Republicans are up in arms about “Eastern elitists”. Democrats are in a dither about lies and distortions. Who’s got it right? Can both complaints be valid? If so, who is the biggest villain?
In a polarized society groping in vain for a unifying narrative, who plays referee? The New York Times? Fox News? MSNBC? (more…)
Sarah Posner writes on religion and politics for the American Prospect. The short piece pasted below features The Matthew 25 Network, a group of evangelical Christians with a unique political twist. You can find more background on the Matthew 25 group in this slightly older piece Ms. Posner wrote for Slate.
Brian McLaren, an influential Christian writer and activist who has caught the eye of Barack Obama, is one of the Christian leaders supporting the Matthew 25 Network. Brian and I first met at an Emergent gathering in New Mexico a couple of years ago. Although he was working on his Sunday sermon, he graciously laid down his laptop and listened to the story of Friends of Justice. We have bumped into one another on several occasions since then and exchange emails every month or two. I recommend his writing highly.
Religious Leaders Petition Palin: Will You Please Start Acting Like A Christian?
The Matthew 25 Network, a Christian political action committee that is supporting Barack Obama, last week released a letter to Sarah Palin, which, in so many words, called on her to start acting like she follows Jesus’s teachings instead of Karl Rove’s. The signers, religious leaders of different Christian traditions, said they were “extremely disappointed in Sarah Palin’s divisive, sarcastic, and often deceptive address at the Republican National Convention,” and asked Palin as “not only as a political figure, but also as a prominent Christian, to recommit herself to campaigning in good faith, with a strong commitment to truth-telling.” The letter cited Ephesians 4:25, which reads, “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are all of the same body.”
One of the chief signers, Brian McLaren, is a prominent figure in a movement known as “emerging church”, an eclectic and growing subset of Christians who eschew the theological literalism of the religious right as well as its politics. In an interview this summer, McLaren described what propelled him to support Obama. Referring to U.S. foreign policy after 9/11, McLaren told me that “some of our darker motivations are at work in our national psyche so that fear and even revenge and a desire to reestablish dominance — I think those are dark motivations, as a Christian.”
This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject for Criminal Justice Schools. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com.
“You do the crime, you do the time”, it’s a saying you’ve heard more than once. But what if you had to do the time for a crime you didn’t commit? How would you feel if you were imprisoned for years when in your heart you knew that you were innocent? And if it’s death row that you’ve been assigned, how would you sleep at night knowing that there’s a high probability that you’ll meet your creator before justice is met? Far too many American citizens are wrongfully incarcerated and facing the bleak prospects of life behind bars or a date with the wrong side of a lethal injection.Most convictions are based on circumstantial evidence and confessions which are produced because of stress, force, the fear of torture, the need to just end the ordeal, trickery, misunderstandings, the influence of narcotic substances or alcohol and mental illnesses. Exonerations are largely based on DNA evidence, thanks to the huge advances that science and technology have made in the years since these individuals were convicted and incarcerated.
But even when the ruling is overturned and the exonerations are upheld, the sad truth is that not even half the number of states in the USA have laws in place that allow compensation to be provided to people who have been wrongly accused, convicted and incarcerated of crimes they did not commit. Rather than take measures to right a wrong, the government is forcing these victims to file suits if they so desire some form of monetary damages to be awarded – they have to fight for both the right to have their dignity and pride publicly restored and for a reasonable amount that will help rebuild the life that was torn down by the courts and the prison walls.
Florida, which has the highest number of wrongful incarcerations, recently passed the Wrongful Incarceration Act which allows for a compensation of $50,000 for each year spent in prison through a miscarriage of justice. But it’s only when you dig deeper that the sordid facts behind this law come to light and you realize that the law is a travesty of justice.
For example, those with prior felony convictions, even non-violent offenders, are not eligible to claim this money, even though they’ve served time for a crime they did not commit. And to top this, the individual who’s been released must petition the original court that sentenced him or her to recognize that they were wrongfully sentenced. All in all, it’s another parody of a law that does not see justice, even deferred, served.
The fact that many exonerated individuals have spent a good portion of their lives on death row should speak volumes for the argument that capital punishment must be abolished; how do you provide restitution to a person who is no longer alive?
When my daugher Lydia was a little girl, she succumbed to the charms of Santa Claus. What healthy child hasn’t? But it wasn’t long before Lydia realized that grownups didn’t believe in the man at the North Pole. Unbidden, Lydia shared her verdict with her parents. “Some people believe there is a Santa Claus,” she explained, “and some people don’t. I choose to believe because it’s more fun.”
It wasn’t long before Lydia was exposed to the magic of mass marketing in the cuddly form of a little doll named Rainbow Brite. Rainbow Brite shared a magical land with a vast array of cute little horses (each sold separately) and two ineffectual antagonists named Lurky and Murky.
