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July 24, 2005

LA: Tallulah Campaigns for College

The News Star
Monroe, LA Saturday, July 23, 2005
By Jordan Blum
jblum@thenewsstar.com
Tallulah residents are proving they're serious about establishing a community college.

Instead of just talking about the idea of transforming the new Steve Hoyle Rehabilitation Center into a community college, a coalition actively seeks to make it happen through multiple awareness campaigns and political lobbying efforts.

The Tallulah-based Louisiana Delta Coalition for Education and Economic Development aims to put the past ills of the infamous Swanson Correction Center for Youth ‹ now Steve Hoyle ‹ by emphasizing education over incarceration, said Moses Williams, coalition spokesman.

The coalition has already used cartoon television commercials depicting the transformation from prison to community college. Now, they are organizing the Tallulah Kids' Project to demonstrate through art what the youth of Tallulah want in their community, including more educational opportunities.

McCall Senior High School student DaShinta Dense, 16, is participating in the art project, in which students ‹ they are mostly of elementary age ‹ are creating 20-foot-long banners with pictures of what they would like to see in Tallulah and at the proposed college. Eventually, the banners will completely wrap around a portable, steel building, which will be shown at news conferences in Tallulah and Baton Rouge, intended to create awareness to their cause. The art is currently on display at the Tallulah Community Center.

"I really wanted to help get this project done and make a mark in history," Dense said. "Most people here want the college because it'll bring a positive vibe to Tallulah.

"Everybody knows the prison ‹ SCCY or whatever they're calling it ‹ but I want Tallulah to be known for a college and not a prison."

A community college in Tallulah would mark the most rural setting for a community college in Louisiana. Coalition members estimate total conversion costs at about $10 million. Since the facility was designed as a school for juvenile offenders, it is an ideal fit, Williams said.

The rehabilitation center officially opened in April for long-term, intensive substance abuse treatment. SCCY, notorious for its violence against juvenile inmates, closed in June 2004 before the state took control and converted it. The rehab center employs 153 people full time and is at about 95 percent of its 260-person capacity, said Assistant Warden Robert Rachal.

Last week, Gov. Kathleen Blanco signed into law a bill amending 2004 legislation authorizing a local government, not the state, to own the rehab center for the purpose of a learning center. The hope is the law will help resolve a complicated cooperative endeavor agreement between the state and the former owners requiring the state to pay $3.4 million in debt service each year for a facility it does not own.

State Sen. Charles Jones, D-Monroe, helped procure $25,000 for a feasibility study during the legislative session that coalition officials hope will lead to a plan to create a community college, Williams said.

"What we have now is a shell of a prison," said Williams, arguing the facility lowers property values in Tallulah. "If we develop the long-term solution of education, then people can earn better jobs, and we won't need a big prison."

In defense of the rehab center, Rachal said he is working with the city and local civic organizations to promote community involvement. There are already cleanup crews helping with beautification for the region.

The first group of inmates successfully completed their 12-month intensive treatment program last week, he said.

Originally published July 23, 2005
http://www.thenewsstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050723/NEWS01/507230
314/1002

Posted by lois at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

Drug Policy Interview with WONPR founders

DRCNet Interview: Cher Ford-McCullough and Jean Marlowe of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform 7/22/05

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/396/wonpr.shtml

Formed in 1929, the original Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) played a crucial role in bringing about the end of alcohol Prohibition. Now, three-quarters of a century later, a new generation of women activists have resurrected the organization and its mission to undo the damage wrought on children, families, and communities by the failed war on drugs. To see what is going on with this relatively new organization, Drug War Chronicle spoke last week with two of the group's co-founders, WONPR president Cher Ford-McCullough and executive director Jean Marlowe.

Drug War Chronicle: What prompted you to form the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform?

Cher Ford-McCullough: It was the Goose Creek raid in South Carolina, when those police burst into that school with guns drawn and terrified those kids. That was when we realized just how bad things had gotten. It was time for women to stand up; we just couldn't have this anymore. We needed to make clear to those police and school administrators that they are not going to do this to our children without being held accountable. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel because we had a model in the original WONPR. Those women succeeded in ending Prohibition, and we applied the same principles they did. Shortly after that raid, Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow/Push Coalition put on a protest in Charleston, and we went down to that. After that, Jean, Florida-based prison activist Kay Lee, and I got together at the hotel and decided to resurrect this group. It was the atrocity at Goose Creek that got us going.

Jean Marlowe: I have two granddaughters, with the oldest just starting first grade. Their mother grew up with this drug war, knowing the police could come and take her children away. I don't want my granddaughters to have to endure that when they grow up. When I saw those police at Goose Creek taking their loaded weapons with the safeties off and pointing them at those children, I took it as seriously as if that had been one of my own children. I was just outraged that they would treat children like that. Our position is that every child in America is red, white, and blue, and they all deserve their rights.

Chronicle: Your organization is named after the original WONPR, which was founded to combat alcohol Prohibition. Why did you resurrect that name?

Ford-McCullough: As we looked at things, we saw that the original WONPR were successful in ending alcohol Prohibition in their time, but we felt that their work wasn't done. While they legalized alcohol again, they didn't end prohibition. We feel that women work together differently and constructively, and we thought we should come together for the common goal of protecting families and children in the war on drugs. We seek to address the issues faced by children whose parents are incarcerated, especially single mothers, but also kids whose fathers are in prison. So many women are affected, and so many of them are from single-parent households. With no fathers around, those women are literally the last line of defense for those children. In nature, the most dangerous animal is the mother protecting her cubs. It seemed very natural for us to pick up the banner to protect the children.

Chronicle: Given your orientation toward women, children, and the family, what issues to you concentrate on?

Marlowe: We really concentrate on how the drug war negatively impacts women and their families, on all the ways it does. The National Organization for Women just passed a resolution opposing the drug war and asking for policies based on compassion, health, and human rights. Part of that resolution explains that they are using pregnant women to write drug laws that have a terrible impact on women and their children. We are really concerned with women who face being sent to prison or losing their children forever because of laws like the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which allows the state to seize children and take permanent custody with the mothers, grandparents, and siblings forbidden from having any contact with that child ever again. This kind of thing is un-American at best and fascist at worst. Any law that allows the state to take away a woman's child when she may not even be guilty of a crime is intolerable.

Women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population, and much of it has little to do with their actual personal responsibility. A lot of them are charged on conspiracy charges and told things will go easy if they cooperate, if they give up names, but they don't know anything. They have no ability to rat someone out, so they get long mandatory minimum prison sentences, they lose their children, they lose their health, they lose everything. These are women in peripheral roles, women who may be dependent on the men or may be abused by them and afraid to go to their authorities.

Right now, we're explaining to the state legislature here in North Carolina that they are incarcerating their tax base. Across the country, there are over two million children who have a parent or guardian in prison, and most of those kids are in some form of state-funded social service program -- Medicaid, free lunch, food stamps, foster care. That's why so many of our state budgets are in the red. When you have millions of children whose parents are in prison, it's not too hard to figure out the taxpayers are going to be left with the tab.

Chronicle: I'm sure this didn't just happen out of the blue. What sorts of histories of activism do you have?

Ford-McCullough: I started out with the Florida Journey for Justice in 2000. We had a friend named Eddie Smith with AIDS who has since died, and we took him down there in our motor home. The next year, I went on the Texas Journey for Justice. I'm also the Kentucky state director for the American Alliance for Medical Cannabis and have been working with long-time marijuana activist and occasional political candidate Gatewood Galbraith since 1999. We went up to Rainbow Farm in Michigan after they shot Rollie Rohm and Tom Crosslin, and we were probably the only activists on the ground giving out information to counteract the lies they were printing in the newspapers.

Marlowe: I got started back in 1995, when Barney Frank introduced the first medical marijuana research bill. I had been talking with Donald Abrams and knew he had permission to do a study with AIDS patients, but NIDA wouldn't give him any and the DEA wouldn't let him import any. So we held the first demonstration in Polk County, North Carolina, history to raise awareness of that bill. We started off with the local newspapers and had stories like "Jean smokes marijuana every day." That prompted a bout with the local cops, which led to more rallies. In 1997, a judge basically accepted that I had no choice but to use marijuana, and ordered the sheriff to return my grow lights and leave me alone.

A group of women called Sisters for Safer Medicine then paid my way to go to Switzerland to a medical marijuana farm. There, you could buy it over the counter. They sent me a package by mail, Customs found it and prosecuted me, and I was put on probation. I asked permission to attend the 2000 Journey for Justice, but they wouldn't let me go, and when my probation officer found out I was sending video clips of the march to Florida legislators, he had me in court two weeks later. The prosecutor told the judge I was an in-your-face activist and needed to be locked up. They violated me because my THC levels were too high, even though I had a federal magistrate's recommendation to go to California to participate in a study on liver disorders. They sent me to federal prison, the women's camp at Alderson, West Virginia -- the one where Martha Stewart did her sentence. Martha made a few promises there, and now she's ready to get off parole and house arrest. I was interviewed by a bunch of media when she got sent in -- CNN, Fox, Newsweek, People -- and some of those folks said I had interesting things to say about the drug war and they would get back to me to do a story. With the National Organization for Women just passing their anti-drug war resolution, it's time for those stories to start happening.

Chronicle: You mentioned talking to the state legislature. How else do you seek to inform and influence public policy?

Marlowe: We do educational forums and workshops. Right now, we're going to different NOW chapters -- we'll do the North Carolina NOW state conference in September, and we'll be doing a presentation at Bennett College in Greensboro. We're also doing a presentation to the state General Assembly women's caucus. That is happening partly because of our issues and partly because we did a lobby day with the legislature. Now, the women's caucus wants us to address them. We've also been working with the National African-American Drug Policy Coalition (NAADPC) since they started. We're trying to reach out across lines of race, social standing, party, or gender. We've even been reaching out to farmers, explaining how prohibition is costing them their farms when they could be growing hemp. We're educating the voting base in this county. The drug war affects us all, and people are starting to realize it's their job to bring about common sense and change.

Chronicle: With the emergence of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, with NOW passing an anti-drug resolution, with WONPR, are we seeing the emergence of a woman- and family-centered segment of the drug policy reform movement, a "womanist" drug reform movement?

Marlowe: Of course you are. Women have an overall view of how negatively the drug war affects everyone, and I think it's fair to say women are more concerned about its impact on children. We did a workshop at NOW, and women drug reformers like Deborah Small from Breaking the Chains, Scarlett Swerdlow from SSDP, Wyndi Anderson from National Advocates for Pregnant Women, Angelyn Frazier from FAMM, and Anjuli Verma from the ACLU Women's Rights and Women's Prison Project were all there. Deborah and Scarlett were instrumental in getting NOW to pass that resolution, but we were all part of that workshop.

WONPR has now received its very first grant, from the Ms. Foundation for Women, and we are thrilled. Our first grant is coming from a mainstream women's organization. Not only are we seeing women's perspective in drug reform, we are seeing the broader women's movement take an interest in the subject.

Chronicle: Are women around the country responding to WONPR?

Marlowe: We have chapters in five states now, and our goal is to have chapters in at least 38 states by 2008.

Chronicle: That's an odd number. The only thing that really jumps out about it is that it is the number of states required to ratify a constitutional amendment.

Marlowe: Funny, isn't it? Anyway, we are seeking to create good, functional chapters, and our membership is growing rapidly.

Chronicle: You've also signed on to the August march on Washington to protest the mass imprisonment of Americans. Why is supporting that march important?

