The Community Can Bring About an End to the Police as We Know It

(Atlanta Blackstar)  Observing all of the activity coming out of the U.S. Department of Justice these days, it seems the feds are now in the business of cleaning up police departments or at least telling the police about their business. Will things change as a result, and should the community play a more active role in policing?

The DOJ investigated the Cleveland Police Department and released a report that found that the police had a pattern of using unreasonable and unnecessary force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, including deadly force, Tasers and chemical spray, excessive force against the mentally ill and dangerous tactics that place civilians and officers at risk. The feds told the Cleveland police to stop beating people upside the head with their guns.

These Are the States That Have ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws

(TakePart)  A Nevada murder trial is renewing the debate over America’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense laws.

The story begins in February, when Cody Devine, 34, and Janai Wilson, 29, apparently went, without permission, to a vacant rental property near Reno, Nevada, owned by Wayne Burgarello. According to prosecutors, Burgarello, 73, found Devine and Wilson resting on a floor. He shot them. Burgarello maintains he was acting in self-defense under Nevada’s Stand Your Ground law.

The case is an important reminder about the debate over the controversial laws. Thirty-three states have adopted some form of Stand Your Ground law, according to the American Bar Association. Ten states have introduced bills to repeal or scale back their Stand Your Ground laws this year, and 13 states have pending legislation to strengthen or enact such laws.

America Is Abolishing the Death Penalty—but Let’s Fix the Criminal Justice System

(TakePart)  Earlier this week, Nebraska became the first conservative state in 40 years to abolish the death penalty. The Republican-controlled legislature in one of the deepest-red states overrode the veto of Gov. Pete Ricketts, also a Republican, effectively dismantling what has been a cornerstone of conservative criminal justice policy for much of the last half-century. Nebraska lawmakers also voted to make life without parole the highest criminal penalty in the Cornhusker State.

With seven states in as many years abandoning the death penalty—for a total of 19 abolition states and 31 remaining death penalty states—it is heartening to see America moving toward an end to capital punishment. However, we must urgently, and smartly, fix the underlying issues that still drive people into the criminal justice system.

If Hillary wants our vote, she has to start being more vocal on our issues

(theGrio) Hillary can run, but she can’t hide from the issues that concern us.

On Sunday, Hillary Clinton — the former Secretary of State and First Lady — announced her candidacy for the White House.

This time around, it is reported that the idea is for voters to meet the “real Hillary,” the warm and fuzzy candidate who will meet in virtual one-on-one, small group settings and address the problems of the middle class.

Why Rand Paul’s presidential bid should matter to black America

(theGrio)  It is official.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is running for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. But why should black America care?

Pay close attention to his views on mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which could move the Republican Party forward on criminal justice reform and possibly attract blacks, younger voters and other Democratic base voters. But don’t lose sight of the senator’s past statements against civil rights, which sound a lot like the same ol’ GOP story. And that story, brought to you by the tea party, has not been very friendly to black people these days.

“I am running for president to return our country to the principles of liberty and limited government,” Paul said on his campaign website.

What would be gained if Terry Williams is executed?

There's an execution planned in Pennsylvania, the first one in thirteen years.  Gov. Tom Corbett signed a death warrant for Terrance "Terry" Williams.  Barring intervention from the Governor, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, or the Philadelphia District Attorney, Williams will be executed on October 3. 

But the execution should not go forward.

Two things stand out about the case of Terry Williams: First, he suffered a traumatic childhood of sexual and physical abuse, and ultimately killed two of his abusers.  Second, a broad coalition of organizations, religious leaders, advocates and others-- including the widow of one of his victims and several of the jurors who convicted him-- are calling for clemency for Terry.

First raped at the age of six by an older boy in the neighborhood, and coming home crying and with a bloodied backside, Terry Williams just couldn't win from day one.  His childhood was one of poverty, neglect and violence.  Terry was brutally abused by his mother with fists, switches, belts and extension cords, and beaten by his alcoholic stepfather, who would smash through the boy's door to administer the beatings. 

Throughout his youth, Williams was passed around by sexual predators, exploited as a sexual object by middle aged adult men who gained access to their teen prey with money, food and clothes.  A middle school teacher betrayed his trust and repeatedly raped him.  While in juvenile detention for a burglary, Terry was gang raped by two older boys. 

And there was no one to protect Terry.  No one stepped in to help this traumatized boy deal with the anger, shame, confusion, paranoia and self-hatred he experienced from years of manipulation and abuse.  As a result of receiving no counseling or mental health treatment, Terry resorted to self-mutilation by banging his head against the wall, cutting himself and making himself bleed.  Further, he attempted suicide in an effort to make the pain go away, and self-medicated in the form of alcohol and drug abuse.

But in the end, Williams lashed out at two sources of his pain, personified: Herbert Hamilton and Amos Norwood.  Using their status to lure teenage boys, these two middle aged men-- a sports booster and a church leader, respectively-- sexually abused Terry.  At 17, Terry killed Hamilton.  And six months later, barely 18, he killed Norwood the day after Norwood raped him, for which Williams was given a death sentence.   

However, the jurors were unaware of the history of sexual abuse.  "I was not aware that the victim in that case had been having sex with Terrance other teenage boys," said one of five jurors now supporting life for Williams.  "I also was not aware that Terrance had been abused by other men.  That would have been a factor in my decision."

In addition, the jurors were not instructed that a life sentence in Pennsylvania means life without parole.  Pennsylvania is the only state that does not require such an instruction in first- and second-degree murder cases.  A number of jurors say they would have voted for life rather than death.  "The reason that I opted for the death sentence was because I was under the impression that if we sentenced Terrance Williams to life in prison then he could get out on parole," said another juror.  "If I had known that a life sentence meant life without parole, I personally would have votes for a life sentence, and I think other people probably would have voted for life too."

