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October 31, 2005

Women Account for Nearly 1 in 4 Arrests

by REBECCA CARROLL, Associated Press
October 23rd, 2005


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Women made up 7 percent of all inmates in state and federal prisons last year and accounted for nearly one in four arrests, the federal government reported Sunday.

A co-author of a Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Paige Harrison, linked an upswing in the rate of arrest for women to their increased participation in drug crimes, violent crimes and fraud.

The number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons in 2004 was up 4 percent compared with 2003, nearly double the 1.8 percent increase among men, the study said. In 1995, women made up 6.1 percent of all inmates in those facilities.

"The number of incarcerated women has been growing at a rate nearly double that of men, due in large part to sentencing policies in the war in drugs," the Sentencing Project, a group promoting alternatives to prison, said in a statement.

The group said the number of drug offenders in prisons and jails has risen from 40,000 in 1980 to more than 450,000 today. According to FBI figures, law officers in 2004 made more arrests for drug violations than for any other offense -- about 1.7 million arrests, or 12.5 percent of all arrests.

Those sentenced for drug offenses made up 55 percent of federal inmates in 2003, the report said.

The total number of people incarcerated grew 1.9 percent in 2004 to 2,267,787 people. That figure includes federal and state prisoners as well as 713,990 inmates held in local jails, 15,757 prisoners in U.S. territorial prisons, 9,788 in immigration and customs facilities, 2,177 in military facilities, 1,826 in Indian country jails and 102,338 in juvenile facilities.

The country’s state and federal prison population -- 1,421,911 -- grew 2.6 percent in 2004, compared with an average growth of 3.4 percent a year since 1995.

Growth last year in federal prison populations was 5.5 percent, outpacing overall prisoner growth but slipping from the 7.4 average annual growth in federal prison populations since 1995. The number of inmates in state prisons rose 1.8 percent, with about half that growth in Georgia, Florida and California.

Harrison attributed some of the prison population rise to tougher sentencing policies implemented in the late 1990s. She said the average time served by prisoners today is seven months longer than it was in 1995.

"You bring more people in, you keep them longer -- inevitably you’re going to have growth," she said.

The Sentencing Project said the continued rise in prisoners despite falling crime rates raises questions about the country’s imprisonment system. The group said the incarceration rate -- 724 per 100,000 -- is 25 percent higher than that of any other nation.

"Policymakers would be wise to reconsider the wisdom of current sentencing and drug policies, both to avoid expensive incarceration costs and to invest in more productive prevention and treatment approaches to crime," Marc Mauer, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.

Another group, the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, said the statistics show little relationship between prison population growth and the crime rate, which has been falling in recent years.

"The nation does not have to lock more people up to have safer communities," said Jason Ziedenberg, the institute’s executive director.

About 8.4 percent of the country’s black males between the ages of 25 and 29 were in state or federal prison, compared with 2.5 percent of Hispanic males and 1.2 percent of white males in the same age group, the report said.

Blacks made up an estimated 41 percent of inmates with a sentence of more than one year, the report said.

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Posted by lois at 05:49 PM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2005

NY: In City Jails, A Question of Force

October 30, 2005
In City Jails, a Question of Force
By JULIA PRESTON
Even in the rough society of the cellblock, where batons and pepper spray rule, a guard is not supposed to punch a prisoner in the face. A face blow - a head strike, in the cold parlance of corrections - should be a last resort.

Shawn Davis was on the receiving end of a head strike when he was an inmate in a Rikers Island jail, and he lost the sight in one eye. Eric Richards, another inmate, had his eardrum broken. Charles Paige's cheekbone was fractured.

"The very first blow was to my face," Mr. Paige said, recalling his scuffle with Rikers Island officers while, he said, his hands were cuffed behind his back.

Head strikes should be rare in jails: they subdue by causing painful and sometimes permanent injury to inmates, and can leave guards hurt as well. But in New York City, hundreds of inmates have suffered head injuries in recent years after clashes with correction officers, according to a lawsuit in United States District Court in Manhattan based on information culled from official reports.

The reports reveal that inmates' heads were punched, hit with batons and kicked in a roster of pain that is costly in human and medical terms and adds friction to an already tense environment. Officers, too, suffered, with broken fingers, fractured wrists and sprained arms.

The suit, by the Legal Aid Society and two law firms, opens a window on the corridors of the city's jails and the hierarchy of violence that guards are instructed to use to control them - a scale that begins with verbal cajoling, ascends to pepper spray and body blows and blocks, and reaches head strikes only when a guard is fighting to save himself. That scale sounds grim but is increasingly accepted practice in prisons across the country and has proven effective in New York jails where it was observed.

The suit recognizes that prison guards must sometimes resort to force. But it charges that the city's officers routinely use head blows instead of starting with less harmful methods. City guards have not been adequately trained, the suit claims, to follow the sequence of escalating force tactics, even though it is clearly spelled out in city correction policy.

"Force is not a foreign concept in a prison, it's part of everyday life," said Jonathan Chasan, a Legal Aid lawyer. But he said, "They should be able to restrain without this level of injuries."

After four years of legal jousting, the two sides are now in intensive settlement talks. Judge Denny Chin has set a trial date for Nov. 28 but apparently hopes to work out an agreement before then.

City officials declined repeated requests for comment on the allegations, saying they do not discuss continuing litigation. In motion after motion, however, the city has battled the suit in court. The city points out that recorded incidents in which guards used force in its jails have decreased significantly, dropping by 33 percent from 2000 to 2004, and are infrequent considering the size of the system, which in all admits about 100,000 new inmates a year.

"Excessive force is not a systemic problem and is antithetical" to its correction practices, the city contends.

The lawsuit looks closely at incidents in which guards used force against inmates in six jails on Rikers Island from Jan. 1, 2000, to Aug. 1, 2003. Of a total of 2,596 incidents, 703 incidents produced head injuries to 738 inmates.

Steve J. Martin, a lawyer and corrections consultant who is a witness for the plaintiffs, sifted through 745 reports of the most serious incidents, which included versions from guards and inmates as well as medical reports. He found 70 cases of inmates with facial fractures or broken teeth, and 113 cases of inmates with facial cuts requiring stitches - results he called "an astounding and frightening litany of injurious force."

Mr. Martin said his research revealed a "routine use of hard impact strikes to the head" in city jails. In one month, April 2003, in three Rikers Island jails he scrutinized, there were 42 serious incidents in which guards used force, with head strikes recorded in 13.

In a more recent sample cited in the suit from six jails, which includes reports from four months in the year before November 2004, guards used head strikes in at least 46 of 218 recorded incidents where they applied force.

Mr. Martin also provided head strike information from other prison systems he has studied, appointed by either a court or a correction agency. Examining reports of guards' use of force in five jails in and around Fort Lauderdale, Fla., during 18 weeks in 2004, for example, among 200 incidents, Mr. Martin found fewer than 8 head strikes. In the Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, in 54 incidents during eight months in 2004, only 2 head strikes were reported. In a sample from Clyde N. Phillips State Prison in Buford, Ga., a rural prison, of 105 force incidents there were none in which an officer reported a head strike, although 10 inmate head injuries were recorded.

A number of the inmates bringing the Rikers Island lawsuit are repeat offenders with volatile temperaments or chilling criminal records - the sort of inmate whom correction officers find hardest to keep in line.

Shawn Davis, 38, is a schizophrenic. He explained, in an interview in state prison in Beacon, N.Y., where he is serving five years for sexual assault, that he visits the clinic once a month for an injection, since he can have fits and seizures if he misses it. After he returned to Rikers Island from a court date on May 28, 2002, an officer barred him from going to the clinic.

"She cursed at me using smart language," Mr. Davis said. "It got me so hyper. I very anxious to have my medications."

He decided to do "something that said I wanted attention," he said: "I picked up a plastic chair and threw it" over the heads of officers in the cellblock control booth.

He was restrained and his hands were cuffed behind his back, Mr. Davis said. But, he said, while riot squad officers dragged him down a hallway, one guard punched him in the face. One guard gave him a parting kick in the temple, Mr. Davis said.

"Both eyes just shut down," he said. "Ruptured globe" was the finding of two surgeons at Bellevue Hospital Center, who operated the next day to try to save his left eye. Doctors later concluded it would never see again.

According to a summary of the correction officers' accounts of the episode, one officer said he had defended himself from a punch by Mr. Davis by punching the inmate back three times in the face. The officer had "a superficial scratch to the left eyebrow and right side of the face." The summary was written by Vincent M. Nathan, a lecturer in criminal justice at the University of Toledo, Ohio, who is also a witness for the inmates in the suit. The city did not provide any material from correction officers.

Another inmate, Eric Richards, 28, could not even remember, in a deposition he gave last year, all his criminal convictions, starting with the one for his first car theft when he was 16. Mr. Richards was in a Queens courthouse holding cell on Jan. 29, 2002, when he objected to a strip search. Mr. Richards claimed that one angry guard had knocked him over with a punch in the face while another had jumped on him and pushed a finger under Mr. Richards's eyelid.

"I'm screaming, 'Get your hands out of my eyes!' " Mr. Richards said. Another officer slammed his head into cell bars, he said.

According to Mr. Nathan's summary of the correction officers' accounts, they said Mr. Richards had started the fight by pushing past one officer and punching another. Two officers acknowledged having punched Mr. Richards in the face. Three officers reported injuries, including one with a sprained ankle.

Medical reports showed that the perforated eardrum had left Mr. Richards deaf in his right ear, and he is also partly blind in one eye.

Martin F. Horn, the correction commissioner, at first agreed to an interview, then declined on the advice of lawyers for the city. But a copy of the city's correction policy, revised by Mr. Horn last year, shows that New York has embraced the idea of a scale of force with many incremental steps before head strikes.

Officers are instructed to try to dominate a balking inmate with "control holds" and "take-down technique." They should not go for head blows "unless unavoidable," and must especially avoid hitting inmates in the head with batons. Guards are required to record any head strikes, which are also called head shots, in a special log book.

Although the policy might sound like bureaucratic rigmarole for a guard facing a raging inmate, corrections experts said prisons around the nation have adopted similar procedures after finding them effective in lowering violence.

"If properly presented and reinforced with training, they do work," said William C. Collins, a lawyer who is an editor of The Correctional Law Reporter, a newsletter. "They allow an agency to give their staff a sense of what is appropriate under some circumstances, and what isn't." Blows to the head, he added, "pretty much aren't on the list."

Several corrections experts said they were troubled by the head strike and injury rates in New York City. "If use-of-force policies are appropriate and followed, you're not going to see a lot of injuries," said Michele Deitch, a University of Texas professor of corrections policy and a leader of a task force for the American Bar Association that is revising national standards for the use of force in prisons.

The suit, in which Legal Aid is working with lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell and Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, seeks better training for guards in self-defense and take-down methods, and calls for working video cameras in the jails.

Measures similar to those demanded in the suit were put into effect, after hard-fought earlier litigation, in the Central Punitive Segregation Unit on Rikers Island, the isolation cells for inmates who make trouble in jail. They resulted in a "significant diminishing" of inmate injuries in confrontations with guards, according to the final court order in the case, in 2002.

