BOOT CAMP DEATH REFLECTS A SYSTEM OF POWER, CONTROL

So now we know how Martin Lee Anderson died.

We can forget the original autopsy report filed by Charles Siebert, a
doctor so inept that he wasn't technically a doctor (he had allowed
his license to lapse) when he issued the report. A doctor so inept
that he once described a person he autopsied as having "unremarkable"
testes. The person was a woman, so if she had testes at all, it would
seem quite remarkable, indeed.

Siebert claimed that after being hit, manhandled and choked by guards
Jan. 5 at a so-called boot camp in Panama City, the 14-year-old
Anderson died of sickle cell trait, a genetic blood disorder carried
by one in 12 Americans of African heritage. That finding has been
roundly hooted by real doctors, who say it is unlikely in the extreme
that the condition could lead to death.

The Friday before last, a new autopsy told a different story. Dr.
Vernard Adams, Tampa's chief medical examiner, found that the child
died because guards covered his mouth and forced him to inhale ammonia.

Just so you know, Martin Lee Anderson was an A and B student, good at
math. He wound up in the boot camp after he took his grandmother's
car for a joy ride.

In other words, hardly the second coming of Al Capone.

As it happens, news of how he died came almost simultaneously with
news of another appalling mistreatment of children in detention.
According to a report from an advocacy group, the Juvenile Justice
Project of Louisiana, more than 100 teenagers were left locked in a
flooded prison in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They had to scramble
to the top bunks to avoid drowning. They went up to five days with
nothing to eat or drink. Some drank floodwater. A large number had
not been convicted of any crime.

And, the vast majority were, like Anderson, black. Indeed, while New
Orleans was about 67 percent black, the report says the prison was at
least 95 percent black. No surprise. Human Rights Watch reports that
black people are more than eight times as likely to wind up behind
bars as whites.

It is telling how mutely we absorb that fact. Some see in it only
proof of the ravaging effects of poverty and miseducation, others
support for the idiot claim that criminality is a native defect of
African peoples.

You seldom hear anyone suggest that it is this way because we the
people want it this way, that in our silence, we give tacit approval
to this means of controlling a population whose mere existence we
have historically found threatening and inconvenient.

In the James Crow years, the institutions of government and society
could hardly have been more brazen in pursuit of that goal. White
teachers told black students they should aspire to no goal higher
than to work as janitors and cooks. White cops turned black suspects
over to lynch mobs.

It could never happen that way in this enlightened era, of course.
And yet, it happens in other ways. A 2002 report by the Civil Rights
Project at Harvard University says black kids are labeled emotionally
disturbed or mentally retarded and shipped off to special-education
classes at rates of up to four times those of white kids. A 2000
study co-sponsored by the Justice Department tells us that, of people
who have never done time in juvenile facilities, a black drug
defendant is 48 times more likely to be jailed than a white one with
the same record.

The means have changed, but the end -- repression, control -- remains
the same, and we steer black kids like cars until they reach it.

Granted, there may have been some white kids in that fetid, flooded
prison. There were certainly some in that brutal boot camp. Yet, it's
no accident that African-American children are always so well
represented in those lousy places, not happenstance that they are so
readily found among society's discards.

So our concern for them now feels . . . well, let's call it belated.
And self-deluding.

Those children were right where we wanted them to be.