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.

What Baltimore Tells Us About America’s Racism and Inequality

(TakePart)  The unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray—who died of a severed spine while in police custody—seemed to have caught elected officials, the public, and the media off guard. And those who are far removed from the problems, the challenges, and the indignities facing poor and disenfranchised communities in that city shake their heads in disbelief and wonder why this is all happening.

Surely, the distant observer or armchair pundit has questions. Why are they protesting? Why are they destroying their own neighborhoods? Why did they loot the CVS? Why didn’t the suspect simply comply with the police and avoid causing his own death?

These questions reflect the very real disconnect between the haves and the have nots in the land of the free, and the gaping chasm on matters of race. It’s impossible to comprehend what’s happening here and now—or know the issues we have yet to face—without having an intimate awareness of black America’s history.

Sorry Bill Clinton: The effects of your drug, prison policies need more than a ‘my bad’

(theGrio)  They always say better late than never.

But in the case of Bill Clinton’s apology for the war on drugs and mass incarceration, is it too much, too late?

President Bill Clinton admitted what few politicians ever do. He said he was wrong. He conceded that the policies of his administration played a role in today’s mass incarceration of America.

As CNN reported, the former president admitted that he and his administration touted the “three strikes” provision of his 1994 omnibus crime bill, while also pointing the finger at Republicans. The legislation provided for mandatory life sentences for people convicted of a violent felony after at least two prior convictions, including drug-related offenses.

America’s 1.5 million missing black men is nothing short of genocide

(theGrio)   Where have all the brothers gone?

The numbers are staggering.

According to a report in The New York Times, black women between the ages of 25 and 54 outnumberblack men by 1.5 million, based on an analysis of data from the 2010 U.S. Census. There were 7.046 black men of that age group not incarcerated, to 8.503 black women.

To put it another way, for every 100 black women, there are 83 black men. This is not the case in white America, where for every 100 women, there are 99 men, almost complete parity.

What that means, effectively, is that black men have disappeared. This reality lends credence to the idea that black men are an endangered species — not just symbolically or rhetorically, but based on the hard numbers.

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.

In theGrio this week: Holder on sentencing reform, and civil rights families in shambles

Check out my two contributions to theGrio this week, including a report on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement on sentencing reform for low-level drug offenses, and a commentary on the sad state of affairs with the children of civil rights families.

Violence Begets Violence in America

So, what do you make of a country where a third grader brings a gun to school to ward off bullies?

In Inkster, Michigan an 8-year old boy brought a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun to his elementary school two days in a row for protection, and to scare off three girls who were bullying him. The weapon was in the boy’s backpack and belonged to a relative. And surely somewhere in this nation of unacceptable levels of violence and gun worship, there are those who think that is a good thing, to arm children to protect themselves. More guns will make us all safer, right?

After the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, America, it seems, is waking up to the need to stem the tide of violence in this country. But there is nothing new here. Whether we look at the shooting sprees and mass murder of young white men in the affluent suburbs or rural areas, or the epidemic of gun violence in communities of color in Chicago and elsewhere, violence is part of the fabric of America. 

From the beginning, this country has used violence to solve its problems. Years of dehumanization of others will do that to you. And this was always the case, from the enslavement of Africans to the genocide of the indigenous population, and from the regime of lynching in the Jim Crow South and elsewhere, to the acts of terror waged against civil rights workers, antiwar protestors and organized labor.

Speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1967, Martin Luther King said “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.” Dr. King’s words are even more relevant today than when he spoke over four decades ago.

The U.S. has the most powerful army, accounting for 58 percent of the military expenditures made by the top 10 military powers. With high gun accessibility and the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, America leads in deadly gun violence. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. homicides are committed with guns, and 70 percent of the weapons seized in drug war-ravaged Mexico are traced back to the U.S. Gun proliferation is bolstered by an anachronistic and obsolete Second Amendment, and promoted by gun manufacturers, who bribe lawmakers and hold the public hostage in the process.

Further, America’s love affair with violence extends to its overly-punitive, disproportionate system of justice. With one quarter of the world’s prisoners, the U.S. is the largest jailer in the world. Prisons are the largest repository for the mentally ill, with more people receiving mental health treatment behind bars than in hospitals or treatment centers. As budgets for education and social services are slashed and jobs are scarce, the American way is to lock up and even kill our perceived problems rather than to build up people and rehabilitate them.

Moreover, our continued reliance on the death penalty in the U.S. is a prime example of what happens when a society perpetuates a vicious circle of violence. While capital punishment was long cast aside in Europe,Canada, Australia and elsewhere, the barbaric practice still finds a welcome home in America - at least for now. The U.S. is part of an unsavory alliance of nations who lead the world in executions - including China, Iran,Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. But the winds of change are blowing.

For a nation conditioned by violence, it is hard to break extremely old and equally bad habits. After all, people are comfortable with what they know, comfortable with what they were raised on. America can break the cycle of violence - however normalized it has become - and yet it must if it wants to break from its troubling past and become better than it was.

Harmful Policies Are Giving All Americans a Black Experience

Whenever you take a look at a bad law that is on the books, or a policy that the government has put into place, you can bet that someone paid for that.  And in this most horrid of political seasons, you'd better believe that attached to each deplorable piece of legislation is a sales receipt.