City officials seem more focused on the fact that overall violence is diminishing than on continuing head injuries. In a deposition last year, Commissioner Horn was asked if he was familiar with the department's system for "reporting head shots."

"Is that a drink?" the commissioner replied.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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

October 29, 2005

Katrina:Bill Would Lift Aid Ban for People with Drug Felonies

October 28, 2005
Hurricane Katrina victims with prior drug convictions would be able to get federal benefits like food stamps and student loans under legislation introduced in Congress this week.

The Houston Chronicle reported Oct. 26 that the Elimination of Barriers for Katrina Victims Act, introduced by Reps. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), calls for a three-year suspension of current laws that ban such benefits, along with public-housing assistance, for convicted drug offenders.

"The bill does not affirm or support acts of crime, (but) it should not be labeled or stigmatized," said Lee. "These are individuals who have lost everything and to a great extent are victims."

One such victim is New Orleans resident Antoinette Samson, 31, who said her family cannot get aid in Texas because her husband was convicted of crack-cocaine possession. The Samsons and their three children are currently being housed by a church. "What is there to do?" she said. "I have no money, I don't even have a job."

The measure may face opposition in Congress, although supporters warned that denying aid to drug offenders only encourages them to return to crime.
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October 28, 2005

Dutch Investigating High Toll in Fire That Killed 11 People Detaineed in Prison

October 28, 2005
Dutch Investigating High Toll in Fire That Killed Detainees
By GREGORY CROUCH and MARLISE SIMONS
AMSTERDAM, Oct. 27 - The Dutch authorities were trying Thursday to determine why the death toll was so high in a fire in a detention center for drug smuggling suspects and illegal immigrants at Schiphol Airport here that killed 11 people.

It took fire squads three hours to control the blaze, which began after midnight Wednesday, and televised images showed that at least part of the detention center had been gutted. Officials said nearly 200 prisoners were being held in the prefabricated complex at the time.

At least 14 people were treated for injuries, 6 of whom were members of the police or security forces.

A spokesman for the local fire department said the first fire trucks arrived at the site 10 minutes after the fire began. But the main question remains why so many people died.

At a news conference in Haarlemmermeer, a town near the airport, officials said part of the reason might have been that there was no quick way to release the prisoners. They said the buildings, which were a temporary holding center rather than a normal prison, had no system for opening cells simultaneously. "The prison guards had to open each cell door individually," said Marjolein Kistjes, a town hall spokeswoman.

The authorities said it was not clear yet how the fire had started and whether it might have been set.

One detainee told a Dutch radio station that once the fire erupted in one of the cells, the prisoners cried out in alarm, but they were not taken seriously. The detainees started kicking and screaming to convince the authorities that the situation was serious, the prisoner said. But even after the guards responded, it took some time to free all the prisoners.

The destroyed wing of the large detention complex consisted of 24 double-occupancy cells, and officials said 43 detainees were in the wing at the time. Most of the guards belonged to a private security company.

In the chaos after the fire, while detainees were being taken out of the cell complex and moved to other towns, at least five escaped. By dawn Thursday, police helicopters were trying to chase them down.

Members of Parliament called Thursday for an inquiry into the airport prison and the conditions there.

The police said they had not yet identified the dead.

The detention center opened in 2003 in part to deal with the growing wave of drug couriers arriving from Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 3,300 courier suspects were arrested in 2004 alone.

But as the Netherlands tightened its immigration laws and took a hard look at political asylum claims, the airport jail also became a transit center for deportees. Some who died were thought to be recent arrivals or people awaiting deportation.

Gregory Crouch reported from Amsterdam for this article, and Marlise Simons from Paris.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

CA: Prison Law Office: Lawyers Go Behind Bard as Guardians of Prisoner Rights

Lawyers Go Behind Bars as Guardians of Prisoner Rights
By Maura Dolan
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 11, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO - They exposed the state's locking up of juvenile offenders for 23 hours at a stretch in cells smeared with blood and feces.

They helped spark an unprecedented federal court takeover of California's prison healthcare system after revealing that prisoners were dying because of medical neglect.

They ended the practice of placing mentally ill prisoners in extreme
isolation.

The Prison Law Office, a nonprofit group of lawyers who labor in the shadow of San Quentin Prison, has in recent years scored a string of court victories felt in nearly every corner of California's teeming prisons.

"There is almost no aspect of California corrections, adult or juvenile, that is not subject to a court order, and almost all of those are the result of suits brought by the Prison Law Office," said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Although its lawyers are underpaid by law firm standards and represent wildly unpopular clients, the group has become a litigation powerhouse so successful that the state in recent years has chosen to fold rather than fight it.

Why, then, do the lawyers seem more frustrated than triumphant?

They complain that the pace of change in California's prisons and youth correctional facilities is achingly slow, that court orders and negotiated settlements take years to achieve and mark only the start of reform.

As they trudge from prison to prison to make sure that promised improvements are in place, they say they must continually remind themselves of what they have accomplished during the group's 30 years of legal advocacy.

"People aren't shot dead anymore; let's start with that one," said Steve Fama, 49, who has worked at the Prison Law Office for 20 years. "During the late '80s to mid-'90s, the number of prisoners shot dead in California was staggeringly disproportionate to the number shot dead in all the other state prisons combined."

The 10 lawyers, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, work in a cluster of modest offices on San Francisco Bay. They receive as many as 100 letters a day from inmates asking for help.

"The kind of cases the Prison Law Office has litigated involve a guy
sticking his arm through the food slot and a guard breaking his arm, people crawling up the stairs to parole hearings because there were no provisions for people with disabilities and inmates on psychotropic drugs dying because their cells overheated," said Sue Burrell, an attorney for the Youth Law Center, a public interest law firm.

In a lawsuit against the California Youth Authority, the Prison Law Office complained:"Rehabilitation cannot succeed when the classroom is a cage and wards live in constant fear of physical and sexual violence from CYA staff and other
wards."

In a report stemming from a lawsuit the office helped bring, a
court-appointed monitor found that the Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation was refusing to discipline guards for serious misconduct at Pelican Bay, a super-maximum security prison.

"Some correctional officers end up acquiring a prisoner's mentality: They form gangs, align with gangs and spread the code of silence," the monitor, John Hagar, wrote.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson reported that at least 34 inmates had died recently because of neglect, incompetence and "even cruelty" by medical staff. Henderson's action followed a lawsuit by the Prison Law Office.

On a tour of medical facilities at San Quentin, the judge observed a dentist who neither washed his hands nor changed his gloves after placing his hands in patients' mouths.

"On average, an inmate in one of California's prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies in the . medical delivery system," Henderson said.

The Prison Law Office was established when memories of the siege at Attica Correctional Facility in New York were still fresh. The 1971 uprising, in which 43 were killed, raised public awareness of brutality and racism in American prisons and spurred widespread calls for reform.

But the passage of years diminished the power of Attica, and the impulse for reform gave way to laws instituting harsher and harsher prison sentences. The inmate population exploded.

From 1983 to 1995, the number of California inmates rose from 30,000 to 160,000. Despite an unprecedented prison construction boom, the prisons are at roughly 193% of their design capacity, frustrating efforts to improve conditions.

Don Specter, 53, director of the Prison Law Office, said sentencing laws need to be revised to reduce the numbers behind bars. As long as the prisons are overcrowded, conditions that violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment will persist, he said.

During the lawyers' visits to the prisons, the inmates tend to be
appreciative.

"A lot of them realize you're their only hope, the only thing that stands between them and the guard," Specter said.

The lawyers have complained that prison rules sometimes make meetings with their clients difficult.

Sara Norman, 37, another lawyer in the office, recalled her irritation when guards at a youth correctional center in Stockton forced her to wear a bulky green stab-proof vest during a tour.

Talking to wards through their food slots, Norman said, she apologized for he vest. "That is not the way I want to be interacting with them," she said.

Alison Hardy, 44, also an office lawyer, said she vigorously objected when guards at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo insisted that she could meet with prisoners only if they were shackled. The guards prevailed.

Yet a prison guard once locked Norman into a plexiglass cell with an
unshackled convicted murderer on death row.

After the interview concluded, Norman called out to the guards to let her out. No one heard her. Eventually, she resorted to "banging and banging and banging on the door."

The inmate was "perfectly nice," and they laughed about the incident, she said. Her point was that prison rules are "utterly arbitrary."

The lawyers said they generally have good relations with prison staff, although their litigation record has caused some resentment.

When the state loses a case, it must pay the Prison Law Office reasonable attorney fees, which is how the office pays for itself.

Lance Corcoran, executive vice president of the prison guards' union,
complained that taxpayers are bearing the expense.

He said the Prison Law Office has "incredible power" and faulted the
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for doing "a very poor job of defending" itself.

Jerold A. Prod, an administrative law judge and former chief counsel for the state corrections department, described the Prison Law Office as "probably a cut above the average public interest legal organization." He also observed that the lawyers could be "blinded by their cause."

He recalled a time when the group wanted work opportunities to be equal for male and female inmates, even though the men vastly outnumbered the women behind bars and the female inmates, he said, mostly wanted to go to beauty
school.

"The fastest way to start a riot at the California Institution for Women at that time was to shut down the cosmetology clinic," Prod said.

The Prison Law Office has benefited from significant free help from some of the state's top private law firms.

"They pick their shots," said Richard B. Ulmer Jr., a partner at Latham & Watkins who has worked with the office.The group knows its way around Sacramento. Specter, often described as unassuming, is reputed to be a fierce negotiator.

"He comes across as a very gentle, quiet person, but man, get out of the way," said Burrell, of the Youth Law Center.

Bruce Slavin, general counsel for the corrections department who has dealt with the Prison Law Office for 20 years, said relations with their lawyers have become "less confrontational" and "less adversarial" over the years.

"If the Prison Law Office brings a complaint to me, they are usually going to be accurate in identifying the problem," Slavin said. "Their solution may not be the same as our solution."

Specter said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger "has a commitment to prison reform that no other governor has had" but still has failed to make any significant reforms.

"The governor gets creamed by the victims' rights activists and the prison guards and starts to sound more and more like [former Gov.] Pete Wilson," Specter said.Even when the governor has signed onto a reform, months may pass before the prisons adopt it, the lawyers said.

Fama, the group's 20-year veteran, recalled his frustration during a recent visit to monitor implementation of reforms at a Southern California prison. He discovered that a logbook intended to ensure that emergency medical supplies were in place had been provided only the day before his visit. The prison was supposed to have had the book months earlier.

Fama said his aggravation eventually gave way to hope. Although progress was slow, his visit had made a difference.

ttp://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prison11oct11,0,4274950,full.story?coll=

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Rosa Parks, Founding Organizer of he Civil Rights Movement

October 25, 2005
Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies
By E. R. SHIPP

Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.

Her death was confirmed by Dennis W. Archer, the former mayor of Detroit.

For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.

The events that began on that bus in the winter of 1955 captivated the nation and transformed a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle.

