Author: Alan Bean

Right-winger + hard time = compassion

·

prisonBy Alan Bean

Why are so many right-wingers suddenly arguing the case for criminal justice reform?  In this fascinating piece in Salon, Justin Elliot of Salon directs this question to Doug Berman, author of the influential Sentencing Law and Policy blog. 

Here are the highlights:

1. Prison is far more brutal than most people believe it to be

2. Most of the conservatives currently leading the smart on crime crusade have been locked up: Duke Cunningham, Charles Colson, Pat Nolan, Conrad Black

3. The religious concept of redemption generally plays a large role in these conversions.

4. Historically, mass incarceration required the enthusiastic cooperation of the political left

5. When you do hard time you realize that harsh penalties are typically applied to crimes disproportionately committed by minorities

6. Busting budgets and historically low crime rates make this a good time for reform, but . . .

7. The political forces that drove mass incarceration are always lurking. (more…)

The Problem with Pornography

· 3 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

This site has had little to say on the subject of pornography.  Our primary agenda is shutting down the machinery of mass incarceration; a subject far removed, one would think, from a discussion of popular culture.  But if Robert Jensen is right, pornography is fundamentally about patriarchy, and patriarchy is about hierarchy: the powerful maintaining a dominant position over the powerless.  So maybe there is a connection, and not just because, as Jensen suggests, there may be a link between the explostion of internet pornography and sex crimes.

As Michelle Alexander suggests, we can’t reform the criminal justice system until we move away from the cruel and punitive public consensus driving the prison boom.  How do we move from a society built on a foundation of hierarchy, control and domination, to a society rooted in equality, love and conversation. 

The piece pasted below is a conversation between Robert Jensen, a fifty-two year-old journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and a twenty-four year-old writer for UT’s F-Bomb blog who keeps trying to argue for a kinder-gentler form of pornography.  Jensen argues that the social impact of the porn industry has changed radically in recent years and doesn’t think that’s a good thing for women or for men.  Jensen, by the way, is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, so he’s given this matter a great deal of thought. 

The Problem with pornography?

FBOMB: If you could briefly describe, what is the problem with pornography?

Robert Jensen: Well, let me first sort of step back. There has long been a conservative, typically religious critique of pornography that poses the problem of pornography as being in conflict with what is traditional family values, which is sexuality confined to a heterosexual marriage. That’s the critique you’ll hear most often in the culture is that conservative, typically religious critique. The feminist critique of pornography approaches it from a very different perspective and says that, in patriarchy, in a society structured around male dominance, one of the ways that dominance is reinforced and perpetuated is in men’s sexual use and abuse of women. One way to say this is, in patriarchy women are routinely presented to men as objectified bodies for male sexual pleasure. One of the vehicles for the routine presentation of women to men as objectified bodies for male sexual pleasure is what I would call the sexual exploitation industries: prostitution, pornography, stripping. These are ways that men buy and sell primarily women’s bodies. Pornography, like prostitution and stripping, is one of those methods of buying and selling women’s bodies. So from a feminist critique, the problem is the way in which those sexual exploitation industries reinforces male dominance, and leads to predictable consequences, primarily for women and children. (more…)

Obama’s problem with white folks

· 3 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

A new Pew Poll shows that Barack Obama isn’t connecting with white voters.  This is hardly big news: Obama won just 43% of the white vote in the 2008 election.  But his popularity rating with white voters now rests at 38%.  Even more chilling, if you’re a Democrat, a full 60% of the white electorate backed Republican candidates in the 2010 midterm election.

What’s going on here?  Two things. 

First, as we commemorate the 43rd anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Republican Party is still advertising itself (surreptitiously, of course) as the Party of White.  

In the short run, this makes a lot of political sense.  Baby boomers, the demographic currently controlling American politics, are 75% white.  But the “Party of White” strategy will shortly run out of gas.   From the earliest days of European colonization, America has been a majority white nation.  Not for long.  A slight majority of Americans 18 and younger are people of color.  These rapidly shifting demographic patterns have injected a strong dose of cognitive dissonance into the hearts and minds of white folk.  We feel we are losing control.  We pull the red lever because we hope it will preserve the white-dominated world we were born into. (more…)

Tom Toles explains Glenn Beck’s last theory

·

By now you will have heard that Glenn Beck’s career on Fox has gone the way of all flesh.  Beck’s popularity was created by widespread dismay over the election of a black president and sustained by Tea Party fervor.  When the fall election was over, Glenn was out of bullets.  As his numbers began to tank, the desperate pundit robbed the arsenals of America’s favorite conspiracy theorists.  Eventually, even Fox News didn’t want to be associated with the bizarre tangle of intrigue appearing on Mr. Beck’s blackboard.

