Flypn’ Nygaz Lyke Ounces

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[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 twenty-five And his life expectancy is to the age sixty-five, meaning he's going to spend forty 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 twenty thousand dollars So if he's a free Black man, he earns twenty thousand a year, which is eight hundred 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