Does bias equal badness?

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By Alan Bean

Recently, I have been looking into the possibility of doing some consulting work as a diversity trainer.  After spending fifteen years driving the back roads of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi confronting racial bias in the criminal justice system, I am extremely sensitive to the often subtle nuances of racial bias and racial resentment.

Many of the narrative campaigns Friends of Justice have sponsored have provoked entirely different reactions from people of color and people of non-color.  There are always a few exceptions, of course, but most white people get extremely defensive when phrases like “racial injustice”, “racial oppression” or “racial bias” are slipped into the conversation.  The same reactions rise when words like “homophobia”, and “sexism” are introduced.

My assumption was that diversity trainers would need to anticipate and defuse the strong emotions they inevitably encounter in workplace settings.  To test my hunch, I ordered Howard Ross’s Reinventing Diversity.  Ross feels like a minority because he is Jewish and like a member of the dominant group because he is white.  He has worked as a diversity consultant for several decades and his thinking has shifted dramatically in recent years.

At a training in central Louisiana, a white man with roots in the region admitted that the stories he was hearing left him feeling torn and confused.  “Here’s my problem,” he said.  “My father and grandfather were the most important people in my life.  They’re both gone now, but they taught me everything I know.  They taught me fishing from the time I was this high.” He motioned with his hand.  “They were leaders in our community, helped people.  My grandfather was the pastor of my church.  They taught me to be a good father . . .”

And then he dropped the bomb.  “But they were both members of the Klan. (more…)

Why you’re in Deep Trouble if You Can’t Afford a Lawyer

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If you’re wondering why indigent defendants rarely get a fair break check out this graph.  Law enforcement expansion has kept pace with an exploding prison population, but money for courts, judges, prosecutors has lagged and funding for public defenders, has hardly changed at all.  The result: your public defender or court appointed attorney simply doesn’t have the time to defend you.   This goes a long way to explaining why so many cases are settled by plea bargain regardless of the merits: the system can’t afford to take cases to trial even when the facts are murky.   Read the full article at Mother Jones.

Republicans take the lead on criminal justice reform

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By Alan Bean

Politics is behind the cancerous growth of the prison-industrial complex.  Tough on crime rhetoric only works on the stump if it translates into legislation after the election.  Politicians run on their records and everyone had a vested interest in establishing the right kind of record on public safety.  This article in CQ gives the impression that Democrats have long been in support of ending mandatory minimums and introducing lighter sentences.  It would be more accurate to say that some Democrats would have embraced the politics of compassion and common sense had that been an option.  But since the mid-1970s, it hasn’t been an option.

The ship of fools that brought us the prison-industrial complex is beginning to turn.  Big ships don’t turn quickly.  In fact, the federal prison system has been growing in recent years, largely thanks to nasty immigration policies shaped by post 9-11 hysteria.  But Republican politicians are in search of a kinder-gentler face (no one wants to look like the guy in the cartoon), so the reform agenda has a chance.  How far this new mood takes us remains uncertain.  Everything depends on how far and how fast Republican politicians are willing to move.  This is a Nixon Goes to China moment.  Democrats are still too fearful of political backlash to take the real risks reform demands.

An End to the Jailhouse Blues?

By John Gramlich, CQ Staff
May 13, 2013

Congressional Democrats have argued for years that too many low-level drug offenders are locked away in federal prisons and that mandatory-sentencing laws disproportionately harm minorities and tie judges’ hands. Lately, they have been joined in those criticisms by Sen. Rand Paul, a tea-party-backed Republican with White House aspirations. (more…)

Learning to love a Thermostat God

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By Alan Bean

“Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?”

This question was originally scrawled in the margin of an Alabama newspaper by an exasperated Martin Luther King Jr.  The church was once a thermostat “that transformed the mores of society,” King told the white clergymen of Birmingham, but it has degenerated into a thermometer that merely reflects the “ideas and principles of public opinion.”

Organized religion takes a dreadful beating in the final section of King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.  From the earliest days of the civil rights movement, King alleges, most religious leaders have “remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.”

In the midst of “a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic justice,” white clergymen have stood on the sidelines mouthing “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”

Preachers have preached the heretical notion that the gospel is unrelated to social issues.  They have concocted “a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, unbiblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.”

The comes the most chilling indictment of all:

On sweltering summer summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward . . . Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here?  Who is their God?”

A thermometer church speaks for a thermometer God who reflects “the ideas and principles of public opinion.”  Fifty years ago, the church was, to use King’s phrase, “the arch defender of the status quo”.  Now we can’t even manage that.  While the larger society inches graceward, we cling to our cherished bigotries.  Our thermometer God lies shattered on the floor and no power on earth can put the pieces back together.

When the Richmond Baptist Association refused to discipline Ginter Park Baptist Church for ordaining a gay man to minister to persons with disabilities and special needs, it was simply acknowledging a change in the social temperature.  Ginter Park wasn’t taking a principled stand on gay rights or marriage equality; the congregation was simply recognizing the gifts of God in a particular believer.  The Richmond Association was neither condoning nor condemning the congregation’s action; it merely decided, albeit by a slim margin, to sweep the matter under the ecclesiastical carpet.

