By Alan Bean

Last year, Dallas-based real estate developer, Ari Nessell, gave away $1,000 a day to small non-profit organizations across the nation.  Friends of Justice is the proud recipient of one of these Pollination Project grants and are using it to kick-start our Common Peace Community program.  Last week, the Dallas CBS radio affiliate ran a story that featured our work.  You can find the audio here.

Should philanthropists make lots of small grants or a handful of large grants?  I suppose that is up to the philanthropists–they don’t ask us.

 

A Thousand Dollars A Day

DALLAS (KRLD) – How much of a difference can $1,000 make? For almost 400 organizations around the world, a thousand dollars has been the start of something big.

Dallas-based developer and philanthropist Ari Nessel gave away $365,000 in 2013, a thousand dollars at a time as part of the Pollination Project. The grants were given to start-up non-profit organizations and individuals who are bringing new ideas to the challenges of environmental sustainability, social justice, and community health and wellness.

KRLD’s Emily Trube spoke with Nessel and some of the people in North Texas who were recipients of the Pollination Project grants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Alan Bean

A quick glance at this graph and you would think you were looking at a comparison of murder rates, incarceration rates, or the use of the death penalty.  America, in so many instances, is an outlier; we have our own unique ways of doing things.  We lock up far, far more of our citizens than other nations.

Although our crime rates generally aren’t that high, we kill each other at an astonishing rate.

Then we execute many of our murderers (especially in Texas and the South) while most other western democracies do not.

Unlike other nations of similar affluence, we make it progressively easier to buy a gun and progressively more difficult to vote.

And then there’s healthcare.

Americans believe that a comparatively privatized health care system offers more effective, efficient and inexpensive medical services.   It only seems natural.  After all, we know that government services are always less efficient and cost-effective than services produced by the private sector.  Right?

In some cases, this is likely true.  Competition can produce low cost, high quality goods and services.  Governments, for instance, don’t make good cars.

But when it comes to healthcare, American insistence on privatizing services whenever possible comes with an extremely high price tag.  The following charts (you can find plenty more at the CSM site) demonstrate just how different the US system is, and how much we are paying for that difference.

Although premiums under the Affordable Care Act are reasonable by American standards, we are still paying far more for medical insurance than nations with single-payer systems.  The phrase “socialized medicine” is misleading.  Parts of the medical system in Canada, for instance, involve the private sector and America covers millions with Medicare, Medicaid and the military medical system.  Still, it appears that involving the government more, in this one instance at least, does wonders for the bottom line.

Blogging is an ephemeral medium: you get a lot of hits (if you’re lucky) the day you write something, but interest immediately wanes.  For the most part, it’s just as well.  Hot, topical stuff always gets the most attention, and every blogger knows that nothing sells like a good scandal or controversy.  That said, if bloggers have something important to say on subjects of timeless importance, the hits will keep piling up over the years.  Most posts, deserve to be immediately forgotten, but some stand up.  This explains why, over the course of a year, some posts that were written prior to 2013 got more attention than more recent contributions.   For this reason, we will just be featuring the stuff our readers liked the most in 2013.  Here’s the list.

1. Don’t blame Al Mohler, it was all God’s idea.  This post hit a nerve with people who studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary before it became an indoctrination academy.  In the picture below, James Petigru Boyce, the school’s founder, is pictured in the Confederate uniform he war on formal occasions during the Civil War.

2. Cliburn gives his regards to Broadway.  Broadway Baptist Church said farewell to its most acclaimed member this year.  I talked about the renowned pianist’s relationship with Broadway Baptist Church, a church committed to great music.

3. Curtis Flowers.  Curtis Flowers lives on death row in the notorious Parchman prison in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.  He has stood trial for murder six times, more than any American defendant in history.  Flowers is innocent, and the appeal of his 2010 conviction demonstrates how he was framed by an incompetent and lazy prosecutor.  Friends of Justice has been working on Mr. Flowers’ behalf since 2007.  Flowers is from Winona, Mississippi, the town where civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten half to death in 1963.

4. Ayn Rand: the mother of American satanism.  The title notwithstanding, this post doesn’t suggest that Ayn Rand was a satanist; but her insistence that her philosophy is the antithesis of Christianity was the inspiration for the pop satanism of Anton LeVey.

