Fighting the Crack/Coke Disparity

Congress is considering a bill that would close the crack/cocaine disparity (for some good links talking about the disparity read this Racewire article) by reducing penalties for crack cocaine. If passed the bill, dubbed the Fair Sentencing Act, will increase the amount of crack (to 500 grams) that would get you 5 years in prison to the same amount as is required now for selling powder cocaine. Obama has said in the past that he is committed to equalizing prison sentences for crack and coke but has been silent thus far on the Fair Sentencing Act.

It is worth noting that many conservatives want the punishment for cocaine to be increased rather than see a reduction in crack sentencing, but that lawmakers are citing economic reasons for avoiding that route - prisons are now being seen as an economic liability even if they are still considered necessary.

Along those lines -- I'm all about reducing or eliminating the disparity but in the Washington Post article about the bill they also mention that it would "stiffen penalties for large-scale drug traffickers and violent criminals." I'm just curious how this expansion of the prison system managed to finagle its way into the bill. Do the lawmakers who are purportedly about reducing or eliminating racist laws not understand the implications of ANY expansion of the PIC? Do they think that these "stiffened penalties" are going to equally affect all people? I'm just baffled at the lack of basic sense... who are we fighting here? Who are we protecting?

Charter School Controversy - and Re-education programs in MI and MO

W has been putting out some fascinating stuff about education and youth that I see as so completely connected.

First of all, they did a great piece on the controversy surrounding charter schools, which have been a hallmark of Obama's education reform program. Articles in both the Boston Globe (here) and the Hartford Courant (here) outline conflicting sentiments in the communities most affected by charter school expansion. A major critique is that not all charter schools are actually better! The Courant article cites evidence from Philadelphia where a study showed that charter school students actually did not perform better than regular public school students. Also, the Globe article points out that in Boston (which has one quarter of the country's charter schools) non-English speakers are remarkably underserved; they make up less than 4% of charter school students despite being one fifth of all public school students.

From RaceWire:

Education historian Diane Ravitch says the question isn't regular versus charter schools, but an issue of social priorities:

We can't solve our problems by handing them off to businesses and community groups. Some schools will claim success by excluding the students who are hardest to educate; others will claim success by drilling children endlessly on test-taking skills.

What should we do? We must strengthen — not abandon — public education....

We evade our responsibility to improve public education by privatizing public schools. In doing so, we undermine the egalitarian promise of public education, thus guaranteeing that many children will continue to be left behind.

Even a charter school with a social mission of promoting economic and racial equity still runs up against the limits posed by selectivity and exclusion. The rush to expand this model across the country may renew, and redefine, the question of separate but equal.

I find this really interesting especially after talking to a friend of mine's older brother who is about to start teaching math in a new Philly charter school - I guess I'll have to ask him about what his experience is like, but he described a really energetic, young group of teachers that will have the ability to work with a smaller group of students than your average public Philadelphia high school. Clearly both benefits and drawbacks.

RaceWire also recently had a really interesting article about re-education programs in MI and MO about the history of racism and anti-indigenous sentiment, respectively. They say:

The new curriculum is designed to inform youth about the history of racial discrimination as well as to provide an understanding of the continued relevance of social movements today.

Um, not to get overly enthusiastic here but.. HELL. YES. It's absurd that students aren't learning about this already and while we'll see how it plays out I can't help but be excited that state governments are finally recognizing the importance of history in modern day struggles and tensions... and recognizing the need to be talking about this in our classrooms with our youth.

That is, of course, if our youth even get to the classroom. In New York, it seems that increasing numbers of children are being locked up in juvenile detention centers for mental health issues and other needs. "In New York State, 54 percent of children in the general population are Caucasian, 20 percent are Latino, 18 percent are African-American, and 6 percent are Asian. In contrast, of the girls admitted to the Lansing and Tryon facilities over the last three years, 54 percent are non-Hispanic African-American, 19 percent are classified as Hispanic, 23 percent are non-Hispanic White, and none is Asian. 10 girls, or 3 percent of the total, are Native American.... Since 1995, African-American boys and girls have consistently accounted for close to 60 percent of children taken into [Office of Children and Family Services] custody." Obviously this filters directly into New York's expansive prison system, and from the sound of these "juvenile centers" it seems as if these children are not socialized for any other kind of life. From RaceWire:

The Department of Justice’s extensive investigation of four of New York’s juvenile detention facilities sheds chilling light on a system plagued by unaccountability and abuse. The new report, released today, documents the routine use of excessive force by staff, which has traumatized and even broken the bones of children while authorities looked the other way. “Anything from sneaking an extra cookie to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone restraint with handcuffs,” the investigators found.

