In a speech delivered to the American Bar Association, Attorney General Eric Holder signaled that the Obama administration wants to move away from the philosophy of mass incarceration.
Holder’s analysis of the criminal justice system is reminiscent of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow except that Alexander’s bold racial claims are softened considerably. Nonetheless, the AG acknowledged that the criminal justice system is systematically unfair to people of color.
The speech highlighted three particular initiatives: those designed to cut down on the incarceration of low-level, non-violent drug offenders with no association to major drug cartels; policies designed to expand the compassionate release of aging prisoners who pose no threat to public safety; and encouraging alternatives to incarceration.
Holder clearly understands that we are locking up far, far too many people and appears to understand that the costs go far beyond the inordinate price tag that comes with mass incarceration:
Today, a vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities. And many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate these problems, rather than alleviate them.
I was pleased to hear the AG acknowledge that federal prosecutors are making too many federal criminal cases. Having covered a number of federal cases, Alvin Clay, the Colomb family, Ramsey Muniz, and the IRP-6, I know how easy it can be for the federal government to make a weak case stick. Federal prosecutors have been handed sweeping powers that translate into a 98% conviction rate. They can’t simply indict a ham sandwich–add a little mustard, and they can get a conviction!
It will be interesting to see if Holder’s critique of mindless prison expansion impacts the immigration system in a meaningful way.
Finally, I was pleased to note that Holder has given the blessing of the Obama administration to the sentencing reforms currently enjoying bi-partisan support in Congress.
Below, I have pasted the conclusion to Holder’s groundbreaking call for a new criminal justice regime, but I urge you read the entire speech. (more…)
Glenn Greenwald blogs for The Guardian on issues related to the tension between security and liberty. He is suspicious of politicians of both parties, the national security state, and what he calls a “sycophantic” mainstream media.
In this piece, he castigates Bob Schieffer for using Michael Hayden, former head of both the CIA and the NSA, as a credible spokesperson on national security issues.
Hayden was the mastermind of an NSA operation dedicated to spying on US citizens that the Department of Justice investigation found to be illegal. That was when Hayden headed the NSA.
Now Hayden works as a shill for the Chertoff Group:
a private entity that makes more and more money by increasing the fear levels of the US public and engineering massive government security contracts for their clients. Founded by former Homeland Security secretary Michael Cheftoff, it’s filled with former national security state officials who exploit their connections in and knowledge of Washington to secure hugely profitable government contracts for their clients.
So how does a highly regarded reporter like Schieffer justify treating a man like Hayden as an objective public policy expert instead of a pitch man for the fear industry with a dark past? It’s simple, says Greenwald:
“Objectivity” in Washington journalism does not mean being free of opinions; it means the opposite: dutifully echoing the official opinions and subjective mindset of those in political power. In the eyes of official Washington and its media mavens, spouting opinions is not a sin. The sin is spouting opinions that deviate from the ones expressed by and which serve the interests of those in power.
Charles Blow says America has become a heartless nation (see his column below). Ask the person on the street for the primary reason for poverty in America and 24% will tell you it’s because welfare prevents initiative. Another 18% will blame crummy schools. Then its family breakdown (13%), and lack of a work ethic (also 13%). These are all explanations endorsed by the conservative movement.
You won’t hear any of the issues favored by progressive Americans until you work much further down the list. Lack of government programs checks in at 10%, and persistent racism polls at a dismal 2%. Unless people of color were excluded from the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll (an unlikely prospect), the liberal diagnosis of society’s ills doesn’t even appear to be playing well in the minority community.
It’s not enough to lament that America has become “a town without pity” (for younger readers, that’s an allusion to an old Gene Pitney song inspired by a 1961 movie). In the 1960s, an American president could launch a war on poverty without worrying too much about the political fallout. Then America’s glory years were overtaken by an era of economic anxiety. When people worry about money, they turn inward and politicians follow suit. (more…)
Media people are disproportionately educated in Ivy League and top-tier universities where traditional values are subjected to rigorous critique
The media, for the most part, take a liberal slant on social issues like abortion and homosexuality.
The media cover American life from a distinctly secular perspective and references to religion are often pejorative or related to scandal
The media avoid frank discussion of racial issues and pundits who offend minority groups frequently get the axe.
