Author: Alan Bean

Southern Baptist Leader Loses Radio Show following Tirade

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This story was originally published by the Associated Baptist Press and requires no editorial comment.  AGB

Richard Land Signs Off Radio Show

Richard Land

By Bob Allen
Associated Baptist Press

Southern Baptists top moral-concerns spokesman told listeners June 2 was his final appearance on the weekly call-in show that sparked recent controversy.

The head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission signed off without fanfare for the last time on the Richard Land Live! weekly radio show June 2.

Land, Southern Baptists’ top spokesman for moral and religious-liberty concerns since 1988, didn’t go into detail about the controversy over recent comments about Trayvon Martin and a plagiarism investigation that brought rebuke and a decision to cancel the program by the executive committee of his trustee board. (more…)

Coming Out Black and Brown

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Pierre Berastain

Pierre Berastain was a Harvard Undergrad when he worked as a Friends of Justice intern in the summer of 2010.  Pierre completed his first year at the Harvard Divinity School last week and we are thrilled to announce that he will once again be working with us as an intern.

When Pierre and I got together at Starbucks this Saturday morning to talk over the details of his work this summer, we talked about the shaping power of narrative–the stories we grow up listening to.  To live in America is to grow up listening to demeaning narratives about homosexuals and homosexuality.

Canada wasn’t much different.  Just before the sixth grade (or Grade 6 as we Canadians called it) my family moved from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories to Edmonton where I was enrolled in Queen Alexandra elementary.  All the boys were calling each other “homos” or just “mo’s”.  I had no idea what you had to do to qualify as a “mo” but I knew it had to be shameful . . . and funny.

I was wrong on both counts; but since this was the only narrative I was exposed to, what was I supposed to think.  Admit it, you grew up in the same cramped and fearful world.

GLBT people grow up with these toxic narratives too, and the damage can be dreadful.  For people of color, the trauma is compounded. (more…)

Will Obama Deliver on Comprehensive Immigration Reform?

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Viviana Hurtado

By Alan Bean

Viviana Hurtado learned about immigration issues while working as a journalist in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.  She understands the desperation that drives men and women across the River and how tenuous the existence of the undocumented can be.  She understands that many extended families contain both the documented and the undocumented.  President Obama’s delay in pushing for meaningful immigration reform means that “many of the estimated 12 million people who live and contribute millions of dollar to the economy will continue to live in fear that at any moment, La migra may pick up and deport a mom or dad, often times of a U.S. citizen”. During my recent trip to “the Valley” I was disturbed by the militarization of the area (I can’t think of a better word).  There was a time when Mexican citizens entered the United States on a seasonal basis, worked a few months in the fields, then headed back to Mexico.  Or they might live on the Mexican side of the border and work as a maid in a Texas border town.  That doesn’t happen anymore.  Once you are in the country, you stay in the country, even if that means being confined to virtual house arrest while documented members of the family venture out of the home to buy groceries.  If your child is picked up by La Migra and transferred to a county jail, you aren’t able to visit; you can’t leave the Rio Grande Valley without passing through the checkpoints that are located within 100 miles of the border on every highway.  Between 1994 and 2008, the overall number of individuals detained i the United States each year swelled from approximately 81,000 to around 380,000.  Thanks to the federal Secure Communities program that has spread to virtually every part of the United States, local law enforcement must put an “Ice Hold” on every person they detain if there is any chance they might be illegal.  At least 400,000 people are deported from the United States every year.

With these policies in place, it is hardly surprising that as many people now cross the border from the United States to Mexico as enter the US from the South.  When I hear critics of the Obama administration insisting that the federal government “get serious” about border security, I wonder what they are talking about.  The President is desperate to prove that he can be as punitive as any Tea Party Republican on the immigration issue; he certainly puts the relatively balanced policies of his predecessor to shame.

Former priest Michael Seifert
Mike Seifert, Equal Voice Network

Mike Seifert, head of the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, took me for a guided tour of the border fence.  “What do people who don’t live here need to know about the life experience of the undocumented?” I asked. Mike thought a moment.  “To tell the story of the world people live in down here,” he said at last, “you would need to invent a new vocabulary.”  (more…)

Zimmerman’s bond revoked

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George Zimmerman, the man accused of murdering Trayvon Martin, is likely on his way back to the slammer after a judge concluded that he and his family lied about the family finances.  Your can read the New York Times story here.