Mamie Norwood, the widow of the victim in Terry's capital case, wants clemency as well.  She said that she forgave him several years ago after a process of prayer and self-reflection.  "I do not wish to see Terry Williams executed.  His execution would go against my Christian faith and my belief system.  He is worthy of forgiveness and I am at peace with my decision to forgive him and have been for many years.  I wish to see his life spared," she said.

Norwood and these jurors are not alone in seeking clemency for Terry Williams.  Now, 35 child advocates, 36 former judges and prosecutors, 48 law professors, 49 mental health professionals and dozens of religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Philadelphia, have publicly called for a commutation of his death sentence.  They join the European Union and numerous organizations such as Amnesty International, Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights, Support Center for Child Advocates, and the Pennsylvania Prison Society.  Moreover, thousands of people have signed a viral online petition at Change.org demanding clemency. 

"With our years of experience in reviewing claims of rape and other sexual violence, we speak out clearly that a crime was committed against Terry, nothing less," wrote the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. "Under no construction of American law or societal norms, is the sexual exploitation of a 13 year old boy by a 50 year old man a relationship, homosexual or otherwise. It is rape and any suggestion to the contrary is offensive."

Meanwhile, a bipartisan state Senate commission wrote a letter to Gov. Corbett calling for a postponement of all executions. 

Remorseful and a different person, Terry Williams' life is on the line--literally.  What could possibly be gained by his execution?  A star athlete and a freshman at Cheyney University when he was convicted, Terry suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and it got the best of him.  We will never know what he could have been, but we do know that he was an exploited victim of violence, leaving a devastating impact on his emotional and psychological development.   Executing him will only continue a vicious cycle of violence.

American Trifecta: Broken Political, Economic and Justice Systems

People are losing faith in a number of America's institutions because these institutions are failing miserably.

For example, take the U.S. criminal justice system. In one week we learned two things: First, Columbia law professor James Liebman and his students revealed that Texas executed an innocent man named Carlos DeLuna in 1989. DeLuna was executed for the 1983 brutal stabbing death of a young woman at a gas station. Forensic evidence was bungled or destroyed, and the crime scene quickly cleaned up. The actual murderer was Carlos Hernandez -- a man with a history of violence who bore a resemblance to DeLuna, and a self-proclaimed knife murderer who bragged about committing the crime. DeLuna's defense team even mentioned Hernandez to the jury as the real killer, but to no avail. Meanwhile, a condemned man maintained his innocence to his grave, and apparently all Latinos look alike to some key actors in the criminal justice system.

Second, and this relates to the first, the University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University announced the creation of a National Registry of Exonerations, a database of more than 2,000 prisoners wrongfully convicted of murder and rape since 1989. The authors of the database found, among other things, that death row inmates -- who are a quarter of those exonerated of murder -- are exonerated nine times more often than other murder convicts. And false convictions are typically the result of prosecutorial misconduct, perjury and bad eyewitness testimony.

In other words, the database confirms what many have maintained for quite some time, which is that the imprisonment and execution of innocent men and women are common, and far more common than you thought. Carlos DeLuna, Troy Davis and Cameron Todd Willingham may not be aberrations, but rather part of a troubling pattern.

Moreover, if the criminal justice system is allowed to exist in such a broken, dysfunctional and corrupt state, what does that say about the system itself, and those who allowed to administer it? After all, systems and institutions are made up of human beings, who have their own agendas, interests, foibles, flaws and prejudices that often conflict with the common good.  Meanwhile, born and raised in the "land of the free," many were conditioned to accept things as they are, assuming our institutions work well and in our best interests. Everyone who is punished is guilty, and the innocent are protected, or so they believed. But that's not always the case.  

Cracks in the criminal justice system reflect incompetence and negligence by some defense lawyers, judges and prosecutors. And prosecutors, at their worst, want to score a big win --  regardless of the tactics employed, and never mind issues of guilt or innocence of the accused, for that matter. So sometimes, they will strike black prospective jurors, coerce witnesses or hide or destroy evidence. Careers are built, livelihoods made and profits amassed through the human raw materials of the prison-industrial complex. And prisons and their contractors need warm bodies, sometimes dead bodies, to justify their existence.

If Carlos DeLuna and the exonerations database represent a turning point in the criminal justice system -- particularly the death penalty -- then other systems have had their turning points these days. For example, problems in the U.S. financial system, in the form of the Great Recession, the subprime mortgage fiasco and the student debt crisis, have precipitated a public discourse on economic inequality, and a critical look at capitalism itself. The conduct of commercial banks, engaged in risky casino gambling with other people's money, has led to renewed calls for re-regulation. Further, the injection of Bain Capital in this political season has placed the spotlight on vulture capitalism, where companies are chopped up and workers jettisoned, all for the profits of the few rather than the nation's economic well-being.

On the political side, it was the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, which gave a blessing to unlimited corporate influence in elections. This resulted in the birth of the Super PAC, the expansion of legalized bribery, and the ability of a small group of hyper-wealthy individuals to determine the outcome of the political process. Perhaps one of the more insidious examples of corporate influence peddling and the buying of lawmakers was ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, sponsored by major corporations, was responsible for a number of offensive policy initiatives across the country, including "stand your ground" laws implicated in the Trayvon Martin shooting death, forced, legislation mandating intrusive ultrasounds for pregnant women seeking abortions, and voter ID laws that stand to disenfranchise millions of people.    

America's criminal justice system is broken, but so are its economic and political systems.  That's quite a trifecta. In each case, the folks running the show are engaged in a winner-take-all proposition. In their adversarial worldview governed by pathological individualism, there always are winners (themselves and their friends) and losers (everyone else). As crimes are committed in high places, we are made to turn on the wrong enemies, powerless scapegoats from the poor and working class, and ethnic, racial and religious minorities. They make you believe that criminalizing, or killing, or deporting, or ostracizing these scapegoats will make your problems go away. And as they deflect attention from their own wrongdoing by way of smokescreens, they count on your undying allegiance to the system, and fealty to the status quo.

