Month: June 2013

Noted author tackles the Curtis Flowers story

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Alan Bean

Paul Alexander is the accomplished author of eight books, numerous eBooks, and over 100 major articles written for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the New York Times.  When he stumbled across my blogging on the Curtis Flowers story, he was immediately interested.  A native of Birmingham, AL, Alexander knows how racial bias is infused into every facet of social life, including the criminal justice system.

Still, my conclusions were too damning to be taken at face value.  Alexander visited Winona, Mississippi, re-interviewed the folks I talked to several years ago, and dug up some fascinating (and disturbing) new information.

The result is Mistried, a gripping eBook released yesterday by RosettaBooks.  You can get the Kindle version for free at Amazon if you act quickly, (or pay $2.99 if you dawdle).  Most readers can digest the contents in less than two hours; the book is of very modest length because Alexander doesn’t waste a word.

If you like the book, please leave a comment and a five-star rating on the Amazon site.

Mistried

By Paul Alexander
Paul Alexander
Paul Alexander

Can a person be tried more than once for the same crime in the United States? Under usual circumstances, no. But in Mississippi, one man was tried six times for the same brutal crime-and his ordeal still hasn’t ended. (more…)

Aging Behind Bars

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By Alan Bean

The American prison population is rapidly aging.  You can find a helpful infographic on the subject here (I have copied the basic information below if you’re in a hurry).

The most shocking statistic is that “between 1981 and 2010, the number of state and federal prisoners age 55 and over increased from 8,853 to 124,900.”  And consider this, if present trends continue “that number is projected to grow to 400,000 by 2030, an increase of 4,400 percent from 1981.”

When I think of prisoners aging behind bars I visualize Ramsey Muniz.  Ramsey was implicated in a marijuana importation conspiracy in the late 1970s.  He wasn’t charged with actively participating in the scheme; but since Ramsey was an attorney who represented many of the people on the suspect list, the feds concluded that he knew what his clients were up to, was indirectly benefiting from their activities, and didn’t turn them in.  Ramsey accepted a plea deal that put him in federal prison for five years.

Then, in 1994, Ramsey was victimized by a bizarre federal scam.  A major Mexican drug dealer was given a get-out-of-jail-free card in exchange for setting Muniz up.

After Ramsey was found guilty by a jury that was intentionally shielded from all the significant facts of the case, the government argued that his conviction in the 1970s should really count as two “strikes” because identical charges accusing the same people of the same crime had been filed in Corpus Christi in San Antonio.  Thus was Ramsey sentenced to life in prison under an old three-strikes provision.

After 20 years behind bars, Ramsey Muniz is an aging inmate who can no longer walk without assistance.  As the infographic makes clear, there are few provisions for compassionate release at either the state or federal level, and those that exist are rarely invoked.  Timorous politicians fear being labeled soft-on-crime.

I have argued that Ramsey Muniz is innocent of the charges filed against him in 1994.  He is an attorney and a civil rights leader who has never profited from the sale of illegal drugs.  But suppose I am wrong.  What it the purpose of keeping a man like Muniz behind bars?  He represents as much of a threat to the community as I do.  A deeply spiritual man with a strong sense of mission, he is capable of doing much good in the free world.

There are tens of thousands of untold stories like this across the nation.  Please give the infographic on aging behind bars your careful attention.

Aging Behind Bars

The elderly population in prison is rising at staggering rate. The consequence of mass incarceration and strict sentencing policies at the federal and state level, older prisoners require more expensive care at a time when their danger to society at large is waning. Most are likely to die in prison, as programs designed to release such prisoners on compassionate grounds are rarely invoked, and don’t have much potential to reduce the population of elderly prisoners. Continued high rates of long-term incarceration of the elderly are likely to add billions to state and federal criminal justice budgets. (more…)

How Texas became a welfare state

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By Alan Bean

Mineral Wells is a Texas town of 17,000 a little over fifty miles due west of Fort Worth.  The Texas legislature passed a budget for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice that will require the closure of two prisons and the Mineral Wells Unit is on the list.  Local officials say they will fight to the last ditch and the last breath to keep their precious prison.

This isn’t about public safety–the state of Texas has decided it doesn’t need the prison–it’s about jobs.

All of which raises a disturbing question.  Was the prison boom that transformed Texas in the 1990s about pork barrel politics rather than public safety?

Back in the day, nobody wanted a prison in their back yard; but hard times in the hinterland changed “you’re not building a prison in my back yard,” to “we’ll provide generous subsidies if somebody–the state or a private prison company–is willing to build us a big house.”  In towns like Mineral Wells and Tulia, the war on drugs, tough on crime politics and prison construction were all about helping little towns survive an agricultural crisis that started in the mid-1970s and shows no signs of letting up.