Case in point: the proliferation of guns in our urban centers.  It is an irresponsible policy, to be sure.  Garry McCarthy, Chicago's new police superintendent, told some truth-telling that you rarely hear from a public official in his position these days.  "So here's what I want to tell you.  See, let's see if we can make a connection here.  Slavery.  Segregation.  Black codes.  Jim Crow.  What did they all have in common? Anybody getting' scared?  Government sponsored racism. I told you I wasn't afraid [of race]. I told you I wasn't afraid," said Chicago's top cop.  He added: "Now I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of the African American history in this country, and tell me if I'm crazy: Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms into our urban centers across this country, that are killing our black and brown children."

McCarthy received the predictable criticism from Andrew Breitbart, the gun lobby and others, but that doesn't change the fact that he spoke the truth.  In fact, their response validated the truthfulness of that which he spoke.  There is no reason for the sale, distribution and trafficking of these weapons of mass destruction, other than to kill people.  Corporate greed on the part of arms manufacturers has turned an obscure and anachronistic amendment dealing with militias into a license to kill, literally, on a massive scale.  The result is a gun for every American, with no system of licensing, registration and background checks.

And there is no valid or logical purpose for these guns, which injure nearly 100,000 Americans each year, killing a third of them and costing us $100 billion annually, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.  Of the large high-income nations, 80 percent of firearm deaths occur right here.  Over a million have died since Martin Luther King's assassination, and they are disproportionately black and brown.  In 2007, African Americans accounted for 13 percent of the population, but 49 of all homicide victims.  Black juveniles are five times more likely than their white peers to die from firearms.  And we export our violence to other countries.  The U.S. arms race fuels the Mexico drug war by supplying 70 percent of the weapons used by the drug traffickers in the carnage to our South.

The U.S. war on drugs has been an abysmal failure--primarily a war on poor people and black and brown people who fill the prisons and are separated from their families.  A color-coded law enforcement policy hunts for drug activity not in the affluent suburbs, but in the inner cities, where such activity is more conspicuous, out in the open.  President Jimmy Carter has called for an end to the global drug war, which was declared 40 years ago.  During that time, Carter noted, worldwide consumption of opiates has jumped 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and marijuana 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008.  Our drug policies have created a burgeoning prison population, busting at the seams.  With 743 people in prison for every 100,000, America boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world.  Government spending on incarceration has skyrocketed.  And I don't see anyone challenging us for bragging rights.  Over three percent of the U.S. adult population finds itself under the supervision of the criminal justice system, either in prison, on probation or on parole.

Meanwhile, America's attempts to craft positive alternatives to incarceration are thwarted by private prison profiteers, who lobby lawmakers, network and contribute handily to political campaigns, according to a new report from the Justice Policy Institute.  Private prison companies work hard to put more people behind bars, and their efforts have paid off, for them that is.  Last year, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies, generated over $2.9 billion in revenue.  The three major corporations have given $835,514 to candidates for federal office, over $6 million to state races, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying.  In case you believe that the Arizona immigration debate was really about the interests of ordinary Americans and safe and secure borders, keep in mind that 30 of the 36 Arizona lawmakers who sponsored that state's atrocious anti-immigrant, anti-Latino law received contributions from the private prison lobby.  Apparently, in the land of opportunity, if a profit can be made from the suffering of others, that extra buck has been tagged and will be claimed by someone.

And someone seeks to profit from the nation's failing public schools, which funnel poor, black and brown children into a school-to-prison pipeline.  Groups such as the Koch Brothers--financiers to the Tea Party--and the Amway and Blackwater-affiliated DeVos family are pouring resources into radical rightwing schemes to privatize public funds, kill the public schools and pocket the money.  When Tea Party types such as the Koch Brothers peddle vouchers and "school choice," feigning concern about poor children and children of color, it is time to walk the other way.  

African-Americans and Latinos are the disproportionate victims of the deregulation craze, which led to predatory lending, the Great Recession, and a foreclosure crisis that decimated homeowners of color and eviscerated billions in private wealth.  And at 16 percent, black unemployment has reached Depression-era levels, double that for whites.  For black men, it is 17.5 percent, and for black teens, 41 percent.  In New York City, 34 percent of black men between 19 and 24 are out of work and out of luck.    

But really, Americans as a whole are out of luck-- the victims of deceptive policies created in the backrooms and boardrooms, by corporate lobbyists and rightwing think-tanks, and paid for by the fortunate few under a legalized system of bribery called campaign finance.  Bad policies gutted Main Street, and facilitated a concept known as the jobless recovery.  The wealthy--getting richer by the day and paying less in taxes-- are sitting on their money.  They only need the rest of us to the extent that they can squeeze more money out of us.  Yet, there are no new jobs, and the poor have nothing to spend.

Some of those who are elected to serve the people are really on the take, water carriers for the plutocracy.  They are paid by wealthy interests to bring ordinary people down, to strip them down to the bone.  Dressed up as shared sacrifice, a regressive regime of trickle-down economics and union-busting has hollowed out working people.  Corporate socialism and welfare for the banks has meant austerity and crippling budget cuts for the common folk.   The hallmark of such policies is America's upward income redistribution and rising inequality, the shame of the industrial world.  The richest 400 Americans own $1.37 trillion, which is more than bottom 50 percent of all U.S. households combined.

And to that extent, everyone is having a black experience now.  Get used to it, or do something about it. In boom times and bust, Black folks in America are used to being poor, of living without, and making do with very little or nothing.  They always made it through with the help of the church, the blues, and each other.  But somewhere in there, there was a movement, too, hint hint.

America's "Shoot 'Em Up, Lock 'Em Up" Mentality Is Its Undoing

Remember all the talk of a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War? Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? Since that time, U.S. defense spending has ballooned, nearly doubling since 2001.

Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, it will be hard for the war hawks to defend keeping American troops in Afghanistan. But they will, even as a majority of people want to cut military spending in order to reduce the deficit, rather than cut important social programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. There's lots of money in the Pentagon, and a group of experts has recommended cutting almost $1 trillion from defense over the next decade. People know that the military-industrial-complex is a drain on the nation's economy -- a threat to economic security, and a parasite that is eating its host bit by bit.

It is hard to shake off bad habits and the U.S. has a number of them. This addiction to remaining in a permanent state of war is one of the largest and most problematic. There is the war on terror and the war on drugs. The former is used to justify the behemoth that is the national security apparatus. Meanwhile, the latter facilitates the growth of the prison-industrial-complex, and the incarceration of predominantly poor, uneducated black and Latino men, in a country with no jobs for them. These two systems are equally exploitative and destructive to human lives, and corporations have found their niche in profiting from the suffering of others.

And while profiting in such a manner is an unsustainable model for the long-term success of a nation, some remain undeterred from pursuing this path. America spends almost as much on military as the rest of the world -- combined. We imprison more people than any other nation, including the most repressive dictatorships you can imagine. In fact, the land of the free is home to only 5 percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

Here, we lock 'em up and shoot 'em up. And we'll go visit someone else's backyard and lock 'em up and shoot 'em up too. And our voracious appetite for guns at home perversely complements our lust for senseless war abroad. With 90 guns for nearly every 100 people, the U.S. is the most armed nation on the planet, and we have shocking homicide statistics to prove it. The second amendment is used as a pretext for an astounding level of gun proliferation that is unheard of in -- and incompatible with -- a stable democratic society. But we know that the National Rifle Association, which, by the way, is increasingly allied with right-wing extremists, militias and domestic terrorists, is funded by the gun industry to the tune of millions of dollars. This, as illegal firearms ravage our urban communities

If so-called American exceptionalism is to be found in war, then Americans are in deeper trouble than they realize. The U.S. has the most advanced military weaponry and high-tech toys for its soldiers to kill and destroy, while American cities crumble under the weight of their low-grade, early-twentieth century infrastructure. Europe and Asia are decades ahead in high-speed rail because they actually have it, and this nation elects politicians who attack high-speed rail as some big government welfare giveaway program. And the rest of the world laughs as we wage war on ourselves, with culture wars, a war on intelligence and progress, and assaults on women's rights, workers and immigrants.

Sounds like a winning strategy, if your goal is to fail miserably -- exceptionally miserably.

California NAACP Is Right for Supporting Prop 19

The war on drugs has been a war on communities of color, plain and simple. Some people realize that it is time to end a war that has devastated so many people, so many families, and has accomplished little to deal with actual drug addiction. A criminal justice model for drug use must give way to a public health model and a regulatory framework.

The California NAACP, with the support of law enforcement professionals, realizes that the state's battle for legalization of marijuana is part of the war against the war on drugs. And this new war is part of the fight for civil rights. Yes, pot legalization is a civil rights issue.

California NAACP president Alice Huffman is catching a great deal of flack for supporting Proposition 19, the ballot initiative that would legalize, regulate and tax the drug in her state. In an official statement, the California NAACP mentioned a recent study by the Drug Policy Institute that clearly shows marijuana laws are unfairly applied to young African Americans. Although young blacks use marijuana at lower rates than their white counterparts, they are arrested for marijuana possession at double, triple or even quadruple the rate of whites. In Los Angeles County, blacks are 10 percent of the population, but 30 percent of the weed-related arrests.

"While marijuana has been decriminalized over the years, there are staggering statistics that African Americans in every county of California have conviction rates far and above those of whites. It is time for the War on Drugs to focus on drug lords and cartels," the NAACP said. "We need to give our young African American citizens a chance at opportunity and not an arrest record that dooms their chances of success. The money spent on these minor drug arrests could be better used on education, health services, and counseling."

Supporting the NAACP is Neill Franklin, a retired black narcotics cop who now leads Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an international group of pro-legalization cops, judges and prosecutors. These are the people who have been on the frontlines of the war on drugs. And war can leave you weary and disillusioned, particularly when you don't like what you witnessed in that war. "As a member of the NAACP, and as a former police officer who waged the 'war on drugs' for three decades, I can tell you that it is long past time to change our failed marijuana laws," Franklin said. "Like Alice and the other good folks at the NAACP, I'm tired of seeing young black men and women funneled through the revolving doors of the criminal justice system, all in the name of a 'war on marijuana' that actually does nothing to reduce its use." Franklin also believes that continuing the failed policy of prohibition bears obscene human and fiscal costs, and California voters need to know that.

Franklin and LEAP are standing with Huffman on an important policy issue, but they are also supporting the embattled California NAACP chief against unwarranted attacks from anti-reform groups. First and foremost among the forces out to get Alice Huffman is the conservative black clergy, led by Bishop Ron Allen of the International Faith Based Coalition (IFBC).

The IFBC website raises more questions than it answers about the organization, which purports to represent a coalition of more than 4,100 congregations. That's quite a claim, and quite unsubstantiated for that matter. The group describes itself as "an all-denominational, multi-racial, non-partisan non-political coalition of churches, ministries, community based organizations, governmental agencies, businesses and concerned individuals." Yet, this "non-partisan, non-political" group lists among its partners the California Republican Party and GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman (in fairness it also lists U.S. drug czar R. Gil Kerlikowske).

