Mass Incarceration

Substance Abuse Is A Public Health Issue, Not A Crime

October 15, 2014 Brave New Films, www.youtube.com Educate! Mass Incarceration, Mental Illness, War On Drugs

It’s simple. Diversion programs work better than incarceration – for everyone. In cities like Seattle, San Antonio, and Salt Lake City, we see that successful solutions are a viable option to help end serious social problems. These services alter the course of people’s lives in a positive way and save taxpayers huge amounts of money. We cannot continue to isolate and imprison people who suffer from mental illness, substance abuse, or homelessness. We must treat them with compassion and care to better serve our communities and our pocketbooks. It's time we got serious about pulling our money out of incarceration and putting it into systems that foster healthy communities. Hundreds of thousands of people are locked up not because of any dangerous behavior, but because of problems like mental illness, substance use disorders, and homelessness, which should be dealt with outside the criminal justice system. Services like drug treatment and affordable housing cost less and can have a better record of success.

Organizing To Stop Shackling, Abuse Of Women Prisoners

October 8, 2014 Victoria Law, www.wagingnonviolence.org Organize! Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Women's Rights

In 2009, after years of organizing by advocates, including formerly incarcerated women, New York State passed legislation restricting the shackling of pregnant women during labor, delivery and postpartum recovery. But the law is not always followed, as Ursulina and 22 other women have learned. Ursulina was three months pregnant when she arrived in 2012 at Bedford Hills — New York’s maximum-security prison for women. It was three years after anti-shackling legislation was passed and supposedly implemented. But when she went into labor, Ursulina was shackled before being taken to the hospital. When she arrived at the hospital, the doctor told her that she was not dilated enough and that she should go home. “I’m not going home,” she told him. “I’m going back to prison.” She was sent back, in shackles and chains.

Guantanamo’s Controversial Force-Feeding Policies On Trial

October 7, 2014 Jason Leopold, www.news.vice.com Educate! Human Rights, Mass Incarceration, Torture, Wars and Militarism

Two weeks ago, medical personnel at Guantanamo Bay told VICE News that hunger-striking detainees are fed no differently than American patients in US hospitals who require feeding tubes. But today, lawyers for Abu Wa'el Dhiab, a 43-year-old Syrian national who has been held captive at Guantanamo since 2002 — he has been cleared for transfer out of the detention facility since 2009 — are arguing in US District Court in Washington, DC that Guantanamo's new force-feeding protocols are particularly abusive, and specifically designed to deter detainees from participating in the hunger strikes. It's a historic case that could force military officials to radically change the way detainees who engage in the protests are treated by their captors.

Political Prisoner Convicted In Trooper Death To Be Released

October 2, 2014 NewsOne Staff, www.newsone.com Educate! Law, Mass Incarceration, police brutality, Political Prisoner, Racism

A man convicted in the shooting death of a New Jersey state trooper in a crime that still provokes strong emotion among law enforcement more than 40 years later was ordered released on parole by a state appeals court Monday. Sundiata Acoli was known as Clark Edward Squire when he was convicted of the 1973 slaying of Trooper Werner Foerster during a stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. Now in his mid-70s, Acoli was denied parole most recently in 2011, but the appellate judges reversed that ruling Monday. The panel found that the parole board ignored evidence favorable to Acoli and gave undue consideration to past events such as a probation violation that occurred decades earlier.

Murder, Mass Incarceration, Militarization And Genocide In Progress

September 29, 2014 Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and Kevin Berends, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Law, Mass Incarceration, militarism, Racism

How does one explain the totality of: mass incarceration of healthy young black males in their most productive years; their falling to state-sponsored murder coast-to-coast; the impoverishment of black wealth through wholesale thievery by corporate and banking foreclosures, and the militarization of police forces arrayed nationwide against black communities? Were these crimes against African-Americans committed in a theater of war they would rise to the level of genocide as defined by the United Nations. The systematic and brutal execution of black men is illegal under domestic and international law. Under UN conventions this crime alone rises to the level of genocide as defined in international law under Article II.

The Mass Incarceration Movement Can Learn From The Climate Struggle

September 28, 2014 James Kilgore, www.truth-out.org Educate! Climate Change, Climate Justice, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Mass Incarceration

The release of the Bureau of Justice statistics for 2013 is perhaps the Rio moment for the movement against mass incarceration. This may be the time for the movement to seriously reflect on the limitations of cherry picking "non-violent offenders" and diverting a few people into drug courts or community service. Ending mass incarceration requires a different kind of movement, one with the active participation and leadership of millions of poor people of color. While policy reports and legislative lobbying can play an important role, as theBlockadia activists in North America are emphasizing, direct action from the critically impacted also needs to be added to the agenda. Let us hope that long before 20 years after this "Rio moment," the movement against mass incarceration will not be lamenting the miniscule impact our actions have had on this systemic problem and still be wondering why a piecemeal, expert-driven approach has not changed the world. And let us also hope that by that time, the vagaries of climate change have not rendered our efforts too late.