Marlowe: Those people in prison on drug charges deserve to have someone out there marching for them. Our position is that drug abuse and addiction should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue. Both of us will be there giving speeches. We hope it does some good. We hope our leaders will start to pay attention to this feminine energy. When I was in the prison camp at Alderson, I promised those women I would become a voice for them and their children. This is part of it.

Posted by lois at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

New Study:Review of State & Federal Law relating to Collateral Conscequences

The Sentencing Project (www.sentencingproject.org) has posted a new study by Margaret Colgate Love entitled Relief from the Collateral Consequences of a Criminal Conviction: A State-by- State Resource Guide. This is the first comprehensive review of state and federal laws and practices relating to restoration of rights and obtaining relief from the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. The study illustrates the extraordinary variety and complexity of state and federal laws that impose continuing burdens on convicted persons long after their court- imposed sentences have been fully discharged. It is an important resource for policymakers interested in offender reentry and reintegration, for practitioners at all levels of the criminal justice system, and for people with a criminal record who are seeking to put their past behind them. The Sentencing Project has been given permission to make available key portions of the study by its publisher, William S. Hein & Co., including an executive summary of the findings and conclusions, 54 detailed state/jurisdictional profiles, and eight tables that provide an overview of national patterns.

Posted by lois at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

CT: Gov. Signs Law to Help Correct Racial Injustice in Sentencing

Thursday, July 14, 2005

This week Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell signed a compromise bill to revise the sentencing guidelines for crack and powder cocaine in Connecticut. Though it was not the bill originally proposed by the Alliance, it is a significant step in the right direction.

The original bill, which Governor Rell vetoed, would have set the amount of crack or powder cocaine that triggers a mandatory minimum sentence at 28 grams. The compromise bill that finally passed sets the trigger for both at 14 grams. Though this is not ideal, it is a drastic improvement over the previous law that could put someone with only half a gram of crack cocaine in prison for as long as someone who possessed 28 grams of the powder form. “While it’s a shame that Governor Rell vetoed the original bill, this new law takes three or four steps forward and only one backward,” said Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director of the Alliance.

Disparate cocaine sentencing laws unfairly target minorities and those living in urban areas, who are more likely to use crack cocaine. In Connecticut, for example, black men make up less than 3 percent of Connecticut's population but account for 47 percent of the state's inmates. We were able to make real progress in correcting this injustice thanks to community organizing by groups like the Alliance Connecticut, a coalition of which the Drug Policy Alliance is a member, and individuals in Connecticut who contacted their legislators and the governor to demand fairness in sentencing.

This victory will serve as a springboard for crucial further reform. Robert Rooks of the Alliance Connecticut said, "This compromise bill is an important first step, but the war on drugs continues to devastate communities of color. We will not stop. The momentum of this win will be carried into next year's battle against systemically racist policies, including mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenses.”

The momentum will also carry over to a fight at the federal level, where similar sentencing disparities exist. The federal government treats small amounts (5 grams) of crack cocaine in the same way as they do large amounts (500 grams) of powder cocaine. Representative Charles Rangel, (D-NY), along with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, has re-introduced into Congress the Crack-Cocaine Equitable Sentencing Act of 2005 (HR 2456). His bill would treat the two forms of cocaine equally in federal sentencing.

Posted by lois at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2005

National Organization for Women: Takes Stand Against War on Drugs

WOMEN'S RIGHTS - ANOTHER CASUALTY OF THE "WAR ON DRUGS"

2005

WHEREAS, the incarceration rate of women convicted of low-level drug-related offenses has increased dramatically in the past decade as a result of our nation's relentless "War on Drugs," and poor women and women of color have been disproportionately targeted for drug law enforcement and receive long mandatory prison sentences that have little relationship to their actions or culpability; and

WHEREAS, two thirds of women in prison have at least two children who are displaced as a result of their incarceration, often forced to live in the care of family, friends, or state-sponsored foster care where they may be at increased risk of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; and

WHEREAS, women's unique patterns of drug abuse and addiction and special treatment needs are inadequately addressed, as women often turn to drugs to cope with undiagnosed or untreated mental illness, and/or the trauma of physical or sexual abuse or other stresses particular to women; and

WHEREAS, the intersection of substance use and pregnancy are increasingly the focus of drug law enforcement; and

WHEREAS, violence against women and other circumstances specific to women's involvement in drug-related activities are often overlooked or ignored in sentencing, such as situations in which women who have been emotionally, physically, or sexually abused by partners involved in drug operations are dependent on them and unlikely to turn to the authorities; and

WHEREAS, after incarceration, women continue to bear the stigma and burden of post-conviction sanctions that constitute collateral consequences of incarceration impeding their reintegration into society, including denial of access to public housing, public assistance and food stamps, higher education aid and civic participation, effectively rendering them second-class citizens;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the National Organization for Women (NOW) iterate its opposition to the "War on Drugs" and in its stead support an approach to drug use and addiction that promotes compassion, public health and human rights; and

THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that NOW educate its membership about the harms the "War on Drugs" inflicts on women, using the NOW web site, NOW materials and literature and regular NOW legislative updates including pending legislation that would negatively impact women; and

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that an ad-hoc committee be created to research current drug policy that has a particular impact on women and report back to the leadership and membership at the next national conference on a potential action plan to be implemented locally and nationally in conjunction with other organizations currently working toward the same objectives.

Posted by lois at 04:20 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: Fighting AIDS Behind Bars

Fighting AIDS Behind Bars

Published: July 22, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/opinion/22fri3.html?th&emc=th

The United States has done relatively little to curtail the AIDS
epidemic that rages within the prison system, where the H.I.V. infection rates are many times as high as in the world outside. Strategies for fighting disease behind bars are better developed in Europe, where the World Health Organization is 10 years into a public discussion project aimed at slowing the spread of H.I.V. and other deadly infections in the prison population. The Europeans seem to have grasped the idea that infections contracted behind bars end up back in the broader society when infected inmates get out.

The World Health Organization's most recent update consolidates what the Europeans have learned over the last 10 years and should be required reading for public health and prison officials in this country. The emerging consensus is that prison has become the perfect environment for the transmission of dangerous diseases like tuberculosis, hepatitis C and AIDS because of crowding, unprotected widespread needle-sharing for intravenous drug use.

The rising infection rates among addicts in general show clearly that
merely declaring sex and drug use illegal has not worked. The prison
systems that have managed to slow the spread of AIDS have employed drug treatment and "harm reduction" strategies - like offering methadone maintenance and distributing condoms.

Many nations, including the United States, are hampered in the fight
against AIDS by a pervasive denial of drug use and sex behind bars.
Politicians often argue that harm-reduction strategies can seem to
promote illicit behavior.

It's understandable that some prison systems may reject the idea of
providing needles to people who use drugs behind bars, even though
needle exchanges have proved to be a cheap and effective way to slow the spread of disease in the outside world. But it seems inexcusable that prisons don't pursue other strategies - like testing inmates and
educating them about disease - while making condoms readily available to those who want them.

It's not necessary to condone behavior that spreads AIDS. But it is
critical to acknowledge that such behavior persists in prisons. The aim must be to slow the spread of disease so as few people as possible get out with infections that endanger society.

Posted by lois at 03:39 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2005

Bob Herbert- "Education's Collateral Damage"

July 21, 2005
Education's Collateral Damage
By BOB HERBERT
Stop the presses! Within just a few days we've had a scandal involving a world-class presidential guru bumped off the front pages by a prime-time presidential announcement of a nominee to the Supreme Court.

No one would argue that these aren't big stories. But an issue that is even more important to the long-term future of the U.S. gets very short shrift from the media. In an era when a college education is virtually a prerequisite for maintaining a middle-class lifestyle, an extraordinary number of American teenagers continue to head toward adulthood without even a high school diploma.

This is not a sexy issue, and certainly not as titillating for journalists as the political witchcraft that Karl Rove has used to enchant George W. Bush. But consider the following from the book "Dropouts in America: Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis," a collection of essays edited by Gary Orfield, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education:

"Nationally, only about two-thirds of all students - and only half of all blacks, Latinos and Native Americans - who enter ninth grade graduate with regular diplomas four years later."

In much of the nation, especially in urban and rural areas, the picture is even more dismal. In New York City, just 18 percent of all students graduate with a Regents diploma, which is the diploma generally required for admission to a four-year college. Only 9.4 percent of African-American students get a Regents diploma.

Over all, the United States has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world, which can't be comforting news in the ferociously competitive environment of an increasingly globalized economy.

"It's terrifying to know that half of the kids of color in the United States drop out of high school, and that only one in five is prepared for college," said Tom Vander Ark of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is making a big effort to boost high school graduation rates and the number of graduates who are prepared for college.

Why is the education of America's young people so important?

"It may sound like hyperbole," said Mr. Vander Ark, "but this is the economic development issue for our society, and it is the social justice issue of our times. It is the most important long-term issue for the civic health of the republic.

"In the aggregate, we need more young people educated at higher levels: more finishing high school, more finishing community college, more finishing four-year degrees. And secondly, I think it's very important that we close the racial and socioeconomic gaps in educational attainment.

"We're seeing a scary level of income stratification that is the result of educational stratification. And it's becoming important not just for the economy but for our society that we help low-income [students], and especially kids of color, achieve high levels of education so that they can participate in the economy and in our society."

Citing statistics from a variety of sources, officials at the Gates Foundation have noted that:

High school dropouts, on average, earn $9,245 less per year than high school graduates.

The poverty rate for families headed by dropouts is more than twice that for families headed by high school graduates.

Dropouts are much more likely to be unemployed, less likely to vote and more likely to be imprisoned than high school graduates.

For those concerned about the state of leadership in America, and who wonder where the next generation of leaders will come from, I can tell you it's not likely to emerge from the millions upon millions of dropouts we're setting loose in the land.

And whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, if you'd like to see a wiser, more creative and more effective approach to such crucial problems as war and peace, terror, international relations, employment, energy consumption and so on, you'll need to rely on a much better-educated and better-informed population than the United States has now.

I don't think Mr. Vander Ark was engaging in hyperbole. The public needs to understand the extent of the high school dropout crisis, and its implications for the long-term future of the U.S. It will most likely have more of an impact on the lives of your children and grandchildren than George W. Bush's appointments to the Supreme Court.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Black Commentator: The Abomination of Mass Incarceration

http://www.blackcommentator.com/147/147_cover_incarceration.html>

Issue 147 - July 21 2005
³A great force of suffering accumulated between the basement of heaven and
the roof of hell...²

Zora Neale Hurston wrote those words almost seventy years ago at the
beginning of her great allegorical work on black America, Moses, Man of the Mountain. She could have been speaking about African America today. As black activists ponder how best to build a mass movement to transform America, a mass movement that must start in but not be confined to our communities, one single low-hanging fruit of organizing opportunity is hard to miss. That
opportunity lies in the manifest unfairness and hypocrisy of America¹s
system of racially selective policing, prosecution and mass imprisonment.