And curiously, IFBC claims the NAACP as a partner, even as it simultaneously urges people on its website not to support the NAACP. "I would like to commend Rev. Ron Allen in his leadership against this evil Prompt 19 [sic]," said Rev. Anthony Evans of the National Black Church Initiative, on the IFBC website. Rev. Evans, by the way, has taken a prominent role against same-sex marriage in Washington. DC., and declared the black church will no longer allow African-American politicians to promote policies (i.e., gay marriage) that hurt the black church. It is uncertain how same-sex marriage will hurt the black church, but oh well.

Of Huffman and "Prompt" 19, Rev. Evans asserted "The NAACP is becoming an enemy to the Black family... Now they are allowing Ms. Huffman to unleash her unethical practices by supporting drugs that have ravished the African American community over the past 30 years." He continues: "I am authorizing all of our churches in the West Faith Command not to [sic] give a damn dime to the NAACP and not allow their congregation to be used for any of the NAACP meetings. There is no way that the Black Church will permit this immoral act as it will only further the devastation of the African American community."

Conservative preachers such as Rev. Evans and Bishop Allen are missing the whole point about the war on drugs, or perhaps this is intentional. Has drug addiction destroyed lives? Yes, to be certain, but so too have the consumption of alcohol and tobacco -- and these substances are not criminalized, but are regulated and treated as health concerns. Detractors insist Alice Huffman and the NAACP are an enemy of black America for supporting the legalization of marijuana. Yet, how can the prohibitionists claim to act in the interests of the black community when they support the perpetuation of a failed drug war that has placed countless black, brown and poor white folk behind bars, wasting their lives away in a cell, separated from their children, with their communities depleted of resources, hollowed out and disenfranchised?

The California NAACP is under fire when it should be applauded for its courage. Alice Huffman is carrying out the mission of her organization, ensuring that it protects civil rights and remains relevant in changing times. Should we expect her to do less?

Obama refocusing failed war on drugs

From McClatchy-Tribune:

U.S. President Barack Obama is moving in the right direction in the war on drugs, saying it should be a health issue, not a crime.

After 40 years and $1 trillion wasted, the war on drugs has been a resounding failure. It has had ruinous consequences in the United States and in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The drug war has given America the world's largest prison population, at nearly 2.5 million people, or roughly one in 100 Americans.

The United States has five per cent of the world's population, but almost 25 per cent of the world's prisoners.

Many nonviolent drug offenders, who shouldn't have been locked up in the first place, are languishing behind bars.

Moreover, this war on drugs also has been a war on black and brown people, who are 70 per cent of the American prison population. Unfair drug sentencing for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine targeted communities of colour for years.

Drug criminalization separates parents from their children with prison bars and destroys urban neighbourhoods by shipping their adult population to prisons in white rural areas, often hundreds of miles away from home.

People who could be productive members of society, good citizens, taxpayers and community leaders are rotting in jail because of the war on drugs. And when they return to society, they cannot find a job because of a felony record.

Our drug policies have also helped spark violence in many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Drug mafias have taken over the region because drugs in the United States are illegal and the demand for them is still high.

Look at Mexico, where almost 23,000 people have been murdered in the last three and a half years, as drug-related gang violence has exploded.

Or take Jamaica, which declared a state of emergency after supporters of an alleged drug kingpin wanted in the United States torched two police stations and barricaded the slums of Kingston, the capital.

The Obama administration has taken a step forward with its new National Drug Control Strategy.

President Obama says he plans to treat illegal drug use as more of a public health issue than a criminal justice problem.

And Obama's strategy claims to take a balanced approach by focusing on prevention, treatment and law enforcement.

For example, there is an emphasis on community-based prevention focusing on young people.

The president also calls for early intervention and addiction treatment in substance-abuse cases, curbing subscription drug abuse and breaking the cycle of drug use, criminality and incarceration.

Nevertheless, it is uncertain the Obama White House will put its money where its mouth is.

Nearly two-thirds of the $15.6-billion federal drug control budget request is devoted to law enforcement and interdiction, which is just more of the same old same old.

The strategy's success depends on whether the administration stays true to its own words and devotes the resources necessary to deal with drug abuse as a public health issue.

Treating it as a criminal justice issue doesn't work.

Is the 'War on Drugs' finally over?

From theGrio:

Recently, the Philadelphia District Attorney announced that he would all but decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Seth Williams, the city's first African-American chief prosecutor, has joined forces with members of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for a new drug policy that could eliminate 3,000 drug cases from the court dockets each year. Under the policy, people who are in possession of up to 30 grams of weed may have to pay a fine, but will not have a criminal record.

For a city such as Philadelphia, money is tight. Cash flow problems are running hand-in-hand with a violent crime epidemic. Police, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys labor in a system that is clogged, overwhelmed and broken. The loosening of penalties on marijuana will free up resources that can and should be devoted to fighting real crimes, violent crimes such as murder and rape. Philly is just the latest example of efforts around the country to take drug policy in a completely new direction. The war on drugs has not ended, but it appears to be slowing down a bit.

The Senate has given green light to narrowing the disparities in sentencing for powder vs. crack cocaine. Currently, it takes 5 kilograms (5000 grams) of powder cocaine to get you a mandatory minimum of 10 years in federal prison, but only 50 grams of crack will give you the same punishment. This 100-to-1 ratio for powder vs. crack would drop to an 18-to-1 ratio, meaning that 280 grams of crack rather than 50 grams would trigger the 10-year minimum jail time. This is a considerable improvement over the status quo, although it could be better. Some judges are even sentencing crack and powder cocaine defendants at a one-to-one ratio.

And the Obama administration will not arrest medical marijuana users who are following state laws.