And yet, people are waking up. When citizens begin to question the institutions that have failed them and society for the benefit of the few, that's when real change has a chance to peek through the window. But we run the risk of missing that window of opportunity.  

China and the U.S.: World Leaders in Executions

They say you're judged by the company you keep. And the countries that execute the most people are members of quite a club.

According to Amnesty International, two-thirds of the nations of the world have abolished the death penalty, including 30 countries over the past decade. Only 21 of the 192 UN member nations carried out executions last year. China was the world leader with likely thousands of executions a year.

Following China were Iran, North Korea, and Yemen, with the U.S. in fifth place.  Trailing the U.S. were Saudi Arabia, Libya and Syria.

As the world trends toward abolition of the death penalty, so too is the U.S. losing some of its appetite for executions. As the Death Penalty Information Center announced in its year-end report, 2011 was the first year since 1976 -- when capital punishment was reinstated in the U.S. -- that fewer than 100 death sentences were produced in one year.

But let's not be mistaken. The death penalty, though on the decline, is still widely practiced in America, and it still is the law in 34 states.

State-sponsored executions represent the ultimate violation of human rights, and it is shameful that the U.S. is one of the world's most willing and enthusiastic executioners. China, which makes no pretenses regarding human rights, executes thousands of people a year because life is cheap in that authoritarian, hyper-capitalist state. Mass forced evictions and demolitions are commonplace for the sake of urban development, whether to make way for the Olympics, the Asian Games, a shoddy high-speed rail project, or Disneyland.

When Wang Yue, a two-year-old girl was left to die by two hit-and-run van drivers and 18 passers-by, people in China blamed a Nanjing judge for creating a climate of apathy. In 2006, the judge forced a Good Samaritan -- a young man who helped an elderly woman who had fallen in the street -- to pay her hospital expenses.  The judge's rationale was that "common sense" dictated that the young man took the woman to the hospital because he was guilty.

In China, with the world's most voracious appetite for executions, 55 crimes (down from 68) are capital offenses, including nonviolent crimes such as government corruption for a relative few unlucky scapegoats, and drug smuggling. It is an arbitrary system in which political maneuvering, the absence of an independent judiciary and perhaps even public pressure play a role in who is executed.

But at least the U.S. isn't China, right?  Maybe not.

In the land of the free, capital punishment remains the tip of the iceberg in a society that often disregards human dignity and human rights. Nearly one in two Americans is poor or low income, and America has the highest level of economic inequality of the advanced nations.  We stand alone in our lack of a national healthcare system. Our lawmakers, legally bribed by corporations, deny climate change for the sake of profit, and squeeze working people as they reward the rich.

Executions are merely the most violent manifestation of this inequity and injustice in the land, a failure to come to terms with bad habits and the demons of an American past that continue to torment us today. In 2011, three-quarters of the executions in the U.S. took place in the South. The lion's share of executions have taken place in the former Confederacy, with its long history of racial violence and segregation, and dehumanization born out of a legacy of slavery.

The U.S. death penalty discriminates against the poor and uneducated, racial minorities and those who cannot afford adequate legal representation.  And a small number of counties are responsible for seeking most of the country's death penalty prosecutions and convictions.

Meanwhile, as America touts its human rights record, it is hard to preach to others, especially China, as it continues to execute its citizens. The death penalty remains America's moral blind spot. It will take a movement, not to mention Europe cutting off America's supply of lethal injection drugs, to turn things around.

Cops Are Missing the Bad Guys While Profiling the Black Guys

The history of African Americans is one of great accomplishments amidst the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. That legacy follows black people, and particularly black men, to this day. And it is enough to make you red-hot burning mad. Although some are ready to usher in a new post-racial era of colorblindness, it is clear that their efforts are grossly premature.

In America, race is a proxy for violence. Black men are regarded as a criminal element, and racial profiling is a practice that goes far beyond the justice system. It is culturally ingrained and normalized. In the days of old, when black people were not allowed to roam about unattended or without permission, slave patrols policed the plantations and hunted down fugitives.

Similarly, today, police sweep through communities of color, searching for criminals. Any black man will do. And cops are searching for drugs, not because black or Latino people use the most drugs, but because of preference, of policy. Drug use among white youth is greater than among youth of color, but you will never see the police descend upon the nation's college campuses, round up those who "fit the description" and force them to endure a demeaning arrest. After all, society views them as the victims. Society has already decided who should be designated as its criminals, even if the "suspects" are as innocuous and upstanding as Henry Louis Gates -- a Harvard professor who was arrested for standing on his front porch and attempting to enter his own home. But status is not what counts; it's all about race.

Twelve Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today is a new book which tells the first-person accounts of black men who, like Professor Gates, have been there. These twelve men were victims of racial profiling, at the wrong place at the wrong time -- which for a black man could mean anywhere. Edited by Gregory S. Parks and Matthew W. Hughey, Twelve Angry Men contains a powerful introduction by Harvard law professor Lani Guinier.

A diverse group of people shares their encounters with the police, including a New York Times reporter who was detained while on assignment; Joe Morgan, a baseball legend who was racially profiled at LAX; Joshua T. Wiley, a hip hop artist who is constantly harassed by police, and Paul Butler, a law professor and former federal prosecutor who was stopped by the cops for living in a nice neighborhood. Meanwhile, Byron Bain, a Harvard Law student, was told by his arresting officer that he must attend the school on a "ball scholarship." Bain compiled a tragically comical "Bill of Rights for Black Men," which includes as its first and second amendments, "Congress can make no law altering the established fact that a black man is a n****r," and "The right of any white person to apprehend a n****r will not be infringed." Newly arrived, foreign-born black men with British accents are not immune from profiling and arrest. Even lawmakers are not exempt, as Congressman Danny Davis recounts his experience of racial profiling by the Chicago police while driving home from his weekly radio show.

