On Wednesday July 31st, people around the world will fast and take other peaceful, non-violent action in solidarity with the California Prisoner Hunger Strikers. Join family members of hunger strikers along with James Cromwell, Angela Davis, Mike Farrell, Danny Glover, Elliott Gould, Chris Hedges, Alice Walker, and Cornel West. We fast knowing the criminalization that killed Trayvon Martin, and the criminalization that justifies the torture of prisoners in solitary confinement are one and the same.

Today is Day 24 of the California Prisoner Hunger Strike. Beth Hastings and I are fasting today. By fasting publicly we hope to broaden awareness of the enormous injustice and the horrific conditions prisoners must endure every day in solitary confinement in the California penal system. Our fast is a personal response to an appalling situation. In California, nearly 12,000 imprisoned people spend 23 of 24 hours living in a concrete cell smaller than a large bathroom. The cells have no windows, no access to fresh air or sunlight. People in solitary confinement exercise an hour a day in a cage the size of a dog run. They are not allowed to make any phone calls to their loved ones. They cannot touch family members who often travel days for a 90 minute visit; their conversation and their mail is monitored by prison guards. They are not allowed to talk to other imprisoned people. They are denied all educational programs, and their reading materials are censored.

How are prisoners put into solitary confinement? The prosecutor, judge and jury is a prison official called an Institutional Gang Investigator. The I.G.I.’s ‘evidence’ may be a book the prisoner has read, a tattoo, or some culturally based art the prisoner has created. But most often, the ‘evidence’ comes from another prisoner, a secret informant. With this ‘evidence,’ the I.G.I can ‘sentence’ the accused to a lifetime in solitary confinement.

The primary demands of the hunger strikers are these:

1. An end to long term solitary;
2. An end to the illegal and immoral use of secret informants;
3. An end to punishing whole racial groups for an individual’s actions;
4. Improving conditions to meet basic humane standards for physical and mental health; and
5. Providing educational programs.

What can you do to help?

You can endorse and support today’s “Hunger for Justice” action. Sign on here…

You can join the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition (PHSS) and participate in one action per week in response to some emergency facing the hunger strikers, and in resistance to the torture. These actions may include an email, phone call, letter, or a vigil and will be initiated by the Emergency Response Network of PHSS.

You can contact Governor Jerry Brown:
Phone: (916) 445-2841, (510) 289-0336, (510) 628-0202
Fax: (916) 558-3160
Suggested script: I’m calling in support of the prisoners on hunger strike. The governor has the power to stop the torture of solitary confinement. I urge the governor to compel the CDCR to enter into negotiations to end the strike. RIGHT NOW is their chance to enter into clear, honest negotiations with the strikers to end the torture.

The federal prosecutor dropped the charges against Aaron the day before his funeral. (Does that count as a tie in her Won/Lost statistics?) The gesture was lost on Aaron’s family, who said Aaron’s death “…is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims.” It seemed clear to the family and many of his friends that the prosecutor had over-reached in Aaron’s case, had in fact driven him to suicide. No less a legal light than Larry Lessig, normally mild and even tempered, weighed in with harsh criticism. Aaron, Lessig wrote,

…was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

The American criminal justice system is worse than imperfect. It is adversarial, each case a trial by combat, defense attorneys and prosecutors jousting before a judge and–infrequently–a jury who will determine the victor. Elaborate criminal codes, precedents, and judicial rules and guidelines describe the boundaries within which the serious game is played. Many, perhaps most, lawyers will agree that the US Attorney’s Office dealt properly with Aaron. Orin Kerr, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy offers a detailed two part post about The Crimimal Charges Against Aaron Swartz.

In Part One, The Law, he concludes that “…the charges against Swartz were based on a fair reading of the law. None of the charges involved aggressive readings of the law or any apparent prosecutorial overreach. All of the charges were based on established caselaw. Indeed, once the decision to charge the case had been made, the charges brought here were pretty much what any good federal prosecutor would have charged.”

In Part Two, Prosecutorial Discretion, Kerr writes, “I think that some kind of criminal punishment was appropriate in this case. Swartz had announced his commitment to violating the law as a moral imperative in order to effectively nullify existing federal laws on access to information. When someone engages in civil disobedience and intentionally violates a criminal law to achieve such an anti-democratic policy goal through unlawful means — and when there are indications in both words and deeds that he will continue to do so — it is proper for the criminal law to impose a punishment under the law that the individual intentionally violated. (Indeed, usually that is the point of civil disobedience: The entire point is to be punished to draw attention to the law that is deemed unjust.)”