"Mrs. Parks's arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest," Dr. King wrote in his 1958 book, "Stride Toward Freedom. "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."

Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950's Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.

That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated in making demands and getting results.

"She sat down in order that we might stand up," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday in an interview from South Africa. "Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom."

Even in the last years of her life, the frail Mrs. Parks made appearances at events and commemorations, saying little but lending the considerable strength of her presence. In recent years, she suffered from dementia, according to medical records released during a lawsuit over the use of her name by the hip-hop group OutKast.Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about Mrs. Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a "plant" by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

"She was fed up," said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. "She was in her 40's. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.' "

In "Stride Toward Freedom," Dr. King wrote, "Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.' "

Mrs. Parks was very active in the Montgomery N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and she and her husband, Raymond, a barber, had taken part in voter registration drives.

At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Mrs. Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. There, she later said, she "gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people."

But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at a department store on Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing on her mind was becoming "the mother of the civil rights movement," as many would later describe her. She had to send out notices of the N.A.A.C.P.'s coming election of officers. And she had to prepare for the workshop that she was running for teenagers that weekend.

"So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested," she said in an interview in 1988.

On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 percent of the bus system's riders. Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites. Then the blacks had to move to seats in the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Even getting on the bus presented hurdles: If whites were already sitting in the front, blacks could board to pay the fare but then they had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door.

For years blacks had complained, and Mrs. Parks was no exception. "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest," she said. "I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."

After a confrontation in 1943, a driver named James Blake ejected Mrs. Parks from his bus. As fate would have it, he was driving the Cleveland Avenue bus on Dec. 1, 1955. He demanded that four blacks give up their seats in the middle section so a lone white man could sit. Three of them complied.

Recalling the incident for "Eyes on the Prize," a 1987 public television series on the civil rights movement, Mrs. Parks said: "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.' "

Her arrest was the answer to prayers for the Women's Political Council, which was set up in 1946 in response to the mistreatment of black bus riders, and for E. D. Nixon, a leading advocate of equality for blacks in Montgomery.

Blacks had been arrested, and even killed, for disobeying bus drivers. They had begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl's arrest for refusing to give up her seat, and Mrs. Parks had been among those raising money for the girl's defense. But when they learned that the girl was pregnant, they decided that she was an unsuitable symbol for their cause.

Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was regarded as "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery - not one of the finest Negro citizens - but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery," Dr. King said.

While Mr. Nixon met with lawyers and preachers to plan an assault on the Jim Crow laws, the women's council distributed 35,000 copies of a handbill that urged blacks to boycott the buses on Monday, Dec. 5, the day of Mrs. Parks's trial.

"Don't ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday," the leaflet said.

On Sunday, Dec. 4, the announcement was made from many black pulpits, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser, a black newspaper, further spread the word.

Some blacks rode in carpools that Monday. Others rode in black-owned taxis that charged only the bus fare, 10 cents. But most black commuters - 40,000 people - walked, some more than 20 miles.

At a church rally that night, blacks unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until these demands were met: that they be treated with courtesy, that black drivers be hired, and that seating in the middle of the bus go on a first-come basis.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and in that period many blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy excuses. Churches and houses, including those of Dr. King and Mr. Nixon, were dynamited.

Finally, on Nov. 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on buses. The court order arrived in Montgomery on Dec. 20; the boycott ended the next day. But the violence escalated: snipers fired into buses as well as Dr. King's home, and bombs were tossed into churches and into the homes of ministers.

Early the next year, the Parkses left Montgomery for Hampton, Va., largely because Mrs. Parks had been unable to find work, but also because of disagreements with Dr. King and other leaders of the city's struggling civil rights movement.

Later that year, at the urging of her younger brother, Sylvester, Mrs. Parks, her husband and her mother, Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit. Mrs. Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965, when Representative John Conyers Jr. hired her as an aide for his Congressional office in Detroit. She retired in 1988.

"There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation," Mr. Conyers said yesterday in a statement, "and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals."

Mrs. Parks's husband, Raymond, died in 1977. There are no immediate survivors.

In the last decade, Mrs. Parks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. But even as she remained an icon of textbooks , her final years were troubled. She was hospitalized after a 28-year-old man beat her in her home and stole $53. She had problems paying her rent, relying on a local church for support until last December, when her landlord stopped charging her rent.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Ala., on Feb. 4, 1913, the elder of Leona and James McCauley's two children. Although the McCauleys were farmers, Mr. McCauley also worked as a carpenter and Mrs. McCauley as a teacher.

Rosa McCauley attended rural schools until she was 11 years old, then Miss White's School for Girls in Montgomery. She attended high school at the Alabama State Teachers College, but dropped out to care for her ailing grandmother. It was not until she was 21 that she earned a high school diploma.

Shy and soft-spoken, Mrs. Parks often appeared uncomfortable with the near-beatification bestowed upon her by blacks, who revered her as a symbol of their quest for dignity and equality. She would say that she hoped only to inspire others, especially young people, "to be dedicated enough to make useful lives for themselves and to help others."

She also expressed fear that since the birthday of Dr. King became a national holiday, his image was being watered down and he was being depicted as merely a "dreamer."

"As I remember him, he was more than a dreamer," Mrs. Parks said. "He was an activist who believed in acting as well as speaking out against oppression."

She would laugh in recalling some of her experiences with children whose curiosity often outstripped their grasp of history: "They want to know if I was alive during slavery times. They equate me along with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and ask if I knew them."

Correction: Oct. 26, 2005, Wednesday:

Because of an editing error, a front-page obituary of Rosa Parks in late editions yesterday referred incorrectly to The Montgomery Advertiser, which printed a front-page article on Dec. 4, 1955, that publicized a boycott of Montgomery's buses the next day. It is a general-interest newspaper, not a black one.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 08:53 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2005

Black Commentator: The Battle for New Orleans: Only a Real Movement Can Win This War

Issue 156 - October 27 2005

by BC Co-Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble

New Orleans represents a challenge to African Americans, unprecedented since the epic struggles of the Fifties and Sixties. The perverse reality, to which African Americans must rise, is that the man-made disaster in the Gulf provides what may be the last chance to build a real Movement, encompassing the broadest sectors of Black America. Cruel history presents the catastrophe as an unwanted opportunity, a test of Black people’s capacity for the operational unity craved by the vast bulk of African Americans. The pain and anger in Black America is all but universal, and demands collective action, the outcome of which will largely define the true State of Black America as it has evolved over the last two generations.

Let us put it bluntly: If Black America fails to configure its human, organizational and material resources to effectively resist the theft and ultimate disfigurement of New Orleans, then we will be forced to confront the existence of fundamental, crippling flaws in the African American polity.

There is much reason for optimism. Movements often need monsters, and George Bush and his minions are a horror show. The Katrina debacle plunged Bush’s Black approval rating to 12 percent, as measured by the prestigious Pew Research Center. That’s only slightly above what most pollsters consider the approval category’s irreducible minimum - "about as low as you can go," according to Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies senior analyst David Bositis. Few doubt that the administration’s callous and ineffectual handling of the Katrina crisis ("negligent homicide," charged Black Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney) caused the near-evaporation of Bush’s thin Black support.

(An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier in September showed only two percent of Blacks approved of Bush’s performance. However, the poll included only 89 African Americans, too small a sample to be considered reliable.)

All African American eyes are on New Orleans, that once-flawed, now devastated jewel of the Diaspora whose people have been dispersed to the far corners of the United States: Alaska, Utah and, literally, who knows where, in addition to large Black population centers. The dissolution of a major African American city - far eclipsing in scale the destruction of Black Tulsa in 1921 - has seared the collective Black psyche. The pain and anger in Black America is all but universal, and demands collective action effectively coordinated by those who purport to be leaders. In the process, new leadership - and hopefully, a "new" New Orleans that is fit for mass Black habitation - will emerge.

Reversing the Slide

Until the watershed year of 1965, which saw both passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Watts, Los Angeles rebellion, most Black Americans, especially in the South, were focused on the elimination of Black voter disenfranchisement and legal segregation. The Civil Rights Movement was not propelled by a laundry list of issues - rather, its overarching project was the defeat of Jim Crow.

By the time of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination and passage of the last major civil rights legislation in 1968 (the Fair Housing Act), the Jim Crow project seemed essentially completed - although still requiring years of mopping up operations. However, Black Power projected an additional set of demands, much more complex and varied, and calling forth a murderous government response that added yet another layer of Black grievances. While the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Movement - those African Americans whose circumstances allowed them to walk through newly opened doors - sprinted to higher living standards and elected and corporate offices, mass Black incarceration became the order of the day in every state of the union, ravaging the very fabric of the bottom half of African American society and threatening to destabilize the half that were doing relatively well.

Although the historical Black Political Consensus survived the sea change that followed the death of Jim Crow, the scope of both Black aspirations and grievances expanded dramatically, reflecting the diversity of the upwardly mobile Black sectors’ often frustrated dreams and the multiplying injuries endured by the left-behind, criminalized Black population.

The Black Movement devolved to various sets laundry lists with often radically different orders of priority, depending on which Black sector was doing the listing. Most African Americans can agree on most items on the list - after all, the Black Political Consensus remains intact - but not on which items are most compelling. Thus, the diversity of the forces set loose in the Black polity by the death of Jim Crow, while not centrifugally spinning African Americans out of a common orbit, has resulted in sometimes dramatic mismatches in political priorities among Black sectors.

We have traveled a great distance from the simple elegance of the chant: "What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!"

As a consequence, efforts to forge "unity" across the Black spectrum inevitably produce long lists of the What We Believe and What We Demand type, drawn up in order of the priorities of whichever group or tendency dominates the gathering. Usually, such lists are broadly inclusive, demonstrating that those in attendance respect and share the concerns of their brothers and sisters representing other Black sectors or political schools of thought. However, laundry lists can only lead to operational unity among those who give high priority to the same items. Other, pro forma line item endorsements add up to not much more than a well-meant "Amen."

A Common Focus

There can be no question that millions of African Americans are eager to find their own specific mission within the context of a broad Black movement, as proven beyond doubt by the 1995 and 2005 "Million" rallies - events that drew multiples of the (integrated) 1963 March on Washington crowd. The problem is, these searchers find themselves still without a mission at the end of the rally.

This October’s Million More Movement rally produced a 10-point Issues Statement, while Nation of Islam leader Min. Louis Farrakhan offered his "Covenant with God, Leadership and Our People." Essentially, both documents are generalized versions of the usual laundry lists - useful for their inclusiveness, just as the rally was worthwhile as "a mass reaffirmation of the existence of an African American polity, a form of Black nationhood that yearns for unity and autonomy in the struggle against white supremacy, and for its own sake." (see BC, "MMM: The Quest for a Movement," October 20, 2005).

But most of all, the huge throng wanted an action plan for New Orleans.