Throughout the book, which is factual yet reads like a novel, these twelve men share the humiliation of being told that you are not allowed in a certain neighborhood, and the terror that comes with having a gun pointed to your head. Told where they can and cannot go and forced to produce their identification, they compare their experiences to antebellum slaves, black South Africans under apartheid, and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. One man, who was stopped at least once a month and as many as three times, had to leave home early enough in order to account for the possibility of being stopped. Perhaps one of the more appalling cases was of a boy in Prince George's County, Maryland, who was accused of shoplifting by a police officer moonlighting as a department store security guard. The guard made the youth take off his shirt, go home and return with his sales receipt to prove that he purchased it. The young man was awarded $850,000 in damages by a federal jury.

Although much of Twelve Angry Men deals with the anecdotal and the personal, the book also delves into the statistical, including a report on racial profiling as practiced by the New York Police Department. According to the report, which was released by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), race, not crime, drives police stops and frisks. This is what blacks and Latinos have been saying for years. And no matter what the neighborhood -- low crime or high crime, black, Latino, white or mixed, the results are always the same.

For example, 80 percent of the stops made by the NYPD between 2005 and 2008 were of African Americans, who are only 25 percent of the city's population. Whites, who make up 44 percent of the city's population, were stopped only 10 percent of the time. Over the past six years, nearly half of all stops were made on the basis of a vague category called "furtive movements," while only 15 percent cited "fits relevant description." In over half of the stops, the officers noted "high crime area" as an "additional circumstance," even in low crime areas.

"CCR has been litigating against the NYPD's racial profiling and suspicionless stops-and-frisks since 1999. For its part, during all this time, the police have claimed that they stop people based upon reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, based upon a description of a perpetrator, and as an effective tool to get guns off the street," Vincent Warren, CCR's executive director, recently told me. "The significance of this report is that New York City must finally come to grips with its racial profiling problem. There are hundreds of thousands of innocent Black and Brown New Yorkers who daily suffer the indignities of these illegal police tactics. And the police department should be protecting them and not harassing them."

Reading Twelve Angry Men made me angry, not because the subject matter was brand new to me, but because it was far too familiar -- not only as a black man, but also as a human rights advocate who worked with police brutality victims and their families back in the 1990s and decided to go to law school as a result. Whether or not racial profiling is a new subject for you, this book should spark some discussions. And bringing this problem into the light is the only way we can begin to fight it. Black folks are not the only victims of racial profiling, to be sure. But examining America's badge of slavery is a good place to start.

New census prisoner policy could benefit American cities

From theGrio:

America's prison population could play an important role in the country's redistricting battles, and help reshape America's electoral map.

A new federal policy will change the way in which prisoners are counted in the 2010 Census. Census officials plan to make prisoner data available earlier than in past years. Prisoners were always counted in the national tally, but the federal government provided prisoner data to states after they completed their redistricting. Now, states will have access to that information prior to redistricting.

This move is important because now, the states will now have the option of counting prisoners based on their home districts--typically urban areas--rather than the rural districts where many of them are imprisoned. Districts with prisons have received more federal dollars because they were able to use their inmate headcount to boost their population. Meanwhile, urban areas have experienced a drop in federal funds, and a loss of representation in Congress, because their populations have declined. After all, the cities have involuntarily donated many of their young men, and increasingly women, to fill up these rural penitentiaries.

And we cannot escape a discussion of the racial dynamics involved in the counting of prisoners. Inmates throughout the United States are disproportionately of color. Nearly two-thirds of America's prisoners are black and Latino. At the same time, the prisons that house these inmates are in predominantly white neighborhoods. With globalization, outsourcing and the shipping of jobs overseas, the prison town has replaced the factory town in depressed, rural white areas. The prison boom has benefited them. But for the inner cities, there is merely more despair.

Some have compared this dynamic to the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which allowed Southern states to count three-fifths of their slave population, who could not vote, for the purposes of tax distribution and Congressional representation. The compromise artificially inflated the influence of the South, on the backs of African-Americans who were regarded as less than human. Similarly, today the warm bodies of black and brown prisoners, who cannot vote, are counted for the benefit of the white communities that imprison them.

In New York, seven state senate districts meet minimum population requirements solely because they count incarcerated people in their population, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. With 44,000 mostly black and Latino New York City residents counted as residents of upstate prisons, these small towns are receiving undeserved political clout. And according to a recent report, 1,912 of the 6,980 residents in Brown County, Illinois, were inmates in 2000. The county's black population was 1,265, fully one-fifth of the total population. However, 1,260 of them--99.6 percent of the county's African-Americans-- were prisoners.

But the new census policy is welcome news for cities that are running out of people and running out of money. The recession is crippling municipal and state budgets alike. But so, too, is unchecked prison growth. One should not underestimate the crippling effects of the prison spending boom on urban life, in the nation that locks up more people than any other. Families are separated not only by prison bars, but often by hundreds of miles. Poor families of the incarcerated often cannot go upstate to visit their loved ones on lockdown, or can do so only through great personal and economic sacrifice. In the case of rehabilitated and nonviolent offenders who don't belong behind bars, their communities are suffering from their absence. They could be raising their families, engaged in occupations, and contributing to the neighborhood as leaders and productive members of society.

Cities are the lifeblood of America, as centers of business, media, culture, learning and the arts. But they have been losing out in recent years, as rural communities have exploited these ghost constituents of color that live behind bars. The new census rules will help urban areas flourish by allowing states to count prisoners in their home districts. A number of states have introduced similar census reform legislation. This is a good start. The next step is to bring some of these prisoners home.

Our Sick Society Normalizes Gun Violence

From BlackCommentator.com and The Huffington Post:



Sadly, it's the sort of thing that happens on a regular basis these days.

Someone, whether a disgruntled employee, a mentally unstable individual, a socially-awkward or obsessive person, you fill in the blank, goes on a shooting spree and exacts vengeance through the barrel of a gun. People express shock that this sort of thing could happen where they live, in the safe environs far from the nation's notoriously crime-ridden inner cities. Some will claim there were no indications the shooting suspect was capable of such violence. Meanwhile, others will insist "there was always something off" about the person. In any case, after the obligatory media coverage and perfunctory surface-level discussions, after the memorials are held, the grief counselors are dispatched and the victims are buried, things generally go back to normal. All is forgotten, that is, until the next tragic shooting that leaves x number of people dead and y number of people injured.