California bill would make simple possession a misdemeanor

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A bill filed by California State Senator Mark Leno would shift the mere possession of small amounts of illegal drugs from felony to misdemeanor status.  This article in Capitol Weekly by Michelle Alexander and Alice Huffman summarize the argument against mass incarceration and explains why Senator Leno’s bill is a step in the right direction. AGB

Teeming Prisons Create a Permanent Underclass

It is no secret that our nation’s prison population has skyrocketed during the last forty years, thanks largely to the failed War on Drugs. The race to incarcerate has led to a quintupling of our prison population since 1980; more than two million people are behind bars today. What’s less well known, however, is that millions more are locked in invisible cages for which there is no key. These cages are not made of steel but of laws, policies, and practices that permanently relegate everyone labeled “felon” to an inferior second-class status. (more…)

NAACP rallies behind the president on marriage equality

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By Alan Bean
Barack Obama’s recent announcement that he favors marriage equality was a game changer.
Nearly 60 percent of African Americans report supporting marriage equality according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, up a remarkable 20 points from about 40 percent in similar polling earlier this year.
You would have seen a similar shift among white conservatives if, say, Ronald Reagan had suddenly come out for an easing of the war on drugs.
Most of us aren’t at all confident in our grasp of moral issues and tend to take our lead from a small cadre of respected opinion leaders.  Obama’s “evolution” on the gay marriage issue won’t impact Tea Party types because, in their eyes, the president doesn’t qualify as an opinion leader.
There is an odd dance, of course, between opinion leaders and the constituencies they influence.  If you get too far ahead of the parade, you may glance over your shoulder and notice that no one is following.  But gay marriage, as an issue, has finally come of age and when that happens, public opinion can shift quickly.
I find it interesting that only two NAACP board members objected to the group’s decision to endorse the principle of marriage equality since the Black church has traditionally taken a conservative stance on the issue.
But, as Pastor Amos C. Brown notes in this article from the Associated Baptist Press, the perception that some on the right hoped to use the gay marriage issue to win support among African-Americans played a large role in the sudden shift in Black opinion.  It is one thing to be disappointed in your president; it is something else altogether to vote for the opposition.  You may be screaming mad at the quarterback; but cheering for the other team is out of the question.
People of color tend to empathize with the GLBT community for the same reason American Jews were disproportionately supportive of the civil rights movement; they’ve seen this movie before.

Pastor Defends NAACP Marriage Stance

The NAACP voted overwhelmingly May 19 to oppose “any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens.”

By Bob Allen

Associated Baptist Press

A Baptist minister and board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said May 26 it would have been hypocritical for the 103-year-old civil-rights organization not to pass its recent resolution supporting marriage equality.

Amos C. Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and president of the city’s local NAACP branch, is a member of the organization’s national board of directors, which voted May 19 to oppose “any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens.” (more…)

Charles Blow: Plantations, Prisons and Profits

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Charles Blow

By Alan Bean

If you really wanted to read the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s eight-part series on the state prison system, but only have time for one quick read, columnist Charles Blow has what you need: a quick summary of the high points. 

Here’s his conclusion:

Louisiana is the starkest, most glaring example of how our prison policies have failed. It showcases how private prisons do not serve the public interest and how the mass incarceration as a form of job creation is an abomination of justice and civility and creates a long-term crisis by trying to create a short-term solution.

As the paper put it: “A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.”

The T-P’s groundbreaking series provides a “thick description” of a deadly interplay between a tragic racial history, a shrinking agricultural economy and tax base, a paranoid electorate, underpaid and under-resourced sheriffs, and a craven political class.  This is the kind of description I attempted in my Taking out the trash in Tulia, Texas and it is great to see the mainstream media, even in these belt-tightening times, taking their responsibility, and their readers, this seriously.

Plantations, Prisons and Profits

By Charles Blow

“Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”

That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it. (more…)

Growing old behind bars

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By Alan Bean

It is good to see Human Rights Watch tackling the issue of aging prisoners.  I will never forget talking to Joe Moore, a brittle diabetic with bad knees, through the Plexiglass in the visitation room of a Texas prison.  The folks handling the medical contract for the state prison system were trying to cut expenses.  A doctor decided to take Joe off his insulin to see if he really needed the medication.  First Joe lost his balance; then his tongue doubled in size, then his eyesight went.  When Joe told the guards he was too sick to work, they forced him to dress and join the kitchen detail.  Joe tried to comply, but he fell unconscious to the floor of his cell and came within a whisker of death.  Without influential supporters in the free world, Joe would have died behind bars.