These awful public policies are inviting targets for electoral and other
mobilizations in black communities and beyond.
The fact that America does implement a public policy of racially selective
mass imprisonment is well documented and beyond dispute. With under 5
percent of the world¹s people, the US accounts for 25 percent of the
planet¹s prisoners. More than half its 2.2 million prisoners come from the
one eighth of its population which is black. Today, an astounding 3 percent
of all African Americans languish in prisons and jails, and nearly as many
more are on probation, parole, bail, house arrest or court supervision.
Tens of thousands of jobless, skill-less, often anti-socialized inmates are
released into black communities each month in which jobs, medical care,
educational opportunities and family or official support are almost
completely absent. Unsurprisingly, many are back behind the walls in a
matter of months. Right now, the shadow of prison squats at the corners of,
and often at the center of nearly every black family¹s life in this nation.
Since 1970, the US prison population has multiplied more than six times.
The explosive growth of America's incarceration and crime control industries
have occurred despite essentially level crime rates over the last four
decades. This has only been possible because the public policies which
enable and support locking up more people longer and for less have until now
been exempt from analyses of their human, economic and social costs or any
reckoning of the relationships of spiraling imprisonment to actual crime
rates or public safety. Most tellingly, while public discussions of these
policies are deracialized, their racially disparate impacts are a seldom
discussed but widely known fact. Thus even though the damning numbers are
widely reported and well known, mass incarceration is practically invisible
as a political issue, even in those heavily black communities which suffer
most from its implementation.
Making mass incarceration a political issue
In the absence of an independent, adversarial press, which might be willing
to raise issues on its own and educate the public, US political discourse is
limited to what officeholders and candidates say and what the media chooses
to report about what they say. As long as no candidate or official can be
heard calling for a moratorium on the prosecution of juveniles as adults, it
is a non-issue. If no candidate or official is cited in the media
advocating the extension of health care, job and educational opportunities
or the rights of citizenship to the prisoner class such proposals are
absolutely off the table. And unless some candidates or officials somehow
get ink or air time publicly questioning the economic and social effects of
mass incarceration on children, on families, on whole communities, these
concerns remain politically invisible.
The fact that sizeable chunks of the population, including likely majorities
in constituencies with large numbers of African Americans might support
radical reforms of America¹s racially skewed policing, prosecutorial and
sentencing practices, if anybody would ask them, is irrelevant. The
establishment political consensus and media lockdown assure that no section
of the public will ever be asked such questions, and hence will never know
how widely shared their own views on the clear injustice of these policies
are.
If we are to build a mass movement in opposition to America¹s crime control
and prison industries, we must succeed in putting the facts of racially
selective mass incarceration, impoverishment and criminalization, first, in
front of our African American communities, and then before the whole of
America, and do so effectively, persuasively, consistently and persistently.
America must be forced to publicly unpack and examine the myths that have
justified its incarceration binge. An indispensable tactic in this struggle
must be the mounting of competent, effective campaigns for elected office
which directly question the unfairness, along with the social and human
costs of these policies, political campaigns which propose radical and
understandable measures to shrink the ³crime control² and prison industries
rather than expand them, and to ameliorate some of the harm already done to
families and communities.
A short list of such down-to-earth public policy proposals might include,
but not be limited to the following:
A moratorium on the prosecution of juveniles as adults, and the confinement
of juveniles in facilities with adult inmates.
A moratorium on all privatization of prisons and jails, including piecemeal
privatizations of such services as inmate feeding, medical care and
probation.
Repeal or sunset of all ³two-strikes², ³three strikes² and indeterminate
sentencing legislation.
The imposition of mandatory ethnic and racial impact statements for all
future prison construction and sentencing legislation, with a period set for
mandatory review comparing the statement at outset with the results no less
than four years out.
Elimination of sentencing disparities between powdered cocaine and crack.
End felony disenfranchisement in those states where it exists, perhaps with
a constitutional amendment guaranteeing voting as a right.
Repeal of legislation banning Pell Grants to convicted felons and inmates,
and require states to offer college credit courses to inmates who have
completed their GED or the equivalent.
Refocus parole systems upon the re-entry and productive reintegration of
former prisoners into society rather than re-imprisonment.
Civilian review boards with teeth to oversee police and prosecutorial
practices.
Explicit commitments to reduce and eliminate disparities in prosecution and
imprisonment.
Over the next several months we should refine and expand the list of policy
positions that campaigns must incorporate if they expect the support of a
mass movement to end the nation¹s policy of racially selective imprisonment.
Organic connections between electoral campaigns and mass movements
In BC¹s June 30, 2005 issue we described some of the essential
characteristics of mass movements, progressive and otherwise:
³Politicians are elected and selected, but mass movements transform
societies. Judges uphold, strike down, or invent brand new law, but mass
movements drag the courts, laws and officeholders all in their wake.
Progressive and even partially successful mass movements can alter the
political calculus for decades to come, thus improving the lives of
millionsŠ.
²Mass movements exist outside electoral politics, and outside the law, or
they don¹t exist at all. Mass movements are never respecters of law and
order. How can they be? A mass movement is an assertion of popular
leadership by the people themselves. A mass movement aims to persuade
courts, politicians and other actors to tail behind it, not the other way
around. ²
There are already many serious people in our communities involved in
churches and voluntary organizations that try their best to offer services
to the families of inmates, that lobby and agitate against drug and
incarceration policies, that attempt to offer counseling and re-entry
services to those emerging from our state and federal gulag. An electoral
campaign and a mass movement is an unparalleled opportunity for grandmothers
in church-sponsored re-entry programs to work with unchurched young people
who know that they, their siblings and classmates are destined to be fodder
for the imprisonment industry if things don¹t turn around. If that isn¹t a
formula that can feed a mass movement, no such thing exists. Electoral
campaigns conducted against the crime control industry are an indispensable
tool in extending a movement¹s outreach.
Still, we must not allow ourselves to become confused about the differences
between a mass movement to change America's policy of selective policing and
racist incarceration, and an electoral campaign, even ones that succeed in
putting the issue of mass imprisonment at its center. Unlike a mass
movement, a political campaign is a decorous, time-limited legal exercise.
We must know that political campaigns have often heralded the demobilization
of a mass movement, even when that movement¹s objectives have not been met.
Being able to use electoral campaigns to advance the agenda of a mass
movement demands prior preparation and steadfast resolve, lest the candidate
before or after election stray from within the bright lines of opposing the
incarceration of juveniles as adults, or demanding racial and ethnic impact
statements and evaluation for sentencing legislation, to use two of several
possible examples.
The culture of campaigns and officialdom as practiced in America today makes
officeholders unaccountable to anyone except corporate cash and corporate
media. Hence it is suicidal for the leaders of local movements to wait for
candidates to emerge and then decide which if any to support. Candidates
that surface without the help of a movement against mass incarceration will
have intended all along to run whether such a movement existed or not, and
should hence be shunned. Local ³movement leaders,² forced to choose among
such a crop, will inevitably choose the ³least worst² candidate, who will
offer only tepid support to a movement¹s ³bright line² issues and will not
advance the cause of de-legitimizing our nation¹s racially skewed crime
control industry at all.
To guarantee that political campaigns endorsed by the movement do indeed
advance the cause, over the individual fortunes and pressures to which
candidates are prey, we must set up local, statewide and even regional
screening committees to recruit and interview suitable candidates for
office, and to facilitate the channeling of funds and campaign expertise to
those who pledge to stay within the bright lines and place the issue of mass
incarceration squarely at the center of their campaigns. A national PAC
whose sole purpose is funding movement-vetted candidates running against
mass imprisonment ­ and other ³bright line issues ­ should be one of the
outcomes of our next national dialogue, now commonly referred to as ³going
back to Gary.² The gathering will occur in the first quarter of next year.
Candidates who run against the crime control industry and racist mass
imprisonment will certainly need all the help they can get. Although they
are likely to receive surprising support and attract tons of youthful talent
and enthusiasm in our base communities, they will face formidable odds
getting their message out through an indifferent or hostile media.
Time-tested best practices like accountable voter registration drives,
accurate phone and door to door canvasses in base areas, and competent
Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) practices will have to be combined with newer
innovations to circumvent the monopoly that corporate media have on access
to the American public, including the black public. BC will explore the
impact of some of these new media tactics and tools in an upcoming article.
Targeting local prosecutors and sheriffs
Federal prosecutors are presidential appointees. But the state level
gatekeepers for the prison industry¹s stream of human raw material are local
prosecutors ­ elected officials who must run for office at the level of
counties, cities and judicial circuits. A number of these jurisdictions
have black majorities. The local politicians with responsibility for
housing pre-trial inmates are usually elected county officials too:
sheriffs.
The table below, which arranges the list of US counties to show those with
the top 130 black populations, shows a target-rich environment, with fully
37 jurisdictions having African American population percentages of 30% or
greater. Every major city in the state of Georgia, for instance, is on the
list, including 3 of the 4 largest counties in metro Atlanta. And you don¹t
need a black majority to run against mass imprisonment and win. A black
prosecutor ran against the Rockefeller drug laws in Albany NY, where African
Americans are a distinct minority ­ and won.
Counties by Black Population
County NameStateTotal County PopulationTotal Black PopulationPercent
Cook CountyIL5,376,7411,405,36126.1
Los Angeles CountyCA9,519,338930,9579.8
Kings CountyNY2,465,326898,35036.4
Wayne CountyMI2,061,162868,99242.2
Philadelphia CountyPA1,517,550655,82443.2
Harris CountyTX3,400,578628,61918.5
Prince George's CountyMD801,515502,55062.7
Bronx CountyNY1,332,650475,00735.6
Miami-Dade CountyFL2,253,362457,21420.3
Dallas CountyTX2,218,899450,55720.3
Queens CountyNY2,229,379446,18920
Shelby CountyTN897,472435,82448.6
Baltimore cityMD651,154418,95164.3
Cuyahoga CountyOH1,393,978382,63427.4
Fulton County GA816,006363,65644.6
DeKalb CountyGA665,865361,11154.2
District of ColumbiaDC572,059343,31260
Broward CountyFL1,623,018333,30420.5
Essex CountyNJ793,633327,32441.2
Orleans ParishLA484,674325,94767.3
New York County NY1,537,195267,30217.4
Jefferson CountyAL662,047260,60839.4
Milwaukee CountyWI940,164231,15724.6
Duval CountyFL778,879216,78027.8
Alameda CountyCA1,443,741215,59814.9
Marion CountyIN860,454207,96424.2
Hamilton CountyOH845,303198,06123.4
Mecklenburg CountyNC695,454193,83827.9
St. Louis CountyMO1,016,315193,30619
Franklin CountyOH1,068,978191,19617.9
Tarrant CountyTX1,446,219185,14312.8
St. Louis cityMO348,189178,26651.2
East Baton Rouge ParishLA412,852165,52640.1
Orange CountyFL896,344162,89918.2
San Diego CountyCA2,813,833161,4805.7
Allegheny CountyPA1,281,666159,05812.4
Palm Beach CountyFL1,131,184156,05513.8
San Bernardino CountyCA1,709,434155,3489.1
Suffolk CountyMA689,807153,41822.2
Hinds CountyMS250,800153,29761.1
Jackson CountyMO654,880152,39123.3
Baltimore CountyMD754,292151,60020.1
Hillsborough CountyFL998,948149,42315
Davidson CountyTN569,891147,69625.9
Richland CountySC320,677144,80945.2
Nassau CountyNY1,334,544134,67310.1
Mobile CountyAL399,843133,46533.4
Montgomery CountyMD873,341132,25615.1
Westchester CountyNY923,459131,13214.2
Jefferson CountyKY693,604130,92818.9
Clark CountyNV1,375,765124,8859.1
Wake CountyNC627,846123,82019.7
Erie CountyNY950,265123,52913
Guilford CountyNC421,048123,25329.3
Lake CountyIN484,564122,72325.3
Clayton CountyGA236,517121,92751.6
Sacramento CountyCA1,223,499121,80410
Oakland CountyMI1,194,156120,72010.1
Pulaski CountyAR361,474115,19731.9
Maricopa CountyAZ3,072,149114,5513.7
Cobb CountyGA607,751114,23318.8
Richmond cityVA197,790113,10857.2
Caddo ParishLA252,161112,48344.6
Montgomery CountyOH559,062111,03019.9
Union CountyNJ522,541108,59320.8
Montgomery CountyAL223,510108,58348.6
Charleston CountySC309,969106,91834.5
Cumberland CountyNC302,963105,73134.9
Jefferson ParishLA455,466104,12122.9
Norfolk cityVA234,403103,38744.1
New Castle CountyDE500,265101,16720.2
Monroe CountyNY735,343101,07813.7
Bexar CountyTX1,392,931100,0257.2
Hennepin CountyMN1,116,20099,9439
Hartford CountyCT857,18399,93611.7
Richmond CountyGA199,77599,39149.8
Oklahoma CountyOK660,44899,24115
Suffolk CountyNY1,419,36998,5536.9
Riverside CountyCA1,545,38796,4216.2
Chatham CountyGA232,04893,97140.5
King CountyWA1,737,03493,8755.4
New Haven CountyCT824,00893,23911.3
Camden CountyNJ508,93292,05918.1
Genesee CountyMI436,14188,84320.4
Contra Costa CountyCA948,81688,8139.4
Fairfield CountyCT882,56788,36210
Durham CountyNC223,31488,10939.5
Jefferson CountyTX252,05185,04633.7
Fairfax CountyVA969,74983,0988.6
Pinellas CountyFL921,48282,5569
Hudson CountyNJ608,97582,09813.5
Muscogee CountyGA186,29181,48843.7
Virginia Beach cityVA425,25780,59319
Delaware CountyPA550,86479,98114.5
Forsyth CountyNC306,06778,38825.6
Gwinnett CountyGA588,44878,22413.3
Lucas CountyOH455,05477,26817
Travis CountyTX812,28075,2479.3
St. Clair CountyIL256,08273,66628.8
Bibb CountyGA153,88772,81847.3
Summit CountyOH542,89971,60813.2
Newport News cityVA180,15070,38839.1
Fort Bend CountyTX354,45270,35619.8
Leon CountyFL239,45269,70429.1
Mercer CountyNJ350,76169,50219.8
Greenville CountySC379,61669,45518.3
Middlesex CountyNJ750,16268,4679.1
Anne Arundel CountyMD489,65666,42813.6
Polk CountyFL483,92465,54513.5
Hampton cityVA146,43765,42844.7
Henrico CountyVA262,30064,80524.7
Passaic CountyNJ489,04964,64713.2
Burlington CountyNJ423,39464,07115.1
Madison CountyAL276,70063,02522.8
Escambia CountyFL294,41063,01021.4
Hamilton CountyTN307,89662,00520.1
Tulsa CountyOK563,29961,65610.9
Denver CountyCO554,63661,64911.1
San Francisco CountyCA776,73360,5157.8
Solano CountyCA394,54258,82714.9
Dougherty CountyGA96,06557,76260.1
Chesapeake cityVA199,18456,82328.5
Montgomery CountyPA750,09755,9697.5
Orangeburg CountySC91,58255,73660.9
Douglas CountyNE463,58553,33011.5
Spartanburg CountySC253,79152,77520.8
Prince William CountyVA280,81352,69118.8
Will CountyIL502,26652,50910.5
Kent CountyMI574,33551,2878.9
Portsmouth cityVA100,56550,89950.6

