Author: Alan Bean

Probing the subtleties of white racial bias

· 3 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

I came across two columns this morning making the case that white people can be riddled with racial bias without feeling any particular ill will toward racial minorities.

In a guest column in the New York Times, Ta-Nehisi Coates uses a grotesque incident of racial profiling involving academy award-winning actor Forest Whitaker as his jumping off point.  The deli employee who accused Whitaker of shop lifting, and frisked him on the spot, claims to be a “good person” without a single racist bone in his body.  Coates doesn’t argue with this self-assessment, but disputes the assumption that racism necessarily involves a conscious dislike of a particular racial group.

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.” (more…)

With Immigration Reform Looming, Private Prisons Lobby Work to Keep Migrants Behind Bars

· 1 Comment ·
Laura Carlsen

By Alan Bean

In this HuffPost piece, Laura Carlsen lays bare the idiot greed driving American immigration policy.  You will notice that most members of the eight-person bi-partisan team pushing the reform agenda in Congress (including all the Democrats) have received generous contributions from the private prison industry.  Why has a smart man like Barack Obama embraced a brain-dead immigration policy.  Well, consider this:

The inhumane and illogical step of pre-deportation detention was invented by the private prison industry. Last year, the Obama administration spent more money on immigration enforcement, including detention, than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined — a staggering $18 billion. The detention centers receive $166 per person, per day in government funds — an amount that would be a godsend to a homeless family or unemployed worker.

Please give this article the attention it deserves

With Immigration Reform Looming, Private Prisons Lobby to Keep Migrants Behind Bars

By Laura Carlsen

As the immigration reform debate heats up, an important argument has been surprisingly missing. By granting legal status to immigrants and ordering future flows, the government could save billions of dollars. A shift to focus border security on real crime, both local and cross-border, would increase public safety and render a huge dividend to cash-strapped public coffers. (more…)

Cliburn gives his regards to Broadway

· 9 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

Last night, Nancy and I watched a taped version of the funeral service for pianist Van Cliburn.  Eight speakers, including George W. Bush and Texas Governor Rick Perry, addressed the 1500 people seated in the theater-style “pews” of Broadway Baptist Church.  A choir of 300 belted out hymns handpicked for the occasion by the great pianist himself.  I have no intention of checking out in the near future, but if I do, I’ll go with Van’s hymn picks without exception: Love Divine All Loves Excelling, Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah, All People that on Earth Do Dwell, When Morning Guilds the Skies, and Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.  (You can find the complete bulletin for the service here.)

These are all old hymns, the kind that churches like Broadway keep alive.  Broadway is known as “the liberal Baptist Church” but there’s nothing liberal or avant garde about the congregation’s musical tastes.  In fact, the l-word doesn’t define the church at all, unless feeding the hungry and ministering to the homeless have suddenly become “liberal” activities.   (more…)

Private prisons fuel growing controversy in Florida

· 2 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

There’s nothing like a good scandal to get people talking about public policy issues that normally fly under the radar.  Take private prisons, for instance.  Like most people, Mary Jane Saunders knew practically nothing about the private prison industry until an alumnus of the school offered Florida Atlantic University a cool $6 million if they would name their football stadium after GEO group, one of the largest private prison companies in the world.  Fortunately, students at FAU knew more about private prisons than president Saunders.  They didn’t want their beloved Owls playing in a football stadium named after a company associated with blatant human rights abuses.    (more…)

Business writer wants more “good time” for federal inmates

· 5 Comments ·
Walter Pavlo

Forbes Magazine is hardly a haunt of bleeding heart lefties and this piece by Walter Pavlo isn’t brimming with the milk of human kindness.  Pavlo writes for Forbes about white collar crime and talks primarily to business groups.  He thinks federal prisoners, who do not benefit from parole, ought to get 128 days of good time per year instead of the measly 54 days the federal system presently allows.  If prisoners could cut their sentences by one-third by acting like model prisoners, a lot of them would.  Moreover, when they return to the free world, as 97% of them will, they will be better prepared for what lies ahead.