Kerr addresses a range of legal questions and issues and I find it hard to disagree with him. But, there seems to be a meaningful issue that the best legal minds avoid. How fair was the prosecutor in the way she played the game? It’s not a question that we often consider. Are prosecutors required to play fair? We have judges and referees to keep both sides in line. But Aaron had a point to make. In order to make his point he needed to have a fair hearing. To get a fair hearing for his victimless crime, he was asked to risk thirty-five years of his life and be branded a felon. The prosecutor offered Aaron a choice. She was willing to drop Aaron’s risk of incarceration to a mere six months, to accept a plea bargain. Aaron could brand himself a felon by pleading guilty, and he would have been denied any hearing whatsoever. In the context of the prosecutor’s daily work, this may have seemed fair, but I think the prosecutor’s balls to the wall approach effectively denied Aaron Swartz a hearing and therefore it denied him justice, and that depressing circumstance cost him his life.

To assure complete coverage, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff tweeted the event. twitter: complete coverage of the World Cup, the Lakers, and deaths by firing squad. All the fits that’s news…

and a one

and a two

and a three

tasteful to a fault.

My first thought was that this is just another case of Driving While Black, only this time it’s about forgetting your keys so you gotta go down to the station to get it sorted out. It was probably more nuanced than that.

That it happened in Cambridge is an eye opener. The cop lives in Natick, a town that’s more than 90 percent white and less than two percent African American, and a place where housing is more affordable than Cambridge. That old Unitarian pederast and Harvard graduate, Horatio Alger, was perhaps Natick’s most notable resident. He retired from his Cape Cod pulpit to Natick, disgraced by his “imprudent behavior” with some teenage boys in Brewster. His reputation did not follow him when he left Natick, moved to New York, and befriended young bootblacks who provided inspiration for his tales of young men who found success through constant striving.

Doug Flutie, who exemplified Alger’s “Strive to Succeed” philosophy, went to Natick High School. The Hostess Twinkie factory (think Dan White, famous San Francisco policeman) in Natick is closed but I suppose that the Cambridge cop could still get them retail at the Quik Trip Market. I know. That’s not fair.

So here we have a white working class cop from Natick, and an upper middle class black professor with the reasonable expectation that the shit could hit the fan simply because of the racial dynamic within the Cambridge university community–I’m surprised no one got tazed.

But I wasn’t there…

But when Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle set up a Commission on supposed “racial disparity” in the Wisconsin criminal justice system, he not only asserted that the disparity is real (which it is) but that it is undesirable. Indeed, his commission is called “The Commission on Reducing Racial Disparities in the Wisconsin Justice System.” It’s true he directed the Commission to “[d]etermine whether discrimination is built into the criminal justice system at each stage of the criminal justice continuum of arrest through parole.” But then he told it to [r]ecommend strategies and solutions to reduce the racial disparity in the Wisconsin criminal justice system. . . .”

It might seem, on first glance, that “racial disparity”—and here the issue is that blacks are jailed and imprisoned at a much higher rate than whites—is a bad thing.

But what if the disparity is the result of the fact that blacks commit more crimes than whites? Looking back at the Governor’s charge to the Commission, if it’s not established that the disparities are the result of discrimination, how do we know we want to eliminate them? And what if incarceration in fact serves highly desirable goals of deterring crime and incapacitating the criminals? If so, the Commission is on a fool’s errand, instructed to recommend things that will make the quality of life in Wisconsin worse. And particularly worse for black people.

Probably McAdams didn’t have the data that white adults commit more drug crimes than black adults, but far fewer whites end up in jail for these crimes than blacks.

That disgusting application of narrow logic and high school debate technique to real problems is part of the reason it’s so difficult to make progress in these matters.

I’ve looked around. I don’t see any follow-up this week in any of the Wisconsin dailies. I’m sure there were a flurry of local broadcast news stories that rode on the Journal-Sentinel story that day, but that’s it. News-cycle over. The so-called “news-cycle” is a joke. People kowtow to the media, warp events to assure maximum exposure on the late news, because — well –if the story doesn’t run the day it all happens, then it isn’t news, is it?

“What you reading?” I asked.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” she said, a little frown at the corner of her lips.

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s okay. I mean it’s good. But I just think about a little black child or Mexican kid readin’ this in school. They look at Holden Caulfield’s life an’ think, Damn, this kid got it good. What’s he so upset about?”

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “So much we know that they never think about, and so much they think about without a thought about us.”