"Katrina" was on virtually every speaker’s lips - the crowd-arouser. From Dr. Ron Daniels, of the Institute of the Black World, who reported that 30 heads of national Black organizations had convened to assist the Katrina families; to CME Bishop Henry Williamson, who assured the vast audience that his denomination was deployed in the Gulf region in strength, providing aid and ministry; to the (whacky) songstress Erykah Badu, who made sense to the crowd only when she invoked "Katrina"; to Min. Farrakhan, who proposed a one dollar per week contribution to a Millions More Movement Disaster Relief Fund; to Congressional Black Caucus chairman Mel Watt’s announcement that the CBC would soon introduce "a specific piece of legislation, restoring the families of the Gulf area…a goal that is definable" - speaker after speaker, representing the broadest spectrum of African American sectors, disciplines and political tendencies, made common cause with Black New Orleans.

"Katrina" - shorthand for the tortures inflicted on the helpless by nature and man, and the planned ethnic cleansing of a great Black city - has the potential to ignite a movement much wider and deeper than the campaigns to Boycott South Africa and Free Nelson Mandela, solidarity actions that breathed life into broadly-based Black politics in the Eighties. Katrina touches home and history, friends and family; it revealed the Black condition in the raw. The exodus of multitudes speaks to the Old Testament cultural framework that is wired into the consciousness of even the most secular African American. On the scales of historical group memory and symbolism, the five days of video-taped Black debasement in New Orleans will weigh as heavily on the African American psyche as the dogs and water hoses of Birmingham.

Katrina-related activities have proliferated beyond the countable, to become an obligatory action item on every authentic Black organization’s agenda. The expanding universe of Katrina projects in some respects already resembles the pre-1960 Civil Rights Movement - a focus of all Black people’s deep concern, but inchoate, not yet fully formed.

In a relatively short period of time, the 1950s Civil Rights offensive was transformed into a great engine of social change. In the current era, however, it is the Right that is on the domestic and global offensive. A Katrina-spawned movement will begin, of necessity, as a broad, Black-anchored resistance.

The Fight to Return

Every strata of Black America - all of which were physically represented on the Capitol Mall, October 15 - shared a soul-deep identification with Mtangulizi Sanyika, of the African American Leadership Project, as he outlined the New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights. In abbreviated form, the displaced citizens demand: the right to return; to retain their right of citizenship in the city; the right to shape and envision the future of the city; the right to [fully] participate in the rebuilding of the city; the right to quality goods and services; the right to affordable neighborhoods; the right to be paid a livable wage; the right to increased economic benefits; the right to preferential treatment in…work associated with rebuilding the city; the right to contracting preference; the right to an environmentally clean and hurricane safe city; and the right to preserve and continue the rich and diverse cultural traditions of the city. (See the full text of the document at the bottom of this page.)

The 12-point Bill of Rights fits wholly within the Black Political Consensus, and could serve as a guide to citizens of virtually every American city. Indeed, the document contains most of the elements of BC’s recommendations for urban "democratic development…to preserve and further empower the huge and strategic Black and Brown presence in the central cities" (More on that, below.)

Thus, a true national movement to defend and support the citizens of New Orleans, if sustained, would infuse millions with the lessons and logic of a new urban politics that elevates human and citizenship rights above corporate rights. A movement that is immersed in the language, spirit and values of the New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights would refine and clarify the African American conversation, and also alter the prisms through which non-Black Americans perceive the world. That’s what real movements do; it’s what the Civil Rights Movement did. In a real sense, the New Orleans document takes the rights gained by the decades-ago movement to what Black folks used to call "a higher level."

However, the Bush regime recognizes none of these rights - not for New Orleans citizens, nor for people anywhere on the planet. Rushing like a storm surge, the Bush men and the corporations they serve saw the breach of the city’s levees as a grand opportunity to flood the region and nation with reactionary rollbacks of citizen and worker protections, to impose by "emergency" measures Hard Right programs that could not pass congressional muster.

Bush Bum-rushes the Gulf

"Whether or not by design, the administration has used the tragedies of hurricanes Katrina and Rita to waive, bend, and break federal laws that protect our civil rights, worker rights, public health and safety, while suspending rules that help small and minority-owned businesses," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), in a letter to key congressional committees.

Among the administrations offenses against law and decency:

Cutting wages for construction workers in the Gulf states by indefinitely suspending the Davis- Bacon Act, which guarantees workers are paid the region’s prevailing or average wage. Suspending wage protections for Gulf Coast workers allows all contractors, regardless of whether or not the work relates to cleanup and reconstruction, to pay as little as $5.15 hour.
Ignoring federal procurement practices, which has resulted in the award of several multi-million dollar no-bid contracts that hurt local small, minority, and women owned businesses.
Denying equal opportunity employment initiatives for workers in the Gulf states through an exemption from some existing Affirmative Action Program (AAP) requirements for new federal contractors dealing with Hurricane Katrina relief.
Exploiting the hurricane to create a private and religious school voucher program that could allow federal money to be used to promote employment discrimination.
Allowing a temporary waiver of environmental protections in the Gulf Coast region and supporting additional environmental suspensions at the expense of the health and safety of Katrina survivors, particularly the poor, disabled, and minority populations.
Rebuilding segregated and inaccessible housing.
Enforcing immigration laws during search and rescue.
The latter outrage demonstrates the Bush men’s pure, devilish cynicism and howling racism. While allowing reconstruction contractors to import low-wage, non-citizen workers from Latin America, Homeland Security’s immigration agents conduct raids that single out Latino-looking residents of emergency shelters.

Having failed to get congressional approval for a federal school voucher program except in the colony of Washington, DC, Bush seeks to establish a de facto national voucher system by dispensing half a billion dollars to private schools that enroll the far-flung children of displaced families.

Thwarted over the years by the U.S. Supreme Court in their jihad against affirmative action, the Bush crowd decrees that such programs will be cleansed from the Gulf by emergency fiat.

Bush policy is the precise opposite of the New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights. The lines of struggle have been drawn in the muck left by Katrina.

Wade Henderson, speaking for the LCCR and 60 other civil rights, labor and advocacy organizations, declared: "Instead of directly meeting the rebuilding challenges created by Katrina, the administration has chosen the moral equivalent of a Trojan Horse."

Little George Wallace, standing in the Alabama schoolhouse door in 1963, seems tame by comparison. At least Governor Wallace was faithful to some version of the rule of law, albeit perverted. Bush recognizes no law, at home or abroad. His regime’s lawlessness has created a host of allies for a new Black movement to call on, should it choose to - from a far longer list than was ever available to Dr. King.

For Whom Katrina Tolls

"If New Orleans is rebuilt as an enterprise zone, private investors will wait for the government to clean up the mess and then build luxury condos to replace affordable housing. They'll turn New Orleans into a theme park, with its former residents unable to afford to come back." - Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. in the Chicago Tribune, October 11, 2005.

It does not have to be that easy. But the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans will surely be accomplished in the absence of a mass Black movement, mobilizing elements of all African American classes and disciplines, the broadest range of large and small organizations, and the forging of strategic alliances with non-Blacks.

Activists should understand that the Battle for New Orleans will take place over years - and that the Bush-corporate assault is well-advanced. In a brilliant article first posted on the website of the Clark-Atlanta University-based Environmental Resource Center, EJRC director Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, a Katrina survivor who directs the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University, spelled out what the nascent movement is up against:

"Hurricane Katrina has opened the floodgate of land speculation and redevelopment scenarios that plan ‘for’ rather than plan ‘with’ the storm victims. What gets built and redeveloped (and for whom) and who participates in the re-building process are major economic justice issues. A small group of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks have divided up ‘pre-completed’ no-bid contracts. A predatory form of ‘disaster capitalism’ exploits the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering."
The Right’s "radical social and economic engineering" cries out for a massive Black response that is equally sophisticated and comprehensive - and backed by masses of fired-up people. The liberation of a once-great Black city from the grip of land pirates acting in concert with the federal government, is no easy task. However, the struggle must be joined, since the outcome may well decide the fate of urban - and therefore Black - America.

Katrina hurled New Orleans into a kind of time machine, instantly fast-forwarding the city to an advanced stage of the gentrification process. The "Negro-removal" stage was skipped entirely, courtesy of the floodwaters. In real-time cities, poor and working people drift away house by house, block by block, with very little drama, to points…unknown. An incremental exile, a piece by piece theft of community, then a final, anti-climactic fait accompli.

In maddening contrast, the Katrina drama has fixed our attention on the sheer precariousness of the Black condition. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge, we see the future of our cities - and we ain’t in it. A specter from the urban future screams at us in the present, in the form of a quarter million displaced African Americans and a valuable hole where a cultural center of Black America used to be.

Suddenly, Black folks are waking up, shaking - and universally angry.

Where There’s a Will, There Must Also Be a Plan

The collective Black human and material infrastructure is exponentially more developed than in 1955, when the African American working poor of Montgomery, Alabama sustained a bus boycott that humbled Jim Crow in the former capital of the Confederacy; or in the years that followed, when a tiny group of progressive Black preachers embarrassed a racist superpower in the eyes of the world, forcing Uncle Sam to leave his white supremacist clothes in the closet; or in 1964, when mere hundreds of young people invaded the fortress of Mississippi with virtually no money in their pockets and little backup during Freedom Summer.

The best and the brightest of the era were at the core of activism, but there were not many of them, and even less cash. The resources that Blacks and their allies can bring to bear in the Battle for New Orleans are on a different order of magnitude than 40 years ago. At long last, and at such high cost to the people of the Crescent City, one senses a general Black will to struggle.

A true national movement has as many components as the polity, itself. The Battle for New Orleans will require lawyers, researchers, city planners, architects, social scientists, psychologists, financiers, educators, pension fund managers, liberation theologians, culture workers, athletes, medical practitioners, criminal justice experts, chefs, t-shirt designers, micro- and macro-organizers, as solid a front of Black politicians as can be assembled - and hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers in struggle.

A vision of the new New Orleans is also required- a full-blown counter-vision to the condo-studded "theme park" corporate blueprint, one that will inspire both those displaced from the city and the African American movement at-large.

In BC’s final edition of the five-part series, "Wanted: A Plan for the Cities to Save Themselves" (July 29, 2004), we sketched some of the steps that must be taken, and questions that must be answered in the quest to build a healthy city, a place that exists for the benefit of those who live there. Much the same process applies to the task of rebuilding and restoring New Orleans under the auspices of its largely displaced citizens.

"We must present the fullest picture of the [new] city’s demographic, physical, and economic layout and activity: where different populations live; how dollars move; where people work, and what types of work they do; where they shop; how they move around the city; what public or private institutions anchor which neighborhoods, and what activity do they create; what is the state of the housing stock, and where; how many businesses exist; who owns them, and who do they employ, and where do the employees live; what is the state of infrastructure (streets, water, sewage, phone and cable telecommunications, mass transit lines, etc.), and who does the infrastructure serve; what are the physically attractive (and, therefore, valuable) sites and vistas, and who owns/controls them; how are police deployed; where are the schools…?"
If African Americans fail to develop a plan for New Orleans, they will have no effective role in the final product of reconstruction, whatever the exertions of a reinvigorated Black movement.