So who are these kids? In 2006, Human Rights Watch profiled two of the detention centers investigated by the Justice Department, Tryon and Lansing, where teenage girls were detained for both violent and nonviolent infractions. Often, they were refugees of the foster care system, arrested after spending most of their lives cycling through the homes of strangers. Many began their path to “delinquency” in school, where “zero tolerance” security tactics were used to keep disobedient kids in line. Drugs and mental health problems drove many children into detention, after poverty and isolation from the healthcare system had kept them shut out of early treatment programs.

As the Times reported earlier this month, juvenile detention has become a makeshift "asylum" for children whose mental health needs have been neglected in their communities, due to poverty and social disinvestment.

If you can stomach the full article it can be accessed here.

Psych Relief Finally On Its Way for Vets

The NYTimes reported today that (finally!) regulations may be changing for veterans in need of psychiatric care. Thus far, soldiers and former soldiers have had to "prove" their need for such care through documentation of their experiences in combat, which is (needless to say) ridiculous and with a marked LACK of understanding about what exactly mental illness is. For the full article read here. One fascinating report indicates that as many as 20% of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq suffer from PTSD.

The problems surrounding soldiers and their psychological states are myriad. This article on what happens to soldiers gone AWOL, from TomDispatch a while back (now linked through Common Dreams), talks about the conditions under which AWOL soldiers are imprisoned. Military industrial complex and prison industrial complex collapse and become one. Almost poetic. Mostly just frustrating and upsetting. It makes me wonder if everyone doesn't see these connections, too, and why the masses aren't demanding CHANGE right now!!!!! Or if they are, how the dominant patriarchy manages to keep it stifled and hidden...I know that millions of Americans are affected by these situations far more than I am, in my little bubble of privilege... AH

In related news, all of the Hawaiian female inmates in a Kentucky prison are being removed from the Otter Creek Correctional Center after widespread documentation of serious sexual abuse. Kentucky is one of the only states in which sex between a prison guard and an inmate is a misdemeanor rather than a felony, and at least five correctional officers (including one chaplain) has been proven, at this point, to have had sex with the women at Otter Creek. (For the full NYTimes article read here.)

Interestingly, the discourse in the NYTimes article and how officials are explaining this absurd abuse of power is how problematic private, for-profit prisons are and how they lack transparency... as if government run prisons are these oases of justice and rehabilitation. And while the article explains WHY Hawaiian women are in Kentucky prisons (lack of adequate funding and beds in HI, for example) they don't really even begin to talk about the tensions that can emerge and how the rape of Hawaiian imprisoned women fits into a history of violence and repression (sexual and otherwise) against indigenous women in the Americas. I guess that would be expecting too much from the NYTimes... but it's disturbing in the implication that your average privileged Times reader is not encouraged to examine this as anything more than a glitch in the system rather than an example of what the system requires.

(Note: While the article doesn't specify that the women are indigenous Hawaiians, I have to assume that some of the victims are, considering the disproportionate numbers of native Hawaiians who are locked up in the U.S. today.)

Why Our Criminal Justice System OBVIOUSLY Has Nothing to do with Justice

The irony and counter-intuitiveness of our prison industrial complex and criminal processing system is overwhelming now, more than ever. And now, more than ever, I am convinced that the only way we will ever escape the demons we are creating and learn to look each other in the eye and treat each other like HUMAN BEINGS is complete and total prison abolition. A new start, a new way of understanding ourselves, understanding the word 'community' and understanding how to love and respect one another.

Today, hundreds of California inmates rioted (for ELEVEN HOURS) in the Reception Center West at the California Institution for Men in Chino. No one was killed but hundreds were wounded and those wounded were disproportionately Black and Latino. Guess what our government is gonna do? CHARGE THEM WITH ADDITIONAL CRIMES... lengthen their sentences. Yea, that makes sense... how??? Read the full NYTimes article here (Of course, it isn't easy getting out either with unemployment being what it is - the latest on unemployment from Racewire here.)

Another article that made me cry was about a sixteen-year-old mentally ill boy named Donald, who has been locked up for two years because of a breaking-and-entering charge despite his diagnosis of several serious mental health disorders. They put him in juvie because they thought he'd get the best treatment there, but have KEPT him there because of violence he has inflicted on himself, on animals, and his attempt to fight a guard. Can anyone not understand that these are clear indications that a violent padded cell is SO CLEARLY not working for this ill PERSON?!? Sorry for the caps but it is just so obvious... and frustrating. And disappointing. And typical. The NYTimes reports:

As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders. About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999 — have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.

Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on multiple — and powerful — psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.

In California’s state system, one of the most violent and poorly managed juvenile systems in the country, according to federal investigators, three dozen youth offenders seriously injured themselves or attempted suicide in the last year — a sign, state juvenile justice experts say, of neglect and poor safety protocols.

In Ohio, where Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist, approved a 34 percent reduction in community-based mental health services to reduce a budget deficit, Thomas J. Stickrath, the director of the Department of Youth Services, said continuing cuts would swell his youth offender population.

“I’m hearing from a lot of judges saying, ‘I’m sorry I’m sending so-and-so to you, but at least I know that he’ll get the treatment he can’t get in his community,’ ” Mr. Stickrath said.

But youths are often subjected to neglect and violence in juvenile prisons, and studies show that mental illnesses can become worse there.

This trap that we're put into - this epistemological resignation, leads us to think that more legislation and more criminalization are the only way. Racewire recently did a great writeup of how hate crime legislation does not effectively counter hate crimes at all and rather contributes to the expansion of the prison and police systems. We need something else. And we need it now.

Sustainable Prisons? (From Liza Bean)

Thanks Liz for showing me this:

You probably don’t use the words “sustainability” and “prison” in the same sentence very often. The housing and feeding of inmates requires huge amounts of water and energy, though, and generates tons of waste. The Sustainable Prisons Project, a partnership between the Washington State Department of Corrections and the Evergreen State College, works to make prisons more efficient… and perhaps even reduce recidivism rates by providing “green collar” training to inmates.

Started in 2004 as a simple project to use dwindling water resources at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center more efficiently, the project now involves food production, recycling, composting, and even beekeeping. Plans for the project include not only building on progress at Cedar Creek, but also expanding the program to three other facilities. The program is even working with national organizations like the Nature Conservancy to protect and restore endangered prairie perennials.

DOC officials see the project as a true win-win: not only can the system save money, but also address mental health challenges and recidivism among inmates by providing them with meaningful work that engages them in issues which extend beyond the prison walls.

Is it time to start using “sustainability” and “prison” in the same sentence more often? Is this a sensible investment in both resource efficiency and prisoner rehabilitation? Let us know what you think…

For the original post and photos see http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2009/08/prison-life-sustainable-prisons-project/.

Ever wondered what hell looks like?

Well, the US DOJ has the answer. (From this article in the NYT on why we shouldn't be afraid to close Guantanamo - there are plenty of draconian US prisons waiting for "most dangerous" criminals.)

Note the emphasis on CONTROL.

Beyond the gates is a 20-foot “no man’s land” between the administrative offices and the inmate housing units. A collapsible barbed wire fence runs along the outside of the strip. Razor wire swirls along the fence, which is rigged with sensors to detect attempted breaches. At night, the security strip is bathed in light and kept under constant surveillance by guards with rifles.

Beyond another set of airlock security doors is a long hallway separating the inmates’ living quarters and the dining hall from the dusty recreational fields and basketball courts at the center of the prison. The hall is interrupted by gates every several feet to control the prisoners’ movement.

“Our thing is control,” said Charles Ringwood, a prison spokesman. “The schedule is controlled. All movements are controlled. Everything has to be controlled.”

Standing above the prison yard, Guard Tower 7 forms the hub of the penitentiary. Wire fences slice the recreation yard into sections. Inmates in standard-issue khaki uniforms played a full-court basketball game in one section; in another, inmates walked in a circle. There were no free weights, which have been banned in most federal prisons.

Inmates live in six triangular housing pods arrayed around the prison yard, each holding about 250 prisoners. Inmates from different housing units rarely associate with one another. Each housing pod has two levels of cells around a common area. Inmates can use earphones to listen to televisions, which are affixed to a post. The area has payphones and a microwave for food bought at the commissary.

Inmates sleep in two-bunk cells. Random searches are conducted daily. Prisoners are counted five times each day — at 4 p.m., 10 p.m., midnight, 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. Inmates deemed to be “high security risks,” including some international terrorists, must check in with prison staff members every two hours. Those who do not may be sent to the Special Handling Unit, a set of isolation cells where inmates have little or no contact with others.

The isolation cells were full, Mr. Norwood said, with 235 inmates there for reasons including violence and disobeying commands. Some are there to be protected from other prisoners. Prisoners generally stay in isolation cells for one to six months, Mr. Norwood said.