Once again, Lydia felt moved to share her personal philosophy. “I like Rainbow Brite better than Jesus,” she informed us, “because she’s more interesting.”
Barack Obama has been in a funk ever since his big speech at the Democratic convention in Denver. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wonders if the once-charismatic candidate is “too cool to fight.” Obama does fine on the stump, Cohen says, but when he appears in a more intimate setting, like across the desk from George Stephanopoulos, the pugulist becomes the professor. In interviews, Obama occasionaly looks “sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon” as Paul Simon put it in one of his wistful songs.
Cohen isn’t alone. “Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama’s coffee needs to be found and arrested by the Democrats,” the Times Thomas Friedman asserts, “because Obama has gone from cool to cold.”
They chattering classes have this one right. I listened to Keith Olbermann’s interview with Obama the other night and found my mind wandering. Obama was cool, likeable, observant, cautious, and dull.
Fear is a big part of the problem. Obama knows that anything he says can and will be used against him in the next McCain attack ad.
But it goes deeper than that. Obama has been hoping that the recitation of undeniable truths will confirm his date with destiny. (more…)
Al Mohler hopes Sa-rah Palin will soon be pounding the vice presidential bully pulpit. But Dr. Mohler would be the first to condemn America’s favorite Hockey Mom if she had the temerity to step behind a Christian pulpit.
Who is Al Mohler, and why should you care what he thinks?
Dr. Mohler is president of my Alma mater, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky. He rose to that position at the tender age of 33 while I was working on a PhD in Theology and Church History at “Southern” in the early 1990s. In 1994 Dr. Mohler handed me my diploma and I haven’t seen him since.
Back in the day, Mohler was a staunch supporter of women preachers, but he also dreamed of being president of Southern Seminary. Like John McCain, Mohler altered a long list of opinions so he could rise in a world shaped by Christian fundamentalists. Gradually, “agents of intolerance” morphed into benefactors. Al has his thirty pieces of silver; it remains to be seen whether John will get his.
Dr. Mohler’s spelled out his position on the proper role of women in response to questions raised by Sally Quinn in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section. Quinn wanted to know why conservative evangelicals were applauding Ms. Palin’s selection when they had just a low view of womens’ abilities. If Sa-rah is under the thumb of “the First Dude” in the home and is barred from teaching men at church, why do the likes of Al Mohler think she’s capable of running the country?
Mohler couldn’t let such an weak and misinformed question stand. Like NFL football players, Southern Baptists have a rule book, Mohler explains. It’s called the Bible. Defensive linemen can’t rush the quarterback until the ball is snapped. No reason, it’s just a rule. Similarly, God says in the Holy Bible that women can’t preach and that’s just the way it is. It may sound arbitrary to us, but it makes sense to One who left us with a fallen world and a perfect Bible.
Dr. Mohler assures his readers that the diminished role of women in the family and in the church has nothing to do with native ability. God just wants it that way. If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with the Creator.
Mohler, like most conservative evangelicals, only appeals to the teaching of Jesus when it suits his purpose (and it almost never does). The Gospels tell us that women followed Jesus wherever he went, bankrolling his operation out of their own purses. Women stood at the foot of the cross when the male disciples had fled into the night. Women were the first to encounter the risen Christ because they refused to abandon the crucified Jesus.
None of the biblical restrictions on the role of women can be ascribed to Jesus. As I have suggested, the picture of Jesus wandering the Palestinian countryside with twelve male buddies doesn’t square with biblical testimony; his entourage ranged from hundreds of people at the height of his popularity down to a handful (of women) at the bitter end.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that women played a major, and largely unrestricted role in the early mission of the church described in the Acts of the Apostles. The Pentecostal movement that shaped Sarah Palin’s religious world welcomed women preachers when it first exploded on the streets of San Francisco back in 1906. “If God calls a woman to preach,” Pentecostals liked to argue, “who are we to ask questions?”
The God card can be played in a variety of ways.
Jesus lives in a world where over-under, who’s-in-charge questions can’t even be asked. Jesus calls people to a life of sacrificial service in which “the first shall be last and the last first.” When his disciples raised the “which of us is the greatest” question, Jesus set a child in the midst of them and hoped they’d get the point.
They didn’t.
When Christians divide over authority issues they betray their Master.
What do we do when a passage of scripture appears to contradict the teaching of Jesus? If you aren’t a Christian it’s a non-issue; but if you’re Al Mohler you can’t dodge. What is the source of ultimate authority for Christians: the Bible, or Jesus?