Black America is challenged to make Katrina/New Orleans the center of gravity around which an inclusive African American movement revolves - a unifying nexus and vision that draws together organizations and previously unaffiliated individuals, especially youth, in common cause. There are plenty of tasks for us all.

African American Leadership Project & The New Orleans Local Organizing Committee & The Greater New Orleans Coalition of Ministers

New Orleans Citizen Bill of Rights’
1. All displaced persons should maintain the "Right of Return" to New Orleans as an International "Human Right." A persons’ socioeconomic status, class, employment, occupation, educational level, neighborhood residence, or how they were evacuated should have no bearing on this fundamental right. This right shall include the provision of adequate transportation to return to the city by the similar means that a person was dispersed. THE CITY SHOULD NOT BE DEPOPULATED OF ITS MAJORITY AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND LOWER INCOME CITIZENS, and must be rebuilt to economically include all those who were displaced.

2. All displaced persons must retain their right of citizenship in the city, especially including the right to vote in the next municipal elections. Citizen rights to the franchise must be protected and widely explained to all dispersed persons. The provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 should be examined and enforced in this regard.

3. All displaced persons should have the right to shape and envision the future of the city. Shaping the future should not be left to elected officials, appointed commissions, developers and/or business interests alone. We the citizens are the primary stakeholders of a re-imagined New Orleans. Thus, we MUST be directly involved in imagining the future. Provisions must be included to insure this right.

4. All displaced persons should have the right to participate in the rebuilding of the city as owners, producers, providers, planners, developers, workers, and direct beneficiaries. Participation must especially include African-Americans and the poor, and those previously excluded from the development process.

5. In rebuilding the city, all displaced persons should have the right to quality goods and services based on equity and equality. Disparities and inequality must be eliminated in all aspects of social, economic and political life. It should be illegal to discriminate against an individual due to their income, occupation or educational status, in addition to the traditional categories of race, gender, religion, language, disability, culture or other social status.

6. In rebuilding the city, all displaced persons should have the right to affordable neighborhoods, quality affordable housing, adequate health care, good schools, repaired infrastructures, a livable environment and improved transportation and hurricane safety.

7. In rebuilding the city, workers, especially hospitality workers should have the right to be paid a livable wage with good benefits.

8. In rebuilding the city, African-American should have the right to increased economic benefits and ownership. The percentage of Black owned enterprises MUST dramatically increase from the present 14%, and the access to wealth and ownership must also be dramatically improved.

9. In rebuilding the city, African-Americans and any displaced low income populations should have the right to preferential treatment in cleanup jobs, construction and operational work associated with rebuilding the city.

10. In rebuilding the city, the right to contracting preference should also be given to Community Development collaboratives, community and faith-based corporations/organizations, and New Orleans businesses that partner with nonprofit service providers and people of color. No contracts should be let to companies that disregard Davis-Bacon, Affirmative action and local participation. Proposed legislation to create a "recovery opportunity zone" should specifically include Community Development organizations and minority firms as alternatives to the no bid multi-national companies. Over the last 30 years, such firms have demonstrated their capacity to successfully build hundreds of thousands of quality affordable housing, and neighborhood commercials and businesses and service enterprises.

11. In rebuilding the city, priority must be given to the right to an environmentally clean and hurricane safe city, rather than the destruction of Black neighborhoods or communities such as the lower 9th ward. Priority must also be given to environmental justice, disaster planning and evacuation plans that work for the most transit dependent populations and the most vulnerable residents of the city.

12. In rebuilding the city, priority must be given to the right to preserve and continue the rich and diverse cultural traditions of the city, and the social experiences of Black people that produced the culture. The second line, Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, creative music, dance foods, language and other expressions are the "soul of the city." The rebuilding process must preserve these traditions. THE CITY MUST NOT BE CULTURALLY, ECONOMICALLY OR SOCIALLY GENTRIFIED. INTO A "SOULLESS" COLLECTION OF CONDOS AND tract home NEIGHBORHOODS FOR THE RICH. We also respectfully request that the CBC initiate its own Commission to thoroughly investigate all aspects of the physical and human dimensions of the Katrina disaster.

Spokesperson: Mtangulizi Sanyika, AALP Project Manager can be reached via Email: WAZURI@AOL.COM.

Posted by lois at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2005

Senseless Census: Cities Lose Voting Power to Rural Communties With Prisons

by Susan E. McGregor
The Amsterdam News, NY
October 20, 2005
When someone is sent to prison, there are certain rights they're expected to lose. Their freedom is stripped away and so is their right to vote.

But for more than 36,000 Blacks incarcerated in New York State, a prison sentence may have deprived them of something else as well: their legal residence.

Despite the fact that the New York State Constitution explicitly states that "no person shall be deemed to have gained or lost a residence by reason of his presence or absence...while confined in any public prison," the 2002 New York State redistricting process did exactly that to more than 43,000 New York City residents incarcerated upstate.

"This is a grotesque injustice in the way that communities are disenfranchised," said Eric T. Schneiderman, deputy minority leader of the New York State Senate.

Last February, Schneiderman, who represents parts of the Bronx and New York counties, introduced legislation that would require future redistricting to be based on a prisoner's last known address, replacing the current practice of using federal census counts, which tally non-traditional populations - like prisoners - essentially by where they slept on the night of the census.

"The census is not why we have all these prisons," says Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative. "But the census is why we have all these problems. States never looked at the fact that the census data was not in compliance with their constitutions."

But while the current districting process violates the New York State Constitution, the 2002 redistricting plan did pass muster with the Department of Justice, partly because compliance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act only requires that redistricting not be "retrogressive."

Yet the conflict between federal and local assessments of residence has produced some impressive paradoxes in the counties where prisons are located. For example, Franklin County, which borders Canada, excludes prison populations when determining its internal districts, but the federal census includes prisoners in Franklin's county-wide population. On the state level, the prisoners exist as residents; on the local level they do not. Research has shown that this counting contradiction exists in approximately one-third of prison districts in New York State.

But the issue extends past the boundaries of the districts and counties that house the prisons. The fundamental problem is that counting prisoners as residents means that the number of actual constituents in prison counties is lower, and therefore each of those constituents' vote is effectively worth more than the vote of someone in another county.

In Franklin County, it was figured that "the vote of 8 residents near the prisons [is] worth as much as 10 residents elsewhere in the county."

Eric Stowers, political Director of the Downtown for Democracy Political Action Committee, which has organized around this issue, points out that "anyone not in a prison district is being hurt."

On the state level, Schneiderman said that he is "very optimistic" about the future of the redistricting issue in the Legislature. But just in case, he and the non-profit coalition New Yorkers for Equal Representation have secured the firm of Boies, Schiller and Flexner, which has tried cases against Microsoft and President Bush, among others, to file a pro bono lawsuit against the state.

Meanwhile Wagner and his associates are lobbying for changes to federal census methods, presenting testimony this past June to the body charged with reviewing census residence rules. According to Wagner, changing the census rules is the best solution both because it would make general research easier and because "this is definitely a problem in every state."

* * *
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/news/amsterdamnews10202005.shtml

Posted by lois at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2005

Incarceration Won't Solve Region's High-Crime Rate

Incarceration won't solve region's high-crime rate
Letter to the Editor, Springfield (MA) Rebpublican. October 24, 2005
I hope that Sheriff Michael J. Ashe, District Attorney William M. Bennett and Acting Police Commissioner William Fitchet read, not only the front-page page story, "Inmate populations hits a record," (The Republican, Oct. 18), but also the column on Page 11 by William Raspberry ("The price of low expectations").

Raspberry refers to work by Professor Todd Clear of the City University of New York, who has documented that mass incarceration - standard in Springfield even before this recent increase - serves to destabilize communities, not make them safer. In exhaustive research, Clear and others have demonstrated that locking up large numbers of people and then releasing them into the same communities where they have little chance of finding drug treatment, legal employment or job training further marginalizes people and their communities.

Incarceration becomes the one-size-fits all response and, with it, comes demands for larger budgets, more and bigger jails and more police. It turns out mass incarceration does not create less crime. It is a self-perpetuating cycle and one that the sheriff and police will not voluntarily break.

Instead, it is up to each of us to demand that we want fewer people in jail and would rather have some of the $55-plus million spent each year to cage people at the Hampden County jail to go to quality education, drug treatment and economic development - the long-lasting and real crime deterrents.
LOIS AHRENS The Real Cost of Prisons Project Northampton

Posted by lois at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)

New Mexico: The Pitfalls of Regional Jails

Editorial

Saturday, October 8, 2005

The pitfalls of regional jails

our views

At first glance, the idea of a regional jail serving Socorro, Catron, Torrance and Sierra counties seems to make a lot of sense.

Torrance County has no jail and houses its inmates at a private prison, which has doubled the county's detention budget; Catron County has an inadequate small jail that needs to be replaced; and Socorro and Sierra counties have rundown old facilities that are at or over capacity, requiring both to have to send their overflow to Gallup. All four counties lack adequate facilities for juveniles and, for the most part, proper facilities for females.

Each of the counties has a relatively small population and none has the financial resources to build a new jail on its own. At the same time, each is paying increasingly more in detention costs to maintain an increasingly inadequate status quo.

Collectively, the population of the four counties justifies a single new jail and the financing it would take to build it. And if transportation costs were built into the operating expenses of the jail, the burden would be shared equally wherever the facility is located (which would most likely be Socorro County for centralization reasons) without the host county getting an unfair advantage.

Despite these positives, there are some pitfalls that other counties have experienced that should serve as cautionary notes.

For instance, one of the suggestions made in the preliminary discussion was to build a large facility ‹ 1,000 beds was mentioned ‹ and rent out the excess to the federal government to house federal prisoners.

Bad idea, as many jails have found out.

First of all, a large facility has large expenses ‹ more staff, more overhead, more maintenance ‹ and unused capacity costs money. With the competition to house federal prisoners, there's no guarantee of 100 percent occupancy and, in fact, few jails that cater to the feds make any money to offset their own costs.

Second, in general, the federal government isn't looking for jail space for tax evaders and white-collar crooks. It needs housing for hardcore federal felons ‹ major drug lords, murders, kidnappers and others who require high security, which has higher expenses.

Instead of large facilities to address future needs, detention experts recommend that new jails be built with capacity for just slightly more than is required for the immediate future. Because modern jails use modular, pod designs, it is relatively inexpensive to add pods as the need arises.

As the regional jail process develops, the counties also need to watch out for the "vultures," those who want to latch onto the project to make a few bucks.

Back in the early 1990s, Valencia County was considering building a new county jail. The initial cost estimate for a modest, adequate, modern facility was $6 million to $7 million. Within weeks, out-of-state "jail consultants," designers, builders and everyone else with a desire to get a piece of the pie had descended on the county. Within months, thanks in part to the make-money-with-fed-prisoners lure, the size of the proposed jail had quadrupled, and the estimated cost was over $40 million, with some independent estimates ranging as high as $80 million.

It was only through the courage and diligence of an official in the state Department of Finance and Administration that the whole scheme finally fell apart.

