Author: Alan Bean

Two fresh takes on the abortion debate

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By Alan Bean

The abortion debate has polarized America.  We are in the midst of a seismic shift on the gay rights front, but the battle lines on Roe v. Wade have hardly shifted.  Most Americans are uncomfortable with the moral implications of abortion; most Americans feel that abortion should remain legal, and politicians on both sides of the ideological chasm have learned to exploit the issue for political gain.  On the Red Letter Christians website, Kristin Day paints this unhappy picture: (more…)

Obama’s second inaugural: an unsatisfactory sort of greatness

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By Alan Bean

Presidential inaugurations are designed to draw the nation back together after a season of partisan bloodletting.  As Barack Obama delivered his second inaugural address, conservative jurists like Antonin Scalia and Texas Senator John Cornyn looked on grim-faced.  Democracy is a team sport in which the other side often wins.  When you lose you suck it up, adjust your game plan, and get ready for the next game.

Obama has often been compared to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., the two Americans most closely associated with the principle of racial equality.  Like Lincoln and King, Obama wields the familiar cadences of our American civil religion in an effort to summon the better angels of our national nature, or at least the best angels on offer at the moment.  Heralds of a new tomorrow, if they are wise, remind us of the journey we have been on and, in so doing, redefine the significance of that journey.  Remember who you are.  Remember who we are.  We may have wandered into strange and dangerous valleys, but we were created for higher ground! (more…)

American slavery persisted until the Second World War

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By Alan Bean

You need to read Douglas A. Blackmon’s article on 20th Century slavery in the American South.  The evidence, contained in thousands of letters preserved by the National Archive and the NAACP, is irrefutable.  But Blackmon says that’s just the beginning.

Dwarfing everything at those repositories are the still largely unexamined collections of local records in courthouses across the South. In dank basements, abandoned buildings, and local archives, seemingly endless numbers of files contain hundreds of thousands of handwritten entries documenting in monotonous granularity the details of an immense, metastasizing horror that stretched well into the twentieth century.

We will never know how many African Americans were forced into lifetimes of unpaid servitude under appalling conditions, but Blackmon, who has researched and written a book on the subject, says the numbers are staggering. (more…)

Tarantino calls America’s drug war the new slavery

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By Alan Bean

Quentin Tarantino has definitely been reading Michelle Alexander.  Last month, while talking up his new movie, Django Unchained on a Canadian talk show, the controversial film director launched into a discourse on the American war on drugs:

Like most celebrities with a limited grasp of the issues, Tarantino garbles his facts a bit.  Most drug war prisoners aren’t held in private prisons and aren’t working for corporations who exploit prison labor.  This happens, to be sure, but it isn’t the typical scenario.   (more…)

Are Waco residents prepared to pay for tough on crime policies?

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By Alan Bean

Over at Grits for Breakfast, Scott Henson has a great post on the high cost of Waco’s tough on crime policies for McLennan County tax payers.   According to the Waco Tribune Herald, “One of every four dollars is now being spent to house and care for inmates — up from $900,000 in fiscal year 2009 and destined to hit as much as $5.5 million this fiscal year.”

“Employment is essential for people who have broken the law and are trying to reenter society”

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By Alan Bean

I spent last night with 15 homeless men at Broadway Baptist Church.  For the past six or seven years, a number of Fort Worth congregations open their doors to homeless people during the hottest and coldest months of the year.  This was my first time, but our guests knew the drill.  Upon arrival, they got out their mattresses and settled in.  Some of the men spent the evening playing cards and chatting with church members, but most turned in immediately after dinner.  This morning, they ate the hot breakfast we prepared, then wiped their tables, stacked the chairs and swept the floor without a word of instruction from anyone.

Some of the men shared their stories with me, others did not; but not a single man is homeless by choice.  Many of them would be working if they could, but jobs are in short supply, especially if you have a prison record.  This morning I found a message from Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project in my inbox. (more…)

Why the NRA opposes gun safety research

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Dr. Art Kellermann

By Alan Bean

Art Kellermann, an ER physician and researcher at Emory University, crunched the numbers and discovered that “a gun kept in the home was 43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defense.”  The NRA was so concerned about the thrust of Kellermann’s research that they shut it down.  This isn’t about protecting the Second Amendment, it is about making the world safe for those who manufacture and sell firearms.  If you didn’t catch this piece on NPR this morning, please give it a look, or click on the link below and give it a listen.