Al Mohler calls this a non-question. The Bible is the Word of God; Jesus is the Son of God; therefore Jesus and the Bible agree on every point.
The argument goes a step deeper. Because Jesus and the Bible agree on all points, it is said, Jesus is cool with every word in the Bible. We don’t need a red-letter Bible (with the teaching of Jesus given special emphasis); Jesus wrote the whole book.
Al Mohler knows it isn’t this simple, but he pretends it is for the same reason John McCain pretends to march in lock step with the Religious Right–political survival demands it.
Theological hair-splitting may seem out of place in a blog dedicated to criminal justice reform, so let me explain myself. Friends of Justice formed nine years ago because a small group of people felt compelled to stand up for the victims of a corrupt drug sting in Tulia, Texas. God didn’t give us any choice in the matter. At the end of the road, when Jesus asks us how we treated the least of his brothers and sisters, we wanted to have an answer.
The United States of America is an officially secular republic, but the Christian faith has always been the default religion of our nation. It matters how that faith is interpreted, especially when preachers are calling the political square dance.
The recent surge in John McCain’s political fortunes can be attributed to America’s newest political celebrity, Sarah Palin. Democrats thought the country was sick and tired of Republican policies. Sarah shows it ain’t so. Everything we are supposed to hate about Dick and W. applies to Sarah in triplicate.
So why is America so tired of Bush-Cheney and suddenly so enamored of Palin-McCain? Because, as the McCain campaign says, this is a campaign about personalities.
And what is it about Sarah Palin’s personality that we like? Simplicity. When Rick Warren asked John McCain how America should respond to EVIL, the well-coached candidate gave the right answer: “Destroy it!” Buoyed by a sudden rise in popularity, McCain set his eyes on Alaska.
The war hero was briefly thrown off-stride by a polite and well-orchestrated Democratic Convention celebrating unity and diversity. As the fireworks exploded over Mile High stadium, voters believed in a country where everyone belongs, color doesn’t matter, and words like justice, mercy and humility meant something. With Barack Obama wielding the brush, all the rich hues of America were flowing together in one glorious portrait.
Then Sarah Barracuda burst on the scene. Suddenly everything was either/or; black and white; GOOD and EVIL; strength and weakness; Pit Bulls and Poodles. Dick Cheney thought Sarah Palin’s speech was terrific. It was precisely what the current VP would have said were he not a national embarrassment.
I am reminded of an old story they used to tell at the seminary that both Al Mohler and I call home. The great Baptist preacher CH Spurgeon was listening to a young seminary student deliver a sample sermon on “the full armor of God” (Ephesians 6).
“And now,” the young man cried, “with my loins girt about with truth, encased within the breastplate of righteousness, my feet shod with the holy gospel I am encased in the full armor of God and ready for the firey darts of the Devil. Where is he?”
Spurgeon bellowed his answer from the back of the room: “He’s in the armor.”
How should we deal with evil? Paul the Apostle puts it this way: “Do not be overcome with evil; but overcome evil with good.”
We have been fighting fire with fire; evil with more evil. That’s the lesson of Abu Graib and Guantanamo. That’s the retributive principle behind mass incarceration.
We’re asking Jesus to sit this one out. His philosophy will do fine after the trumpet sounds and history draws to an end; but while we live in this fallen world we can’t afford to think like Jesus–it could get us killed.
I have no quarrel with non-Christians who jetison the teachings of Christ–it’s a free country. But I do have a problem with Christians who trample on the cross.
Al Mohler is right; Christians don’t get to pick and choose. If Jesus tells us that God is on the side of the poor, the weak, the outcast, the blind and the broken, we have no choice but to live as if it were so. In the words of the prophet Micah: “He hath shown you, O man, what is good, and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”
Is that what we’re hearing from Al Mohler, Sarah Palin and the religious right? Can anyone explain why not?
My religious friends will accuse me of cherry-picking my biblical quotations. To keep things real, I urge you to read the Gospel of Luke from beginning to end in a single setting (it won’t take more than an hour, probably less).
Am I suggesting that you will find Jesus endorsing the official platform of the Democratic Party? Not a bit of it. Luke’s Jesus can’t be tossed into the blender and transformed into the thin ideological gruel served up by our major political parties.
You may dismiss Luke’s Jesus as a sentimental idealist. That’s your right. But if you take that view, please don’t call yourself a Christian. It’s embarrassing.
The 2008 Republican Convention in the Twin Cities was awash in white. A raft of articles, most significantly this major piece from the Washington Post, have noted that only 36 of the 2,380 delegates were African America, the poorest Black representation since statistics were first recorded 40 years ago.
Michael S. Steele, a Black Republican who was once lieutenant governor of Maryland, surveyed the monochrome crowd and shook his head in disgust.