Who’s Getting Caught In The ‘School-to-Prison’ Pipeline?

September 27, 2014 Frederick Reese, www.mintpressnews.com Educate! Education, Mass Incarceration, Racism

In 2009, for example, the Los Angeles Unified School District reported that among its students who were given out-of-school suspensions, 62 percent were Hispanic and 33 percent were black. Only 3 percent were white. Similarly, the West Valley School District in Spokane, Washington, reported that of the students who were expelled that year, 20 percent were black and 60 percent were white — this, for a school district whose student body is 86 percent white and 4 percent black. Also in 2009, in the Normandy School District of St. Louis, 100 percent of all students who received more than one out-of-school suspension, 100 percent of all students expelled without educational services, and 100 percent of all students referred to law enforcement were black. In New Orleans, all of the Orleans Parish School Board’s expulsions under its “zero-tolerance” policy were black, as were 67 percent of the board’s school-related arrests.

Languishing In Jail With No Charges Or Lawyer

September 27, 2014 Campbell Robertson, www.nytimes.com Educate! Human Rights, Mass Incarceration

Sheila Burks has not seen her nephew Octavious much over the past few years. Sitting in her house far out in the Mississippi countryside, she ticked off his stints in the Scott County jail: There was the 18-month stay that ended in 2011; the year that ended in June 2013; and a stretch that began with an arrest last November and is still going. It is hard to figure out what all this jail time has actually been about. While the arrests that led to these jail stays have been on serious felony charges, Octavious Burks, 37, a poultry plant worker, has not been convicted of or even faced trial on any of the charges. For nearly all of his time in jail, including his current 10-month stay, Mr. Burks has not even had access to a lawyer.

Egypt: Hunger Strikes Against Mass Arbitrary Arrests

September 16, 2014 Revolution-News, www.revolution-news.com Resist! Egypt, Human Rights, Hunger Strike, Mass Incarceration

156 people are now on hunger strike in Egypt, 82 inside Egyptian prisons and 74 outside, in solidarity with all those who have been arrested by the Egyptian military and police forces. Estimates say around 41,000 people have been arrested in Egypt since the ousting of Mohammed Morsi in July 2013. Human rights groups report at least 25,000 people have been arrested this year and many have died while in custody. Reports indicate that torture is still widely used on prisoners. While many in Egypt and abroad are elated with today’s news of the Shura Council detainees being released on bail, there are still way too many people locked up in deplorable conditions for ridiculous reasons in Egypt. It is difficult to keep track of who exactly is in Egyptian jail but here’s a list of some recent arrests.

False Perception Of Black Crime At Root Of Injustice

September 15, 2014 The Sentencing Project, www.sentencingproject.org Educate! Ferguson, Mass Incarceration, Racial Justice

This report examines how racial perceptions of crime are a key cause of the severity of punishment in the United States. Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies, authored by Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Ph.D., research analyst at The Sentencing Project, synthesizes two decades of research revealing that white Americans’ strong associations of crime with blacks and Latinos are related to their support for punitive policies that disproportionately impact people of color. Coming on the heels of the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri, the report demonstrates that the consequences of white Americans’ strong associations of crime with blacks and Latinos extend far beyond policing.

Wrongfully Convicted, Leonard Peltier Is Turning 70 In Prison

September 12, 2014 Silja J.A. Talvi , www.alternet.org Educate! Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Mass Incarceration

This September, Leonard Peltier will spend his 70th birthday in pain and isolation. Prisoner # 89637-132 is exactly where the FBI wants him: locked up in one of America's largest federal supermaximum prisons in Coleman, Florida. One of America's longest-suffering political prisoners, Peltier is an Anishinabe-Lakota Native American who has wrongfully spent nearly 40 years in prison for the alleged murder of two, armed FBI agents in a shoot-out on the impoverished Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. Peltier was brought up on murder charges on the word of a young Indian woman whom he had never met. That woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, retracted her testimony in 2000, issuing a public statement to explain that her testimony was forced after months of abuse and intimidation at the hands of FBI agents. Despite international outcry and an abundance of evidence that the FBI coerced, harassed, and manipulated testimony as well as ballistics evidence at Peltier's trial in 1977—and the FBI's subsequent admission that they have no idea who was actually responsible for the deaths--Peltier has been denied parole repeatedly.