In the process, small-government Texas became the nation’s biggest welfare state.

It is unwise and immoral to base public safety decisions on the economic needs of isolated farming communities, but that is precisely what we have done.  Listen to the public officials in the Star-Telegram article below lamenting the loss of their darling prison and you realize that our nation’s great prison boom spread a horrible case of welfare dependency across the American heartland.

Mineral Wells vows to fight devastating closure of prison

BY ANNA M. TINSLEY

atinsley@star-telegram.com

The uncertainty is troubling many in Mineral Wells.

The question that continues to linger is whether the Mineral Wells Pre-Parole Transfer Facility — a 2,100-bed, privately run minimum-security prison — will close. (more…)

Three amazing stories reveal the rich contradictions of Mississippi

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Chockwe Lumumba
Will Campbell
Paul Alexander

By Alan Bean

Three Mississippi stories grabbed my attention this week.  Will Campbell, the white civil rights activist and renegade Baptist preacher from Mississippi, died this week after a long and painful decline.  Chockwe Lumumba, the erstwhile Black nationalist attorney, was elected as mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.  Finally, Paul Alexander, the former TIME reporter who has written for The New York Times, the Nation, Salon, the Daily Beast, Paris Match and the Guardian, will soon be releasing Mistried an eBook on the bizarre railroading of Curtis Flowers in Winona, Mississippi.

Taken together, these stories capture the rich contradictions of the Magnolia State.  Campbell and Lumumba represent opposite poles of the civil rights movement.  Lumumba ran for mayor of Jackson as a centrist candidate who cares about economic development and job creation as much as civil rights; but there was a time when the lawyer-politician was so disillusioned with White America that he advocated the creation of a separate, predominantly Black, nation in the Southeastern United States.

Campbell, by contrast, insisted that God’s grace was offered to the Klansman as well as the oppressed.  “Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well,” he famously said.  Acting on this belief, Campbell regularly engaged with violent white segregationists over a glass of whiskey. (more…)

Love thy stranger as thyself: the evangelical coalition driving immigration reform

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By Alan Bean

This is good stuff!  In a NYT op-ed, UNC history professor Molly Worthen draws attention to one of the primary forces driving the immigration debate in America–the counter-intuitive coalition between white and Latino evangelicals.

It is easy to regard this fragile network with skepticism.  When over 70% of Latino voters pulled the lever for the blue team, savvy Republicans knew they had to edit their immigration talking points.

True, but it goes deeper than that.

Worthen argues that Latino evangelicals don’t share the libertarian, small government leanings of their white counterparts.  Moreover, a large and influential cohort of educated young white evangelicals is embracing aspects of the old social gospel with its focus on social or systemic sin.  This is not a cosmetic shift from the old evangelicalism, Worthen insists; it represents a fundamental shift in theological focus:

For a Christian, the question of whether an undocumented immigrant is a criminal or a victim trapped in an unjust system depends on how one thinks about sin and human responsibility . . . There are signs that evangelicals’ softening on immigration reform reflects a changing theology of sin and Christian obligation: a growing appreciation of how unjust social and legal institutions and the brutality of global capitalism trap the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses. This may be particularly true of younger evangelicals who are disillusioned with their parents’ Christian right. (more…)

The fingerprints of the private prison industry are all over the immigration reform process

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By Alan Bean

When the for-profit giant Geo Corp insisted a few months ago that they would stay out of the immigration reform debate I was suspicious.  These people are in the money-making business and real reform would have a disastrous impact on the bottom line.  The industry wants the US government to lock up as many people for as long as possible because that’s what a decent ROI demands.  The private prison people don’t care about the families that are ripped apart by the draconian policies they advocate or whether the punitive approach makes a lick of sense.  They aren’t in the making sense business; their in the money-making business.  Which is why they should not and must not influence the political process.  As this article from the Nation makes clear, the private prison industry is deeply invested in the political process because the shape of reform emerging from Washington is a make or break proposition.  It is particularly significant, as I have frequently noted, that the for-profit prison boys are big supporters of the the Gang of Eight (more on this below).

Disclosure Shows Private Prison Company Misled on Immigration Lobbying

Earlier this year, one of the largest private prison corporations in the country sent out a statement to reporters claiming that it would not lobby in any way over the immigration reform debate. A new disclosure shows that the company, the Boca Raton–based Geo Group, has in fact paid an “elite team of federal lobbyists” to influence the comprehensive immigration reform legislation making its way through Congress. (more…)