I didn’t have to tell Gara who they and us were. We lived in a they-and-us world while they lived, to all appearances, alone.
— Walter Mosley, Blonde Faith

Where does this story of the American gulags start? It’s correct but facile to trace its roots to 17th century slavery in North America. The white flight to the suburbs in the fifties simply underscored the white bigotry and racism that emerged after the civil war to continue to dominate those who had been enslaved. If black people were moving in, then white people had to move out. It was about property values they said, as they smiled pleasantly, and withdrew from onerous contact with the black pariahs.

In the sixties white people started to feel confused. The feelings of entitlement hadn’t gone away, but the insularity, the sense of being simply “us” in a world where black people were invisible was challenged by federal law, and by an assertiveness welling up in the black community, an assertiveness that was on one hand principled, powerful, and orderly, and on the other hand riotous, chaotic and frightening. The Watts riots in 1965, the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the emerging strength of the civil rights and black power movements, growing from the work for integration and fair wages in the fifties to radical community support efforts in the seventies — all heightened white Americans’ awareness of the disparities and discrimination limiting opportunities for black Americans to find equality of treatment and opportunity anywhere in America. And that growing white awareness included an unhealthy element of fear.

The population density and ghettoized conditions of black people living in urban neighborhoods in many if not most American cities, and the structural unemployment of black workers that ran at about double the rate for white workers fed a growing culture of alienation among the poor.

I think it’s interesting that one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the dynamics that drive these conditions is essentially forbidden by the strong taboo in American culture against any analysis that smacks of “Marxism.” The obvious class distinctions that cut across color lines, the impoverished people — white or black — share common needs and live in similar circumstances. A working class of people who are doing their best to provide for their families and are fortunate enough to have stable employment, exists and it is comprised of blacks and whites. A middle class of salaried people, professionals, and business owners has higher income and more opportunities than the working class that has more limited choices and lower incomes. Wealth itself is color blind, although wealthy people obviously are not. Regardless, an upper class of wealthy people has characteristics, needs, and influence unrelated to color but highly correlated to the opening opportunities of education and association that comes with wealth.

To even begin to discuss the disparities in justice administration revealed in the reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel cited last Tuesday, we’ll have to agree that the people concerned, the inmates and the enforcers, are bound by prejudices and class distinctions, driven by attitudes of fear and alienation, and sorely in need of help everywhere in “the system.”

Here are a couple of links that I’ll try to write about soon…
The Sentencing Project… some findings:

• Since the inception of the “war on drugs” in 1980, there have been more
  than 31 million arrests for drug offenses in the United States.
• In the nation’s largest cities, drug arrests for African Americans rose at three
  times the rate for whites from 1980 to 2024, 225% compared to 70%. This
  disparity is not explained by corresponding changes in rates of drug use.
• In 11 cities, black drug arrests rose by more than 500% from 1980 to 2024.
• The extreme variation in city-level drug arrests suggests that policy and
  practice decisions, and not overall rates of drug use, are responsible for much
  of this disparity.

Human Rights Watch — Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States

The racial disparities in incarceration generated by drug control strategies raise deeply troubling questions. Why are white drug users and sellers comparatively free of arrest and incarceration for their illegal activity? Why has the United States continued to address illicit drugs primarily with a punitive criminal justice approach, including harsh prison sentences? Why has the country been willing to impose the burden of incarceration for drug offenses primarily on those who by virtue of race and poverty are already among the most marginalized in society and the most politically powerless?

1.6 million Americans are in prison.

But Cheney is on the outside. And George Bush is on the outside. And the Keating five are on the outside. That entire mafia of American upper class privilege strips the wealth of the nation, destroys lives around the globe, operates outside the law and gets away with it, while inner-city hard-cases get cracked for a little weed and put away for years where they won’t be cluttering up the unemployment statistics.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 adult Hispanic men is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2024. One in 15 adult black men is, too, as is one in nine black men ages 20 to 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States (pdf file), also found that one in 355 white women ages 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one in 100 black women.

What was it Pogo the ‘possum used to say? “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

“Criminal Justice in Wisconsin: Effective Strategies for Change” will be held at Edgewood College on Saturday, February 23, 2024, from 9:30 am- 2:30 pm at the Anderson Auditorium. Speakers will include:

• Madison Police Chief Noble Wray, on the Governor’s Commission on Reducing Racial Disparity in Wisconsin’s Justice System;
• Representative Mark Pocan, on the work of the ad hoc committee on Effective Strategies for Community Justice;
• Anthony Streveler of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, discussing the Council of State Government’s Justice Reinvestment Project;
• Judge Carl Ashley, who serves on the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s sub-committee for more effective strategies for justice;
• The Rev. Jerry Hancock, on current trends in Restorative Justice;
• District Attorney John Chisholm, on Milwaukee County’s efforts to develop community alternatives; and
• County Executive Kathleen Falk and Scott McDonell, chair of the County Board, on what is happening in Dane County.