It was said that Amy Bishop, that biology professor at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, was angry because she had been denied tenure by the university. She supposedly visited a shooting range before her shooting rampage. And she was obsessed with President Obama. We also know that she shot her brother to death years earlier in what was ruled as an accidental killing, and she was a suspect in an attempted pipe bombing of her professor at Harvard.

There are questions that are beyond the scope of this commentary, but deserve some mention nonetheless. We know that the three victims who died, allegedly at her hand, were faculty of color. Was this deliberate? Certainly there is a story hidden in there, somewhere. Had Amy Bishop been a person of color herself -- perhaps an African-American, or a Muslim with an Arab surname -- would she have eluded the institutional screeners and gatekeepers for so long, given her sketchy past? Was she given a pass because she is white, despite her issues? Perhaps for some, these are insensitive questions to ask at this time, or any other time for that matter, but ask I must.

Oddly and consistently, such questions are always raised after the fact. You never hear of a shooting rampage that was thwarted, with the perpetrator-to-be either apprehended or otherwise stopped in his or her (generally his) tracks. Never do we hear of an intervention that allows such troubled individuals to receive the counseling and treatment they need, to protect themselves, and us, from the demons that haunt them.

And yet, while we will dismiss the perpetrators of such vicious acts as criminals or mentally disturbed outliers, our response to these tragedies reveals far more about our sick society than the troubled souls who committed the crimes. Tens of thousands of people die from gunfire in America every year, and most never get media attention. And yet, in a nation that has normalized the notion of a gun for every person, this is apparently a situation we are willing to tolerate. Based on the lack of an adequate public policy response to America's gun problem, one must conclude that these firearm deaths are viewed as collateral damage, the price society is willing to pay for a so-called "free" society of gun ownership rights.

No one can believe that the level of violence, of gun violence, in the United States is compatible with a stable, vibrant and free society. Add to the mix, the high level of hopelessly unemployed and (or) foreclosed citizens who lack an outlet to vent their frustrations; the legions of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who have returned home with undiagnosed or untreated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; and the use of prisons as a repository for the mentally ill, with inmates returning to the streets sicker than when they were on lockdown. Lots of guns, economic despair, deprivation and mental illness -- these conditions are a recipe for disaster.

In short, we are sick, and we need good medicine. The nation's political leadership often has proven too cowardly or too compromised to provide anything more than band-aids, but the band-aids haven't worked. In a country with so many crises, gun violence is yet another problem we have avoided for too long, only to have it shoot us in the face. But we cannot ignore it anymore, and we must make it right.

California chooses education over prisons

From theGrio:

With California a fiscal basket case, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently unveiled a draconian 2010-2011 budget for his state. He hopes to close a shortfall of nearly $20 billion through $6.9 billion in federal funds and $8.5 billion in budget cuts. On the chopping block are state aid to public transportation, schools, services for immigrants, in-home care and prisoner health care. Plus more than 200,000 children will no longer be eligible for health insurance.

Part of the problem is that prison spending is too costly, unsustainable, and indefensible. In California, prisons eat up over 10 percent of the state budget, while the state's public universities are only 7 percent. And California spends $18,000 more per prisoner than the ten largest states, according to the Governor's office.

Schwarzenegger recently proposed changing the state constitution so that no less than 10 percent of the budget would be allocated for higher education, and no more than 7 percent would be spent on prisons. California has the right idea when it comes to ending its prison boom and investing more in its future. But other states should follow suit as well.

"Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future," Schwarzenegger said in his January 6 State of the State speech. "What does it say about a state that focuses more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns? It simply is not healthy. I will submit to you a constitutional amendment so that never again do we spend a greater percentage of our money on prisons than on higher education."

For the Golden State-- the largest economy in America, crippled by high unemployment and the housing crisis--harsh fiscal realities are forcing lawmakers to seriously question the ways in which taxpayer funds are allocated. In many ways, California's prison problem is a profoundly American story, the culmination of years of misplaced priorities and failed policies.

Politicians, eager to please voters with a tough-on-crime stance, passed draconian laws that were popular yet made no sense. These unfair laws--with catchy names such as "Three Strikes"-- led to a swelling of the prison population, with more people behind bars and with longer sentences. Special interest groups such as the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) have donated millions of dollars to political campaigns and successfully lobbied for stiff drug laws and longer prison terms. Prison overcrowding has become such a problem that a federal court found the conditions unconstitutional, and ordered California to cut its prison population by as many as 55,000 inmates.

The poor, African Americans and Latinos have been disproportionately affected by the prison boom. Three-quarters of incarcerated men in California are of color.

Meanwhile, California's students cannot afford to go to college. The state's public university system has suffered from budget cuts and a recent 32 percent tuition hike, which has sparked student protests.

Throughout the country, state governments are faced with a cash shortage and expensive, burgeoning prison populations. Unfortunately, desperation often serves as a factory for bad ideas. For example, Arizona is considering privatizing its 40,000 inmate prison system, including its death row. And Pennsylvania has decided to ship 2,000 prisoners to cash-needy Michigan and Virginia in February to address overcrowding issues.

But ultimately, states cannot outsource, privatize or ship all of their problems away. The answer is to develop thoughtful and effective alternatives to incarceration, decriminalize nonviolent drug offenses, and broaden opportunities for educational and economic advancement. And Black and Latino youth should have a future filled with something better than prison bars. Spending more on prisons than colleges is a recipe for disaster.

New York's Juvenile Prisons Are A Crime

If you can judge a society by the way it treats its children, then New York fails in a big way. In fact, the Empire State should be found guilty of child abuse and neglect.