The following article, compiled by a liberal blogger who calls himself akadjian, suggests that the media is driven by money not ideology. If MSNBC skews left and FOX tilts right, it’s because targeting a specific demographic can be good for the bottom line. Because the media business is about producing profits there is a strong disinclination to cover stories that reflect badly on rich people or that question the fundamental character of American economic life.
If the argument below is that the American media never touch these stories, I don’t buy it. All of the issues below are regularly featured on MSNBC (particularly on the Rachel Maddow Show) and pop up occasionally in the mainstream media. But these stories don’t get nearly the coverage they deserve, partly true because they aren’t sexy or titillating; and partly because the folks who pay the bills shape the editorial policy of most media outlets. Normally this influence is indirect (editors know where the lines are drawn), but I suspect the one-percent has its ways of expressing displeasure and punishing offenders.
You will be particularly interested in number 11: Nixon’s Southern Strategy. It begins with a 1970 quote from a candid Kevin Philips:
The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Notice the logic here. It isn’t that Democrats won’t be able to attract enough Black and Latino voters to win; it’s that the Blue team’s very success with minority voters will drive White voters into the Red camp.
The implications of this insight (and Philips nailed it) are staggering. It means that every time lefties get a bunch of minority folk and counterculture Whites together to demand justice we are begging the White majority to adopt the opposing view. That’s not what we’re trying to do; but that’s what we’re doing. At some point we progressive types must start taking the gut reaction of White conservatives into consideration and ask how we can get a conversation started. Without at least 30% of the White electorate you can’t win a statewide election in Texas or anywhere else across the South and much of the American heartland. In Texas, 80% of White voters went for Romney in 2012 and I suspect the figure was even higher among White males.
If you know anyone who still believes in a “liberal media,” here’s 15 things everyone would know if there really were a “liberal media”.
1. Where the jobs went.
Outsourcing (or offshoring) is a bigger contributor to unemployment in the U.S. than laziness.
Since 2000, U.S. multinationals have cut 2.9 million jobs here while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg as multinational corporations account for only about 20% of the labor force. (more…)
Co-sponsors of the legislation: Patrick Leahy (D) and Rand Paul (R)
By Alan Bean
It wasn’t too long ago that ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, was shilling for the private prison industry. Perhaps because that didn’t do much for the group’s reputation, they are now endorsing reforms which, if adopted, could significantly reduce the federal prison population.
Known as the Justice Safety Valve Act, the measure would give federal judges the freedom to depart from mandatory sentencing guidelines in cases involving non-violent offenders. The idea is that draconian federal sentences should be reserved for the worst of the worst.
Conservatives like this idea because the tax payer foots the bill for unnecessarily harsh prison sentences that do nothing to augment public safety. Although I have often criticized president Obama for his inaction on the criminal justice reform front, his weak reform record may be a blessing in disguise. Conservative law makers who instinctively oppose everything the president is for are now free to support this common sense legislation without appearing to endorse one of Obama’s pet projects.
It is nice to see ALEC and FAMM on the same side of an issue. This is yet another sign that political conservatives are doing far more than their liberal counterparts to further the cause of reform.
I wonder if it would be possible to make this law retroactive? Ramsey Muniz, an icon of the Chicano movement in Texas, is serving a life sentence because of federal mandatory minimum laws. Muniz is demonstrably innocent, but you have to spend several hours digging through the arcane details of the case to realize that. Even those who believe he did the crime must question the justice of keeping a 70 year-old man who can no longer walk without assistance in prison. And, even if you aren’t offended by the bizarre gyrations the feds used to convict Ramsey, he has never been accused of violent crime. In short, he is precisely the kind of inmate the Justice Safety Valve Act is designed to help.
A major conservative policy organization has endorsed criminal justice reform, lending further bipartisan support to a bill in Congress that would lessen mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent offenses.
The American Legislative Exchange Council, a free-market advocacy group that works with legislators and businesses to craft model legislation, gave its approval to the Justice Safety Valve Act on Monday.
The bill would allow judges to depart from imposing mandatory minimum sentences on nonviolent criminals when they believe different sentences are appropriate.
Such a policy would save money by ensuring that only truly dangerous criminals spend decades in prison on the taxpayer’s dime, wrote Cara Sullivan, a legislative analyst at ALEC.