The idea of radically reducing the prison population makes sense even if you don’t care about the human dynamics of the issue.  It saves tax payer money.  But here’s the question; if we don’t have jobs for these people, and if we refuse to hire ex-offenders with marketable skills, what’s to keep them from re-offending?  It will take a combination of compassion and common sense to answer this question.  If there is no work for felons in the free world we must make work for them–and that could cost almost as much as locking everybody up for everything.   (more…)

In Memoriam: Van Cliburn

· 1 Comment ·

Van Cliburn performs in Moscow in 1958 (Courtesy of Van Cliburn Foundation) 

By Alan Bean

Acclaimed pianist Van Cliburn died yesterday after a long struggle with cancer.  The Associated Baptist Press has a wonderful piece about Cliburn’s Christian faith that features comments from key members of Broadway Baptist Church, the congregation Cliburn called home.  I have been a member of Broadway for almost two years, but I never had the pleasure of meeting it’s most famous member.  As pastor Brent Beasley notes in the ABP article, Cliburn would slip into a back pew at the beginning of the service, then slip out.  By all accounts he was a loving, shy, discreet, and deeply spiritual man. (more…)

Justice Scalia and the politics of racial resentment

· 2 Comments ·

scalia-465.pngBy Alan Bean

According to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court needs to rescue Washington politicians from the scourge of political correctness.  Sure, the Senate voted 98-0 to keep key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in place, Scalia seemed to be saying, but they only voted that way because the right to vote has become a “black entitlement” and Senators didn’t see an upside to opposing civil rights.

One assumes the same arguments could have been employed against the Voting Rights Act when it was initially passed a half-century ago.  After Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were murdered in 1964 for trying to register black voters in Mississippi, and after civil rights leaders were gassed, beaten and trampled by horses on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma,, Alabama in 1965 public opinion was inflamed and a band of craven politicians yielded to the dictates of political correctness by unconstitutionally placing sovereign states under a federal yoke.  Is that what Justice Scalia believes?  And what of Justices Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito?  Do they buy this line of reasoning? (more…)

Evangelicals find the heart of God on immigration

· 2 Comments ·
Jim Daly of Focus on the Family

By Alan Bean

American Evangelicals are gradually joining the push for immigration reform and the impetus behind this shift in emphasis is most apparent in Focus on the Family, a para-church organization founded by the controversial James Dobson.  But Dr. Dobson has yielded leadership of Focus on the Family to the irenic Jim Daly, and the difference in approach is beginning to show.

James Dobson started out as a Christian psychologist with a mission to teach Christian parents how to discipline their children.  As anyone who has ever spent low-quality time with undisciplined children knows, Dobson was scratching where a lot of families were feeling the itch.  Originally, Dobson stayed on message and his avuncular and often humorous presentations were warmly received in Christian churches across North America.  As a young pastor, I used his films on Sunday evenings.  Parents felt overwhelmed by the challenges of parenting and Dobson seemed to have the answers. (more…)

“OwlCatraz” reconsidered

· 1 Comment ·

By Alan Bean

It’s hard for any university to turn down a multi-million dollar donation from an alumnus, even if you have to name a stadium after a notorious private prison company to do it.  After students of Florida Atlantic University occupied the office of president Mary Jo Saunders, she agreed to sponsor a public discussion on the propriety of naming the home of the FAU Owls after GEO Group, the second largest private prison company on the planet.  The clever student who thought up the “Owlcatraz” name should be given a large cut of the credit on this one–that name is going to stick!

Meanwhile, GEO is fighting back.  Criticism of the company’s record has centered on the dreadful conditions discovered at GEO’s Walnut Grove facility in Mississippi.  Now GEO vice president for corporate relations, Pablo Paez is claiming that GEO didn’t even run the Walnut Grove facility until August 2010 and therefore can’t be blamed for problems they inherited from their predecessor.  (more…)

Sequestration has an upside

·

By Alan Bean

Sequestration means the federal government will have to make $85 billion in across the board budget cuts.  While Americans like the idea of low taxes in the abstract, they won’t like the concrete consequences of this process.  On the other hand, if the government is spending obscene amounts of money to make America less safe and more unequal, a few cuts might encourage some long-overdue rethinking.

Sequestration will mean a 5% cut to the Department of Justice.  That’s 1.6 billion dollars, y’all.  Since the federal prison system has exploded by 800% since 1980 during a period of falling crime it might be time to close some prisons and find less expensive ways of promoting public safety.

This post on The Hill’s Congress blog makes precisely this argument. (more…)