Unpacking the myths around the crime control industry
Crime control policies on every level in the U.S. are based upon racist
myths. Myths are powerful because they are never questioned, never
examined, never unpacked. Nobody disputes that Justice Department data
going back decades shows rates of drug use among blacks and whites to be
about the same. A combination of white racism and a willingness to ignore
unpleasant facts largely account for white indifference at the disparity
between white and black rates of arrest and prosecution for offenses created
with equal frequency by both groups. But black support for an industry and
for public policies that criminalize a third of all young black men, which
disrupt and retard the formation of strong families, and cripple workforce
and educational opportunities for such a broad cross section of us, is at
best ambivalent and at worst paper-thin, even among African Americans
working in the industry, based as it is upon a tenuous mass acceptance that
this is all somehow part of the normal balance of society.
³It¹s hot in the summer,² we tell ourselves, ³it¹s cold in the winter, and a
third of all young black men are in and out of jail.² Or we say ³It¹s a
trap! It was out there waitin¹ for them and they fell in it!² Both these
positions are understandable as mental adjustments much like those that some
of our forbears thought they had to make to get along in the world of
triumphant Jim Crow and white terror eighty or a hundred years ago. Such
views are uncomfortable for the black people that hold them, and unstable.
We must engage them by depicting mass incarceration not as the way normal
societies behave, but as a failed experiment that punishes our entire
community, a malevolent social policy that can be challenged and must be
changed.
Our language must be carefully constructed to aid in the process of
demythologizing crime and crime control policies. We need new terminology,
new language that better enables people to grasp the issues around mass
imprisonment and the criminal justice industry as malevolent social policies
which can be changed, rather than unalterable facts like cold in the winter
and heat in the summer. For example, the terms ³criminal justice system²
and ³corrections² ought to be replaced in all our dialogue with terms like
³crime control industry², or ³imprisonment industry.² A ³system² is a very
generalized term that does not tell us much, while an ³industry² is a very
specific kind of system. To call it an ³industry² instead raises powerful
questions of profit and accountability which are obscured when we call it
anything else.
White establishment pundits and politicians of a generation ago warned us.
They predicted the coming of what they called a ³white backlash.² This was
their name for a predicted white racist response to the just demands of
African America for equality of opportunity and economic justice advanced by
the movement of the 1960s, a response some feared would entrench racial
inequality and privilege deeper than ever before. They were right.
Beginning in the 1970s the selective mass imprisonment of African Americans
helped to swell the six or sevenfold expansion of the prison population.
And while the rhetoric and official policies that enabled this were
ostensibly race-neutral, the results were an open secret. Around the same
time, Dr. King was saying that the movement which would save the nation¹s
soul would have to emerge from black America. He was right too.
The struggle to de-legitimize the racist crime control and prison industries
are at the heart of this generation's struggle to de-legitimize racism
itself. America¹s policies of racially selective policing, prosecution and
imprisonment are the first target for a mass movement which must emerge from
our communities, but which must not be confined to them. Laying the
intelligent groundwork for such a movement remains the task before us, when
we go back to Gary.

Posted by lois at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2005

Justice Policy Institute: Fact Sheet: Ganging Up on Crime

FACT SHEET: Ganging Up on Crime

April 11th, 2005


JPI FACT SHEET

Ganging Up on Crime?
Putting Gang/Crime Statistics in Context

“Gangs have declared war on our nation. They are ravaging our communities like cancer-urban, rural, rich and poor – and they are metastasizing from one community to the next as they grow”-Congressman J. Randy Forbes, Fourth District of Virginia (April 5, 2005)
---In the state of Virginia between 2003 and 1993 violent crime dropped by 25% declining from 24,160 to 18,115[i].

“One-third of individuals under the age of 18 are now members of gangs, according to the Department of Justice.” --Bush Declares War on Rising Youth Gang Violence (April 7, 2005), Brandee J. Tecson, MTV.Com
---If this were correct then 24,211,474[ii] youth aged 18 and younger would be in gangs, a figure not substantiated by crime data or what we know about gang crime.

Crime, and Cuts in Context: Some neighborhoods in the United States continue to experience unacceptable rates of violent crime. While Congressional sponsors caution “gangs are an ever-present and growing problem,” the leading indicators of crime in the United States show that the historic crime drop witnessed in the 1990s continues in most parts of the country. Both adult crime and youth crime fell throughout 2003, and mid-year 2004 — the latest years of consistent and available data from the justice department. But while most gang experts call for an appropriate social service response to youth development and neighborhoods in distress, this administration and Congress support huge cuts to programs that serve youth. These cuts and punitive provisions in the HR. 1279 The Gang Deterrence and Community Protection Act are likely to do more to destabilize communities and aggravate crime than promote public safety.

The leading national indicators suggest that crime is far from growing or surging.

Serious adult crime has fallen. The latest crime survey from the FBI’s Uniform Crime reporting program examines the first six months of 2004. Compared to the first six months of 2003, violent crime fell 2% in 2004, and the number of homicides fell by 5.7%. The drop in violent crime and homicides over the one-year period was the biggest drop recorded since 2001, which came after the historic drop in crime of the 1990s.[iii] Violent crime, adult and juvenile, fell by 28% from 1993 to 2003; 1,926,017 and 1,381259 respectively.[iv] Homicides declined at similar rate of 33% from 1993 to 2003; 24,536 and 16,503 respectively. [v] In recent years from 2001 to 2003, during the so-called surge in gang violence, youth homicides declined by 3%

Serious youth crime has fallen. The latest crime survey from the FBI’s Uniform Crime reporting program breaks down the age of people arrested for serious offenses in 2003. The number of people under 18 arrested for homicide declined 30%. Between 1993-2003, youth homicide arrests declined by 75%.[vi] Youth violent crime fell by 46% from 1993 to 2003.[vii]

Serious Gang Crime in Context: While many communities do experience unacceptable levels of serious crime, including gang crime, our measures of serious gang violence do not tell us that the problem is “ravaging” all our communities. In 2002, gang homicides represented 7% of the known circumstances in which homicides occurred. Four times as many homicide victims were killed in relation to an “argument” than a gang.[viii]
“It is easy to underestimate the grip that gangs have on some of our cities. But the sad reality is that their grip on urban life is lethal.”

—United States Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Northern District of Illinois-Chicago Area (April 5, 2005)

Serious crime has fallen in most cities. Even in cities where law enforcement says there are “super-gangs,” the latest federal surveys show crime on the decline. Compared to the first six months in 2003[ix], the number of homicide arrests fell by 25% in Chicago in 2004, robbery arrests fell by 7%, and property crime fell by 4%.

This administration proposes cuts to programs that serve young people and communities in distress.

Juvenile prevention programs, such as the Juvenile Accountability Block Grant (JABG), will be zeroed out in this administration’s budget.
Child and Family Services, which include Head Start and services for Abused and Neglected Children, will be cut by 3.3 billion dollars in the next four years under President Bush’s budget.[x]
Elementary and Secondary education will be cut by upwards of 11 billion dollars in the four years.[xi]
Vocational and Adult education will be cut by 5.8 billion in the next four years.[xii]
FACT: Imprisoning more young people as adults, increases crime.
HR 1279 proposes to change the federal juvenile justice system to authorize prosecution of 16 and 17 year old gang members who commit violent crimes. Research[xiii] conclusively shows that prosecuting young people as adults does not reduce youth crime. Research shows that young people prosecuted as adults, in comparison to youth held in juvenile facilities, are more likely to:
commit a greater number of crimes upon release
commit violent crimes upon release
commit crimes sooner upon release.
FACT: Punitive rhetoric distracts from real problems.

· Inciting fears and promising to crack down on mythical threats does not serve the public. Gangs are a symptom of social distress and HR 1279 is ill equipped to address the underpinnings of crime in a productive manner.



