Author: Alan Bean

North Carolina poised to repeal Racial Justice Act

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By Alan Bean

In the dwindling days of the 2009 legislative session, lawmakers in North Carolina, voting along party lines, passed a Racial Justice Act that allows death row defendants to use statistics to corroborate claims of racial bias in the criminal justice system. Then came the 2010 election. With the Republicans now in control of the state legislature, prosecutors from across the state are calling for the repeal of the Racial Justice Act.

The controversy centers in a study by the Michigan State University Law School finding that qualified black jurors in North Carolina are more than twice as likely to be excluded from juries as qualified white jurors.

Of the 154 inmates currently on death row in North Carolina, 33 were tried by all-white juries and 40 had juries with only one person of color. The state is approximately 70% white and 25% African-American. (more…)

Was the Moynihan Report racist?

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By Alan Bean

A recent post touched on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”  (You can read Moynihan’s report here.)  A New York Times article celebrating the political incorrectness of Jonathan Haidt suggested that many prominent sociologists now agreed with Moynihan’s controversial ideas.  Below I have pasted two examples of this phenomenon, one by Harvard’s William Julius Wilson, the other by James T. Patterson, a Brown University history professor.

First, let me share a few of my own thoughts.  We must distinguish between Moynihan’s actual report and the version of that report reflected in contemporary media accounts.  Moynihan, a trained sociologist, touched on a wide variety of issues, but the media chose to focus on his “tangle of pathology” in the black family.  In Moynihan’s defense, he didn’t actually say that all black families were disintegrating.  Middle class blacks were doing just fine, he acknowledged; it was the folks in the urban slums he worried about.  (more…)

Is civil rights morality blinding social scientists?

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By Alan Bean

Two articles in recent editions of the New York Times caught my eye.

Although the scientific community is nearly unanimous in backing biological evolution, a new study shows that only 28% of high school biology teachers teach a strong version of evolutionary science, 13% teach straight creationism and the rest are noncommittal. 

The second article highlighted (with apparent approval) University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s belief that his profession is riddled with liberal bias.  While at least 80% of social scientists report being politically liberal, studies show that 40 percent of Americans report being conservative while only 20 percent are liberal.   

Haidt says social psychologists comprise a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” (rooted in the civil rights movement) that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals. (more…)

Isaiah 58:1-12: a word to the righteous

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"Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

 A new moral consensus for ending mass incarceration must flow from narratives of faith.  Isaiah 58 is a natural starting place. 

The setting for this prophecy is the hard years following the return from Babylonian captivity, approximately 500 BCE.   The people who made the trek back to Jerusalem quickly became disillusioned.  The walls of holy city were still broken down.  Solomon’s glorious temple lay in ruins.  Work began on a new temple, a modest structure a fraction the size of the building it replaced, but progress was slow.

The people had expected more.  Much more.  They couldn’t understand why God was letting them down.  Their commitment to Torah had strengthened considerably during the hard years of exile.  Worship attendance, sabbath keeping and tithing were all way up. 

Still the people struggled.  They couldn’t understand why such bad things were happening to such good people. 

Isaiah’s response speaks for itself. (more…)

Judge’s 10 Commandments display ruled unconstitutional

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By Alan Bean

R. J. Rushdoony

This Politics Daily article by legal analyst Andrew Cohen reflects the combination of panic and zeal conservative Christians are evincing in these strange times.  Ohio trial judge James Deweese didn’t just display the Decalogue in his courtroom, he displayed a series of posters arguing that the law rests on a religious (read ‘Christian’) foundation.  The implication is that, shorn of its biblical support system, the law would crumble to dust.  Consider this gem:

There is a conflict of legal and moral philosophies raging in the United States. That conflict is between moral relativism and moral absolutism. We are moving towards moral relativism. All law is legislated morality. The only question is whose morality. Because morality is based on faith, there is no such thing as religious neutrality in law or morality. (more…)

Good news, bad news for final two Tulia defendants

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The good news is that the last two victims of the Tulia drug sting, Landis and Mandis Barrow, have had their records cleared.  (The full explanation for this delay of justice can be found here.)  The bad news is that both men remain entangled in the criminal justice system.