The New York Times recently reported on the deplorable state of New York's juvenile justice system. Gov. David Paterson appointed a task force to look into the matter. A draft report prepared by the task force--a stinging indictment of the state's treatment of juveniles in state custody--comes three months after a federal investigation found constitutional violations at four facilities. The abuse was so severe, including broken bones, concussions, knocked-out teeth and other injuries, that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) threatened to take over the prison system.

The task force was assembled as a result of years of complaints, and incidents such as the death of an emotionally-disturbed 15-year-old boy after he was pinned down by prison staff. The bottom line is that New York's juvenile centers are broken, expensive, unfair and a failure.

It is shocking that the state spends close to $210,000 per year to incarcerate a youth. More than 1,600 juveniles enter the system each year. In these days of budget cuts, shortfalls and economic triage, that is money that will not go to that child's education and development. What does the taxpayer, or the juvenile, for that matter, actually get for $210,000? Not much, it appears. Although the system was meant for those juveniles who are a danger to society if not themselves, there is no system to assess whether they are a risk to public safety. Over half of the children are placed in these detention centers for misdemeanor offenses such as drug possession, truancy and theft. And three-quarters of those youths who are released from custody return within three years.

Many of these children have problems that are not being addressed, including developmental disabilities, drug or alcohol addiction problems, and mental illness. But the facilities are understaffed, with only 55 psychologists and clinical social workers, and absolutely no psychiatrists that can prescribe medication. Moreover, juveniles are locked up with violent adult criminals and susceptible to physical abuse, while staff use force as a form of discipline for the most minor infractions.

Race and the criminal justice system are inseparable, and the New York system is proof of that. Blacks and Latinos are less than half of the state's juvenile population. Yet, at over 80 percent, black and Latino youth are the overwhelming majority of the occupants of its juvenile prisons. And while seventy-six percent of these children come from the New York City area, they are imprisoned upstate, far away from their families, out of reach, and accessible only through a great expense. With a median age of 16 and one-third of them reading on a third grade level, they have learned nothing in a school system that has failed them. Not surprisingly, they receive no education in these centers.

"The DOJ report makes clear what many system stakeholders have been saying for a very long time: namely, that New York's juvenile justice system is failing in its mission to nurture and care for young people in state custody," the task force said of the previous federal investigation. "The state's punitive, correctional approach has damaged the future prospects of these young people, wasted millions of taxpayer dollars, and violated the fundamental principles of positive youth development." Further, the task force concluded that New York State is endangering the public by placing thousands of children in these facilities.

The report concludes that institutionalizing youth should only be used as a last resort for small percentage of them, and to protect public safety. In those cases, the goal should be to rehabilitate them, rather than harm or harden them. Some of the recommendations made in the report include reducing the use of institutional placement; addressing the racial disparities; reinvesting in communities, expanding community-based alternatives to institutional placement; funding education and mental health treatment programs that prepare juveniles for release and reentry, and creating a system of transparency and accountability.

For those who are familiar with the dysfunction and inequities of the criminal justice system, this report should not be surprising. This author has no shortage of commentaries written on this very subject. Nevertheless, this report should shock the conscience of expert and layperson alike. In poor communities and communities of color, children are funneled through a cradle-to-prison pipeline, as the Children's Defense Fund so effectively reported in recent years. With a broken education and no employment opportunities, these children are being set up for a life behind bars. Schools are a holding pattern for prisons, and with metal detectors and armed police with the power to arrest, many urban schools resemble prisons. Society's answer is to incarcerate more and more people, and to criminalize and punish at a younger age. This tragic situation plays itself out throughout the nation, with the same results. And as the nation with the world's largest prison population, what does America have to show for it?

Gov. Paterson's task force report provides a warning not only to New York concerning its miserable juvenile justice system, but to other states as well. And in the end, they should be applauded for finding constructive solutions to a problem that should concern us all. In Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida, California, Texas and everywhere else, no longer can we ignore the consequences of our inaction.

Ohio rapist shows high price of prisons ignoring rehabilitation

From theGrio:

http://www.thegrio.com/2009/11/ohio-rapist-shows-high-price-of-prisons-ignoring-rehabilitation.php 

Plea Bargains In The Criminal McJustice System

By David A. Love, Daily Kos and Open Salon

In Philadelphia, it is time for a new district attorney. The current D.A. Lynne Abraham is retiring, and none too soon— after 18 years in the position, she has been called “America’s deadliest D.A.” for her exceptionally voracious appetite in seeking the death penalty. Without question, most of the people sentenced to death were African American.  

A report by the Death Penalty Information Center noted that Amnesty International characterized Pennsylvania’s death penalty as one the most racist in America. Philadelphia, with 14% of Pennsylvania’s population, has accounted for more than half of the state’s death sentences. Further, Blacks in Philadelphia were far more likely to get the death penalty than similarly situated defendants—3.9 times to be exact. The report also said the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s death row prisoners are Black, and 84% of death row inmates from Philadelphia are Black. 

Yet, despite the complaints about Abraham over the years, someone voted her back into office, election after election, didn’t they?

Seth Williams recently won the Democratic primary for the D.A.’s race, which means he stands a better than good chance of becoming Philadelphia’s next prosecutor in this heavily Democratic city. If he wins, he will have lots of power. But will he use those powers for good? His platform looks promising, including dealing with violent rather than nonviolent crime, employing preventative measures, and most of all, reducing the number of plea bargains.

A plea bargain is an agreement in a criminal case where the defendant pleads guilty to a crime—usually to a lesser crime than the original charge—and waives his or her right to a jury trial, and the right against self-incrimination. At its worst, I view plea bargaining as a shortcut to justice, sometimes an injustice in and of itself. A plea bargain is to justice what fast food is to gourmet cooking. Quicker doesn’t necessarily mean better, and 90% of criminal cases end up in plea bargains. It gives the impression that justice is a deal that can be bartered. Perhaps these plea bargains are the grease that helps to lubricate an often frustratingly slow and overburdened justice system. Or perhaps they are the grease that clogs up the arteries of the justice system, and makes that system hardened, calcified, inelastic and diseased— unable to allow justice to flow.