JPI

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[i] Uniform crime Report, 2003; 1999 http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius
[ii] United States Census Bureau General Demographic Characteristics:2003
[iii] Preliminary figures comparing the first six months of 2004 to the first six months of 2003, from the Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius)
[iv] Uniform Crime Reports, 2003, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius
[v] Uniform Crime Reports, 2003, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius
[vi] Uniform Crime Reports, 2003; 2002, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius
[vii] Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Juvenile Arrest Rates by Offense, Sex, and Race (1980-2003).
[viii] Supplemental Homicide Reports, by Circumstances, http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/circumsttab.htm
[ix] Preliminary figures comparing the first six months of 2004 to the first six months of 2003, from the Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius)
[x] Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Where would the cuts be made under President’s Budget? State Data (February 22, 2005)
[xi] Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Where would the cuts be made under President’s Budget? State Data (February 22, 2005)
[xii] Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Where would the cuts be made under President’s Budget? State Data (February 22, 2005)
[xiii] Research by Donna Bishop of Northeastern University and Jeff Fagan of Columbia University concerning the impact of trying and incarcerating young people in adult facilities on re-offending summarized in ‘The Florida Experiment: An Analysis of the Impact of Granting Prosecutors Discretion to try Juveniles as Adults,” www.justicepolicy.org

Posted by lois at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Judget Henderson's prison health care takeover most radical in US history

by Judy Greenspan

Years of protests may finally pay off.
Branding California’s infamous prison system “terribly broken,” U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson announced June 30 that he would appoint an independent authority to oversee health care in this state’s prisons. According to Alison Hardy, an attorney with the Prison Law Office, “The judge has clearly recognized the ongoing risk of death and harm to patients is unconstitutional.”

Henderson’s decision, after hearing two weeks of testimony and scathing reports of prison visits in the class action suit Plata v. Schwarzenegger, represents the most radical and complete takeover of a prison health-care system in U.S. history.

Henderson, who began his legal career as the first African American lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department who investigated civil rights cases, has taken bold action in other class-action lawsuits involving prisons and civil rights in this state. In 1995, Henderson ruled in favor of Security Housing Unit (SHU) lockdown prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison.

Henderson also tried to block implementation of Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative in this state. Unfortunately, his ruling was later overturned by a higher court.

Prisons stuffed with poor

Medical neglect and abuse are no strangers to the California prison system. For the past 20 years, civil rights attorneys, prisoner activists, human rights advocates and family members have pointed the finger at the California Department of Corrections for its inhumane treatment of prisoners.

California, with a prison population of nearly 165,000, has set a national trend in the building of mega-prisons. With the cooperation of racist sentencing laws, it has packed its prisons to double and triple capacity with poor people of color.

Ten years ago, the legal and public spotlight was on the abysmal care and medical neglect in this state’s women’s prisons. A class-action lawsuit called Shumate v. Wilson exposed needless deaths and torture of women prisoners. An unprecedented legislative hearing inside one of the women’s prisons brought forth heartrending testimony from women prisoners about their poor care.

According to Cassie Pierson, staff attorney with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and one of the litigators of the Shumate case, “Judge Henderson’s decision validates what women prisoners have been telling us for many years and may give them hope. In 2000, women prisoners voiced their concerns before the legislature and nothing happened. Right after the hearings, eight women died and women have continued to die unnecessarily.”

Women prisoners inside the Central California Women’s Facility have told this reporter that, if anything, medical care is worse than ever.

Yvonne Hamdiyah Cooks, executive director of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, worries that women prisoners, who are often “invisible” within the predominantly male prison population, will continue to have their health care needs overlooked, even by a federal monitor.

Prisoners’ rights advocates, community activists and family members see Henderson’s decision as an important step forward. However, many emphasize that the appointment of a federal receiver is only one of several measures that should be taken to change this brutal prison system.

So much more needed

Corey Weinstein, M.D., a founder of California Prison Focus, a statewide organization fighting for the human rights of prisoners, points to the massive and unnecessary incarceration of poor people in this state, along with a legacy of prison guard brutality and murder, as equally serious problems to address.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his newly anointed California Department

of Corrections and Rehabilitation have used the excuse of prison overcrowding

to prepare the public for the building of more prisons. However, groups like Critical Resistance and the Prison Moratorium Project have made a strong case for releasing large numbers of prisoners convicted of drug-related and nonviolent crimes into community programs and treatment centers.

Battered women’s groups and Families to End California’s Three Strikes laws are calling for the expedited release of lifers who have been held years beyond their expected release dates.

Mark Smith, a recently released lifer with serious medical problems, stated, “I am thrilled with Judge Henderson’s decision to tackle this terribly troubled system. If, however, the guards’ union is allowed any influence in this much overdue undertaking, like all else they get their hands on, then we can expect a watered-down version with little long-term benefit.”

In California, prison guards with a nursing assistant license are able to dispense medications and decide whether prisoners can see a doctor. This conflict of roles for these medical technical assistants (MTAs) has had deadly consequences for prisoners with chronic and serious illnesses.

According to prisoners’ rights activists, trying to access care from an MTA is like having to go to the state police for your yearly physical. The California Correctional Peace Officers’ Association (CCPOA) is a wealthy political action committee that “contributes” to the campaign funds of most state legislators.

Geppetto Launer, formerly incarcerated in California’s Corcoran prison, is “hopeful and cynical” about the effect of the federal takeover. Living with HIV while inside prison, Launer had a great deal of experience fighting to get proper medical care. Launer fears that state and prison interference with the receiver will lead to stonewalling. “I wish the governor and other state officials were forced to spend one week in any of our state’s prisons — they would quickly change their tune!” Launer added.

This story was first published at www.workers.org, Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011. Email ww@workers.org.

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Posted by lois at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2005

Understanding Collateral Sanctions and Barriers to Re-entry

Understanding Collateral Sanctions and Barriers to Re-entry
By Michelle Gaseau, Managing Editor
Corrections.Com

Few would deny the logic of restricting an ex-offender convicted of child molestation from ever working in a day care center. The potential harm avoided far outweighs the limitation on an individual's freedom.

But when collateral sanctions are applied indiscriminately and block an ex-offender's ability to re-enter society as a law-abiding citizen, then the grounds for these restrictions come into question.

Disqualifications for ex-offenders vary from state to state and range from the loss of voting rights to ineligibility for pubic housing.

"It's huge problem. Most people who have criminal justice records are low income [residents] and private housing is very expensive in this country. If you have a criminal record you can be barred from public housing [but] if you don't have a stable residence it's hard to get your life back together," said Jamie Fellner, Director of the U.S. Division for Human Rights Watch.

No Second Chance, a Human Rights Watch report published last year chronicles the experiences of many ex-offenders who have been denied public housing because of draconian regulations imposed by both the federal and local governments around public housing eligibility

The report's authors identified one story of an ex-offender in Pennsylvania who was denied public housing for herself and her two children because of a previous shoplifting conviction in which she stole a tube of ChapStick from the local drug store.

Fellner said the injustice in the application of these rules and regulations is glaring.

"The federal regulations give the local housing authorities [the ability] to create their own. Unfortunately, many have created sweeping exclusions in the type [of crime] and length of time [they apply] and, in some cases, even if they are arrested and never prosecuted," she said. "You can be excluded from public housing because you forged a check. We're not talking about just excluding people for violent conduct."

Fellner said these restrictions, which many offenders don't even know about until after they are released, not only impact the ex-offender's ability to get back on their feet, but also their ability to take care of their children.

"Many ex-offenders are women with children and if they are denied public housing, then where are they supposed to go? There are ripple effects for society and it's not necessary," she added.

Joan Petersilia, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at University of California, Irvine and an advisor to the California Youth and Adult Corrections Agency, has written about re-entry issues and says that collateral sanctions can be problematic in many ways, but housing and employment are areas that are critical for ex-offenders.

"The restrictions have been increasing and increasing. There are fewer jobs for which they are eligible," said Petersilia.

She added that licensing requirements in many states have changed to exclude certain offenders from the types of jobs that they would typically access.

"These are jobs that, in the past, they could qualify for -- a nail technician, carpenter, trades jobs and many of the requirements exclude as a blanket policy those with conviction records," she said.

Because of the unfairness of many of these sanctions, several efforts have emerged to increase the dialogue about these disqualifications and how to implement change so that true re-entry and reduced recidivism can be achieved.

Standards and Model Statutes

The American Bar Association over the last several years has paid special attention to collateral sanctions both in its Justice Kennedy Commission Report, which was issued in 2004, and in the creation of standards about collateral sanctions, which were approved in 2003.

According to attorney Margaret Love, Chair of the ABA's Criminal Justice Standards Committee's Task Force on Collateral Sanctions, member of the Justice Kennedy Commission and a former U.S. Pardon Attorney for the Department of Justice, many in the criminal justice system are starting to realize that collateral sanctions are a problem.

"These disqualifications, what we really call sanctions - it's a new way of looking at it. It has long been thought of as civil disability, but if something happens to you automatically, then your legal status has changed. That is part of the sanction of the crime and, as a result, you have to be notified; that's only fair," said Love.

As a legal matter, Love said that the legal system could be impacted if offenders pleading guilty are not notified about the sanctions they may face in the future.

"If someone pleads guilty in ignorance of a standard - and would have fought the charges otherwise -- then you let them withdraw the plea. Judges are worried about this," she said.

Beyond these legal issues, the ABA felt the need to attempt to reform these regulations so that they are fairly applied to those who pose a specific and related public safety risk and so that offenders clearly understand the challenges they will face after release.

The standards that have been created by the ABA address the fact that collateral sanctions are not typically collected on one single system, that they should be accounted for in sentencing and that they should be applied based on a substantial relationship between a person's conduct and the specific duty or benefit in question. In addition, the standards were written to focus attention on the impact collateral sanctions have on a person's ability to re-enter society and resume normal, every-day activities.

Examples of restrictions that the ABA states are not justified under the standards are denial of student aid, loss of a driver's license upon conviction of a drug offense and absolute barriers to employment or licensure.

"There are also a lot of states that have always required criminal records checks and you can't qualify for education, child care, elder care professions - but those are very good entry level jobs. Also there are a lot of transportation jobs that are controlled by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) -- truck driving, airport employees -- that have new regulations that require criminal records checks," said Love.

Included in the ABA's standards is a suggestion that legislatures collect, set out or reference all collateral sanctions in one chapter of the criminal code and identify with "particularity" the type, severity and duration of the sanctions and to what offenses they apply. The standards also state that a legislature should only impose a sanction if it can justify that the sanction matches the conduct of that offense; that the court should ensure that the defendant has been informed of collateral sanctions before accepting a plea; that the legislature should authorize the sentencing court to take into account applicable collateral sanctions in determining the overall sentence; and that the legislature establish a process by which a convicted person may obtain review or an order of relief from any discretionary disqualification.

Although states are under no obligation to follow the ABA's standards, they are considered a general standard of practice and specific ABA standards have been referred to recently by the U.S. Supreme Court as such areas as adequate assistance of counsel and death penalty representation.

In addition, last year the ABA's Justice Kennedy Commission report urged states and the federal government to remove unwarranted legal barriers to re-entry and suggested many of the same reforms as the new ABA standards.

In its report, the Commission recommended that jurisdictions "should identify the legal barriers to re-entry, including both collateral sanctions imposed upon conviction and discretionary disqualification of convicted persons from otherwise generally available opportunities and benefits." In eliminating these barriers, the commission suggested that educational programs be developed not only for public officials and employers, but also for the private sector.