New Documentary Exposes Destruction Of Justice System

August 27, 2014 Messiah Rhodes, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Film, Mass Incarceration, Police, Prison

Control is a feature-length documentary that tells the story of Luther, an African American teenager whose life has been caught in the web of the criminal justice system. Co-directors Chris Bravo, an independent filmmaker, and Lindsey Schneider, who works for Vice, investigate how the system of mass incarceration affects the court system, high schools and the living rooms where families confront it on a daily basis. A three-year-long project, Bravo and Schneider followed Luther, affectionately known as Mouse, as he deals with a felonious second-degree assault charge, which he received by simply being outside of his building. Yet, Control is not primarily a story about guilt or innocence, crime or punishment, but rather about how the ongoing presence of the justice system in this community infuses every aspect of daily life. I sat down with Chris Bravo and Lindsey Schneider in Union Square Park recently to discuss their film, which recently won the Best Documentary award at The People’s Film Festival in New York City and which has been screened at the Oakland International Film Festival, the Landlocked Film Festival and many other venues.

Fighting Poverty And Reducing Jail In Real Time

August 26, 2014 Julian Adler, www.talkpoverty.org Create! Mass Incarceration, New York City (NYC), Poverty, Prison

Many of us who work in the criminal justice system have come to understand the profound connection between poverty and mass incarceration. Put simply, individuals with criminal histories – even minor ones – find it exceedingly difficult to enter the workforce and provide for their families. One pragmatic response to this problem is to incarcerate fewer people, particularly in local jails. While much of the public debate and academic discourse focuses on the challenges of reducing federal and state prison enrollments, mass incarceration is a problem with a significant local dimension too. As of June 30, 2013, an estimated 731,208 persons in the U.S. were confined in local jails; a much larger total of 11.7 million persons were imprisoned in local jails at some point over the preceding year. More than 6 out of 10 of those jailed in the U.S. have yet to be convicted of any crime. Indeed, many of those held in pretrial detention are actually eligible for release yet they cannot afford to post bail – often nominal amounts of money. And contrary to popular thinking, the overwhelming majority of criminal prosecutions concern relatively minor offenses. In New York City, three out of four cases that make it to criminal court are misdemeanors – a total of more than 235,000 cases in 2012.

The Killing Of Black Men Continues

August 20, 2014 Ron Daniels, www.ibw21.org Educate! Mass Incarceration, Police, Racism, Violence

When will it stop? The police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, coming on the heals of the killing of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man by a policeman’s choke hold in Staten Island, New York, is yet another painful, traumatic reminder of the long history of occupation, torture, abuse and killing of Black people in America, particularly Black men. Indeed, within hours of the killing of Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, an unarmed Black man with a history of mental problems, was killed in Los Angeles under suspicious circumstances. It doesn’t matter that there is an African American President of the United States or that Blacks are mayors of major American cities, run Fortune 500 companies or are pace setters as high paid and adored hip hop moguls, entertainers and athletes; the killing of Black men continues. Once again legions of Black people and people of conscience and goodwill are in the streets in Ferguson, Missouri and in solidarity rallies across the country. But, to add insult to injury, in scenes reminiscent of the brutalizing of civil rights protesters in Birmingham and Selma in the 60’s, St. Louis County Police units with sharpshooters, sniper squads, mine-resistant trucks and a “Bearcat armored truck” unleashed a ferocious assault on peaceful marchers, firing tear gas, stun bombs and rubber bullets into the ranks of terrorized protesters. The whole nation and the world witnessed this vicious onslaught against the First Amendment by highly militarized police that looked more like soldiers on the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan than the suburb of a major American city. There was “shock and awe” throughout the land.

Black Men No Better Off Than 40 Years Ago

August 14, 2014 Freddie Allen, www.louisianaweekly.com Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Mass Incarceration, Racism

Black men are no better off than they were more than 40 years ago, due to mass incarceration and job losses suffered during the Great Recession, according to a new report by researchers at the University of Chicago. Derek Neal and Armin Rick, the co-authors of the study, found that reforms in the criminal justice system at the state-level largely contributed to disparities in arrests and incarceration rates that ultimately stifled educational and economic progress for Black men. “The growth of incarceration rates among Black men in recent decades combined with the sharp drop in Black employment rates during the Great Recession have left most Black men in a position relative to white men that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965,” the co-authors wrote. The report cites research conducted by James Smith and Finis Welch published in 1989 that showed, “the Black-white gap in completed years of schooling among males ages 26-35 fell from 3.9 years of schooling in 1940 to 1.4 years in 1980.” Blacks also experienced “dramatic economic and social progress” during that time period. That progress slowed for Black men during the 1990s, and in some cases, reversed course entirely.

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