Please don't feed the PRISON MONSTER!

Abolición! Ahora!

From Philly IMC:

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.

Part 1 here

Update from CR

One in 31

Explosive growth in the number of people on probation or parole has propelled the population of the American corrections system to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 U.S. adults, according to a report released by the Pew Center on the States. The vast majority of these offenders live in the community, yet new data in the report finds that nearly 90 percent of state corrections dollars are spent on prisons. One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections examines the scale and cost of prison, jail, probation and parole in each of the 50 states, and provides a blueprint for states to cut both crime and spending by reallocating prison expenses to fund stronger supervision of the large number of offenders in the community.

All State Fact Sheets

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas
California Colorado Connecticut Delaware
District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii
Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa
Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine
Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota
Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska
Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico
New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio
Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island
South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas
Utah Vermont Virginia Washington
West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

Visit the “Policy Framework to Strengthen Community Corrections” for a menu of five model policy provisions that can help corrections agencies reduce recidivism and cut costs.

View Full Report:

March 02, 2009 -
One in 31 (report) (Adobe PDF)

Corporal Punishment in Schools and its Impact

In a HRW and ACLU report, officials in 21 states have affirmed the beating of children as a sound educational practice

The report says:

Certain minority groups—particularly African-American students—receive corporal punishment at disproportionate rates. African Americans constitute 17.1 percent of the nationwide student population, but 35.6 percent of those paddled. Even while overall corporal punishment rates have declined during the last 30 years, disparate rates of physical punishment of African-American students have persisted.

Racewire wrote a great article about this - click here for it.

Also, the Children's Defense Fund's Cradle to Prison Pipeline Campaign has really important information and steps toward action. They write:

Nationally, 1 in 3 Black and 1 in 6 Latino boys born in 2001 are at risk of imprisonment during their lifetime. While boys are five times as likely to be incarcerated as girls, there also is a significant number of girls in the juvenile justice system. This rate of incarceration is endangering children at younger and younger ages.

This is America's pipeline to prison — a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment and often premature death. Although the majority of fourth graders cannot read at grade level, states spend about three times as much money per prisoner as per public school pupil.

I know that in a lot of ways the incarceration of children makes sense if you look at the larger function of the prison industrial complex - because of course none of it MAKES SENSE how rational people think about what makes sense, rather it is all about maintaining the hierarchy of power that currently exists and above all, supporting the status quo - but reading this just hurts so much. The prison system is painful and harmful and I hurt when I read about anyone locked up and everyone who is locked up or loves someone who is locked up but it hurts that much more to read about children being beaten in schools and locked up. It makes the world seem hopeless.

Sorry for rambling. In light of all this I need some Shel Silverstein:

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

Nobama Nobama No

I'm feeling down today. Can't provide any more commentary than that.

The first workplace raid under Obama:

28 employees were arrested when over 70 ICE agents forcibly raided Yamato Engine Specialists in Bellingham, Washington.

Racewire's Hatty Lee quotes the President:
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time for a president who won’t walk away from comprehensive immigration reform when it becomes politically unpopular.” President Obama's words from Sept. 2008. Maybe he needs to be reminded of these words.

What we can do:
• The Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) asks the president to stop raids
• The Campaign for Community Change asks us to call President Obama

Also, from Racewire, Tammy Johnson critiques Obama's racial coding:


In other not particularly uplifting news:

The NYT reports that:
Across the country, children are providing care for sick parents or grandparents — lifting frail bodies off beds or toilets, managing medication, washing, feeding, dressing, talking with doctors. Schools, social service agencies and health providers are often unaware of those responsibilities because families members may be too embarrassed, or stoic.
Reuters also wrote yesterday:
Prison inmates infected with the AIDS virus often stop taking life-saving drugs after being released, raising health risks for them and their communities, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
The researchers said the U.S. prison system has become an important front in efforts to curb the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?! The implications are too overwhelming for me to think about right now

Continuing struggles..

There's new technology for policing the border apparently - people can be minutemen now from the comfort of their living rooms. For the full article on NPR click here

Texas sheriffs have erected a series of surveillance cameras along the Rio Grande and connected them to the Internet.

Thousands of people are now virtual Border Patrol agents — and they're on the lookout for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.

On Blueservo's Web site, each camera focuses on an area that's known for illegal crossing. Next to a real-time view of a grassy meadow is the message: "Look for individuals on foot carrying backpacks." A shot of a border highway says, "If you see movement from the right to the left, please report this activity."