The ABA's standards and recommendations were also considered as part of a proposed "Act" that will soon be considered by the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws at its annual meeting this summer. It is possible that out of the NCCUSL conference discussion about collateral sanctions some new model code or statute would be created for states to follow.

In the interim, state officials, including corrections agencies, should become educated about these barriers to re-entry, Love said.

"They have to become familiar with these. There are some states that require the DOC to notify people about how to get their licenses back. Parole and probation are the ones that it's really important for. They are ones that are guiding re-entry [in many cases]. But everyone in the system, the prosecutors, the defense, prison people and community supervision [need to be involved]," Love said.

In Ohio, corrections officials are paying attention to the effect of collateral sanctions and hope that in the near future some of them will be changed.

Ohio Considers Changes

A corrections re-entry program can only do so much to prepare offenders a smooth return to the community if state collateral sanctions serve as a roadblock for those who want to turn their lives around.

Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Director Reginald Wilkinson would like to see many of these barriers lifted and is making an effort to push in that direction.

"In some cases they are warranted. [But] in other cases there is no nexus between the reason for incarceration and their future employment. It's a travesty and an embarrassment," said Wilkinson.

Wilkinson said in many ways collateral sanctions are a hypocrisy because states urge offenders to work hard and keep their noses clean after release, but then it offers hurdles rather than open doors.

"I do believe corrections agencies ought to be advocates to make public officials aware about the impact. It can be a part of re-entry [but] it's a bigger issue with public officials. The inmates can't do anything about it. We tell them what they are eligible for. If someone has ambitions to do something where there is a barrier, we'll let them know that," he said.

Wilkinson advocates for states to allow for discretionary disqualifications rather than blanket prohibitions about the types of jobs ex-offenders can hold, the kinds of housing they are eligible for and assistance they can receive from the government.

He said some states, such as Delaware, have enacted laws that prohibit the outright disqualification of all ex-offenders from certain types of employment. Ohio corrections officials believe this is legislation worth exploring further.

"In Ohio we're trying to review the range of collateral sanctions and look carefully at what is the sensible balance that we need to have defined in statute that mitigates [unfair exclusions]. If here is a reasonable nexus - such as a convicted sex offender and employment in a day care center -- but if it is a barrier without a nexus, that's what we are concerned with," said Ed Ryan, Deputy Director, Office of Policy and Offender Reentry for the Ohio DRC.

Ryan said corrections officials are examining the practices of others states to compare where Ohio sits in terms of disqualifications and potentially make recommendations to the legislature about changes to the laws in Ohio.

"Ohio is fairly moderate in terms of the range of collateral sanctions relative to other states; some states are much more onerous than Ohio," Ryan said.

Offenders in Ohio, for example, regain their ability to vote after release while in some states, offenders do not.

But, other collateral sanctions such as denial of student loans to certain drug offenders are controlled on the federal level.

Some federal legislators have realized this. In fact, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank introduced legislation earlier this spring to repeal those restrictions and the bill is now in committee.

"The dilemma folks have is often when you enter a plea of guilty, you don't know that there is a wide range of sanctions that may be imposed on you," said Ryan.

Beyond the legal limitations for ex-offenders are the unspoken wage penalties that ex-offenders experience when landing a job and the general stigma society places on ex-offenders.

What it will take to rectify this situation for ex-offenders and create a climate that welcomes success after release, according to Fellner of HRW, is for the federal, state and local legislators - as well as society -- to truly embrace the idea of re-entry.

"A lot of this has been promoted and fostered not just by a general tough-on-crime philosophy but more specifically on the drug war," sad Fellner. "The U.S. is still talking out of two sides of its mouth. On the one hand, it talks about rehabilitation and on the other hand, there are these barriers."

But as more research is conducted and the barriers are made more visible, advocates hope that change will follow.

Resources:

HRW - http://www.hrw.org

ABA CJ Section - http://www.abanet.org/crimjust/home.html

Open Society After Prison Initiative - http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/focus_areas/after_prison

Joan Petersilia - http://www.seweb.uci.edu/users/joan/

Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett By Jennifer Gonnerman
Life on the Outside tells the story of Elaine Bartlett, who spent sixteen years behind bars for selling cocaine - a first offense - under New York's controversial Rockefeller drug laws. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnInquiry.asp?r=1&isbn=0374186871

When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) By Joan Petersilia
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019516086X/qid%3D1044985345/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/002-8436846-2618428

Posted by lois at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)

"Gang Violence" Declined 73% from 1994-2005

July 15th, 2005
‘Gang Violence’ Declined 73% from 1994-2003
Study shows ‘Gang-related’ violence accounted for 7%
of all homicide. High unemployment and low-income
strongest factors in ‘gang-related’ homicides

Washington, DC---According to a new report from the
Justice Policy Institute, despite a rash of
sensationalized cases surrounding gang violence, the
phenomenon actually decreased over 70 percent from
1994-2003.

In Ganging Up on Communities, researchers put many of
the current concerns about rising gang crime into
context, and analyze the need, and the impact of
additional federal laws to address the problem.
Currently, several new pieces of federal legislation
are being advanced to address the “gang crisis,”
federalizing law enforcement efforts that have
historically been the jurisdiction of the states, and
proposing laws to try more youth as adults. According
to the data from the policy brief, some of the
policies being proposed may exacerbate the country’s
crime problem, and steers resources away from local
and state groups that have shown success.

“While some communities still experience unacceptable
levels of crime, including youth crime and gang crime,
the data just doesn’t support elevating gangs to the
level of a “national crisis,”” said Jason Ziedenberg,
executive director of the Justice Policy Institute and co-author of the report. “We don’t need an additional layer of federal laws on top of the state laws to address this issue. We need to invest the resources in groups that have been proven successful in working with youth and gangs.”

In this policy brief, researchers highlight the
several legislative proposals call for new federal
powers to prosecute 16 and 17-year-old youth as adults
for gang-related violent crime. According to the FBI
Uniform Crime Reports, the number of people nationwide
reported to be arrested in 2003 for either a
“gangland” or “juvenile gang homicide” totaled 1,111—approximately 7% of the 16,503 homicide arrests that year. Of those, only 111 were reported to be under 18 years-of-age.

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) reports
that, between 1994 and 2003, the rate of reported
violent victimizations by perceived gang members fell
from 5.2 per 1,000 to 1.4 per 1,000—a decline of 73%.
According to the NCVS, “violent crimes for which
victims identified the offender to be a gang member
peaked in 1996 at 10% of all violent crime and
decreased until 1998 to about 6%, not significantly
changing since.”

“Federalizing the gang issue by increasing criminal
penalties and loosening the criteria for deporting
youth is not the answer to the gang problem -- it has
the likely outcome of victimizing youth not involved
in criminal activity,” said Mai Fernandez, Chief
Operating Officer of the DC-based Latin American Youth
Center.

“In those communities where there is a gang problem, specialized law enforcement strategies paired with specially tailored employment and social services programs can make a huge difference in decreasing gang violence,” she added.

According to one study based on Los Angeles and
published in the Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection
and Critical Care, the strongest correlations with
gang violence were employment and income. In
communities where unemployment rates were between 14%
and 16%, there were 15 times as many gang homicides as
in neighborhoods where the unemployment rate was 4% to
7%.

Justice Policy Institute

Posted by lois at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2005

Ten Worst Places to be Black

Ten Worst Places to be Black

by Bruce Dixon, BC Associate Editor

http://www.blackcommentator.com/146/146_cover_dixon_ten_worst.html

For all charts and tables go to link above.

The pervasive corporate media bubble, which grossly distorts the views most Americans have of the world beyond their shores, and of life in America's black one-eighth, operates to fool African Americans, too. While a fortunate few of us are doing very well indeed, and many more are hanging on as best we can, the conditions of life for a substantial chunk of black America are not substantially improving, and appear to be getting much worse. This is a truth which can't be found anywhere in the corporate media, but it is nevertheless one with which we must familiarize ourselves in preparation for the upcoming national black dialogue. It is high time to begin constructing useful indices with which to measure the quality of life, not just for a fortunate few, but for the broad masses of our people in America's black one-eighth.

Measuring the quality of life in black America
Painting an accurate picture is not difficult. Useful measures of family income and cohesiveness, of home ownership, life expectancy, education levels, of unemployment and underemployment abound. But among all the relevant data on the state of black America today one factor stands out: the growth of America's public policy of racially selective policing, prosecution, and mass imprisonment of its black citizens over the past 30 years. The operation of the crime control industry has left a distinctive, multidimensional and devastating mark on the lives of millions of black families and on the economic and social fabric of the communities in which they live.

About half the nation's 2.2 million prisoners are black. With only 36 million of us, that's an astounding 3% of African Americans, counting all ages and both sexes, languishing behind bars, with a roughly equal number on probation, parole, house arrest or other court supervision. Almost one in three 18-year-old black males across the board is likely to catch a felony conviction, and in some communities nearly half the black male workforce under 40 have criminal records. A felony conviction in America is a stunningly accurate predictor of a life of insecure employment at poverty-level wages and no health care, of fragile family ties, of low educational attainment and limited or no civic participation, and a strong likelihood of re-imprisonment. Each month, tens of thousands of jobless, skill-less, stigmatized and often anti-socialized ex-prisoners are released back into communities that lack job and educational opportunities, where intact families are more the exception than the rule, and where upward social mobility is a myth.

Clearly, more than any other single public policy, the day to day operation of America's crime control industry magnifies and exacerbates racial inequality, deepens black poverty, and wreaks widespread destabilization on black families and communities. Among the many scholars and researchers who have persuasively argued and extensively documented these conditions is Dr. Paul Street of the Chicago Urban League in "The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois and the Nation."

So if you want to know where black families fare the worst, where the lowest wages and life expectancy are, where to find the highest unemployment and the greatest number of single parent households among African Americans, you don't need an online survey. You certainly don't count the black businesses or the black elected officials. You count the black prisoners, and the former prisoners, and the ruined communities they come from and are discharged into. That's what BC did, and here are the results.

The Ten Worst States in the US to be Black

Wisconsin leads the nation in the percentage of its black inhabitants under lock and key. Just over four percent of black Wisconsin, including the very old and the very young of both sexes, are behind bars. Most of the state's African Americans reside in the Milwaukee area, and most of its black prisoners are drawn from just a handful of poor and economically deprived black communities where jobs, intact families and educational opportunities are the most scarce, and paroled back into those same neighborhoods. So Wisconsin, and in particular the Milwaukee area justly merit the invidious distinction of the Worst Place in the Nation to be Black.

Iowa, with only a small black population, is not far behind. The crime control industries in Wisconsin and Iowa seem to have learned to make the most efficient use of the preferred human material available to them, locking up the few black inhabitants of those states at a rate 11.6 times higher than whites.

Texas, the nation's second largest state, is the third worst place to be black in America, and is in a class by itself, first because its extraordinary rate of black incarceration affects such a large population. Only New York has more African Americans than Texas, and only the two relatively small states previously mentioned lock up a higher percentage of their black citizens. Though California has 50 percent more people, Texas has a slightly larger prison population and only a 5 to 1 ratio between its black and white rates of imprisonment. We may safely assume that since very few of its wealthy Texans are behind bars, Texas is just a very bad place to be poor, whether you're black or not.

A total of 900,000 African Americans live in Oklahoma, Arizona, Delaware, Nevada, Oregon and Colorado, and another 2 million-plus in California, where the proportion of prisoners among total African Americans hovers just under 3 percent.