There was a time when the war on drugs seemed like a good idea to many. Faced with an epidemic of drug use and the violent crime associated with it, society concluded that it had to address the crisis. Politicians were quick to portray themselves as "tough on crime" in order to attract voters on election day. So, draconian drug laws have placed more and more people behind bars for longer and longer periods of time. Catchy slogans such as "three-strikes" made good public relations but terrible law. As a result, 2.4 million people are behind bars in America, about 70 percent black and brown.

And the world's largest prison population was built from the war on drugs. Drugs have fueled the growth of prisons. Around 20 percent of state prisoners and over half of federal prisoners are drug offenders, and around half of all inmates are incarcerated for nonviolent drug and property crimes.

Meanwhile, the criminalization of drugs is responsible for the bloody drug cartel turf war in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which has left 5,000 people dead in two years. Prohibition was an abysmal failure for alcohol, and it certainly has not worked for drugs, so why not decriminalize, tax and regulate certain illegal substances?

A study by a Harvard economist concludes that marijuana legalization would save $13.7 billion per year in government spending on drug enforcement--$10.4 billion to the states, and the rest to the federal government. And a tax on marijuana could generate $6.4 billion in revenue if the drug is taxed at a rate similar to alcohol and tobacco, and that's a conservative estimate.

According to a recent poll, a majority of Americans under 30 favor legalizing marijuana, and a majority of Americans of all ages favor legalizing medical marijuana. The drug is illegal under federal law, and used for medicinal purposes in 16 states, including California. The Golden State could become the first state to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults when Californians vote on an initiative in November. Taxing the drug could yield the state $1.4 billion annually.

Similarly, drug decriminalization initiatives are being introduced throughout the nation. For example:

· The judiciary committee in the Connecticut legislature voted to decriminalize marijuana for adults 18 and over who possess less than a half of an ounce.

· A ballot measure in Oregon would decriminalize marijuana and allow people to grow the crop with permits.

· Colorado voters passed an amendment that made their state the only state in the Union to recognize a constitutional right of qualifying patients to use medical marijuana.

· In January, the New Jersey legislature voted to allow medical marijuana dispensaries for chronic diseases such as AIDS and cancer. Last year, 60 percent of Maine voters approved of similar dispensaries, and in April, the state legislature authorized up to eight medical marijuana dispensaries.

· Massachusetts voted for a ballot initiative to decriminalize pot in 2008.

· In Nevada, a ballot initiative to tax and regulate weed could make its way on the ballot in 2012. And while Arizonais an inhospitable place where Latino immigrants are concerned, voters of that state will decide whether to legalize medical marijuana in November.

Now, while this is progress, the war on drugs is far from over. But perhaps Americans are beginning to open their eyes. Criminalization has given us failed policies, full prisons, empty coffers, and little else to show for it. Now is the time to make a change with the nation's drug laws.

Harvard Murder Highlights the Perils of Being Young, Gifted and Black

On March 16, former Harvard student Brittany Smith was indicted for her alleged involvement in a campus shooting that left a man dead.

Smith was charged with being an accessory after the fact in the May 2009 murder of 21-year old Justin Cosby. Specifically, Smith is accused of participating in a drug deal gone bad, of giving three New York men--including her boyfriend--access to her Harvard ID swipe card, which gained them access to her Kirkland House dorm. The men allegedly robbed and shot Cosby, who is linked to the campus drug trade and died the next day. Smith allegedly hid the murder weapon, helped the men escape, and lied to a grand jury. In other words, she's in a heap of trouble. And while the accused are innocent until proven guilty, she deserves little of your sympathy if all of this is true. But that doesn't mean that we cannot mourn ruined lives, and the loss that is associated with broken dreams unfulfilled expectations.

Smith and another Harvard student linked to the incident, Chanequa Campbell, were banished from the college and not allowed to graduate. Campbell, who has not been charged, came short of accusing Harvard of racism. "The honest answer to that is that I'm black and I'm poor and I'm from New York and I walk a certain way and I keep my clothes a certain way," Campbell told the Boston Globe, in response to a question about Harvard's reason for ordering her to leave. "It's something that labels me as different from everyone else."

To be sure, Campbell and Smith did not receive the support from black folks on campus that Professor Henry Louis Gates enjoyed after his incident. Of course, I speak of Gates' altercation with a Cambridge police officer as the scholar tried to enter his home. But then again, Gates had done nothing wrong except "break into" his own house while black. The students' alleged association with the campus drug trade, and their apparent involvement in the incident in question, resulted in the murder of a young man on campus. It is not my goal to prosecute this case in this commentary, nor can I assess whether race played any role in this case. But I do know that cries of racism ring hollow here. Drugs are no stranger to Harvard or any other university, and while Harvard students have experimented with drugs for years, never did it result in a drug-related murder.

The lesson learned here is to mind the company you keep. This goes for African American students, and anyone else for that matter.

The fall from grace of these two Harvard students, these young black women with faded promise, reminds me of Edmund Perry. In 1985, 17-year old Perry, a Harlem native and then-recent graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy who was about to enroll in Stanford, was shot to death by a plainclothes police officer. Witnesses claimed Perry and his brother, a Cornell engineering student, tried to mug the officer. It just so happens that Eddie, who decried his prep school's racism and "adopted a street-savvy swagger to mask his own insecurities", was dealing drugs at Exeter. White folk with something other than good intentions tried to use this incident to prove the argument that, you can dust them off, dress them up and school them as you may, but "these" people are beyond our help.