Later, Valencia County built a sensible jail that serves its needs without busting the budget.

That, we would hope, would be the approach the county officials involved in developing this proposal would take.

Most importantly, the counties need to keep control of the process at all levels and avoid "pie in the sky" deals and private, for-profit prison operators.

A regional jail might be the best idea, but the four counties involved need to study it from the standpoint of meeting their needs, not entering the prison business.
http://www.dchieftain.com/opinion/55104-10-08-05.html

Posted by lois at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Teen Acquitted in School Zone Marijuana Case

The Associated Press
September 28, 2005
PITTSFIELD, Mass.- An Otis teenager has been acquitted of dealing marijuana in a case stemming from a controversial arrest that could have landed him in jail for two years.

Kyle Sawin, 18, was found innocent Friday of three counts each of distribution of marijuana and of committing a drug violation in a drug-free school zone.

Prosecutors say Sawin was selling drugs to an undercover police officer in a Great Barrington parking lot that was located within a school zone. Selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school carries a two-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.

One school is located about 175 paces from the parking lot; another is about a four-minute walk away, at the bottom of a hill down a side street. Both schools were closed for the summer when Sawin was arrested for selling enough marijuana to roll about three joints.

A jury deadlocked on the case when Sawin was first tried in July. District Attorney David Capeless pushed for a retrial despite opposition from some community members who said charging Sawin - who had no prior criminal record
- with the school zone violation was unfair.

Sixteen others who were arrested with Sawin in last year's parking lot drug bust are still awaiting trial.

Posted by lois at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

Number of Women in Prisons Is On The Rise

October 24, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (AP) - Women made up 7 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons last year and accounted for nearly one in four arrests, the government reported Sunday.

The number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons in 2004 was up 4 percent compared with 2003, more than double the 1.8 percent increase among men, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. In 1995, women made up 6.1 percent of inmates in those facilities.

The total number of people incarcerated grew 1.9 percent in 2004 to 2,267,787.

That figure includes federal and state prisoners, as well as 713,990 inmates held in local jails, 15,757 in United States territorial prisons, 9,788 in immigration and customs facilities, 2,177 in military facilities, 1,826 in Indian jails and 102,338 in juvenile facilities.

The country's state and federal prison population, 1,421,911, which excludes state and federal prisoners in local jails, grew 2.6 percent in 2004, compared with an average growth of 3.4 percent a year since 1995.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2005

771,608 people arrested for marijuana in 2004

Marijuana Arrests at All-Time High Again
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/408/alltimehigh.shtml

America's war on drugs continued full steam ahead last year, with the FBI reporting in its annual Uniform Crime Report Monday that an estimated 771,608 persons were arrested on marijuana charges in 2004, nearly nine out of ten of them charged with simple possession. The figure is an all-time high, breaking last year's record of 755,000, and gives the lie to oft-repeated law enforcement claims that marijuana enforcement is not a high priority. While marijuana use levels have been near stagnant in the past decade, the number of pot arrests has more than doubled since 1993.

The number of people arrested on marijuana charges in the US last year is greater than the population of the entire state of South Dakota (755,000), or for those urban dwellers, nearly as many as the population of San Francisco (777,000) and more than all of Jacksonville (736,000), Columbus, Ohio (711,000), or Austin (657,000).

Marijuana arrests accounted for 44.2% of all drug arrests, but it's not just pot arrests that were sky-high. The total number of drug arrests topped 1.74 million last year, and again, the vast majority -- 81% -- were for simple drug possession. Although drug use levels have remained relatively flat over the past decade, the number of drug arrests has increased by more than 9% since 2000 and nearly 23% since 1994.

Drug arrests were the single highest arrest category, edging out drunk driving (1.43 million arrests), simple assault (1.28 million), and petty larceny (1.19 million). There were more drug arrests than arrests for all property crimes combined (1.65 million) and more than three times more drug arrests than arrests for all violent crimes combined (590,000). (Simple assaults are not included in the serious violent crime category, which tallies aggravated assault, murder and intentional manslaughter, rape, and robbery.)

But it was the high number of marijuana arrests that brought out the critics. "These numbers belie the myth that police do not target and arrest minor marijuana offenders," said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "This effort is a tremendous waste of criminal justice resources that diverts law enforcement personnel away from focusing on serious and violent crime, including the war on terrorism."

"If we look at the government surveys, marijuana use has been stable or trending a bit downward in recent years, and yet we keep setting new records for the number of arrests," said Marijuana Policy Project communications director Bruce Mirken. "This strongly suggests that the arrest rates are driven by law enforcement priorities, what cases the cops choose to investigate, which arrests they decide to make. It is local police priorities that are causing this to happen. Reasonable people have to ask if this makes any sense," he told DRCNet. "Maybe there is a better use for these law enforcement resources, such as going after actual criminal or terrorists or other dangerous folks."

There are regional variations, noted Mirken. "While marijuana arrests as a percentage of all drug arrests increased from 39.9% in 1995 to 44.2% last year, the percentage of pot arrests was lowest in the West. Where things really went through the roof is in the Northeast, where marijuana arrests went from 36.3% of all drug arrests to 48.5%. Why that is happening in the Northeast I don't know, but somebody up there is putting more emphasis on marijuana smokers."

A marijuana arrest has human costs, ranging from a criminal record to loss of student financial aid and potential career difficulties. Sometimes the consequences of a simple pot bust are even more serious.

"It's important to remember that each of these statistics represents a human being, and in many cases, a preventable tragedy," said Aaron Houston, MPP director of government relations. "One of those marijuana arrests in 2004 was Jonathan Magbie, a quadriplegic medical marijuana patient who died in the Washington, DC, city jail while serving a 10-day sentence for marijuana possession. Had Congress not blocked the district's medical marijuana law from taking effect, Jonathan Magbie would almost certainly be alive today."

"Arresting adults who smoke marijuana responsibly needlessly destroys the lives of tens of thousands of otherwise law abiding citizens each year," NORML's St. Pierre said. "With nearly 17 million citizens arrested on marijuana-related charges since 1965, is now not the time for the state and federal governments to finally consider legally controlling marijuana via taxation? Is not such a public policy preferable to the current one where government arrests an extraordinary amount of citizens for an adult behavior that is not deviant, or, for that matter, dissimilar than consuming products that contain alcohol?"

Of the 17 million marijuana arrests mentioned by St. Pierre, nearly half have occurred in the last 10 years. Almost eight million people have been busted for pot since 1995.

Posted by lois at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

Museum of Modern Art Mutes Harm Reduction Message

MOMA Exhibit Mutes DanceSafe's Drug Harm Reduction Message
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/408/moma.shtml

Last week, Marc Brandl, executive director of the rave culture harm reduction organization DanceSafe was feeling pretty pleased. After months of back and forth with one of America's most prestigious art institutions, some of DanceSafe's harm reduction materials were slated to appear in an exhibit at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

"DanceSafe is proud to announce that our drug information cards, Adulterant Screening Kits, and poster will be going on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. The harm reduction- based tools we have used for years to educate and empower people around the world will be included in a special exhibit called 'SAFE -- Design Takes on Risk,'" Brandl announced last week.

According to MOMA, the SAFE exhibit "features a carefully selected array of more than 300 contemporary design objects and prototypes from all over the world designed for a variety of reasons: to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances; respond to emergency situations; ensure clarity of information; and provide a sense of comfort and security. The objects displayed in the exhibition address the spectrum of human fears and worries, from the most exceptional to the most mundane, from the dread of earthquakes and terrorist attacks to fear of darkness and loneliness."

This week, after seeing the exhibit, Brandl and DanceSafe were singing a different tune. Most of the DanceSafe materials were not in the exhibition. Of all the materials DanceSafe provided to the museum, the only item to make it into the show was a postcard on the dangers of hearing loss. To add insult to injury, the exhibit also distorted DanceSafe's drug education and harm reduction mission statement, making the group appear as if it were devoted to sonic harm reduction, not reducing the harms of drug use under prohibition.

"We had been in contact with them since March, when the approached us asking if they could use our cards for an exhibit, and we signed an agreement to that effect," Brandl told DRCNet. "I even made a last minute phone call last week, and they assured us everything was all set. We didn't have any indication that our materials had been cut; all they said was that everything was ready to go," he said.

"But when we got to the opening, all they had on display was our card about hearing protection and they described us as an organization that works at parties to help people with their hearing and to get home safely -- there was no mention at all of drugs," Brandl said. "Now, hearing safety and getting people home safely is in our mission statement, but 95% of our mission is drug-related harm reduction, as in drug education and pill testing at concerts."

At the MOMA exhibit, DanceSafe was described as "a not-for-profit organization targeting the rave and nightclub community encouraging protecting hearing loss and getting home safely."

That's not quite how DanceSafe sees itself. According to the group's mission statement, available on its web site, "DanceSafe is a nonprofit, harm reduction organization promoting health and safety within the rave and nightclub community... We train our volunteers to be health educators and drug abuse prevention counselors within their own communities, utilizing the principles and methods of harm reduction and popular education. Our volunteers staff harm reduction booths at raves, nightclubs and other dance events where they provide information on drugs, safer sex, and other health and safety issues concerning the electronic dance community (like driving home safely and protecting one's hearing). We also provide adulterant screening or pill testing services for ecstasy users... Our information and services are directed primarily towards non-addicted, recreational drug users. Non-addicted drug users are an under-served population within the harm reduction movement, despite the fact that they comprise the vast majority of drug users in our society. While many organizations exist that provide services to drug-dependent individuals, few groups address the needs of the majority of non-addicted, recreational users. We hope to fill this gap..."

Brandl and other DanceSafe members suspect that MOMA pulled the drug information cards and adulterant testing kit because the museum did not want to step into the controversial territory of making drug use safer, but that suspicion remains unconfirmed.

"The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the exhibit was the drug war strikes again," said Brandl. "I am sorry to see drug war politics creep into a modern art museum that is cutting edge and supposedly above such things."

Paola Antonelli, MOMA curator of architecture and design and the person in charge of the exhibit, didn't provide any confirmation of Brandl's thesis in her relatively non-responsive response to a DRCNet query about the matter. "DanceSafe was selected for SAFE is because we are in awe of their approach to safety by means of harm reduction," she said in an e-mail. "We feel that the strategy and the way it is realized with design are admirable and valuable. We are proud to have them in the exhibition."

As for the missing drug-related materials, all Antonelli would say was, "Very often, when the installation happens, the original checklist gets revised and works might be dropped. Other works in the exhibition were similarly sacrificed. I am sorry that they have felt misrepresented. Our intention was quite the opposite, giving wide visibility to a company that is doing a lot of good."

Antonelli has not responded to a second DRCNet query requesting clarification about whether concern about promoting safer drug use was a factor in the decision to not use the drug information cards or testing kit.