Maverick judge apologizes for harsh sentences

· 1 Comment ·

By Alan Bean

Judge Jack Weinstein

Over at his excellent Sentencing Law and Policy blog, Doug Berman highlights an amazing opinion recently issued by US District Judge Jack Weinstein in the case, United States v. Bannister.  (You can find the full opinion here.)  Federal judges aren’t as constrained by mandatory minimum sentences as they once were, but Jack Weinstein makes it clear that the sentences in this case would have been much less severe if he had his druthers.

“These defendants are not merely criminals,” Weinstein concludes, “but human beings and fellow American citizens, deserving of an opportunity for rehabilitation. Even now, they are capable of useful lives, lived lawfully.”

The eighty-nine year old Weinstein is a philosophical dinosaur who believes we have a duty to create a just society (what kind of socialist claptrap is that?)  Read this brief excerpt from a much longer sentencing opinion and you will learn precisely what is wrong with America’s war on drugs. (more…)

Supreme Court justices wash their hands of the Troy Davis case

· 3 Comments ·
Laura Moye of Amnesty International and Kathryn Hamoudah of Georgians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty address a Troy Davis rally in Atlanta

By deciding not to hear further appeals in the Troy Davis case, the Supreme Court of the United States has given Georgia officials a green light to proceed to execution.  But nothing is simple when issues of life and death are on the line.  

Georgia won’t be able to proceed directly with an execution because their supply of sodium thiopental, a powerful anesthetic that is the first of three shots administered during lethal injection in Georgia and dozens of other states, was recently seized by federal authorities.  The producer of sodium thiopental announced that it would no longer be exporting the drug to the United States because their product was intended to cure, not kill.  Georgia is one of several states that appears to have procured quantities of the drug illegally from a sketchy outfit in the United Kingdom. (more…)

Ghost-writing the law: ALEC and the conservative legislative agenda

· 4 Comments ·
Paul Weyrich

Is it a coincidence that conservative governors across the land are proposing remarkably similar legislation in 2011? 

Bill Berkowitz at Talk to Action doesn’t believe in coincidence. 

While the much-heralded Koch brothers from Wichita, KS. have invested untold millions in shaping pro-corporate, anti-public sector legislation, they are by no means the only players in the game.  According to Berkowitz, a Washington DC-based outfit called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) has been shaping and coordinating conservative legislative efforts across the nation since it was founded by the late Paul Weyrich in 1973.

So, if this ALEC outfit is such a major player, why haven’t you heard about the organization?  Simple, they work very hard to retain their anonymity.  Although the conservative movement has done a remarkable job of convincing middle class white folks that the federal government is their enemy, the wave of rage currently sweeping over America was sparked by a fiscal tsunami emanating from the corporate world.  It is amazing how lies prosper when backed by massive funding and how the unfunded truth can be so easily swept away in the backwash. (more…)

Ira Glass exposes the drug war in a small Georgia town

· 3 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

If you’re like me, Ira Glass is the seductive, soft-spoken storyteller you occasionally encounter while working in the garage on a Saturday afternoon.  This America Life is captivating radio.  Ira Glass pulls us into a story with unadorned language.  He speaks without exclamation points or rhetorical flourishes, but you can’t stop listening.  The other day I was painting some lawn furniture I had rescued from a neighbor’s lawn (he was throwing it out, I promise!) when This America Life came on.  I was disappointed to learn that Ira Glass had ceded his microphone to a guest storyteller and pictured the unassuming Ira catching a few rays in the Bahamas.  But I was wrong.  Ira was down in Georgia, putting the finishing touches to an hour-long expose of Amanda Williams, a Superior Court judge who suffers from a peculiarly American form of madness.

Here’s a summary of the Part 1: (more…)

ACLU report focuses on Mississippi drug war

· 1 Comment ·

 

For years now, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas have been competing for the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in America.  A new report commissioned by the ACLU of Mississippi asks why the Magnolia state’s prison population has exploded in recent years.  According to the report:

Mississippi has the second highest incarceration rate in the nation, at 749 prisoners per 100,000 residents. Between 1994 and 2007 the state’s incarceration rate ballooned by 105 percent, compared to just 46 percent for the nation as a whole and 51 percent for the Southern region. During that same period, prison expenditures by the state of Mississippi grew by 155 percent. By mid year 2008, Mississippi’s prison population had reached a record high of 22,764. (more…)

Feeding the market for American mythology

· 2 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

Two articles grabbed my attention this morning.  The first deals with fairy tales about the Christian origins of America; the second addresses civil war fairy tales (hint: it had nothing to do with slavery).

Every trained historian, regardless of personal ideology, knows that America was founded by Deists and high church Protestants who were desperate to save their fledgling nation from European-style religious wars.  Hence the separation of church and state.

Similarly, you would be hard pressed to find a single person who has studied American history at the graduate level who would argue that Southern slavery was irrelevant to the civil war.  Unfortunately, the sentimental attachment to Christian-America and the confederate Lost Cause is so passionate that elaborate mythologies arise unbidden to satisfy the demand. 

Over at Talk to Action, Chris Rodda begins a jaw-dropping post thusly: (more…)