How Much Better is Better? How Much Worse is Worst?

The answer in both cases is, unfortunately: not much. Only one hundredth of a percentage point separates Iowa's 3.30% rate of black incarceration from that of Texas, with 3.29%. Twenty-seven more states manage to lock up between 2 and 3% of their African American inhabitants, and only Maine, Hawaii and North Dakota fail to incarcerate more than 1.55% of blacks. For whites, the national average ratio of prisoners to the general population is less than 4 tenths of one percent.

The damning truth laid bare once again by this fact, is that America's policy of racially selective policing, prosecuting and imprisonment of its black one-eighth is a truly consistent and national one, even though it is implemented with arbitrary severity by countless state and local authorities.

Dishonorable Mentions
This distinction goes to New Jersey, Connecticut, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York.

BC's Dishonorable Mention is reserved for those states not already enumerated which have the highest disparity between black and white incarceration rates. Wisconsin and Iowa belong here too, with disparity rates between 11 and 12 to one, but they have already been mentioned. This dismal category is especially significant because black populations in three of the states with extraordinary disparity rates fall largely within the New York City Metropolitan Statistical area, the largest concentration of black people in North America. Suffice it to say that for practical purposes, New York City and its environs are not that much better a place to be black than Texas.

STATE...........BLACK-WHITE DISPARITY

New Jersey............13.15 to one

Connecticut...........12.77 to one

Minnesota.............12.63 to one

Pennsylvania..........10.53 to one

New York.............. 9.47 to one

The second largest concentration of African Americans in New Jersey lies within the Philadelphia Metropolitan Statistical Area. Note Pennsylvania's fourth place ranking on the Dishonorable list.

The "enlightened" state of Minnesota has two more peculiar distinctions. First, it commits one of the nation's largest percentages of offenders to community corrections, the generic name for "non-prison" sentencing alternatives. With one of the nation's highest rates of disparity between its black and white inhabitants, it appears that Minnesota's white offenders are disproportionately funneled into alternative sentencing situations, but we have no data to support such a conclusion. Secondly, according to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, which together with the US Census Department is the source for all numerical data in this article, Minnesota had the fastest growing prison population in the country as of mid-year 2004, the latest date for which stats are publicly available.

What About the South?

Alert readers may have noticed that except for Delaware and Texas, not a single southern state made BC's Ten Worst or its Dishonorable Mention, even though Louisiana is well known to have the nation' highest per capita rate of incarceration for its whole population. How is this possible?

The answer is that our ranking is based solely on the percentage of a state's black population behind state and local prison walls. The following table sorts the top 13 states in order of their relative black populations, from Mississippi with 36% to Illinois with 15%. This statistical approach catches all the states of the old South except Texas and Florida, and reveals an interesting pattern.

All eleven southern states in this table lock up noticeably higher per capita numbers of their whole populations, black, white and otherwise, than do New York and Illinois. But southern rates of disparity between black and white imprisonment do not approach those of Illinois at 7.5 to one or New York's 9.5 to one. Like Texas, nine of these eleven Southern states achieve their overall high imprisonment rates by confining white people to prison twice as often as New York and Illinois. Furthermore, the five states with the highest black percentage of their total populations have rates of black imprisonment closer to those of Illinois and New York than to Texas. Like Texas, the Old South is just not a good place to be poor, whether one is black or white.

Federal Prisoners: Another Texas and then some

Finally, discerning readers have probably noticed that near the beginning of this article the proportion of all African Americans in the nation's prisons and jails was given as about 3%, but the numbers quoted for only three states reached or exceeded that figure. How did we get three percent?

The missing incarcerated, who did not figure in BC's calculations for the Dishonorable Mentions and Ten Worst list because BC was unable to sort out their states of origin, race or region, are those in federal prisons and jails. The federal gulag held about 170,000 people as of mid-year 2004, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, slightly more than the Texas prison system, and growing much faster. We have not yet obtained racial breakdown data for federal prisons, but if and when it becomes available it may show racial disparities as severe as those in Illinois, which would suffice to make almost half of federal inmates African American.

Better Lives, Better Families, Better Communities

The work of reclaiming lives, families and communities shredded by America's incarceration binge must take place in hundreds of cities and towns and in several arenas. Thousands of churches and local organizations are trying with scant resources to provide re-entry services to former prisoners. While their efforts deserve praise and support, BC believes that problems created by bad public policies demand solutions that include changing those destructive policies. In fact, it is misleading and foolish to portray the problem of racially selective mass imprisonment as one addressable by a million individual solutions, by several hundred thousand family solutions, or by ten thousand black church and small business solutions.

The problem is that public policy in America only moves in the direction of addressing human needs when under the insistent pressure of mass movements. Where will the mass movement come from to change America's racially selective policy of mass incarceration? What will be its first tasks, and what will it look like? These are among the key questions before black activists between now and the time we "Go back to Gary."

For chart of states go to link listed above.

Your comments are always welcome.

or Click here to send e-Mail to
Publisher@BlackCommentator.com

Posted by lois at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2005

CA: Prop 36: Advocates Urge Preservation of Drug Treatment Not Incarceration

Jul 12, 2005, By BETH FOUHY
Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A state program that directs nonviolent drug offenders into treatment rather than jail has been effective and must be allowed to continue without new legislative restrictions, a group of drug treatment advocates said.

"It's rare in public life to enact something that makes a great deal of common sense and moral sense. That's what this program does," said the Rev. Peter Laarman of the Los Angeles-based Progressive Christians Uniting and a supporter of the program. The teleconference Monday was organized by the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit group that drafted the measure.

Proposition 36 - the so-called Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act passed by voters in 2000 - allocates $120 million per year for first- and second-time offenders to evade incarceration and enroll in drug treatment programs instead.

The law has won praise among many treatment advocates, who say it has helped thousands of drug users kick their addiction and saved taxpayers roughly $250 million in incarceration costs annually. But law enforcement officials complain the program lacks accountability and that offenders are not sufficiently punished for lapses.

A 2004 UCLA study tracking the effectiveness of Proposition 36 found that about 34 percent of offenders who were sentenced under the law and had showed up for treatment, had successfully completed their treatment. Supporters of the law called the figures encouraging, noting the difficulty of treating addiction.

But opponents pointed out that the UCLA study also found that 31 percent of offenders treated under the measure were re-arrested, compared with an 18 percent rate for other programs.

"Proposition 36 has been a treatment failure," said John Lovell of the California Narcotics Officers Association.

With funding for Proposition 36 set to expire in 2006, several lawmakers have authored legislation to renew the funding while applying certain restrictions. A bill that would allow a short-term jail option for certain offenders sponsored by state Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, overwhelmingly passed the Senate last month and is now making its way through the Assembly.

In an interview, Ducheny said the bill was designed to improve offenders' rate of compliance, while at the same time boosting the number of people eligible for the program and extending the length of time a person could be eligible for treatment.

"We're not saying in any way that folks should be incarcerated for the drug conviction," Ducheny said. "What we're saying is there needs to be a way to put you back in the program if you fall out."

In a conference call with reporters to commemorate the four-year anniversary of the passage of Proposition 36, several supporters warned Ducheny's bill would allow courts, not doctors, to make key medical decisions for drug offenders.

"Chemical dependency is a medical and public health problem that demands an appropriate solution," said Lisa Folberg of the California Medical Association. "Under this bill, judges would be making decisions about appropriate addiction treatment. We think they need to be made by people who understand treatment."

Paul Colbert, a Sacramento resident who said he was addicted to methamphetamine for 22 years before going through treatment under Proposition. 36, said the program had succeeded for him while several stints behind bars had not.

"I see people I used to do drugs with and they say they can't believe I got clean," Colbert said, adding that he'd been drug free for 3 1/2 years.
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Posted by lois at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)

Drum Major Institute Finds Schools Targeted by Impact Schools Are Among the Most-Overcrowded & Underfunded

DRUM MAJOR INSTITUTE REPORT FINDS SCHOOLS TARGETED BY IMPACT SCHOOLS SAFETY INITIATIVE ARE AMONG THE MOST OVERCROWDED AND UNDER-FUNDED IN THE CITY
New York City, June 9, 2005 - Today, the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI) released A Look At The Impact Schools, a profile of the middle and high schools targeted by City Hall¹s "Impact Schools" safety initiative. This report finds that high levels of crime and disorder aren¹t the only characteristics that distinguish the Impact Schools from their peers in the New York City public school system.

Schools targeted for inclusion in the Impact Schools initiative were selected by the NYPD and the DOE for their higher than average number of criminal incidents, transfers of students due to safety violations, and what the DOE terms "early warning problems" such as low school attendance and disorderly behavior. The Impact Schools initiative currently stations two hundred armed police officers, security cameras and metal detectors in twenty two of New York City¹s "high crime" public schools.

Based on an analysis of the 2003-2004 Annual School Reports released by the Department of Education, this report concludes that, as a group, the Impact Schools were more overcrowded than the average city high school, were far larger than most city high schools, received less funding per student for direct services, had more students overage for their grade, and served a student body that was disproportionately comprised of poor and black students as compared to the average New York City public high school.

"Our report finds Impact Schools suffering, with less support for added challenges. It raises the question of whether our children and their teachers will truly ever be safe until we address these profound inequities,² said Andrea Batista Schlesinger, DMI Executive Director.

According to the report, prior to the initiative¹s instatement, Impact Schools were more overcrowded and less adequately funded than their counterparts. Spending for individual students in New York schools rose $1,217 from 2002-2003 while students in Impact Schools received a mere $609 increase in student spending.

Additionally, while the average city high school operated at 105.9% capacity during the 2003-2004 school year the average Impact School was at 111% capacity. Schools like Christopher Columbus HS and Walton HS were at more than 180% capacity.

The report also shows that poor students of color comprised a disproportionately higher percentage of the student body at the 22 Impact Schools than at other schools. More than sixty percent of students at the 22 Impact Schools are living in or near poverty, compared to 53.9% of city high school students in other New York schools. As well, the number of entering 9th and 10th graders that are overage for their grade at the 22 Impact Schools is 44% higher than at other New York City schools. Nearly forty percent of entering 9th and 10th graders at the city's 22 Impact Schools are overage for their grade, compared to just 27.5% of entering 9th and 10th graders citywide.

³The Impact Schools initiative has invited an unprecedented expansion of the criminal justice system into our schools,² said Kate Kyung Ji Rhee, DMI fellow and director of the Prison Moratorium Project. ³By the time they reach high school, many of these students have already experienced difficult academic obstacles which require additional educational resources; we should not use criminal justice strategies to solve an educational problem.²

DMI is a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to challenging the tired orthodoxies of both the right and the left. The goal: public policy for social and economic fairness. DMI¹s approach is unwavering: We seek to change policy by conducting research into overlooked, but important issues, by leveraging our strategic relationships to engage policymakers and opinion leaders in our work, and by offering platforms to amplify the ideas of those who work for social and economic fairness. For more information, visit www.drummajorinstitute.org

Links for more info:

* HYPERLINK
"http://www.drummajorinstitute.org/plugin/template/dmi/*/3197"Read A Look At The Impact Schools in its entirety

Posted by lois at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2005

Race, Place and the Perils of Prisonomics

Z Magazine Online
July/August 2005 Volume 18 Number 7/8
Special Report

Race, Place, and the Perils of Prisonomics
Beyond the big-stick, low-road, and zero-sum mass incarceration con

By Paul Street
It’s the silences that speak the loudest in dominant media’s coverage of current events. Consider, for example, a Detroit News story that appeared in mid -uly 2001 under the curious title “Ionia Finds Stability in Prisons.” This article told the enlightening tale of how the semi-rural Michigan town of Ionia, located halfway between Lansing and Grand Rapids, had recently become one of the state’s fastest growing and “most improved” communities thanks to its five thriving penitentiaries together employing 1,584 workers who collectively made $102 million a year. “The state’s urban centers dump their felons,” the Detroit News reported, “in prison towns and forget about them. Suburbs balk at housing felons, envisioning escapees trampling through their gardens and hiding out in their tool sheds.” But “Ionia,” the paper noted, “sees things from the other end of the spectrum. The prisons bring, of all things, security.” According to Detroit News reporter Francis Donnelly, Ionia’s “penitentiaries, five veritable Great Lakes of cash, provide sustenance to every sector of [Ionia’s] once-dry economy: jobs for residents, customers for stores, revenue for the city government,” including “nearly $1.2 million of the city’s $3.8 million budget.”