DanceSafe is not just complaining; the group's New York City chapter met Wednesday night to plot strategy. "We have not made a final decision about what to do about this, but it's possible we may distribute some of our information cards that were not included outside of the MOMA or to people going in," said Allison McKim, who along with Sarah Hill is co-director of DanceSafe NYC. "I was talking to national director Marc Brandl about some strategies to get some media attention. I suspect in the next few days we will probably distribute in or near the MOMA itself," she told DRCNet. "We will also encourage our members and friends to complain to MOMA about this."

For McKim, too, MOMA's decisions on the DanceSafe materials were mystifying. "I'm very surprised in part because when they are doing an exhibit about design approaches to dealing with risk, it seems like it would be very appropriate for tackling issues like drug use," she observed.

For whatever reasons, MOMA chose differently.

Posted by lois at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

Post-Hurricane Katrina: New Orleans Narcs Itching to Make More Busts

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/408/nonarcs.shtml
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans doesn't have the money to prosecute its current prisoners, prisoners whose sentences have been completed are being held weeks beyond their release date, the city still can't find 169 prisoners missing since the storm, and doesn't have a prison to keep them in (the Amtrak station is serving as a makeshift jail) if it does find them. The police department has seen 250 officers desert their posts during the flood, four officers charged with brutality, and others accused of looting. Oh, and the chief of police resigned.

But none of that is stopping the New Orleans Police Department's Vice and Narcotics Squad. In an interview this week with the Kansas City Star, head narc Capt. Tim Bayard said his 48-officer unit stayed intact throughout the crisis. The spirit of police camaraderie within the unit was so high that the entire squad, including women, shaved their heads in a statement of solidarity. "Even the women shaved their heads, ya know?" Bayard explained. "We have a dedicated bunch here."

This week, after weeks of dealing with the hurricane and its aftermath, the drug squad is itching to get back in business. Using storm-damaged Wagner's Meat Market on Claiborne Street as their station, the narcs gathered to get their orders from Bayard.

It was time to get out and bust some dopers, Bayard told his eager squad. "Stay together. Hunt in packs. And I want to drive this point home: Get in touch with your snitches. Let's get something going... If you got bad guys you can deal with, set it up. I'd like to get back to doing real police work again."

"Alright!" came the chorus of replies.

New Orleans may be recovering from the terrible damage of Hurricane Katrina, but some of its residents will soon suffer new damage inflicted by prohibition's war without end.

Posted by lois at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Placements in Foster Care Are at Lowest Since Mid-80's

October 23, 200
Placements In Foster Care Are at Lowest Since Mid-80's
By FERNANDA SANTOS
The number of New York City children in foster care has dropped to roughly 18,000 - half what it was just six years ago, and a total that approaches levels not seen since the mid-1980's, when crack cocaine began to sweep through local streets and tear thousands of families apart.

City officials and other experts say that the decline has been driven by a number of forces: a healthy economy, a radical falloff in the use of a highly destructive drug, and a shift in local child welfare policy, which now seeks to keep children in their own homes whenever possible.

"It's a historic change," said David Tobis, executive director of the Fund for Social Change, a private organization that tracks child welfare trends nationwide. "What happened in New York is extraordinary. There's a lot that needs to be changed, and the city recognizes it, but you can't deny that the continuous drop in foster children is terrific - and the city is doing that while helping families stay together."

Indeed, interviews with government officials, independent experts and lawyers who work in the Family Court system reflect widespread agreement that the city has made great strides in preserving families by offering parents a host of services - counseling, housing aid, food stamps, drug treatment - to help avert further abuse.

In 1991, the city's foster care population reached a record high of 49,100 - a figure reflecting the consequences of the crack epidemic, but also the way the child welfare agency counted children in care - and generally has been in decline since then. Still, as recently as 1999, the number of children in the custody of the state stood at 35,200.

Some experts and officials caution that the steep declines of recent years is cause for concern. They question whether the push to keep families together might be leaving children in harm's way, and worry that there is not an adequate supply of preventive services - counseling and drug treatment - for all the families at risk.

Moreover, they raise the possibility that the closing of any number of foster care agencies as the overall population shrinks might leave the city vulnerable in the event of another crisis.

"I see the changes with cautious optimism," said Lauren Shapiro, director of the family law unit at South Brooklyn Legal Services, which represents parents whose children have been placed in foster care. "Where the gap is now is that the preventive services are not enough, and what's out there is not comprehensive enough."

City officials, however, are quick to assert that investigators with the Administration for Children's Services are trained better than ever to accurately assess a child's needs and less likely to miss any warning signs. What is more, when families are kept together, the city saves millions of dollars.

Under the Bloomberg administration, the money saved by the city's child welfare agency through the reductions in the number of children in foster care - an estimated $27 million in the fiscal year that began in July - will be put back into the system in large part to finance the services that help families stay together while under agency supervision.

"It's not that we won't need more money as we go along, but this plan allows us to start moving toward fulfilling the current needs of the system," said John B. Mattingly, the agency's commissioner. "The goal is to reach a balance, to have an agency that is putting its money, and the right amount of money, in the right programs."

New York City's foster care population has undergone drastic changes in the past 25 years, but none as profound as those sparked by the beating death of 6-year-old Elisa Izquierdo by her mother in 1995. The girl had repeatedly come to the attention of child-welfare workers, but they missed the warning signs.

The unprecedented public pressure that followed compelled the Giuliani administration to hire a former prosecutor, Nicholas Scoppetta, himself a product of foster homes, to fix the system. Mr. Scoppetta's tenure was initially characterized by aggressive enforcement: from 1996 to 1998, nearly 35,000 children were removed from their homes and placed in foster care. In 1999, however, that number began to go down because, Mr. Scoppetta said, officials slowly recognized that child safety could be better served by preventing the trauma of foster care placement in the first place.

"There is always a debate as to whether you're a family preservation agency or a child protective agency, but I think that misses the point," Mr. Scoppetta, now the city's fire commissioner, said in an interview. "It's about assessment, and the whole perspective is that if a child can be safe at home, you should leave that child at home."

The agency under Mr. Scoppetta's leadership is generally credited with hiring more people, increasing salaries, improving training and establishing a computerized evaluation system to track the quality of its foster care services. It also adopted the recommendations of a panel of national experts brought in by court order to evaluate the foster care system.

Under Mr. Scoppetta's successor, William C. Bell, the number of admissions into the foster care system dropped to 6,200 in 2003, his last year in the agency, from a record high of 12,000 in 1998.

Meanwhile, agency officials assert, only 8 percent of the children left in their homes after reports of abuse or neglect were maltreated within a year of the first accusations. Moreover, the overall number of complaints of abuse has declined by 52 percent over the last seven years - an indication, some experts say, that the city has managed to keep families together without compromising children's safety.

"The new approach of keeping families together is just as effective at treating the disease - i.e., child abuse - without nearly as many side effects - i.e., the trauma of separation," said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a private group in Alexandria, Va.

"There is no system in the country that has succeeded going the other way, favoring removal over preservation," Mr. Wexler said. "New York City tried going the other way first, and it didn't work. It's clear the panic didn't make children safer."

Nationwide, other cities and states with troubled child welfare systems have also moved away from removing children as the first option, and their foster care populations have also slowly begun to decline.

The principal reason for reduction of the nation's foster care population is that welfare agencies have been able to significantly increase the number of children discharged from foster care, often through adoption, according to Wade Horn, the assistant secretary for children and families at the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

For New York, the next step, Mr. Mattingly said, is to develop a partnership between the agency and community-based organizations that would allow the city to mobilize a network of foster parents at a moment's notice should crisis spark a sudden increase in demand.

The partnership, which is still in its planning phase, would also allow these organizations to invest in programs and services that are most needed to protect children and preserve families in their neighborhoods.

"What we hope to be able to do is to offer neighborhoods flexible funding so that they can spend the money on these families and their children the way they think is best," Mr. Mattingly said.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Priv

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

Boston: Addicted to Drug Money---DA & The Police Hoard Money for Salaires and Consutlants

By Michele McPhee/ Special Report
Sunday, October 23, 2005 - Updated: 08:58 AM EST

Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley is using monies seized in criminal investigations to pay the salaries, pensions and benefits of 10 prosecutors - funds that are earmarked to fight the war on drugs, the Herald has learned.

Conley's chief of staff John Towle defended the salaries as a legitimate use of drug forfeiture funds, saying: ``Under the law it's allowable.''

The BPD and the DA's office receive hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in revenues from the confiscated assets of drug dealers, money that is spent with no public scrutiny or budgetary constraints.

Now several city councilors are sponsoring a bill that would earmark one-third of those monies specifically for drug treatment.

``Treatment and recovery is an equal partner on the the war on drugs,'' City Council President Michael Flaherty said. ``Unless we bring treatments and recovery to the table, we are never going to get to the point of being able to curb substance abuse and drug activities in our neighborhood.''

Mayor Thomas M. Menino said he supports the bill that will earmark drug monies to treatment beds. But Towle said his office will fight to keep the money, which is currently split between the DA`s office and the BPD.

Under Massachusetts law, drug forfeiture money can be used for ``any law enforcement purpose'' deemed appropriate.

``We are putting prosecutors in the courtroom,'' Towle said.

The DA's office also used the money for office space, equipment and drug purchases for undercover detectives, according to an accounting of the fund received by the Herald.

The BPD spent the bulk of its drug forfeiture money on a contract with Ron Smith & Associates, which has been paid more than $250,000 to clear a backlog of unprocessed fingerprint evidence. The cost includes hotels, airfare and food for experts who have flown in from Mississippi. Other expenditures included nearly $10,000 on crime scene cones and $34,000 on 33 digital cameras.

The DA's office did give a $7,000 grant this year to the Gavin Foundation's Cushing House, which is a residential treatment center for teenaged boys. A similar house for adolescent girls is opening this month at in at the Cushing House.

The City Council said that's not enough and several councilors signed a petition to create a special law to decide who should get funds from city forfeitures.

The bill includes startling information from the city's public health department, such as: ``Boston had the highest rates of reported illegal substance use among major metropolitan areas in the nation.''
BostonHerald.com - Local / Regional News: Addicted to drug money: DA, cops hoard dealer dough for salaries and consultants

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

October 22, 2005

Women Who I Incarcerated Finally Gets An Abortion

October 21, 2005, NY Times
Inmate at Center of Case Gets Abortion
ST. LOUIS (AP) -- A Missouri inmate whose effort to get an abortion went all to the way to the U.S. Supreme Court underwent the procedure.

The woman had the abortion Thursday in St. Louis, after the courts ruled that the state Corrections Department must provide her with transportation to the clinic at taxpayer expense.

The four-months-pregnant inmate was in prison in Vandalia, 80 miles from St. Louis, for violating her probation on a methamphetamine-possession charge.

The woman, whose name was not released, was willing to pay for the abortion but said she could not afford transportation. The prison system refused to give her ride because of a Missouri law that forbids the use of tax dollars to facilitate an abortion.

But a federal judge ruled that the policy violated the woman's right to an abortion, and the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let the judge's action stand.

''The governor remains disappointed in the court actions that compelled the state's involvement,'' said Spence Jackson, a spokesman for Gov. Matt Blunt. Jackson said that the prison policy reflects Missouri values.