“I am not going through another election cycle where we fail to energize and engage minority communities,” he said. “Have you ever heard that saying — about how the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result? Well, what we’ve done with minorities has become a form of political insanity.”
Has it ever occurred to Mr. Steele that his fellow Republicans are wearing their whiteness as a badge of honor?
Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy was based on a safe political hunch. In a country in which eighty-six percent of the electorate is white and in which southern whites bristle at the mere mention of “civil rights”, you can win elections by telling people of color to go to hell.
You don’t want to be gross about it, of course. In fact, the pitch loses its appeal if it becomes too obvious. You want a few Black folks around to throw the media hounds of the scent. Much better to spread the message with a wink the copious use of code language.
Words and phrases like “thug,” “drug dealer,” “welfare dependancy,” “unwed mother,” “baby momma,” “crime”, and “inner city” become synonyms for “Black”. African Americans are welcome in the political process as long as they know their place. The great “liberal” sin is giving a damn about poor people, especially poor Blacks and Mexicans. More code language.
Lynn Westmoreland, a Georgia Republican, recently referred to Barack Obama as “uppitty”. Reminded that the term was racially charged, Westmoreland refused to back down. Few southern Republicans are this forthright, but the numbers in St. Paul (and in Jena) don’t lie.
In Minnesota, the elephant in the room was all-white all the time.
Which brings me to Sarah Palin’s frequent allusions to small town America. Who lives in these small towns Ms. Palin venerates? Any Black folks or Mexican immigrants?
Not a chance. In Republican code language, “inner city” stands for minority, small town stands for white. It’s more complicated than that, of course. Small towns also stand for religion, common sense and basic decency; cities stand for godlessness, book-learning and moral degeneracy. Simply by evoking her small town roots, Republicans like Sarah Palin send a powerful message to their target audience.
Democrats use the same rhetorical tricks, but they’re playing catch-up and everybody knows it. Republicans know that scenes from the ethnically diverse Democratic Convention in Denver rankle many white voters (even if they’re not sure why).
The big give-away was the nasty derision Republican speakers repeatedly heaped on Barack Obama’s impressive career as a community organizer. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wasn’t impressed:
When Rudy Giuliani referred to Barack Obama’s past as a “community organizer” Wednesday, the crowd broke into ugly, patronizing laughter. These, presumably, are people who never needed a neighborhood advocate. Imagine if Democrats ever reacted that way to someone who worked as an entrepreneur or a church leader.
A recent New York Times study revealed that Barack Obama is viewed favorably by only 30% of white voters. And that’s a national poll–sample white southerners in isolation and God only knows how low the number might go.
Among Latino voters, on the other hand, Barack Obama has opened a commanding lead.
Conversely, a whirlwind tour of the Black media suggests that Sarah Palin’s popularity is almost entirely confined to white America. In Black America, Sarah Palin’s Minnesota accent (where’d she get that, anyway?) was like finger nails on the chalk board.
The same effect occurs in reverse when Barack Obama when the vast majority of white southerners hear Mr. Obama work his magic before an ethnically diverse crowd.
After opening up a seven-point lead following the Denver convention, Barack Obama has dropped back into a statistical dead heat with his Republican rival. All it took was a few snide remarks from Palin and her less charismatic Republican brothers and the swing voters swung. We have moved beyond superficial convention bounces and into the home stretch.
John McCain didn’t want to depend on the old Reagan coalition of religious conservatives, disaffected southern whites, big business and traditional conservatives that propelled the Republicans to prominence in the 1980s. That was George W’s way to win an election; the Maverick had other plans.
Then reality set in. Although McCain was holding his own a few steps back of his Democratic opponent, the swing voters in the Midwest were leaning toward Obama. So John McCain fired up the base by chosing Sarah Palin as a running mate and hiring Rovian spinmeisters to revamp his campaign. After the spunky Alaskan tossed red moose meat to an adoring convention crowd on Wednesday night, McCain returned to inclusive, non-partisan themes more in keeping with his temperament.
The crowd didn’t want to hear it. Only when their nominee reminded the audience of his war hero credentials did they stir from their slumbers. McCain didn’t get a real roar of approval until he told the faithful to stand up and fight.
The Reagan coalition transcends Nixon’s southern strategy–but without a crude appeal to white racial resentment the Republicans couldn’t survive as a major American political party.
Unless, of course, they stunned the world by returning to their lost heritage as the Party of Lincoln.
John McCain is the only Republican who could run this close to Barack Obama in the wake of a disastrous Bush presidency. By firing up the virtually all-white Republican base, Sarah Palin has John McCain back in the race. Still, can you win an election by ignoring a quarter of the electorate? If so, what does that tell us about the nation we live in?