“This helps ensure lengthy sentences and prison spaces are reserved for dangerous offenders, allowing states to focus their scarce public safety resources on offenders that are a real threat to the community,” she wrote in an email to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “This approach, as opposed to simply throwing more dollars at corrections, reduces prison overcrowding while still holding offenders accountable.”
Many of the people sentenced under mandatory minimums were convicted of selling drugs, and committed no violence. Some were found guilty of breaking federal marijuana laws, even though they resided in states where growing and selling marijuana are legal under state laws.
While many conservative lawmakers once held to a “tough on crime” approach to criminal sentencing, the inefficiency and financial waste of imposing harsh sentences on low-level drug offenders has pushed libertarian-leaning elements of the GOP to embrace the Justice Safety Valve Act. Conservatives are also concerned that federal laws interfering with judges’ abilities to set appropriate sentences — and states’ rights — are just another example of overreach on the part of the Obama administration.
President Obama has not yet taken a stance on the Justice Safety Valve Act, though he previously expressed support for the idea before he became president.
Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a criminal justice advocacy group, praised ALEC’s decision to add its voice to the call for sentencing reform.
“There is nothing conservative about inefficient, one-size-fits-all sentencing laws that cost billions in tax dollars and offer no public safety benefit in return,” wrote Greg Newburn, Florida project director for FAMM, in an email to TheDC News Foundation. “ALEC’s adoption of a model safety valve reflects the growing consensus among conservative lawmakers that mandatory minimums are ripe for reform.”
The Justice Safety Valve Act is co-sponsored by Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. It also enjoys bipartisan support in the House of Representatives.
On July 30th, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) held hearings on Capitol Hill entitled “A Conversation on Race and Justice in America” in response to the intense national debate that has resulted from the killing of Trayvon Martin. Racial profiling – “a secret hiding in public,” according to panelist Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center – was discussed, as were Stand Your Ground laws. Less attention was paid to the perilous way the legal system treats some African-Americans who end up in it, especially those with neither the money nor the means to defend themselves.
Consider Curtis Flowers. Today, he sits on Mississippi’s death row, where he has been for 16 years. Tried six times on the same murder charges – the only known person in American history to endure that fate – he has never hedged in proclaiming his innocence, even refusing plea bargains. “I’m not going to say I killed someone when I didn’t,” he said in 2010. “I would rather be executed and go to Heaven and know I did the right thing than to be in this world if I have to admit to something I didn’t do.”
Flowers’ ordeal began in July 1996 on the morning Bertha Tardy and three of her employees were killed execution-style in her furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. They were shot with such precision that it took only five bullets to kill four people. Two weeks earlier, Flowers worked for Tardy for about three days. He said he quit; others said he was fired. Regardless, Doug Evans, the local district attorney, zeroed in on Flowers as a disgruntled employee and made him the prime suspect. (more…)
Is America an idea about “liberty and justice for all” that can be embraced by an endless assortment of people from a wild array of cultures; or is America a uniquely White Western cultural phenomenon that only works when White Westerners are in control of the process?
Shortly before his death in 2005, Samuel T. Francis was asked to compose a statement of principles for the Council of Conservative Citizens, an unabashedly racist organization created in 1985 from old White Citizen’s Council mailing lists. Francis had been an editorial writer and columnist with the Washington Times between 1986 and 1995, but lost his job after criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention’s apology for slavery. This bold stand transformed Francis into a standard bearer for Lost Cause stalwarts in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. By the time he authored a statement of principles for the CCC, Francis was terminally ill and didn’t pull any punches. For example, here’s his take on immigration:
We believe that the United States derives from and is an integral part of European civilization and the European people and that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character. We therefore oppose the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States that threatens to transform our nation into a non-European majority in our lifetime. We believe that illegal immigration must be stopped, if necessary by military force and placing troops on our national borders; that illegal aliens must be returned to their own countries; and that legal immigration must be severely restricted or halted through appropriate changes in our laws and policies. We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.
The Council of Conservative Citizens claims that its racist vision is shared by a majority of White people in America. I hope they are wrong. Everything hinges on our definition of America. Are we primarily an idea to which anyone can ascribe, or are we a distinct culture that will always be alien to non-white people with roots in the non-Western world? (more…)
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
People who talk about the “liberal” media reference a specific fact set:
Friends of Justice 