It is difficult to decipher the extent of the Barrow twins’ involvement with Tom Coleman in Tulia.  My files are stuffed with letters from Landis and Mandis wrote me while in prison, and my book Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas benefited from that correspondence.   A few Tulia defendants admitted selling crack to the undercover agent, but they were charged with selling powder cocaine. 

This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but it isn’t.  Coleman bought a few ten or fifteen dollar rocks of crack cocaine from known users but received as much as $200 for the highly diluted 8-balls of powder he turned in to the Amarillo Police Department. (more…)

America’s Prisons: Create Spartan Conditions; Get Gladiators

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Our friend Stan Moody tells the tragic story of how a shift in America’s moral consensus transformed a model prison into a hell hole.

America’s Prisons: “Create Spartan Conditions; Get Gladiators!”

February 3, 2011

Author: Stan Moody

In its November 1995 issue, The Atlantic Monthly reported on McKean, amodel federal prison in Bradford, PA. The focus of the article was a mild-mannered warden by the name of Dennis Luther, then about to retire. In thegolden age of the Corrections growth industry, Warden Luther was considered bythe Bureau of Prisons senior management to be a maverick who flagrantly violatedbureau policy. (more…)

Can we end mass incarceration without mentioning race?

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By Alan Bean

The criminal justice reform movement has two distinct branches that may have trouble sharing a common message or strategy.

The first branch of reformers is best represented by Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” thesis.  Alexander sees the war on drugs as primarily an assault on poor people of color.  Reformers, she argues, have either avoided racial arguments altogether, or have focused on Rosa Parks-type defendants who transcend racial stereotypes.  Consider this quote from her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:

Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy on behalf of criminals. Even at the height of Jim Crow segregation—when black men were more likely to be lynched than to receive a fair trial in the South—NAACP lawyers were reluctant to advocate on behalf of blacks accused of crimes unless the lawyers were convinced of the men’s innocence . . . outside of the death penalty arena, civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to leap to the defense of accused criminals. Advocates have found they are most successful when they draw attention to certain types of black people (those who are easily understood by mainstream whites as ‘good’ and ‘respectable’) and tell certain types of stories about them. Since the days when abolitionists struggled to eradicate slavery, racial justice advocates have gone to great lengths to identify black people who defy racial stereotypes, and they have exercised considerable message discipline, telling only those stories of racial injustice that will evoke sympathy among whites. (more…)

Does banning the noose change anything?

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For the fourth straight year, Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has introduced an anti-noose bill.  The Noose Hate Crime Act of 201 stipulates that “Whoever, with intent to harass or intimidate any person because of that person’s race, color, religion, or national origin, displays a noose in public shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.”

Hate crimes legislation, though admirable at first glance, raises serious First Amendment issues.  In practice, it will be difficult to prove that a specific noose hanger was motivated by a desire to “harass or intimidate”. 

Jackson Lee’s bill was first introduced as a response to the noose hanging in Jena Louisiana, but I’m not sure it would (or should) apply to that kind of situation.  What would have been gained by locking up the Jena noose hangers for two years?  Would this teach them a lesson they would never forget, or would it simply harden the racial resentment that motivated their act in the first place? (more…)

When the Devil plays God

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Byron De La Beckwith the younger

By Alan Bean

“The devil will sometimes play the part of God and let things happen.”  Byron De La Beckwith Jr.

The Jackson Clarion Ledger has published two articles stemming from an interview with Byron De La Beckwith Jr.  Byron II claims his father didn’t kill civil rights leader Medgar Evers in June of 1963. 

He said those behind Evers’ assassination belonged to the Citizens’ Council, which produced television shows in which “experts” declared that African-Americans were genetically inferior. He would not share the names of the men involved. He said they later joined the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, believed to be responsible for at least 10 killings in the 1960s.

 Jerry Mitchell reports that the FBI will be looking into De La Beckwith’s assertions, but I doubt new facts will emerge.  De La Beckwith, like his daddy, enjoys the limelight and intends to make the most of it.

More interesting, from my perspective, is Byron the Second’s description of his personal contribution to 1960s anti-civil rights terrorism and his sad reflections on the current status of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan.  (more…)