And what does this election portend for the criminal justice system? John McCain spent over five years in a squalid prison cell. Later in life, he came within a hair’s breath of a federal indictment in the Keating 5 scandal. Sarah Palin has a beef with the allegedly abusive state trooper who briefly married into her family. Thanks to her overly-aggressive pursuit of justice, she finds herself the subject of an ethics inquiry. Will these experiences make the Republicans more sympathetic with the victims of mass incarceration?
I wouldn’t bet the rent money.
Meanwhile, neither presidential candidate has much to say about the criminal justice system. Standing up for criminals makes the Illinois Senator sound too Black. Talking tough on crime might draw unwanted attention to the less savory aspects of McCain’s resume.
More significantly, Sarah Palin mocked Mr. Obama for championing the due process rights of alleged terrorists: “Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America; he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”
Would she be this cavalier in dismissing the civil liberties of poor defendants and undocumented immigrants?
So one assumes. It’s all part of the strategy.
This Truthout article asks how much the South’s old plantation prisons have evolved since they were created in the post-Reconstruction period as a way of maintaining a quasi-constitutional vestige of Old South slavery? Are they some kind of different, the same ole, same ole, or something betwixt-and-between?
Friends of Justice board member, Tory Pegram, figures prominently in the telling of this tale. Tory now works full-time with an organization working to bring justice to the Angola 3. Another recent Truthout article uses that case to illustrate how difficult it can be to get the exonerated back to the free world.
Ms. Pegram was the first person to respond to my call for allies in Jena. Her grassroots organizing played an invaluable role in bringing justice to a desperate situation. Much of Tory’s Jena magic was performed under extraordinarily stressful conditions–(the most interesting bits of the Jena saga may never be told).
This plantation prison story reminds me of Robert Caro’s New York Times op-ed in which he recalls how Lyndon Johnson (born 100 years ago, yesterday) brought tears to the eyes of Martin Luther King Jr. Johnson turned that trick with a dramatic speech in defense of a 1965 voting rights bill that enfranchised millions of African Americans. Caro sees Barack Obama’s historic election campaign as a direct result of Johnson’s principled stand. We’ve come a long way, baby!
Caro (who has been knee-deep in LBJ research for several years) admits that Johnson was a typical Southern demagogue in his early years in the Senate. Secretly, the pugnacious Texan was on the side of the poor, but his ambition forced him to cooperate with hardline segregationists. Johnson’s familiarity with Southern politicians helped him push through legislation that would never have passed without him; but the ultimate result was the mass defection of southern Democrats to the Republican cause.
The shift didn’t happen until pragmatic Republicans like Richard Nixon signalled their willingness to wink at bigotry. Ronald Reagan transformed “the Southern strategy” into an art form.
I have often wondered how conservative white evangelicals can reject the Democratic Party over the abortion issue while sliding into the sleazy embrace of an all-white party that sold out to bigots and sons-of-bigots in the late 1960s. I’m not suggesting that all Republicans are overtly racist any more than I would characterize all Democrats as pro-choice (most Black Democrats aren’t). It is the lack of concern with the undeniable facts of history that upsets me. Can we assume that a party that made a deal with the Devil forty years ago has gradually evolved into a more inclusive and open convocation? Or do we think the Southern strategy wasn’t didn’t rise from the pit of hell?
Can we assume that prisons created to produce free prison labor (slavery by other means) have gradually evolved into enlightened correctional insitutions?
Read on and share your answer with us.
Thursday 28 August 2008
by: Maya Schenwar, t r u t h o u t | Report
On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn. They work for pennies, literally. Armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad disciplinary report from a guard – whether true or false – could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. The farm is called Angola, after the homeland of the slaves who first worked its soil.
This scene is not a glimpse of plantation days long gone by. It’s the present-day reality of thousands of prisoners at the maximum security Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola. The block of land on which the prison sits is a composite of several slave plantations, bought up in the decades following the Civil War. Acre-wise, it is the largest prison in the United States. Eighty percent of its prisoners are African-American.
“Angola is disturbing every time I go there,” Tory Pegram, who coordinates the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, told Truthout. “It’s not even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what’s going on.”
Mwalimu Johnson, who spent 15 years as a prisoner at the penitentiary and now works as executive secretary of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, concurred.
“I would truthfully say that Angola prison is a sophisticated plantation,” Johnson told Truthout. “‘Cotton is King’ still applies when it come to Angola.”
Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, as are 17 percent of Texas prisoners and a full 40 percent of Arkansas prisoners, according to the 2002 Corrections Yearbook, compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute. They are paid little to nothing for planting and picking the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago.
