Sixteen states have more people in prison cells than college dorms

(theGrio)  College or prison: which is more important? In 16 states in the land of the free, the answer is prison.

As was reported in MetricMaps, there are 16 states where there are more bodies filling up the prisons than there are students living in college dormitories. What is truly fascinating, maybe even disturbing, is that nearly all of these 16 states are located in the South, the bottom portion of the country. You must view the map in order to appreciate the gravity of the situation.

Let than sink in for a minute. More people behind bars than in the dorms. What could it be about the South that would explain this? Could it be a tradition of slavery, racial violence and Jim Crow segregation, a legacy of criminalizing and dehumanizing people and of just not treating folks very well?

On the Need to Validate Young Black Men

In recent weeks there have been a number of news stories about young black men who were accepted to numerous elite colleges, including any and all of the blue chip, Ivy League schools of their choice. All of these positive news stories have provided a welcome respite from the usual fare, the portrayals of black youth as dangerous thugs, uneducated, unproductive, and a criminal element.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn Must Pardon Randy Steidl Now

Gordon "Randy" Steidl is a survivor and a hero.

He survived 17 years in the Illinois prison system, 12 on death row, for a crime he did not commit.  That is something few of us can fathom.  Now he is fighting against the death penalty as the board chairman of Witness to Innocence, the national organization of exonerated death row survivors and their loved ones.  Randy helped bring about the repeal of the death penalty in his home state of Illinois, when Gov. Pat Quinn signed an abolition bill into law.

Now all Randy is looking for is a pardon from the Governor.  And he's been waiting for an answer for 11 years, since he first filed his petition.  Is it so much for an innocent man to ask?

Steidl and co-defendant Herbert Whitlock were convicted and sentenced to death for the 1986 double murder of Dyke and Karen Rhoads, a newlywed couple in Paris, Illinois, in the rural Southern part of the state.  The couple had been brutally stabbed to death in their bedroom.

Meanwhile, the miscarriages of justice plaguing Randy's case provide us with clear reasons as to why the death penalty is a problem.  In essence, Randy Steidl was framed by the police and the prosecutors.  His wrongful conviction was secured through the "creation" of two sketchy witnesses, who came forward years after the fact to claim they witnessed the murders, and later recanted.  There was fabrication and suppression of evidence.  In fact, no physical evidence linked the men to the crime.  Further, Randy suffered from an inexperienced lawyer who couldn't get the job done, didn't ask the right questions, and failed to look into the prosecution's manufactured case against his client.

Randy was resentenced to life in 1999 based on an ineffective defense counsel claim.  And in 2003, a federal judge overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial, stating it was "reasonably probable" that a jury would have found him not guilty if provided with all the evidence.  In 2004, he was a free man, the 114th innocent person released from America's death row since 1973.  Whitlock was release four years later. Randy's story was featured in the British film project One For Ten, a series of documentaries on innocence and the death penalty.

In 2002, Steidl filed a petition for a pardon when George Ryan was governor. His petition has been pending through successive administrations, and is now the longest pending pardon awaiting a decision from the current governor, Pat Quinn.  Recently, lawyers from the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School and the People's Law Office wrote a letter to the governor requesting a pardon for Mr. Steidl.

"Certainly, there is enormous public support for Randy's pardon based on innocence.  Governor Quinn, this matter has lingered for far too long. Please do the right thing now, and allow this innocent man to clear his good name," the letter said.

"At a bare minimum, please do Randy the honor of sitting down with him, face to face, and explain to him why you have decided so many other pardon petitions during your tenure in office -- including 65 grants of clemency this past Friday -- but have repeatedly passed over his," the October 16 letter continued.

Randy Steidl is an innocent man, this is certain, and Governor Quinn has the power to grant him a pardon today.  Nothing can erase what Randy has experienced, and nothing can return to him all he has lost.  But let the man officially clear his name and his record, something which is curiously difficult for many among the wrongfully convicted.  What else is there to discuss?

140 years after the 15th Amendment, more progress must be made on voting rights

From the Progressive:

It has been 140 years since the 15th Amendment was ratified, but we still have a ways to go to ensure the right to vote.

The 15th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on March 30, 1870. It states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it adds: “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

With voting rights granted to former slaves, the change to the American political landscape was dramatic. There were more than 1,500 black political officeholders during Reconstruction, all of them Republicans. They included a governor and a lieutenant governor, state legislators and members of Congress and the Senate.


Despite the new voting rights protections guaranteed under the 15th Amendment, there was considerable Southern white resistance to black participation in American civic and political life. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were formed to intimidate blacks. And as federal troops left the South and Reconstruction came to a close, the South descended into an era of Jim Crow segregation. States engaged in the wholesale disenfranchisement of blacks, wiping them off the political map.

It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that full citizenship rights would be restored to black people. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of people died securing that right.

And sadly, now, in 2010, remnants of Jim Crow remain.

An estimated 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of felony convictions, including 4 million who are out of prison. A third of them are black. That means one in eight black men can’t vote.

“As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified,” says Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Some politicians want to return us to the days of Jim Crow laws. At a Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tenn., in February, former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo told an audience he lamented that “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” He added, “People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.”

Tancredo’s objectionable statement was a not-so-subtle reference to literacy tests, a weapon of choice used by Jim Crow states to disenfranchise black voters.

On the 140th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, Tancredo and others would have us turn back the clock, and return to a time when people of color were denied the right to vote.

Let’s expand democracy rather than shrink it.