When a citizen spots suspicious activity, they click a button on the Web site and write a report. That message goes to the corresponding sheriff's office. The sheriff may handle the problem or call the U.S. Border Patrol.

To date, more than 43,000 people have logged on and become, as the Web site calls them, "virtual Texas deputies."

But resistance to the military/prison industrial complex lives on.

PhillyIMC reports that:

On Monday, February 16th, a diverse group of 30 anti-war and peace activists occupied the Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall in Northeast Philadelphia for about ten minutes. Activists had taped signs to their chests that read WAR IS NOT A GAME. Upon the arrival of two officers from the Philadelphia police civil affairs unit, the activists who had been holding freeze positions left the Center. A press release was read to the retired Army civilian director of the Center and two Army officer connected with it. For the full story read here

TAKE ACTION NOW!!!

On January 20, 2009 guards in the Special Management Unit (SMU) at the State Correctional [sic] Institution (SCI) in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania assaulted six prisoners, reportedly citing as reasons that these men file grievances against guard misconduct and are engaged in civil litigation against DOC officials.

We are asking that you read the alert, become angry, and act accordingly to help protect the men in the SMU and by extension all others subjected to the normalized white supremacist torture occurring on a daily basis inside prisons in the state of Pennsylvania and throughout the U.S.

FOR THE MEMO AND INFORMATION ABOUT HOW TO TAKE ACTION click here

Judges Plead Guilty to Jailing Youths for Profit

You can't make this shit up. And just when I was feeling optimistic...

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

My thoughts exactly on the entire scandal that is the PIC. The entire system needs to be abolished. Prison abolition, please. Now.

Torture at Angola Prison

Torture at Angola Prison:

President Obama promises to close Guantanamo, but a court proceeding in Louisiana exposes brutality closer to home

By Jordan Flaherty

The torture of prisoners in US custody is not only found in military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. If President Obama is serious about ending US support for torture, he can start here in Louisiana.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is already notorious for a range of offenses, including keeping former Black Panthers Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, in solitary for over 36 years. Now a death penalty trial in St. Francisville, Louisiana has exposed widespread and systemic abuse at the prison. Even in the context of eight years of the Bush administration, the behavior documented at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola stands out both for its brutality and for the significant evidence that it was condoned and encouraged from the very top of the chain of command.

In a remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola, twenty-five inmates testified last summer to facing overwhelming violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly a decade ago. These twenty-five inmates - who were not involved in the escape attempt - testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell, and threatened that they would be killed. They were threatened by guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons. They were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were bloodied, had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily functions, and beaten until they signed statements or confessions presented to them by prison officials. One inmate had a broken jaw, and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years.

While prison officials deny the policy of abuse, the range of prisoners who gave statements, in addition to medical records and other evidence introduced at the trial, present a powerful argument that abuse is a standard policy at the prison. Several of the prisoners received $7,000 when the state agreed to settle, without admitting liability, two civil rights lawsuits filed by 13 inmates. The inmates will have to spend that money behind bars –more than 90% of Angola's prisoners are expected to die behind its walls.

Systemic Violence

During the attempted escape at Angola, in which one guard was killed and two were taken hostage, a team of officers - including Angola warden Burl Cain - rushed in and began shooting, killing one inmate, Joel Durham, and wounding another, David Mathis.

The prison has no official guidelines for what should happen during escape attempts or other crises, a policy that seems designed to encourage the violent treatment documented in this case. Richard Stalder, at that time the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, was also at the prison at the time. Yet despite – or because of - the presence of the prison warden and head of corrections for the state, guards were given free hand to engage in violent retribution. Cain later told a reporter after the shooting that Angola's policy was not to negotiate, saying, ''That's a message all the inmates know. They just forgot it. And now they know it again.''

Five prisoners – including Mathis - were charged with murder, and currently are on trial, facing the death penalty – partially based on testimony from other inmates that was obtained through beatings and torture. Mathis is represented by civil rights attorneys Jim Boren (who also represented one of the Jena Six youths) and Rachel Connor, with assistance from Nola Investigates, an investigative firm in New Orleans that specializes in defense for capital cases.

The St. Francisville hearing was requested by Mathis' defense counsel to demonstrate that, in the climate of violence and abuse, inmates were forced to sign statements through torture, and therefore those statements should be inadmissible. 20th Judicial District Judge George H. Ware Jr. ruled that the documented torture and abuse was not relevant. However, the behavior documented in the hearing not only raises strong doubts about the cases against the Angola Five, but it also shows that violence against inmates has become standard procedure at the prison.