Perhaps some plea agreements serve a legitimate purpose. But what happens when the defendant didn’t commit a crime at all, and is pressured into taking the deal by his or her defense lawyer or coerced by the D.A.? What if the crime should not have been prosecuted at all, such as the case of marijuana possession, or a good kid with no prior offenses? A criminal record—in most cases secured as a result of a plea bargain, whether or not the defendant actually did the crime—can mean prison time, social stigma, and a bar to many educational and employment opportunities. Prosecutors have a lot of power, and they have a lot of discretion in deciding who gets prosecuted and for what offenses. They may choose not to prosecute a nonviolent, victimless crime, or choose not to seek punishment that serves no legitimate social purpose. And as they say, you can indict a ham sandwich.

The fact of the matter is that many prosecutors build their careers on the backs of the prosecuted. The number of convictions one racks up become notches in the belt of one’s political career, rungs in the ladder of success. And whether those people actually committed crimes is secondary in importance, if important at all. 

The American Bar Association (ABA) Rules of Professional Conduct, as well as the Pennsylvania rules, say the following about the role of a prosecutor:

Rule 3.8 Special Responsibilities Of A Prosecutor

The prosecutor in a criminal case shall:

(a) refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause;

(b) make reasonable efforts to assure that the accused has been advised of the right to, and the procedure for obtaining, counsel and has been given reasonable opportunity to obtain counsel;

(c) not seek to obtain from an unrepresented accused a waiver of important pretrial rights, such as the right to a preliminary hearing;

(d) make timely disclosure to the defense of all evidence or information known to the prosecutor that tends to negate the guilt of the accused or mitigates the offense, and, in connection with sentencing, disclose to the defense and to the tribunal all unprivileged mitigating information known to the prosecutor, except when the prosecutor is relieved of this responsibility by a protective order of the tribunal.

 
The realities of how some prosecutors behave fly in the face of these sensible rules— rules which assume that the ultimate goal is getting to the truth, rather than the personal aggrandizement of the lawyers and others who oversee the criminal justice system.  

Consider the town of Tenaha, Texas, where the D.A. and the police are being sued for, literally, highway robbery: A federal class-action lawsuit alleges that cops have been illegally stopping hundreds of mostly out-of-town, Black and Latino motorists, and giving them the choice of taking a felony charge, or handing over their money and valuables. A black grandmother from Akron, Ohio was forced to give up $4,000 after Tenaha police pulled her over. Meanwhile, an interracial couple from Houston surrendered over $6,000 to police, who had threatened to take their children and place them in foster care. Between 2006 and 2008, the town has seized around $3 million under this perverse use of Texas’ forfeiture law, which requires such seized money to be used for law enforcement purposes. But in Tenaha, proceeds from these illegal seizures went to a church and a little league baseball team, and one officer received a $10,000 check. “We try to enforce the law here,” George Bowers, the town’s mayor said. “We’re not doing this to raise money.”

And consider the town of Tulia, Texas (there seems to be a pattern with these Texas towns), where a racially-motivated drug sting led to the arrest of 46 people, nearly all African American, on bogus drug charges. No drugs, money or weapons were seized because no crimes had been committed. Yet, some of these people were sentenced to very hard time, 99 years in one case. Fourteen of the defendants took pleas and were sent to prison. Prosecutors relied on the testimony of a sketchy undercover narcotics agent with a checkered past. The regional, 26-county drug task force that masterminded the sting was allowed to play by its own rules. They received federal money, and were funded based on the number of arrests and convictions they helped win. Such disasters cannot occur without the participation of sheriff's departments, disreputable police officers and unscrupulous district attorney's offices that are looking to make that big score.  

And society participates in the madness by putting profit into imprisonment, and by endorsing public officials who thrive on a “tough on crime”, “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” stance.

Two judges in Luzerne County, PA were looking for that big score when they collected $2.6 million in kickbacks from private juvenile detention centers. In return, the judges helped the centers secure their contracts, and filled the centers with over 5,000 children, many first-time offenders who committed minor offenses. The judges denied many of these juveniles access to an attorney. Like the law enforcement agent or the prosecutor who racks up arrests or convictions for personal advancement, it is amazing what happens when dollars are at stake.

When justice is reduced to a hustle or a deal—not unlike the economic system that the justice system has undergirded for so long—we all become cheapened in the process. And all you have left is a fast food justice system, a McJustice system.  

Our House Is On Fire, Part 2: Please Don’t Feed the Prison Monster

By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com


The following is the first part of an ongoing Color of Law series. Click here to listen to my discussion with Mark Thompson on the "Make It Plain" program, Sirius Radio 146, XM 167.

At its worst, America’s criminal justice system represents the place where racism, greed and corruption intersect. At its best, it is inherently flawed, unjust, and unreliable, and little better than its worst.

The engine that drives this injustice system is known as the prison industrial complex. It is the theater in which the nation’s foremost method of social control—and a failed method at that—plays itself out to the detriment of society. Recent events help to underscore just how bad things are:


First, two Pennsylvania judges were recently convicted for receiving $2.6 million in cash to send 5,000 juveniles, many first-time offenders, to two private detention centers. One judge secured the contracts for the companies, while the other judge filled up the facilities with warm bodies.


Meanwhile, Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, that state’s highest criminal court, is in a heap of trouble.  The State Commission on Judicial Conduct initiated impeachment proceedings against Keller for incompetence, violating her duties as a judge and casting public discredit on the court. Now for a state such as Texas, whose justice system boasts an already pitifully low standard of integrity, with defense attorneys allowed to fall asleep during their client’s trial, this is no small potatoes. What did this self-described pro-prosecution judge do? Well, she refused to keep the court open after 5pm when she knew Michael Richard, a death row inmate, sought a last-minute appeal challenging the constitutionality of his punishment (lethal injection). The inmate was unable to file an appeal and was executed.

