Take Back the Night misguided

Take Back the Night rally, planned for tonight on upper campus, is designed to create awareness about the dangers women face on the streets.

However, the national Take Back the Night campaign, which has the good intention of decreasing crimes against women, really promotes the expansion of a burgeoning police state.

The National Organization for Women has been pushing for local and national government to increase the amount of police officers on the streets and increase the severity of criminal sentences.

But the United States already imprisons more people than any other country in the world and half of the two million prisoners in the country are black. Prisoners are the only oppressed class in the United States.

Jason Kosareff

The Take Back the Night movement, popular with mainly middle-class white women, should abandon their call for heavier police repression of black impoverished communities.

Real feminism is for the end of oppression for all people, male and female, not the increased oppression of one traditionally oppressed class in favor of another traditionally oppressed class.

The choice of more prisons and police is a poor one for women to make. Better solutions than putting more police officers on the street can and should be sought.

The massive prison-industrial-complex that currently exists is not the solution to crime. More incarceration has done little to end crime, only smash communities by ripping out one of every four black college-age men and placing them in prison, thus undermining the black community and creating more poverty and crime.

The myth of the black rapist lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce on unsuspecting white women is what has led to so many lynchings in the past, it should not be perpetuated.

Jason Kosareff is the news room assistant for the Daily Forty-Niner.