There is no fee or formal pre-registration for the Forum, but if you plan to attend please contact Edgewood College by February 20, 2024 at heffern@edgewood.edu or 608-663-2218

[tags]community justice, restorative justice, racial disparity in justice[/tags]

The United States Census Bureau statistics reviewed by the Commission revealed that Wisconsin has a population that is 86% Caucasian. By comparison, the statistics of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) reveal that 43% of the inmates in DOC adult facilities are Caucasian.

African-Americans comprise 6% of the overall population of Wisconsin, but also represent 45% of the population in the adult DOC facilities. Hispanics represent 4% of the state’s overall population, but 8% of the correctional population.

Despite these disparities, the question of the existence of discrimination in the criminal justice system remained.

There’s a lot to chew on in that last sentence. I won’t try to unpack it right now. I should note that Hispanics are often counted as white in the studies the Commission relied on, so it is likely that they represent a percentage of the correctional population higher than eight percent, reducing further the number of all other whites held.

It was reported to the Commission that

…for almost all offenses, Blacks are much more likely to get a new prison sentence than Whites. The exceptions are homicide, family offenses, DUI, and “other” drug sales. For most offenses, Blacks are at least twice as likely to draw a new prison sentence. For marijuana possession, Blacks are 11 times more likely to draw a prison sentence, and for opium/cocaine possession, 3 times more likely. These calculations showing a greater likelihood of arrests being converted to prison sentences for Blacks than for Whites are consistent with the Sentencing Commission’s analysis of sentences. [The report “Race and Sentencing in Wisconsin: Sentence and Offender Characteristics Across Five Criminal Offense Areas” was issued by the Wisconsin Sentencing Commission in August 2024. — fp] These gross disparities do not tell us why this difference is occurring, but they definitely point to something that is happening within the system. In particular, they show that the high rates of prison sentences are not simply a function of crime and arrest, but also need to be attributed to something happening within the system.

The recommendations embedded in today’s report are lengthy and technical. They will need to be deconstructed in order to find the way through the process labyrinth and the Public Service jargon to a simple set of actions we can take to improve justice administration by eliminating the conditions that lead to disparities.

* * *
And, in the “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, Jackass” category, it has been reported by Highbrid Nation that nineteen year old Brian Purvis, one of the Jena 6 defendants, has been popped for assault when he went all aggro on some guy he accuses of messing with his ride. Damn, Brian! Didn’t your folks teach you any better than that?

I said,

The source essay from the Electronic Village that Prometheus 6 analyzes may have some factual errors, and it may perpetuate some myths. But the last part of the essay is an imprecation for us to help each other, for black people to help get the young men in the community a hand up in terms of educational success.

P6 was on me like — well, like white on rice. He said,

My problem here: MAY HAVE factual errors? MAY perpetuate some myths?

Take a stand. Does it, or does it not, contain factual errors? Does it, or does it not, perpetuate some myths? And is it ever acceptable to promote factual errors and myths?

No. And allowing it lets you “get beyond” the issues without correcting them, thereby allowing one to reach conclusion you would never, ever reach when considering the whole truth.

P6 has a lot in common with me. We’re both heavy into truth and justice. Trouble is, he wants me to accept the strength of his convictions without testing my own against the truth that I find. And he’s a persuasive writer selecting facts and data that make it appear like Jackson indeed was laying out bullshit. But I don’t think it’s that cut and dried. Quoting from the Schott Report, Jackson says only 35% of black males graduate from Chicago High Schools. P6 says bullshit. Nationally, 55% of black males did not receive diplomas with their cohort. That phrase, “with their cohort,” is important because it limits the assessment of black male educational achievement to the young men who move from K through 12 and graduate without any interruptions. P6 is right about that. But he’s wrong to tie national data to Jackson’s argument, since Jackson was talking about Chicago schools where, according to the report, only 35% of black males do graduate with their cohort.

But let me get beyond nit-pickery nonsense here. I think this country is so far down the path to ruin that it’s unlikely we’ll make the changes necessary to assure compliance with the US Bill of Rights and with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in my lifetime.

Article One of the UN Declaration says: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. So rather than calling bullshit on each other, it might be better for us to agree on what we can agree on, try to share perspectives where we have strong convictions of the truth, and respect that everyone is on her or his own path. Allies are better than onlookers in this struggle, so I’m not jumping down Phillip Jackson’s throat any more than I’m getting up in P6’s face.

How did we end up with so many black men in jail? How are we going to get them out and get them home?  How can we pout an end to the “Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track” right now?

What the hell is the “war on drugs” and how do we put an end to it?