Also, Keller rejected a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA evidence showed that he did not rape the victim.  “We can't give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,”  Judge Keller said. “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important. When witnesses testify, and when jurors return a verdict, they need to know that they can't come back later and change their minds.”


Finally, a three-judge federal panel recently ruled that California’s state prisons must reduce their inmate population by one-third, or about 57,000 prisoners. The judges found that the level of overcrowding in the state institutions deprives the inmates of adequate healthcare and is unconstitutional.


By itself, any one of these stories shocks the conscience. We would hope that these sordid tales are the exception to the rule. However, these cases reflect a dysfunctional system that is functioning as designed by a dysfunctional society. Allow me to demystify the prison industrial complex and identify the threads that connect the crooked judges in Pennsylvania and Texas, and overcrowded prisons in California.

It was no accident that the United States became the nation with the world’s largest prison population, with 2.3 million behind bars, and a total of 7.3 million in jail, prison, parole or probation, or 1 in every 31 adults. America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and the majority of these are people of color. The most ruthless and repressive totalitarian dictatorship cannot claim such impressive statistics. Public policy, informed by a legacy of Jim Crow racism, the profit motive and obscene, misplaced priorities, explains it all.

The United States has decided to treat prisons as a growth industry. Prisons have become the new company town, in a nation where most of the factory jobs left long ago, casualties of globalization and the race to find the lowest worldwide labor costs. They are built in mostly rural White areas, and over the years these communities courted these prisons, whether state-operated or privatized, for the jobs they promised to bring to these depressed communities.

Every factory requires raw materials. The raw materials for the prison-as-factory are Blacks and Latinos, and poor Whites—uneducated, in many cases illiterate, and unskilled casualties of a system that has programmed their failure through a cradle-to-prison pipeline. The criminalization of youth of color, systemic poverty, failed public schools and the wholesale denial of opportunity is fundamental to this pipeline.

In order to ensure a steady stream of Black, Brown and poor White bodies, these raw materials, into the factory, you must maintain the right policies. So, in the Jim Crow segregated South, the powers that be decided to keep Blacks in their place and eviscerate their political power, to maintain a system of slavery after slavery had been supposedly abolished. Through the Black Codes, the Southern establishment criminalized certain behaviors that were associated with the Black community. Certain offenses such as “mischief,” “insulting gestures” “cruel treatment to animals,” and the “vending of spiritous or intoxicating liquors” applied only to African Americans. In addition, it was illegal for Blacks to cohabit with Whites (which carried a life sentence) or keep firearms. Kangaroo courts were utilized to fill the prisons with Black men, who were farmed out for their labor and summarily, forever, denied the right to vote.

Nowadays, a high-tech Jim Crow has met the information age. In recent decades, the war on drugs has resulted in draconian sentencing, particularly for crack cocaine (a drug associated with poor drug users of color) vs. powdered cocaine. Politicians climb the career ladder through their tough on crime stance, exploiting White fears of Black criminality. Police conduct raids and sweeps in Black and Brown poor communities, rather than the suburbs and posh corporate suites, to find illegal drug activity. Communities of color are punished in the process. Black and Latino men (and increasingly women) are shipped upstate to far-flung prisons in White communities. Their families can visit them only through great personal and financial hardship. In a new twist on the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise (which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the benefit of the Southern states in terms of Congressional apportionment and the distribution of taxes), these prisoners are counted as residents of these rural for census and tax purposes. Yet, they are unable to vote, and in many cases unable to vote after they complete their sentence (about 5.3 million people cannot vote because they have felony convictions, including 13% of all Black men). Meanwhile, the mostly urban communities that raised them are depleted of resources— human, political and economic.

And the lynching of Black men was made cleaner, legitimate and more “respectable” by bringing it into the justice system in the form of state-sponsored executions. Executions, like Texas backwater lynchings, are arbitrary, barbaric and race-based. The defendant typically is a man of color, the underlying crime involves a White victim (80% of the time, according to the Death Penalty Information Center), and the chief prosecutor is White (98% of the time). Like the lynch mob, the administrators of the death penalty system ultimately care little about guilt or innocence. Someone’s got to pay, and anyone will do. When soon-to-be former Judge Keller expressed her sentiments that we can’t give every innocent person a new trial, she was getting at the heart of a criminal justice system that cares everything about finality and little about true justice. And so, new raw materials are constantly required to satisfy the hunger of the prison machine.

Those who are interested in the expansion of the prison boom, including the corrections officers’ union in California, private prison firms, and others, lobby state legislatures for longer, harsher sentences to keep more people behind bars for longer periods of time. As a result, ruinous policies based on catchy slogans, including three strikes laws, have prevailed. And as the prison population has burgeoned in the process, so too have the state budget allocations for prison spending. A society should be judged for its misplaced priorities when it spends more on incarcerating people than on educating them. But this is where criminal justice policy clashes with economic reality. At a time when states are going bankrupt—unable to pay their state employees, unable to pay tax refunds, or unable to collect the trash—ineffective profligate prison spending is breaking the banks of state governments. And despite the promises of a retributive and punitive legal regime, the war on drugs has been an abysmal failure. Draconian sentencing destroys communities and does not fight crime. America’s attitude towards drugs and drug policy, not to mention a steady supply of guns from the U.S., is wreaking havoc on cartel-ridden Mexico. And as the Obama administration has signaled that the federal government is moving away from the decriminalization of marijuana, California is now considering legalizing marijuana and taxing it to bring in billions of dollars in annual revenue.

One thing is for sure: the current path is bankrupting the United States, both in a moral and economic sense. The prison building madness has run its course, and it is time for it to stop. In a nation that has tried to make a buck from just about everything, including human bondage and the misery of others, America must stop feeding the prison monster.

Cick here to read Part 1 of this series: Our House Is On Fire, Part 1: Now the Robber Barons Replace the Welfare Queens (and Rightly So)