The hearing shows a pattern of systemic abuse so open and regular, it defies the traditional excuse of bad apples. Inmate Doyle Billiot testified to being threatened with death by the guards, "What's not to be afraid of? Got all these security guards coming around you everyday looking at you sideways, crazy and stuff. Don't know what's on their mind, especially when they threaten to kill you." Another inmate, Robert Carley testified that a false confession was beaten out of him. ""I was afraid," he said. "I felt that if I didn't go in there and tell them something, I would die."

Inmate Kenneth "Geronimo" Edwards testified that the guards "beat us half to death." He also testified that guards threatened to sexually assault him with a baton, saying, "that's a big black…say you want it." Later, Edwards says, the guards, "put me in my cell. They took all my clothes. Took my jumpsuit. Took all the sheets, everything out the cell, and put me in the cell buck-naked…It was cold in the cell. They opened the windows and turned the blowers on." At least a dozen other inmates also testified to receiving the same beatings, assault, threats of sexual violence, and "freezing treatment."

Some guards at the prison treated the abuse as a game. Inmate Brian Johns testified at the hearing that, "one of the guards was hitting us all in the head. Said he liked the sound of the drums – the drumming sound that – from hitting us in the head with the stick."

Solitary Confinement

Two of Angola's most famous residents, political prisoners Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have become the primary example of another form of abuse common at Angola – the use of solitary confinement as punishment for political views. The two have now each spent more than 36 years in solitary, despite the fact that a judge recently overturned Woodfox's conviction (prison authorities continue to hold Woodfox and have announced plans to retry him). Woodfox and Wallace – who together with former prisoner King Wilkerson are known as the Angola Three - have filed a civil suit against Angola, arguing that their confinement has violated both their 8th amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment and 4th amendment right to due process.

Recent statements by Angola warden Burl Cain makes clear that Woodfox and Wallace are being punished for their political views. At a recent deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain, "Lets just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller." Cain responded, "Okay. I would still keep him in (solitary)…I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them...He has to stay in a cell while he's at Angola."

In addition to Cain's comments, Louisiana Attorney General James "Buddy" Caldwell has said the case against the Angola Three is personal to him. Statements like this indicate that this vigilante attitude not only pervades New Orleans' criminal justice system, but that the problem comes from the very top.

The problem is not limited to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola – similar stories can be found in prisons across the US. But from the abandonment of prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison during Katrina to the case of the Jena Six, Louisiana's criminal justice system, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, often seems to be functioning under plantation-style justice. Most recently, journalist A.C. Thompson, in an investigation of post-Katrina killings, found evidence that the New Orleans police department supported vigilante attacks against Black residents of New Orleans after Katrina.

Torture and abuse is illegal under both US law – including the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment - and international treaties that the US is signatory to, from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified in 1992). Despite the laws and treaties, US prison guards have rarely been held accountable to these standards.

Once we say that abuse or torture is ok against prisoners, the next step is for it to be used in the wider population. A recent petition for administrative remedies filed by Herman Wallace states, "If Guantanamo Bay has been a national embarrassment and symbol of the U.S. government's relation to charges, trials and torture, then what is being done to the Angola 3… is what we are to expect if we fail to act quickly…The government tries out it's torture techniques on prisoners in the U.S. – just far enough to see how society will react. It doesn't take long before they unleash their techniques on society as a whole." If we don't stand up against this abuse now, it will only spread.

Despite the hearings, civil suits, and other documentation, the guards who performed the acts documented in the hearing on torture at Angola remain unpunished, and the system that designed it remains in place. In fact, many of the guards have been promoted, and remain in supervisory capacity over the same inmates they were documented to have beaten mercilessly. Warden Burl Cain still oversees Angola. Meanwhile, the trial of the Angola Five is moving forward, and those with the power to change the pattern of abuse at Angola remain silent.

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans, and an editor of Left Turn Magazine. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and his reporting on post-Katrina New Orleans has been published and broadcast in outlets including Die Zeit (in Germany), Clarin (in Argentina), Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org.Research assistance for this article by Emily Ratner.

Resources:
The Angola Three - http://www.angola3.org
Safe Streets Strong Communities - http://www.safestreetsnola.org
Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children - http://www.fflic.org
Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana - http://www.jjpl.org
NOLA Investigates - http://www.nolainvestigates.com
Left Turn Magazine - http://www.leftturn.org
Letter From Angola State Prison, by Nathaniel Anderson, #130547 - http://www.leftturn.org/node/1155