Lack Of Up-To-Date Research Complicates Gun Debate

January 14, 2013

Vice President Joe Biden is getting ready to make recommendations on how to reduce gun violence in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. (more…)

American slavery Hollywood style

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By Alan Bean

Dexter Gabriel thinks Americans have a hard time conducting a public discussion on the subject of slavery, so we ask Hollywood to address the subject on our behalf.  Because most movie-goers are white, however, we get films that never take the subject further or deeper than white America is willing to go.

Consider the fact that, prior to the 1960s, depictions of slavery in American cinema were unabashedly positive.  Now that tells you something about the white American psyche!

This year, two high-profile Hollywood films, ‘Lincoln’ and ‘Django Unchained’, address the slavery issue in ways which, predictably, leave America looking pretty damn good.  At least we have advanced from the days when slavery was rendered positively, but Gabriel thinks we’ve got a long way to go.

This analysis is pretty much on target.  There are plenty of objective scholarly treatments of slavery, of course, but they are generally read by scholars and a handful of justice activists.  If you want the non-Hollywood take on slavery check out this piece in Colorlines. (more…)

“The Abolitionists” and the awkward dance between movements and institutions

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The AbolitionistsBy Alan Bean

Two facts struck me last night as I watched The Abolitionists on PBS.  First, the amazing characters who shaped the movement were all people of faith.  Second, the abolitionists were not warmly received by the institutional churches of their day.

Thus has it always been.  Movements and institutions have a troubled relationships.  It’s the way of the world.

In early December I listened to Brian McLaren describe the awkward but potentially fruitful relationship between institutions and movements.  Institutions, in Brian’s understanding, conserve the gains made by past social movements.  Movements make proposals or demands to current institutions to make progress toward new gains.  Organizations and movements need one another but inevitably frustrate and anger each other.

Movements harden into institutions so they can survive.  New movements are created when institutions become too inflexible to respond to present challenges.

Without movements, institutions stagnate.  Without institutions, movements evaporate.

McLaren notes that some movements successfully inject their values into the institutions they challenge.  Other movements create their own institutions or pass away–it must be one or the other. (more…)

Liptak: When Death Row Lawyers Stumble, Clients Take the Fall

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Why, Adam Liptak asks, is it morally permissible to blame clients for their lawyers’ mistakes?  In the case in point, a death row inmate was represented by a drug-addicted attorney who eventually committed suicide.  Not surprisingly, legal motions were improperly filed and, precisely for this reason, a court refused to hear the defendants case.  Here’s Liptak’s discussion of the primary issue:

. . . why is it morally permissible to blame clients for their lawyers’ mistakes?

The legal system generally answers by saying that lawyers are their clients’ agents. The answer makes perfect sense when you are talking about sophisticated clients who choose their lawyers, supervise their work and fire them if they turn out to be incompetent or worse.

But the theory turns problematic . . . when the clients are on death row, have no role in the selection of their lawyers and have no real control over them.

As a legal layperson, I have never understood why defendants should suffer for the sins of their attorneys.  But they do.  All the time.  AGB

When Death Row Lawyers Stumble, Clients Take the Fall

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Published: January 7, 2013

WASHINGTON — Twice in recent years, the Supreme Court rebuked the federal appeals court in Atlanta for its rigid attitude toward filing deadlines in capital cases. The appeals court does not seem to be listening.

A few days after Christmas, a divided three-judge panel of the court ruled that Ronald B. Smith, a death row inmate in Alabama, could not pursue a challenge to his conviction and sentence because he had not “properly filed” a document by a certain deadline.

As it happens, there is no dispute that the document was filed on time. But it was not “properly filed,” the majority said, because Mr. Smith’s lawyer did not at the same time pay the $154 filing fee or file a motion to establish something also not in dispute — that his client was indigent. (more…)