On land previously occupied by a slave plantation, Louisiana prisoners pick cotton, earning 4 cents an hour. (Photo: Louisiana State Penitentiary)
Many prison farms, Angola included, have gruesome post-bellum histories. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Angola made news with a host of assaults – and killings – of inmates by guards. In 1952, a group of Angola prisoners found their work conditions so oppressive that they resorted to cutting their Achilles’ tendons in protest. At Mississippi’s Parchman Farm, another plantation-to-prison convert, prisoners were routinely subjected to near-death whippings and even shootings for the first half of the 20th century. Cummins Farm, in Arkansas, sported a “prison hospital” that doubled as a torture chamber until a federal investigation exposed it in 1970. And Texas’s Jester State Prison Farm, formerly Harlem Prison Farm, garnered its claim to fame from eight prisoners who suffocated to death after being sealed into a tiny cell and abandoned by guards.
Since a wave of activism forced prison farm brutalities into the spotlight in the 1970s, some reforms have taken place: At Angola, for example, prison violence has been significantly reduced. But to a large extent, the official stories have been repackaged. State correctional departments now portray prison farm labor as educational or vocational opportunities, as opposed to involuntary servitude. The Alabama Department of Corrections web site, for example, states that its “Agriculture Program” “allows inmates to be trained in work habits and allows them to develop marketable skills in the areas of: Farming, Animal Husbandry, Vegetable, meat, and milk processing.”
According to Angola’s web site, “massive reform” has transformed the prison into a “stable, safe and constitutional” environment. A host of new faith-based programs at Angola have gotten a lot of media play, including features in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.
Cathy Fontenot, Angola’s assistant warden, told Truthout that the penitentiary is now widely known as an “innovative and progressive prison.”
“The warden says it takes good food, good medicine, good prayin’ and good playin’ to have a good prison,” Fontenot said, referring to the head warden, Burl Cain. “Angola has all these.”
However, the makeover has been markedly incomplete, according to prisoners and their advocates.
“Most of the changes are cosmetic,” said Johnson, who was released from Angola in 1992 and, in his new capacity as a prison rights advocate, stays in contact with Angola prisoners. “In the conventional plantations, slaves were given just enough food, clothing and shelter to be a financial asset to the owner. The same is true for the Louisiana prison system.”
Wages for agricultural and industrial prison labor are still almost nonexistent compared with the federal minimum wage. Angola prisoners are paid anywhere from four to twenty cents per hour, according to Fontenot. Agricultural laborers fall on the lowest end of the pay scale.
What’s more, prisoners may keep only half the money they make, according to Johnson, who notes that the other half is placed in an account for prisoners to use to “set themselves up” after they’re released.
Besides the fact that two cents an hour may not accumulate much of a start-up fund, there is one glaring peculiarity about this arrangement: due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the country, most Angola prisoners are never released. Ninety-seven percent will die in prison, according to Fontenot.
(Ironically, the “progressive” label may well apply to Angola, relative to some locations: In Texas, Arkansas and Georgia, most prison farms pay nothing at all.)
Angola prisoners technically work eight-hour days. However, since extra work can be mandated as a punishment for “bad behavior,” hours may pile up well over that limit, former prisoner Robert King told Truthout.
“Prisoners worked out in the field, sometimes 17 hours straight, rain or shine,” remembered King, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement at Angola, until he was released in 2001 after proving his innocence of the crime for which he was incarcerated.
It’s common for Angola prisoners to work 65 hours a week after disciplinary reports have been filed, according to Johnson. Yet, those reports don’t necessarily indicate that a prisoner has violated any rules. Johnson describes guards writing out reports well before the weekend, fabricating incident citations, then filling in prisoners’ names on Friday, sometimes at random. Those prisoners would then spend their weekend in the cotton fields.
Although mechanical cotton pickers are almost universally used on modern-day farms, Angola prisoners must harvest by hand, echoing the exact ritual that characterized the plantation before emancipation.
According to King, these practices are undergirded by entrenched notions of race-based authority.
“Guards talked to prisoners like slaves,” King told Truthout. “They’d tell you the officer was always right, no matter what.”
During the 1970s, prisoners were routinely beaten or “dungeonized” without cause, King said. Now, guards’ power abuses are more expertly concealed, but they persist, fed by racist assumptions, according to King.
Johnson described some of the white guards burning crosses on prison lawns.
Much of this overt racism stems from the way the basic system – and even the basic population – of Angola and its environs have remained static since the days of slavery, according to Pegram. After the plantation was converted to a prison, former plantation overseers and their descendants kept their general roles, becoming prison officials and guards. This white overseer community, called B-Line, is located on the farm’s grounds, both close to the prisoners and completely separate from them. In addition to their prison labor, Angola’s inmates do free work for B-Line residents, from cutting their grass to trimming their hair to cleaning up Prison View Golf Course, the only course in the country where players can watch prisoners laboring as they golf.