And in 1994, 24 year old Kemba Smith pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute crack, and was sentenced to 24.5 years. Her case was a true travesty, and put the spotlight on America's harsh, draconian and disproportionate drug sentencing laws. Her true crime was having an abusive drug dealer boyfriend, a guy she met as a student at Hampton University in Virginia. Smith described herself as someone who grew up in a sheltered middle-class existence, and hung out with the wrong crowd at school. Fortunately President Clinton pardoned her after she served six years, and she can use her second chance in life to teach others.

These cases are blatantly vivid reminders that young people, in this case African-American, lead fragile lives. Even for those who appear to be gliding on a road to success, that road is precarious and fraught with danger. There are negative influences and the corrosive effects of peer pressure. Black kids are ridiculed by their classmates for trying to act white, as if being intelligent, scholarly and gifted are incompatible (rather than synonymous) with blackness. College-bound students of color have a hard time of it, often with little support even from family, and incurring the resentment of a community short on opportunities. Some young people cannot reconcile their personal aspirations with their desire to "keep it real" and stay true to their community. Perhaps they can't take the pressure of navigating two worlds, and the culture shock it entails. Perhaps in this materialistic society, they lack grounding, whether social, political or spiritual, and they eke out an existence feeding on media stereotypes. Maybe we are all to blame for not properly imbuing children with more character-building, positive influences. Maybe they just aren't comfortable living in their own black skin.

This is not to make excuses for those who seem to have so much, yet waste it all. After all, many people have soared high with much less to work with, while others seem to squander their opportunities and fall so far, so hard and so fast. Certainly it is not as simple as a case of black youth gone bad, of rotten criminals getting what they deserve. Nor is it as simple as a case of racial victimization. I don't think the civil rights movement fought for the right of black students to get caught up in the campus drug game, with dead bodies strewn along their path. But one thing is certain: we must learn from the Chanequa Campbells, the Brittany Smiths, the Kemba Smiths and the Edmund Perrys. We must learn what can go wrong when you are young, gifted and black.

Our House is on Fire, Part 4: U.S. Drug Policy has Gone to Pot

By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com

The following is the fourth part of an ongoing Color of Law series. Click here to read any of the commentaries in this series.

In a recent online town hall meeting at the White House, President Obama was asked by the online audience whether he thought legalizing marijuana would create jobs and help the economy. It was the most popular question asked at the meeting. “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Obama remarked, then adding, “No, I don’t think this would be a good strategy.” He seemed to give a little chuckle, as did the extras who were cast as audience members in the background behind the president.

But this is no laughing matter, and America’s failed war on drugs is serious business. Dead serious, in a literal sense. The United States has a voracious appetite for drugs, this is without question. Over the years - in a move tinged partly with greed, partly with boneheadedness and shortsightedness, and partly with racism - the nation has treated drugs as an issue of morality and criminal justice. As a result of this war on drugs, poor communities and communities of color have been decimated. Rather than target the places where most of the drugs are consumed - in the White suburbs, middle-class areas and wealthy enclaves - law enforcement targets the areas where drug sales and drug use are most conspicuous: the inner city. As a result, 1 in 99 adults is behind bars, including 1 in 36 Latino adults, 1 in 15 Black adults, and 1 in 9 African Americans between the ages of 20 and 34. Yes, I said 1 in 9. Generations are spending their most formidable years in prison over drugs, sometimes most of their lives, when they should be raising their families, contributing to society, getting an education, what have you. Like the effects of the Vietnam War, the damage visited upon these communities by the drug war is irreparable. America has become the most incarcerated nation, with a rate of imprisonment five times higher than the rest of the world.

The effects of these harsh punitive policies, and the criminalization of drugs, have implications beyond the borders of this country. Mexican drug cartels, meeting America’s drug demand, are wreaking havoc on Mexico. That country is in trouble, big trouble. Over 1,100 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico so far this year (6,200 in 2008), due in no small measure to the use of American firearms. Decapitations, kidnappings, torture, the use of hand grenades, and murders with military-style assault weapons are standard fare. And this crisis is spilling over into the United States.

Although America’s weapons policy has created the carnage in Mexico, the Obama administration will face formidable opposition from the gun lobby if it tries to ban assault weapons. Don’t get me started with the Second Amendment and the so-called right to bear arms. This farce represents a vehicle by which arms manufacturers hide behind bogus and dishonest interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, and get rich by profiting from human bloodshed. No good comes from the proliferation of these weapons of mass destruction.

Poverty in Mexico is the context by which drug cartels gain their recruitment foothold. I suppose that NAFTA, with its empty hopes of prosperity, did not work out as well as some people envisioned it. With poverty fueling the drug trade in Mexico, and America’s appetite for drugs creating the demand, is it really any different from poor people in the U.S. who are lured to the drug trade? I speak of people in this country who lack economic and educational opportunities and are lured by a materialistic culture that tells them to obtain money by any means, without regard for the consequences and who is harmed. You know, kind of like Wall Street executives.

These days, the economic crisis, failed drug policy and failed criminal justice policy threaten to intersect in the form of demands for drug decriminalization, particularly the legalization and regulation of marijuana. I wonder what took so long. Already, legislation has been introduced in the California state assembly to legalize the cultivation, possession and sale of marijuana and tax the $14 billion annual crop. Such a move could allow California - a state that cannot afford to pay its state employees amid a budget crisis, spends more on prisons than on public universities, and has been ordered to set one-third of its prisoners free due to overcrowding - to potentially rake in billions of dollars in desperately needed revenue. Prohibition did not work, and fuelled gangsterism in the U.S. Now, alcohol is legal, and some states regulate alcohol through taxation or by selling through state controlled stores.