5. Stories we believe in: Learning from Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm.  What did Ronald Reagan understand about the power of story that liberals never seem to grasp?

6. Money for nothing: how racial bias destroyed six lives, stymied a black-owned business and outraged a congregation.  This narrative was written at the end of months of careful research.  This case sheds light on the disastrous rollout of the Obamacare website; this is what always happens when a single website tries to bring too many players together.  The men and women at IRP believed they could help a long list of federal law enforcement agencies share data.  For their trouble, they were investigated, raided, and tried for, essentially running a fake business.  After all, the government implied, who ever heard of a black-owned IT company?  This case would have been lost to memory if the six defendants hadn’t belonged to the same Pentecostal congregation in Colorado Springs.  These people don’t quit!

7. Tom Berry: Ten years of waste, immigrant crackdowns, and new drug wars.  If you want to know why America’s immigration policy is so badly broken, this article by Tom Berry is a great starting place.  “Continuing down the same course of border security buildups, drug wars and immigration crackdowns will do nothing to increase security or safety,” Berry says.  “It will only keep border policy on the edge – teetering without direction or strategy.”

8. Songs got us through: Fannie Lou Hamer in Winona, Mississippi. The sadistic brutality Hamer and her friends endured in Winona beggars comprehension unless you understand the times.  In 1963, only 6.4% of Mississippi’s eligible black voters were registered.  In Montgomery County it had been years since the last African-American had voted.  It took men like Sheriff Earl Wayne Patridge to maintain this unnatural state of affairs.

9. Of hell and hell fire, it’s not what you think.  We are taught that God is love.  We are taught that God consigns the wicked to hell for eternity.  Surely both can’t be true?

10. Welcome to the Parchman plantation.  This post, written following a failed attempt to visit Curtis Flowers at Parchman prison in 2010, keeps getting a lot of attention.

 

By Alan Bean

Four short years ago, a slim majority (54%) of Republicans believed in some form of biological evolution; now only 43% hold that opinion.  You rarely see this kind of dramatic opinion swing in such a small time frame, so what’s driving it?

This is an important question because, in the Pew survey I am citing, the alternative to belief in biological evolution is that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”  We can debate the details of evolution–how it happened, whether the hand of God was guiding the process, etc.–but the notion that all living things have existed in their present form since the dawn of time is demonstrably false.  To persist in this opinion is to deny the overwhelming consensus within the scientific community–that is, the folks who know what they are talking about.

On Sunday morning, a member of my Sunday school class expressed his amazement that educated people could assert that the universe simply appears to be ancient because God created a world that looks much older than it really is.  “The man who signed my PhD diploma believes precisely that,” I informed the class. (more…)

Google Tulia, Texas and you will be bombarded with references to the ill-fated drug bust of 1999.  By the time Rick Perry pardoned thirty-five defendants in 2003, Tulia had earned the unofficial title of the most racist town in America.  I have long argued that what happened in Tulia was simply the most obvious example of wrongheaded policies playing out nationwide.  By hiring Jeffrey Yarbrough as the town’s first African American police chief, Tulia shows that it has learned from painful experience.  If anything, Yarbrough is over-qualified for the position and the Panhandle community is fortunate to have a man with his background overseeing its police department.

City of Tulia Hires Jeffrey Yarbrough as Next Chief of Police

By Alan Bean

In Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas there is no air conditioning on death row.  Arkansas is a blessed exception.

Those who have been following the sad saga of Herman Wallace, a prisoner at Louisiana’s Angola prison who has spent 41 years in solitary confinement, know that hellish heat is but one of the many challenges he faces.

Curtis Flowers, a death row inmate in Mississippi’s Parchman prison, has shared his own struggles with the merciless summertime heat.

Now a judge has ruled that the extreme heat afflicting inmates on Angola’s death row constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Question: why are southern states so adamant that death row inmates should be tortured mercilessly between April and November.  Is the idea to prepare them for hell?  Or is it simply a way of ducking anticipated criticism from a pitiless citizenry?

Judge rules heat levels on Angola death row subject inmates to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’

By Lauren McGaughy, NOLA.com | The Times Picayune 

Death row inmates incarcerated in unventilated cells and without access to cool water at Angola prison are being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, a federal judge in Baton Rouge ruled Thursday (Dec. 19).