Another landmark of the town, the Angola Prison Museum, is also run by multi-generation Angola residents. The museum exhibits “Old Sparky,” the solid oak electric chair used for executions at Angola until 1991. Visitors can purchase shirts that read, “Angola: A Gated Community.”
Despite its antebellum MO, Angola’s labor system does not break the law. In fact, it is explicitly authorized by the Constitution. The 13th Amendment, which prohibits forced labor, contains a caveat. It reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
That clause has a history of being manipulated, according to Fordham Law Professor Robert Kaczorowski, who has written extensively on civil rights and the Constitution. Directly after the 13th Amendment was enacted, it began to be utilized to justify slavery-like practices, according to Kaczorowski. Throughout the South, former slaves were arrested for trivial crimes (vagrancy, for example), fined, and imprisoned when they could not pay their fines. Then, landowners could supply the fine in exchange for the prisoner’s labor, essentially perpetuating slavery.
Although such close reproductions of private enslavement were phased out, the 13th Amendment still permits involuntary servitude.
“Prisoners can be forced to work for the government against their will, and this is true in every state,” Kaczorowski told Truthout.
In recent years, activists have begun to focus on the 13th Amendment’s exception for prisoners, according to Pegram. African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated; one in three black men has been in prison at some point in his life. Therefore, African-Americans are much more likely to be subject to involuntary servitude.
“I would have more faith in that amendment if it weren’t so clear that our criminal justice system is racially biased in a really obvious way,” Pegram said.
Prison activists like Johnson believe that ultimately, permanently changing the status quo at places like Angola may mean changing the Constitution – amending the 13th Amendment to abolish involuntary servitude for all.
“I don’t have any illusions that this is a simple process,” Johnson said. “Many people are apathetic about what happens in prisons. It would be very difficult, but I would not suggest it would be impossible.”
Even without a constitutional overhaul, some states have done away with prison farms of their own accord. In Connecticut, where the farms were prevalent before the 1970s, the farms have been phased out, partially due to the perceived slavery connection. “Many black inmates viewed farm work under these circumstances as too close to slavery to want to participate,” according to a 1995 report to the Connecticut General Assembly.
For now, though, the prison farm is alive and well in Louisiana. And at Angola, many prisoners can expect to be buried on the land they till. Two cemeteries, Point Lookout 1 and 2, lie on the prison grounds. No one knows exactly how many prisoners are interred in the former, since, after a flood washed away the first Angola cemetery in 1927, the bodies were reburied in a large common grave.
Point Lookout 1 is now full, and with the vast majority of Angola’s prisoners destined to die in prison, Point Lookout 2 is well on its way, according to King.
“Angola is pretty huge,” King said. “They’ve got a lot of land to bury a lot of prisoners.”
No one knows how many of the prisoners kept in involuntary servitude at Angola are innocent. But at least one who has proven his innocence in court, overturning his conviction, is still behind bars. Please see “Declared Innocent, but Not Free.”
If Mychal Bell returns to the football field it will be as a college player. Abbey Brown’s article in the Alexandria Town Talk will give you all the details.
Frankly, I don’t care if Mychal plays football this year. Like any High School Sr. he needs to get serious about his studies and prepare himself for college. Given his notoriety, I’m sure some coach will give him a shot.
Friends of Justice interceded on Mychal’s behalf because we didn’t want to see him tossed into the Louisiana prison system for a decade or longer. Had we not intervened, that’s what would have happened.
Mychal Bell’s father blames defense counsel for Mychal’s latest setback. This continues a pattern of shocking ingratitude. Thanks to Louis Scott and the rest of Mychal’s legal team, the student athlete paid a reasonable price for his actions. Mychal has been through hell since his arrest in December of 2006, but so has Justin Barker, the young man Bell assaulted.
According to another Town Talk story, Bell recently told CNN (a) that Jena is a racist community and (b) that he struck Mr. Barker. In other words, Mychal didn’t just admit to the crime to avoid trial. Initially, I was agnostic on the guilt-innocence question because of the strong evidence on both sides of the issue. The alleged racism in Jena has never been the issue–this fight has been about protecting the due process rights of six vulnerable young men.
Mychal’s case has been handled appropriately and reasonably by the criminal justice system. The former football star and his family should be rejoicing that he will be able to return to school this year and resume a semi-normal life. As Mychal admitted to the man who wanted to be his coach, he’s not a movie star–he’s a gifted but confused adolescent from a troubled family who made a bad decision and paid the price. If Mychal spends plenty of time in the library and the weight room this year he’ll eventually get his shot at the big time.
