Both ex-felon Herman Garner and Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton's Center for African American Studies, which hosted the conference, expressed similar views on the impacts of mass incarceration.
Dr. Glaude said mass incarceration is a "moral crisis with political and social consequences for America's future," during his remarks opening the conference.
Garner, in an interview, described the US prison system as the "biggest problem" in the American black community.
While politicians pushing punitive policies help drive mass incarceration its budget- busting persistence implicates the blind-eye of society, said one conference panelist, history professor Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the new director of the fabled Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.
"Middle-class whites and blacks in the U.S. are a new kind of "Silent Majority' regarding mass incarceration," Dr. Muhammad charged. "This "Silent Majority' supports unjust policies of increased law enforcement and incarceration as the only way to address crime," ignoring proven alternative approaches like "jobs, education and ending societal inequities."
Famed Princeton Professor Dr. Cornell West criticized both the black middle class and black leadership for inaction on mass incarceration.
"The new black middle class and black leadership are not attuned to the suffering in poor black communities," West said during the conference's Keynote Conversation between him and Professor Alexander.
"We need more middle-class people with genuine respect for the poor. This is more than serving as role model mentors," he said.
Author Alexander said ending the "mind-boggling scale" of mass incarceration requires "a major social movement."
One attendee at the Princeton conference, Daryl Brooks, an activist in Trenton, NJ who operates the respected "Today's News N.J." blog, backs Alexander's suggestion.
"To fix this problem we need mass boycotts. America only understands money and violence. We need to shutdown businesses like during the 60s," said Brooks, who spent three-years in prison for a conviction he says was false, aimed at crushing his activism.
"Blacks leaders allowed this incarceration to happen by doing too little to challenge this repression," Brooks said.
The Obama Administration is doing too little to address mass incarceration and its impacts, many of the Princeton panelists and conference attendees agreed.
These critics blast the Obama Administration for what they called its tepid approaches to the torturous scourge of 240 sexual assaults daily in state and federal prisons, charging it with foot-dragging on the Prison Rape Elimination Act which was approved by Congress during the administration of George W. Bush.
While Obama fulfilled a campaign pledge to address the sentencing disparity penalizing powder cocaine more harshly than crack cocaine (a drug derived from powder cocaine), Obama's proclivity for bipartisan consensus has resulted in legislation that lower but did not eliminate the disparity.
A 1995 US Sentencing Commission report called for eliminating the scientifically bogus disparity a recommendation rejected by Democratic President Bill Clinton and the Republican controlled Congress -- the first ever rejection of a Commission recommendation.
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