In a 102-page ruling handed down six months after the suit was filed, Judge Brian A. Jackson said the high heat levels on death row at Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, violated the 8th Amendment rights of the inmates housed there.

The suit was filed on behalf of three offenders who said the extreme temperatures exposed them to a heightened risk of irreparable harm or death because of specific health issues, like high blood pressure. But Jackson said his ruling would apply to all inmates on Angola’s death row, because prison officials could “move any death row inmate to a different tier and/or cell at any time.”

“Accordingly, the court finds that a remedy aimed at ameliorating the heat conditions throughout the death row facility is necessary to adequately vindicate plaintiffs’ rights,” the ruling read. As of February 2013, there were 82 inmates housed on Angola’s death row tiers.

The defendants in the case are the Department of Public Safety and Corrections and its head, James LeBlanc; Angola Warden Burl Cain; and Assistant Warden Angelia Norwood, who oversees the death row tiers.

Jackson ordered the defendants to draw up an action plan to “reduce and maintain the heat index in the Angola death row tiers at or below 88 degrees.” The heat index takes into account both temperature and humidity levels, and is often described as “how hot it feels.”

Additionally, Jackson ordered the defendants to maintain this temperature between April 1 and Oct. 31 — the hottest months of the year in Louisiana — by monitoring and reporting the heat levels every two hours. Especially at-risk inmates must also be supplied with 24-hour access to cold water and cool showers, the ruling said.

The defendants’ action plan on how to fulfill these mandates must be submitted by Feb. 17. Plaintiffs have until March 10 to respond. By that date, the court will also have appointed a “special master” to ensure the plan is being implemented.

Corrections press secretary Pam Laborde said that the department was carefully reviewing Jackson’s ruling, but it would most likely appeal.

The suit was filed in Louisiana’s Middle District Court in Baton Rouge in June by New Orleans-based advocacy group the Promise of Justice Initiative on behalf of three convicted murderers currently housed on Angola’s death row: Elzie Ball, 60; Nathaniel Code, 57; and James Magee, 32.

All three men have high blood pressure and other health concerns they said were exacerbated by the high temperatures. The death row tiers are cooled using fans and do not have air conditioning.

During the August trial, the three plaintiffs were allowed to testify in court. Ball called the heat “indescribable” while Magee said it felt like a sauna in the morning and an oven in the afternoon. Code said he often experienced waves of dizziness and disorientation in the summer months.

Mercedes Montagnes, staff attorney for the Promise of Justice Initiative, said Thursday there was a “very positive” reaction to the ruling among her colleagues. Responding to the longer than expected period between the three-day trial and the ruling, Montagnes said she believed Jackson was “making a really considered ruling and giving everyone a fair opportunity to be heard.”

She said remedying the heat situation probably would involve installing a climate control system on the tiers. While prison officials during the trial said this would be outside of their budget to undertake, Montagnes said she thought the issue could be fixed with some “pretty minor adjustments.”

The trial was a rocky one for state and prison attorneys. At one point, Warden Burl Cain apologized after it was revealed that prison staff members had been ordered to erect awnings and spray cool water on the outside walls of the tier. Both of those actions could have irrevocably damaged temperature data the court was collecting for use in the trial.

Jackson also criticized the department for using fiscal issues as a reason for not undertaking changes to the prison’s climate controls. He reiterated this in Thursday’s ruling, saying, “Defendants’ purported financial hardships ‘can never be an
adequate justification for depriving any person of his constitutional rights.'”

Code was convicted of killing eight people, including three minors, in the mid-1980s in Shreveport. Ball killed a beer delivery man during a robbery in 1996 in Jefferson Parish. Magee was convicted in 2007 of fatally shooting his wife, Adrienne, and his 5-year-old son, Zach, near Mandeville, as well as trying to kill his two daughters.

Angola is on 18,000 acres of farmland, around 60 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. It houses 5,149 prisoners and is the state’s only maximum security prison. The prison is most commonly known for its controversial biannual prison rodeo.

Louisiana Middle District Court – Angola Heat Case Ruling 12/19/2013

Lauren McGaughy is a state politics reporter based in Baton Rouge. She can be reached at lmcgaughy@nola.com or on Twitter at @lmcgaughy.