The travel costs were estimated at $350 for two guards plus fuel.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

Posted by lois at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)

State Removes Newborn Over Father's 20 year old conviction

October 22, 2005
Officials Remove Newborn Over Father's Abuse Case
By KATE ZERNIKE
POTTSVILLE, Pa., Oct. 21 - County officials here in Eastern Pennsylvania left notes on Melissa WolfHawk's door, she said, warning her that they were monitoring her pregnancy. They told her they would try to take her child as soon as she gave birth.

She had the Caesarean section on Tuesday. Against her doctors' wishes, she left the hospital two days later to appear in court, but on Friday she lost her fight when a judge gave the boy to Schuylkill County.

At issue, officials say, is not so much Ms. WolfHawk's fitness as a mother as her choice of mates. The newborn's father, her husband, served a decade in prison as a sex offender in New York 22 years ago, convicted in the rape and sodomy of two teenage girls. The boy is the third child Ms. WolfHawk has lost for just that reason. The baby - lawyers are not disclosing his name - will be in temporary custody pending a hearing on longer term arrangements on Oct. 31, as well as an ongoing challenge that Ms. WolfHawk has filed in federal court.

The case illustrates the debate over how far the authorities should go in drawing boundaries between sexual offenders and their neighbors - or, in this case, their own families.

Ms. WolfHawk's lawyer says the county is violating her rights, and misusing the sex offender registries that have been established in the last several years across the country under measures known as Megan's Laws.

"That they're going to decide who you can associate with as a parent, that's just astounding," said Mary Catherine Roper, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing Ms. WolfHawk. "I don't know when imminent danger to a child became you can't have any friends we don't like, or even any exes we don't like. If you ever associate with someone who turns out to have engaged in child abuse then that's it for you."

County officials argued during the federal court hearings that they had a doctor's report saying that Ms. WolfHawk had used drugs; she denies that, saying there is no evidence in any of her medical records and that she will undergo screening to prove she is clean.

But officials say that their primary concern is the record of her husband, DaiShin John WolfHawk, although there is no evidence, they say, that he has abused children recently.

"He has a history of violent sexual abuse against kids," said Karen Rismiller, a lawyer for Schuylkill County Children and Youth Services. "Just because he served time doesn't allow someone to be around children. He's a sex offender registered in Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland."

Ms. WolfHawk testified on her own behalf in the hearing Friday, which was closed to the public. She refused to say anything as she walked out of the courtroom, holding her abdomen with a hand still affixed with a hospital bracelet, and wearing a blue sweatshirt reading "Transport for Christ" and her long red hair in braids. Judge Charles M. Miller said she could have two hours of supervised visits with the baby before the next hearing. Her lawyer said she had been breastfeeding the child and would deliver frozen milk to the county. "She's hoping it gets to the baby," Ms. Roper said, "but that obviously isn't the same as holding and breastfeeding her baby."

"It's devastating to an infant to be stripped from his mother in the very first days of his life," Ms. Roper said.

Ms. WolfHawk has expressed support for her husband in previous interviews, saying she saw no evidence that he was the monster depicted by county officials. He appeared with her in federal court last week, but did not appear here Friday. He could not be reached for comment.

Ms. Roper said that the two, who married in June 2002, have maintained separate residences for about two years, and that Ms. WolfHawk would be willing to sign an agreement to stay away from him if that would win her custody of her child.

The county, however, says that the baby is proof that she will not stay away from him. Mr. WolfHawk, now 53, was known as John Joseph Lentini when he pleaded guilty in 1983 to raping and sodomizing two teenage girls. He was sentenced to 5 to 15 years and served 10. Under state versions of Megan's Law, he is required to register with local police.

Mr. WolfHawk changed his name and declares himself chief of an Indian tribe called the Unole E Quoni, which he says has 175 families but is not recognized by any government. Ms. WolfHawk's lawyer said the two met 11 or 12 years ago; they are both members of the tribe.

Ms. WolfHawk had a son by a previous marriage, and Schuylkill County officials moved to take custody of him two weeks after the WolfHawks married, her lawyer said. The boy, now 8, remains in foster care. She became pregnant by Mr. WolfHawk and moved to nearby Lancaster County in 2003, because, a caseworker testified in federal court, she feared that Schuylkill County would take the child. Schuylkill County alerted Lancaster County, whose officials found her living in Schenectady, N.Y., and took the child back to Pennsylvania. By that time, a couple Ms. WolfHawk had lived with briefly in Maryland had filed for custody of the child, arguing that Mr. WolfHawk was unfit. That couple now has custody of the child.

In federal court hearings, county officials alleged that besides the two girls he was convicted of raping, Mr. WolfHawk had abused his daughter, who is now in her 30's, an accusation he denied.

The unusual case has raised some doubts even with groups that champion the rights of abused children.

Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said he respected the right of agencies to take custody of endangered children, but said that the standard for removing a child had to be set "very high."

"If somebody was convicted 20 years ago and has not reoffended, and the circumstances of the offense would not appear to make him a threat to young children, then this is troublesome," Mr. Allen said.

David L. Levy, the chief executive of the Children's Rights Council, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, said, "I am not aware of any case where a 20-year-old conviction, no matter how heinous, has been used to remove a child from the care of the perpetrator and from a mother who had nothing to do with that crime."

"The state may think that because they're married, the only way to make the child safe from the father is to remove him from the mother," he said. "But what about her due process and constitutional rights? If they can show a present danger, I'd be the first one to support removal, but they need to show a connection between 20 years ago and now."

Terry Aguayo contributed reporting from Miami for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Compan

Posted by lois at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2005

National Advocates for Pregnant Women--Building Pro-Choice Grassroots activism

Dear Friends and Supporters:

Last month, we had an extraordinary opportunity to test the theory that by building on the lessons learned from our clients, our concurrent work on drug policy reform, and Terry McGovern’s research on building grassroots pro-choice activism, we could begin to go on the offensive in our efforts to advance reproductive and social justice in America. On September 22 I testified by telephone before the South Dakota Task Force on abortion, along with other experts – pro and anti-choice -- I participated in an event clearly intended to lay the groundwork for new and even more punitive restrictions on access to abortion services in South Dakota and nationwide.

How this came about?

In September our colleague and ally Terry McGovern at the Women's Health and Human Rights Advocacy Initiative at Columbia University (WHHRAI) forwarded an e-mail from South Dakota Activists asking for a legal expert to testify at a special Legislative Taskforce Hearing on Abortion. We assumed one of the much larger pro-choice groups that focus on abortion would provide the legal expertise they were looking for. When it turned out that the South Dakota activists had not been able to find anyone, we followed up, and in the end provided the needed testimony.

Why was South Dakota having hearings on abortion?

Just like people who oppose environmental protection measures, people who oppose abortion don’t have any real science or medicine on their side. So what do they do? They create doubt. So for example, they convinced the South Dakota legislature to have hearings on the question of whether or not abortion in America today is voluntary and informed. Of course abortion is both – but by asking such questions our opposition creates doubt and puts our side on the defensive.

Indeed, the anti-choice movement has been doing this effectively for the last thirty years. Anti-choice activists use state legislatures as a tool not only for creating doubt but also as a laboratory for proposing and testing new restrictions on abortion. The new restrictions – whether on “partial birth abortion” or “fetal pain” also provide vehicles for inflaming and organizing opposition to abortion and support for broader economic and political agendas. This particular hearing and task force are apparently designed to provide the basis for new restrictions on abortion – including one that would require all pregnant women seeking to have an abortion to first have a psychiatric or other separate evaluation before being allowed to have the procedure. Even more ominously, local activists believe South Dakota wants to be the first state to provide the newest US Supreme Court justices with an opportunity to overturn Roe.

Supporting Local Activist, The Value of Going On The Offensive

Unfortunately, grassroots and state based pro-choice activists have had far too little support in their efforts to match and surpass the well organized efforts of the anti-choice activists. Our side also tends to stick to certain scripts that narrowly defend abortion and that rely on legal arguments that are technically correct—but unlikely to inspire or motivate our base –much less expand it. NAPW took a different approach. We took on the task force and anti-choice expert Vincent Rue by asking why the committee was ignoring the health concerns of the majority of pregnant women – including the ones who continue to term and the ones who suffer miscarriages and stillbirths. As local activists reported, the anti-choice members on the committee were finally, on this rare occasion, put on the defensive.

When we fully challenge anti-choice activists and put them on the defensive, we create the possibility for advancing an affirmative, offensive strategy and a framework that honors rather than demeans pregnant women, mothers and families.

Below please find two of the thank yous we received as well as the local AP story on the hearing. One of the e-mails we got after the testimony said: “To me, this feels like the beginning of a movement in SD.” As for the press, it does not capture the scope or tenor of our testimony, but it is an unusually balanced piece.

In any event, we hope this testimony will spark discussion and ideas for shifting the debate and developing both new frameworks and new commitments to supporting state-based activists like Kate Looby as well as the real grassroots activism that NAPW and WHHRAI are demonstrating is possible. We will update you soon on other aspects of NAPW’s work including some victories in cases in Oregon, Wyoming, and Washington.

Yours Truly,

Lynn and Wyndi and Wen-Hua

Posted on Thu, Sep. 22, 2005
Experts disagree about abortion counseling, consent

CHET BROKAW
Associated Press

PIERRE, S.D. - A South Dakota panel studying abortion heard Thursday from experts on both sides of the issue who disagreed sharply on whether women get enough information before abortions and whether they make voluntary decisions to have abortions.

Vincent Rue of the Institute for Pregnancy Loss in Jacksonville, Fla., said women are often under stress when they decide to get abortions and many report that they wish they had received more information before making that decision. Women also need time to evaluate the information before deciding whether they should have an abortion, he said.

"If an abortion decision is not voluntary, consent is not possible," Rue told the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion.

However, New York lawyer Lynn M. Paltrow of National Advocates for Pregnant Women said state laws around the nation require that women seeking abortions get more information than they would receive before getting other kinds of medical treatment.

"There is no legal, medical or scientific evidence that abortions are being done in this nation involuntarily," Paltrow said.

The task force heard Wednesday and Thursday from a series of national experts on various issued related to abortion. The panel decided to hear from South Dakota experts and take public testimony at its next meeting on Oct. 20-21.

The panel, created by this year's Legislature, is studying aspects of abortion and will report to the Legislature by Dec. 1. That report may urge changes in South Dakota's laws regulating abortion. State lawmakers said the study is needed because more medical and scientific information has become available since the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

Rue said women often feel pressured to have abortions from family members and others, and they are under pressure to make a decision quickly.

Rue recommended that states impose a longer waiting period between the time women receive information and the performance of an abortion, better screening to determine which women are at risk of having physical or psychological problems from abortions, and tailoring some information to teenagers.

Laws also should require that clinics report if women seeking abortions have been victims of abuse, give more information to women about the options of childbirth and adoption, and do a better job of determining whether women seeking abortions have been victims of abuse, Rue said.

"If women are not prepared and they make a decision in a highly stressful environment, then in my opinio