Joe Moore died a few years after being exonerated and released from prison.  His friends were with him and he was able to buy a little farm and work his own cattle after release.  He left this world with his dignity intact.

And then I think of Ramsey Muniz, the Latino politician and civil rights legend currently housed in a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas.  Ramsey is 70 years old and can’t walk without the help of a cane.  Like Joe Moore, Muniz is the victim of a shady drug bust and a rigged trial.  But what if, like most prisoners, Joe and Ramsey were guilty as charged?  Does it make any sense to warehouse aging men and women, at an average cost of $50,000 a year, who no longer represent a threat to public safety?

The excellent eight-part series on Louisiana incarceration in the Times-Picayune emphasized the growing geriatric wing of the state’s notorious Angola prison.  Decades of life without parole sentencing have created a pitiless system bereft of compassion and common sense.

In her summary of the 110-page report she produced for Human Rights Watch, Jamie Fellner underscores the senseless horror of forcing thousands of elderly offenders to die behind bars.

Among the more than 26,000 state and federal prisoners aged 65 or older are some who have severe physical and mental impairments.  One 87-year-old I met last year while conducting research on older prisoners could not tell me his name. He had been in prison for 27 years, 20 of them in a special unit because of his severe cognitive impairments.  I met prisoners who were dying and could not breathe without assistance; prisoners so old and frail they needed help getting up from their bed and into their wheelchairs; prisoners who lacked the mental and physical ability to bathe or eat or go to the bathroom by themselves.

Frail and Elderly Prisoners: Do They Still Belong Behind Bars?

As the US confronts a growing population of geriatric prisoners, it is time to reconsider whether they really need to be locked up. Prison keeps dangerous people off the streets. But how many prisoners whose minds and bodies have been whittled away by age are dangerous? (more…)

Jobs, housing and public safety

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By Alan Bean

America’s punitive consensus is counter-productive.  We don’t want to be victimized by ex-offenders, so we exclude them from the job market and bar access to low-income housing.  Left without viable options, they re-offend.  Maybe they write a hot check, or they resort to nickel-and-dime drug dealing, or they break into the neighbor’s home and haul the loot to the nearest pawn shop.  Policies designed to lower exposure to ex-offenders, breed criminal behavior.  Street crime rises, recidivism rates soar, and incarceration rates are stuck in the stratosphere.

Mitch Mitchell, a crime reporter with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, does a terrific job of documenting the plight of the ex-offender.  For decades, politicians have been competing to see who can be toughest on crime; gradually, Mitchell’s article, suggests, they are beginning to grapple with the consequences of their punitive policies.  

Mitchell should be applauded for emphasizing the housing issue, a piece of the puzzle that is often overlooked.  Here’s the thesis paragraph: 

Finding housing and employment are crucial to an ex-offender’s successful reintegration into society, experts say. But after serving their time, many ex-offenders find that they cannot get a job without a home address and cannot find a place to live without the money to pay rent. So they may end up roaming the streets.

Ex-offenders in Texas often can’t find housing or work

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

By Mitch Mitchell

mitchmitchell@star-telegram.com

For a brief moment, Tim Baker considered that death might improve his situation.

“Suicide is natural for someone who is depressed,” Baker said. (more…)

Anticipating a non-white America

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By Alan Bean

Peter Laarman speaks what every honest historian knows to be true: America was founded by white Protestant males for white Protestant males.  The conservative movement has made modified this stance in modest ways, but the older view has never been repudiated–you just can’t talk about it in public anymore.  So what happens to these United States white folks no longer form a majority of the population?

We may be a long way from finding out.  In Texas, white folks will no longer comprise a majority of eligible voters by 2020, but since Texas Democrats refuse to celebrate their party’s diversity (for fear of offending white voters) it could be a long time before theoretical electoral advantages translate into electoral power.

Nationally, the shift will take longer still.  Laarman reminds us that white babies are now in the minority, but, at 59, I likely won’t live to see the day when the American population (cradle to grave) is less that 50% white, and I certainly won’t be around to celebrate when the majority of voters become non-white.

In states like California, Arizona and Miami, the Hispanic vote can no longer be ignored by either major party.  But money talks in politics and in 2050 the big money will still be controlled by the white tribe.  Prosperous people understand the importance of voting and can always be counted on to vote their interests. (more…)