The time seems ripe to change America’s attitudes towards the criminalization of drugs, and the behemoth prison system which grows from current drug policy and feeds on society. The failed war on drugs has created a 1200% increase in drug incarceration rates since 1980 (from 41,000 people incarcerated to over 500,000), and has disproportionately hurt African Americans. Further, a significant percentage of those who are locked up have no history of violence or high-level drug activity.

In light of this reality, Senator William Webb (D-VA) has introduced a bill called the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009. The legislation provides for a commission to review the entire criminal justice system (state and federal), and make recommendations regarding the reform of incarceration policy and drug policy, among other things. We do not know what will become of the senator’s legislation, but we do know that the current ways are unsustainable. And the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Click here to read any of the commentaries in this series.

On the Criminalization of Black Motherhood

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 8, 2008

On this Mother’s Day, it is fitting that we take time to think of all of the mothers, disproportionately poor, and disproportionately of color, who are behind bars in the United States. Victims of a failed war on drugs, pawns in a for-profit prison scheme that requires more and more warm bodies, locked up, to boost the bottom line, Black women are the fastest growing demographic in America’s prisons. They are twice as likely as Latina women, and three times as likely as White women to be incarcerated.

Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2000, African American children (7.0%) were almost nine times as likely to have a parent in prison as White children (0.8%), while Latino children (2.6%) were three times as likely as white children to have a parent in prison.

And in a related matter, according to the Children’s Defense Fund at least 58 percent of children in foster care are children of color. Of this, Black children are 35 percent of children in foster care, even though they are only 16 percent of the population. Latino children make up 17 percent of foster children; 2 percent of the foster care population are American Indian/Native American children, although they represent only 1 percent of the general population, and 1 percent is Asian Pacific Islander.

In a 2002 opinion in Nicholson v. Scoppetta - which involved a class action suit by battered women against New York City’s unjust child welfare policies - federal district Judge Jack B. Weinstein characterized the excessive removal of children from their homes as “a form of slavery.” According to Northwestern University law professor Dorothy Roberts in a Colorlines magazine article, the role of racism in the child welfare system is a national disgrace: “Most white children who enter the system are permitted to stay with their families, avoiding the emotional damage and physical risks of foster care placement, while most black children are taken away from theirs. And once removed from their homes, black children remain in foster care longer, are moved more often, receive fewer services, and are less likely to be either returned home or adopted than any other children.”

In a society that seeks retribution, punishment and profit rather than rehabilitation and preservation of families as a desirable goal, women of color are penalized for their race, their gender, and even their motherhood. Women of color are more likely than White women to be monitored and supervised by the state, and more likely to experience state control over their bodies and their children. Call it a holdover from slavery, when Black women had no right to privacy, were violated at will, and could not make decisions regarding themselves, their bodies or their families.

Some states have enacted laws which criminalize drug-dependent expectant mothers and violate their civil liberties. Women’s eNews reported that eighteen states have laws that are racially discriminatory and potentially interfere with a woman's reproductive rights. Penalties may include arrest and termination of their parental rights. Driven by hysteria and misinformation regarding the so-called “crack baby” epidemic, these laws first became popular during the 1980s.

South Carolina was the first state to uphold the criminal conviction of a woman who has taken drugs while pregnant. In South Carolina v. Whitner (1997), that state’s highest court affirmed that child abuse laws apply to the behavior of a mother while the fetus is in her womb, and she may be prosecuted for harm to her viable fetus. In 1992, Cornelia Whitner was sentenced to eight years for unlawful child neglect— smoking crack cocaine during her pregnancy.

In 1989, a group of prosecutors in South Carolina, in cooperation with the police and public hospitals, decided to start punishing pregnant women who test positive for cocaine—most of them African American women who sought prenatal care. Proponents claimed the law was designed as a “family-friendly” measure to stop pregnant women from abusing drugs and to improve the health of the baby. Studies have shown the opposite: Such laws deter women from seeking prenatal care and the limited drug treatment that is available because they are afraid of going to jail.

Cocaine is by no means the leading cause of birth defects. Alcohol abuse is responsible for more birth defects. Tobacco is particularly damaging, as is poverty, malnutrition, stress and exposure to lead.

And the prosecution of pregnant women for drug use takes us down a slippery slope that leads to a logical conclusion of criminalizing alcohol and tobacco use.

But the issue is not a pregnant woman’s right to take drugs, but whether African Americans are accorded the same constitutional rights as everyone else. The issue is whether the state can intrude in the reproductive lives of women. Drugs already are illegal, and child abuse charges amount to piling on. Treatment for their disease, proper prenatal care and mental health services, rather than criminalization, will help make these mothers’ lives whole and productive. And as the Drug Policy Alliance has reported, “removing a child from his family may cause serious psychological damage - damage more serious than the harm intervention is supposed to prevent.”

Critics decry a police mentality that allows the state to monitor the behavior of parents, and all-too-readily separate parents from their children, rather than deal with systemic social ills. “Child welfare policy and practice in the United States can't be understood fully in isolation of other larger social phenomena in our country,” says NYU law professor Martin Guggenheim, author of What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights, in a PBS Frontline interview. “We are a country that proclaims a child-loving philosophy, which is belied by harsh statistics that suggest for an advanced, industrialized country, we do very poorly by and for our children. We have a shockingly high infant mortality rate; we have known environmental pollution conditions in many, many industrialized cities, in which children suffer from life-threatening asthma at shockingly high rates; we have inadequate housing; we have inadequate income assistance for many, many children in this country. Given our relative wealth, one could say objectively we are one of the poorest distributors of income to children in any advanced country. We have the highest rate of poverty among children in any advanced country.”