A bigger, nationally focused story on the same topic appeared two weeks later on page one of the New York Times, under the title “Rural Towns Turn to Prisons to Re-ignite Their Economies.” By Times reporter Peter Kilborn’s account, “prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant, state, federal, and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300 jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing. As communities become more and more familiar with the benefits that prisons bring, they are also becoming increasingly adept at maximizing their windfall through collecting taxes and healthy public service fees.”

Kilborn quoted the city manager of Sayre, Okla- homa, which had just opened a prized new maximum- security lockdown. “There’s no more recession-proof form of economic development,” this local official told Kilborn, than incarceration because “nothing’s going to stop crime.” Thanks to money brought in through taxes on prisoners’ telephone calls, sales taxes paid by prisoners and prison staff, and to water, sewer, and landfill fees, Killborn added, Sayre’s city budget increased from $755,000 in 1996 to $1,250,000 in 2001, permitting the town to set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital improvements. No such savings or investments were possible before prison construction began, when Sayre “was surviving largely on federal crop support payments to its dwindling farm population” in the wake of the collapse of the state’s oil and gas industry during the 1980s.

The extent of some rural communities’ sense of dependence on the prison industry was poignantly suggested in a Chicago Tribune article that appeared six months later, when then-Illinois Governor George Ryan closed his state’s rural Vienna Correctional Center. A page one Tribune story on resulting local union protests noted, “At a time when other industry in Illinois’ southern end is weak, Vienna and other prisons dotting the [state’s] farm fields are considered a force as much for economic development as for public safety.” As southern Illinois coal mines closed during the 1970s, the paper observed, workers in that region turned to the Vienna and later the Shawnee correctional facilities for jobs.

According to the Tribune: “When their children graduated from high school, parents encouraged them to start a career in what appeared to be a dependable industry. ‘That was the only thing going on when I was coming up, that and the mines and the rock quarries,’ said Larry Flynn, who went to work at Vienna in 1985. ‘It ain’t bad work and there are good benefits, if you can handle the stress.’ The pay is good too. A correctional officer can make about $40,000 a year, not bad in a place where new homes sell for less than $100,000.”

“Over time,” the Tribune added, “the local economy has grown up around the prison like a vine.”

Each of these newspaper articles did an excellent job telling an important story about a striking and relevant contemporary issue. In a land partly founded on an agrarian ideal, prisoners actually outnumber farmers. Most of the United States’ “correctional” facilities are found in rural areas. Two and a half decades of globally unparalleled prison expansion has combined with the rural economic fallout of corporate globalization in the U.S. to turn the mass confinement of mostly urban “offenders” into a leading, often desperately pursued “growth industry” for non-metropolitan jurisdictions that have become less able to make good livings in farming, logging, mining, and manufacturing.

During the 1990s, 245 prisons were built in 212 of the nation’s 2,290 rural counties. As Tracy Huling has noted, “The acquisition of prisons as a conscious economic development strategy for depressed rural communities and small towns in the United States has become widespread. Along with gambling casinos and huge animal confinement units for raising or processing hogs and poultry,” Huling reports, “prisons have become one of the three leading rural economic enterprises as states and localities seek industries that provide large-scale and quick opportunities.”

Caucasian Country Keepers

By the time each of the newspaper articles quoted above were written, the most striking aspect of the U.S. correctional boom, beyond its sheer magnitude—the U.S. emerged as the world’s leading incarceration state by far during the 1990s—was its heavily racialized nature. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of black men in jail or prison grew fivefold, to the point where, as the Justice Policy Institute reported in 2002, there were actually more black men behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the United States. On any given day, U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics Director Jan Chaiken reported in 2000, 30 percent of African-American males ages 20 to 29 were under correctional supervision—either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. The nation’s disproportionately urban black populace comprised 12.3 percent of the U.S. population, but blacks made up nearly half of the roughly 2 million Americans behind bars by the turn of the millennium. The incarceration rate for African Americans was 1,815 per 100,000 compared to 609 per 100,000 for Latino Americans, 99 for Asian Americans, and 235 for white America. For black adult males the incarceration rate was a remarkable 4,484 per 100,000, compared to 1,668 per 100,000 for Latino males and 1,318 for white males. Reflecting astonishing racial disparities in the waging of America’s domestic “War on Drugs,” roughly one in ten of the world’s prisoners was an African-American male by the turn of the millennium.

In 15 percent black Illinois, 64 percent of the state’s prisoners were African Americans. The state’s incarceration rate for blacks was 1,550, compared to 127 for whites, per 100,000. There were nearly 20,000 more black males in the Illinois prison system than the number of black males enrolled in the state’s public universities. Reflecting the strong correlation between blackness and urban residence in a still highly segregated state and nation, 70 percent of the state’s prisoners came from the Chicago metropolitan area, home to 83 percent of the state’s African Americans.

The color of Illinois’ non-metropolitan “downstate” prison keepers was an entirely different matter. Eighteen of the twenty adult correctional facilities constructed between 1980 and 2000 in Illinois were located in rural counties that are disproportionately white for the state. Just four of the state’s twenty new (post-1980) prison towns had black municipal populations above the state average, and in three of these cases this was only because the census authorities count prisoners as residents of the towns in which they are involuntarily warehoused, not their communities of pre-incarceration residence.

Things were much the same in other states where the nation’s disproportionately urban black population supplies most of the correctional sector’s raw material. In New York, prison and census researchers Peter Wagner and Rose Hyer note, three-fourths of the state’s prisoners come from the New York City metropolitan area; 80 percent of the state’s inmates are black or Latino and 91 percent are kept in predominantly white “upstate” sections of New York. Those sections host all of the 38 New York state prisons constructed between 1982 and 2000.

The U.S. is dotted with a large number of non-metropolitan jurisdictions that are much more officially black than they appear in their commercial and residential districts. New York is home to 11 rural counties where black prisoners make up 64 percent or more of the total black population. Across the nation, Wagner and Heyer find, there were 173 counties with more than half of their black populations behind bars in 2000. One such jurisdiction is Ionia County in Michigan, officially home to 2,867 black Americans, all but 165 of whom were warehoused in Ionia prison.

A Massive Transfer of Value

According to criminologist Todd Clear, the “economic relocation of resources” from black to white communities that results from racial disparities and related spatial patterns in mass incarceration are considerable. “Each prisoner represents an economic asset that has been removed from that community and placed elsewhere.... The removal may represent a loss of economic value to the home community, but it is a boon to the prison community.” By Clear’s estimation in the late 1990s, “Each prisoner represents as much as $25,000 in income for the community in which the prison is located, not to mention the value of constructing the prison facility in the first place. This can be a massive transfer of value: A young male worth a few thousand dollars of support to children and local purchases is transformed into a $25,000 financial asset to a rural prison community. The economy of the rural community is artificially amplified, the local city economy artificially deflated.”

Generally quite poor, prisoners deflate the income profiles of downstate communities, making prison towns eligible for extra poverty-directed public dollars. The prisoners do not benefit, however, from the rural roads, schools, and bridges built with public funds tied to prison development. At the same time, prisoners put relatively minimal strain on local infrastructure beyond occasional trips to court and the use of prison shower and toilet facilities. They do not benefit from the enhanced political power that prisons bring to rural jurisdictions. Politically disenfranchised prisoners (inmates can vote in only two U.S. states, both in predominantly white New England) count towards the representation of the electoral districts in which they are incarcerated, not the districts from which they came and to which most of them return.

The third thing missing from the journalistic accounts quoted at the beginning of this article is the terrible effect of racially disparate mass incarceration on the labor market experience and related economic and life chances of the disproportionately black inmates who provide the critical raw material for the nation’s prison boom. The story of mass incarceration’s role in transferring wealth out of urban and black communities is incomplete without factoring in the significant negative impact felony records and prison histories have on future earnings and employment for those who serve as captive developmental resources for rural prison towns. If the U.S. prison construction boom creates some measure of economic stability and security—just how much is a matter of increasing skepticism and debate (as we shall see below)—for non-metropolitan communities, it exacerbates economic chaos and instability for the disadvantaged and segregated inner-city communities that provide so disproportionately large a portion of the correctional complex’s “raw material.”

According to one social-scientific survey of more than 3,000 employers nationwide, more than 60 percent of employers would not knowingly hire an ex-offender. By comparison, 92 percent of employers would likely hire a current or former welfare recipient and 83 percent would hire someone who had been unemployed for a year. Reflecting this employer bias and a host of related barriers, the best social science research finds that incarceration carries a 10 to 20 percent “wage penalty.” Ex- prisoners on average experience no real wage increases in their 20s and 30s, when young men who have never been incarcerated tend to experience rapid wage-growth. Prison time serves to channel individuals away from skilled occupations and into job sectors characterized by low wages, limited job stability, and fewer opportunities for advancement. It significantly disrupts the career-building process as ex-offenders are left to “start back at square one,” in sociologist Devah Pager’s words, “with respect to gaining a foothold in a particular occupation.”

Since incarceration rates are especially high among those with the least power in the labor market—young and unskilled minority, particularly African American, men—mass U.S. imprisonment and felony marking tends to exacerbates racial inequality. Thanks to its racially disparate labor market and related (under-) developmental consequences, the prison industrial complex has become a significant form of racially regressive and highly regulatory state intervention in the U.S. labor market and economy. Sociologists Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett find that “the penal system has a pervasive influence on the life chances of disadvantaged minorities. “Although typically the preserve of criminology,” Western observes, “incarceration appears to shape aspects of inequality that are of traditional interest to stratification researchers. It seems likely that status attainment, school-to-work transitions, and family structure are all influenced, perhaps even routinely, by the penal system in the current period of high incarceration. From this perspective, the usual list of institutional influences on social stratification—schools, families, and social policy—should be expanded to consider the coercive redistribution of life chances through incarceration.”

It doesn’t help, of course, that inmate education and rehabilitation have been systematically de-legitimized and de-funded at the same time that the U.S. has built and operated a record number of new prisons in a spirit of what leading national prisoner “reentry” expert Jeremy Travis calls “robust retributivism.”

Limits of Prison-Based Rural Growth

The fourth silence has to do with the limits of prison-based economic development in the rural U.S. As a number of investigators begin to critically and systematically investigate the impact of prisons on rural economies, we are discovering that mass incarceration’s “boon” and “windfall” for non-metropolitan areas may be much less impressive than advertised. Thanks to state and union seniority rules, professional certification requirements, and