Almost 600 people were taken into custody yesterday in Laurel, Mississippi. Of this group, 450 were immediately shipped off to the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) prison in Jena, Louisiana. The AP story is here, and the New York Times article is here.
That’s right, Jena.
As I have previously mentioned, Jena’s prison has a painful history. Originally opened as a private (for profit) juvenile facility, the Jena prison was forced to close in response to accusations of racially motivated abuse. The facility re-opened post-Katrina as an overflow facility for state inmates from New Orleans. Once again, allegations of racism and abuse shut the prison down.
Hope springs eternal, however, especially in the prison business. If you built it, they will come. No matter how badly you screw up you will be forgiven. The Jena facility reopened this year as an ICE prison designed for the sort of people arrested in the Mississippi sweep. This kind of immigration bust creates extreme anguish in the affected community and, in some towns, has left businesses on the verge of bankruptcy. Only a few thousand of the between ten and twenty million undocumented workers in the United States are touched by these sweeps, but that’s okay, the strategy is to keep up appearances.
These pictures of Jena’s spanking new ICE prison was taken a few days before the big march in Jena last September. You will notice the signs of construction–the ICE facility has been greatly expanded. Jena residents rejoiced when the contract was signed.
The Geo Group was once known as Wackenhutt. After frequent association with scandal the company wisely changed its name.
The immigration issue stirs strong passions. The government has a compelling interest in maintaining secure borders. Workers are often concerned that the undocumented are taking jobs from American citizens. Some of the articles about the raid in Mississippi noted that Black and white workers cheered as the detainees were led away. This issue has driven a wedge between Black and Latino communities.
Big business supports the idea of comprehensive immigration reform. Entire industries (fruit and vegetable farms, meat packing plants, etc.) have become dependent on undocumented workers. Superficial security checks are run at the time of hiring, but it isn’t hard to obtain fake papers. Big business loves illegal immigration because it creates a large labor pool and the undocumented can’t complain when they are exploited.
George W. Bush and John McCain are both in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. Both men hail from border states so they understand the complexities of the issue. Barack Obama talks tough on immigration (like virtually every other politician in America) but is more inclined to hold employers accountable.
I have always identified with immigrants, legal and illegal, because I carried a green card for over twenty years before becoming an American citizen this February. I came to the United States because I married an American citizen. Earlier, my wife Nancy emigrated to Canada because she married me. We know how it feels to wake up in a foreign country.
In Tulia (our home until July of last year) Nancy and I lived in close proximity to the local Latino community. In fact, two young Mexican women on student visas stayed with us while they completed High School. Nancy and I often attended dances and weddings at which we were the only Anglos and nobody spoke a word of English.
Nativists have a hard time with immigrants who don’t speak English–especially if they show a fondness for the Mexican flag. But when you can’t feed your family in your home village, and you know well-compensated work is waiting just across the border, you do what you have to do.
“But it’s against the law!” Lou Dobbs roars, “these people are criminals!”
Of course they are, in the technical sense. But desperate people play by their own rules. If Lou Dobbs was reincarnated as destitute peasant in Monterey he’d soon show up in Los Angeles with his wife and kids and nobody with an ounce of compassion would blame him.
Until recently, the business community took advantage of lax border security by hiring millions of untrained manual workers while government officials winked in the background. Meanwhile, it became harder and harder for people from Mexico and Latin America to enter the country legally. We must have secure borders, but we must also make it possible for people to become American citizens without paying thousands of dollars, struggling through miles of red tape and waiting for years. I waited four years before Homeland Security was willing to take a chance on me. In the post-9-11 world my work was considered subversive. But delays of two and three years are not unusual.
The raid ICE carried out in Mississippi yesterday was more symbolic than practical (unless you are a Geo Group executive and need the warm bodies). How long will it take for Howard Industries to replace 600 workers? Assuming these people were being paid just above than minimum wage, it is difficult to argue that native born Americans will be eager to take their jobs. And if we punish the plant by shutting it down for a year, can you imagine the impact on the local economy?
There are no easy answers to the immigration conundrum, but nativist hysteria solves nothing. Compassionate Americans want to open our borders to as many foreign nationals as the economy and the social infrastructure can accommodate. Unfortunately, the sort of xenophobia flowing from talk radio (and Mr. Dobbs program on CNN) make it difficult for well-intentioned politicians, Democrat or Republican, to make much headway on this issue. Politicians can’t afford to get too far ahead of the social curve.
Scott Henson recently published a tightly-argued post that distinguishes between police interviews (information gathering conversations) and full interrogations (accusatory exchanges driven by a presumption of guilt). If you have ever wondered why innocent people would sign a false confession this is a must read.
Friends of Justice 