Malissa Ann Crawley, a mother of three healthy children, was one of the women prosecuted under the South Carolina law who petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. She was sentenced to five years for testing positive for cocaine during pregnancy. At Crawley’s hearing, the judge remarked: “I’m sick and tired of these girls having these bastard babies on crack cocaine and until they change the law, the law they gave me, it said I could put them in jail.”

The Drug Policy alliance also noted that the Whitner decision “gave law enforcement a green light to arrest and prosecute pregnant women for child abuse who suffered from drug and alcohol dependence. The decision also opened the doors for prosecuting women for homicide by child abuse, as in the case of South Carolina vs. Regina McKnight.”

Also commenting on the devastating effect of Whitner, National Advocates for Pregnant Women says that infant mortality in South Carolina increased for the first time in a decade. In addition, the state has experienced a 20 percent increase in abandoned babies, and there has been a dramatic decline in the number of women seeking drug treatment program services.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Whitner case on appeal. But in 2001, the nation’s highest court decided in Ferguson v. City of Charleston that a public hospital violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by performing drug tests on women, and reporting the results of the tests to the police without the woman’s consent. Nevertheless, the criminalization of women struggling with addiction continues with the promulgation of unjust laws.

Punishing pregnant women for their addiction is unconscionable public policy. Locking up the mother, purportedly to save the baby, is primarily a violation against the Black mothers who are targeted, as well as their families and communities. But ultimately, it is an attack on us all.

Is the Road to Prison Reform Paved with Good Intentions?

By David A. Love
Published by The Black Commentator
October 11, 2007

The nationwide problem of prison overcrowding provides a perfect opportunity for society to examine real prison reform. Exorbitant prison spending threatens to cripple state budgets, as lawmakers in many parts of the country allocate more funding to lock up their citizens than to educate them and provide them with essential services.

With over 2.2 million people incarcerated in its federal, state and local institutions, no other country imprisons as many of its people per capita - or in absolute numbers for that matter - as the United States. As a result of failed policies driven by the politics of fear and racial scapegoating - the war on drugs, tough-on-crime measures, and draconian sentencing guidelines — America's prisons are an emerging national crisis. After spending years forsaking the concept of rehabilitation in our criminal justice system, in favor of retribution for its own sake, we know that the system is overburdened and overwhelmed. And many have concluded that the old ways are not serving us well.

In California, the three-strikes rule and a powerful corrections officers' union have created a burgeoning prison population. Over 172,000 prisoners are housed in 33 facilities designed for only 100,000, costing the taxpayers more than $8 billion annually. Inmates do not receive adequate healthcare, and recidivism is high. A three-federal judge panel will determine if the California prison system requires a population cap, releasing thousands of inmates and alleviating the deplorable overcrowding.

Meanwhile, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation recently announced a new policy that would free thousands of nonviolent parolees who are unlikely to re-offend. The program would remove certain parolees from supervision after six months rather than the usual three years. And ex-convicts who are no longer under the supervision of the system cannot be sent back to prison for violation of parole.

And similarly, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell is proposing alternative sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders, including early release, drug treatment, and recidivism prevention programs. This, as the Keystone State faces a crisis of prison overcrowding, with a legacy of tough sentencing and life without parole that has broken up families and ravaged poor communities, yet has done nothing to address the troubling homicide rate in cities such as Philadelphia.

As the least regarded among society, prisoners are not a high priority among lawmakers and those who promulgate public policy. And many believe that prisoners deserve any punishment they receive above and beyond their prison sentence. But in order to halt the revolving door of recidivism that plagues our prison system, society must pay attention to the civil rights and quality of life of prisoners and strive to rehabilitate them.

The purging of religious and spiritual materials from prison libraries on the grounds that blocking inmates' access to such books will stem the spread of terrorism - as reported in the New York Times on September 10, 2007 - is misguided and unconstitutional. That the federal government wants to fund medical experimentation on prisoners — following a report last year by the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, which recommended a return to such practices — is unethical, unconscionable and barbaric.

Although they are deprived of their liberty, prisoners are entitled to the same basic constitutional rights we all share. However, the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 (PLRA), enacted by Congress ostensibly to put an end to frivolous prison litigation, has crippled inmates' ability to seek redress and protect their rights in the federal courts. The PLRA requires:

• an exhaustion of administrative remedies
• restricts the courts' authority to provide relief when prisons violate the law
• requires that prisoners suffer a physical injury in order to recover for mental or emotional injuries
• imposes a severe cap on attorneys' fees

The PLRA is a roadblock for valid claims of prisoner abuse, and must be repealed.

And when prisoners are released, they are subjected to punishment above and beyond their original sentence. Ex-cons lose their right to vote in some states, cannot obtain licenses for certain professions, and are denied financial aid for college because they have a felony conviction. It is difficult for these individuals - predominantly of color and mostly poor, unskilled and uneducated - to rebuild their lives and support their families when society stands in their way.

America is at a crossroads on the issue of prison reform. Locking our problems away has not made society whole. The failed "law and order" stance must give way to a smarter and more thoughtful approach that examines and tackles the interrelated problems of poverty, low education, joblessness and crime. We cannot continue on a path that does not address the root causes of America's ills, fails to reduce crime, and bankrupts us - not only economically, but spiritually and socially - in the process.

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love