were charged with First Degree Murder after they shot and killed a Hispanic homeless man whose crime was camping in the wrong location.

Civil Rights lawyer and author Michelle Alexander has documented what she calls “The New Jim Crow,” a system of discriminatory policies, laws and legal decisions that ensure that an increasingly privatized prison system is fed a steady stream of prisoners. Over aggressive policing is part of that system.

Over the last 30 years or so, violent crime in the United States has dropped significantly, and yet as of October 2013 the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.

But your chances of being in prison depend not just on your character but on where you live and what you look like. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, in 2010 the incarceration rate for African Americans was 2,207 per 100,000, for Hispanics, 966 and for white Americans 380. If you are African American, your chances of going to prison are nearly seven times those of your white fellow citizens. It is difficult to arrive at a number because records are not kept consistently but nearly 1,000 civilians are killed by police every year in the U.S., and again, people of color are over represented in that group. Data like these help explain why African Americans and other racial minorities are harassed, attacked, beaten and killed by authorities much more frequently than their white counterparts.

And no, I do not want to live in such a country. But right now, we do. We need change in the U.S., but too many police, judges, politicians and private citizens resist such change. America needs an open and fearless conversation about race, crime, justice and prisons.

Larry Jones was a Parliamentary Assistant in Canada. He is a former teacher and is currently on the board of the Peoria Chapter of the ACLU and works with handicapped adults at ADDWC in Eureka.