Conflict avoidance worked just fine when the church served as a social thermometer, but those days are gone.

And that’s just fine.  In fact, it’s great!  Only a thermostat God can save us.

When was the last time you heard a Baptist minister, conservative or moderate, talk about God’s love for undocumented immigrants?

I don’t want to hear partisan politics from the pulpit anymore than you do; but the gospel of the kingdom transcends politics because the biblical God transcends borders, skin color, language, gender, nationality or any other arbitrary human distinction.

Our preaching must reckon with a thermostat God who is eternally fiddling with the social temperature.  But what can a thermostat God do with a church that, having lost the power to reinforce the moral statues quo, stands on the sidelines mumbling “pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”

Not much of anything, it seems.

The church will leaven the social order when the gospel of the kingdom leavens the church.  Light generates heat.  A thermostat God can’t thaw a frozen culture without cranking up the temperature in the Body of Christ.

Conservatives divide over immigration reform

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Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation

By Alan Bean

The immigration reform debate is dividing politicians and pundits on both sides of the ideological divide.

At the liberal end of the spectrum, activists fear that the “seal the border” rhetoric emerging from the bipartisan “gang of eight” will be a boon for the private prison industry and a disaster for civil rights.  Moderate democrats (President Obama among them) respond with the argument that asking for everything could mean getting nothing.

On the right, as Jennifer Rubin’s column in the Washington Post suggests, the fight is between pro-reform Republicans who realize the GOP can’t afford to be labeled anti-Latino, and hard line partisans who have built careers on a foundation of white racial resentment.  The extreme ideologues oppose immigration reform for the simple reason that Barack Obama (the arch liberal in their view) is for it.  The Democrats can pander to their minority base with give away and amnesty programs if they like, the conservatives say, we’re on the side of hardworking, honest, decent (that is, white) Americans.

The consistently conservative Rubin is particularly alarmed by a recent Heritage Foundation report that laments the prospect of millions of freeloading Mexicans overloading the American welfare system.  This approach isn’t just insulting to Latinos, Rubin says, it unwittingly embraces the liberal heresy of a static economic pie.  Since there are only so many human and natural resources to go around, liberals say, we’ve got to conserve resources while adopting Small is Beautiful economic policies.

Rubin rends her garments in horror.  Because the economy is a dynamic and growing organism, she says, millions of motivated Latino workers taking jobs, paying taxes and building homes is a sure-fire recipe for economic expansion.

Conservative leaders slam Heritage for shoddy immigration study

Posted by Jennifer Rubin on May 6, 2013 at 5:06 pm

In what was almost certainly an unprecedented press call, top fiscal conservatives from Americans for Tax Reform, the Cato Institute, the Kemp Foundation and the American Action Network took what had once been the premier conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, to the woodshed for its immigration report that sees trillions in cost and no benefits from immigration reform.

With a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, Josh Culling of ATR said that while Heritage was a “treasured ally,” its work was a rehash of a flawed 2007 study that ignored all the benefits of immigration reform. Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh was even more outspoken saying “how disappointed” he was that Heritage abandoned conservative dynamic scoring (i.e. the impact a piece of legislation’s impact on the economy). He accused Heritage of not following years of their own work, which has striven to look at the impact on behavior of changes resulting from reforming the tax code and other innovations. “They ignored GDP, they ignored productivity,” he said in reeling off the list of items in the Gang of 8 legislationleft out of Heritage. Cato’s study, which did use dynamic scoring, found that immigration reform would add $1.5 trillion in growth over ten years while forcing out 11 million immigrants (the Heritage solution) would lower GDP by $2.6 trillion over ten years. (more…)

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses–We Have Private Prisons to Fill

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Immigrant female detainees inside their holding cell of the Willacy County Immigration Detention Center in Raymondville.

I have been researching Operation Streamline and the private prison industry for several years now.  This is by far the best researched, thorough, and devastating treatment of these issues I have found.  The Texas Observer deals with issues the mainstream media wouldn’t think of touching.  In 1999, a packet of information from Lili Ibara of Friends of Justice sparked a 16-page investigative piece on the Tulia drug sting.  Nate Blakeslee’s article did what the New York Times and the Washington Post can’t afford to do–it told the story from the perspective of the poor black folks who had been directly impacted by a bogus narcotics operation.  It told the truth as it can only be seen from the bottom looking up.  This piece is just as good.  

Ask people on the street about Operation Streamline and you get blank stares.  Admit it, dear reader, even you, as well informed as you are, have never heard of the program.  And since we’re being brutally honest, most of you won’t take the time to read this article either.  Of course you won’t.  But if you really want to know what’s driving America’s immigration system, invest half an hour in Forrest Wilder’s article on Streamline and private prisons.  It pretty much says it all.  AGB

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses—We Have Private Prisons to Fill

The profits and losses of criminalizing immigrants.

by  Published on Wednesday, May 1, 2013, at 12:14 CST
Immigrant female detainees inside their holding cell of the Willacy County Immigration Detention Center in Raymondville.

Delcia Lopez/San Antonio Express-News/ZUMA Press
Immigrant female detainees inside their holding cell of the Willacy County Immigration Detention Center in Raymondville.

When Jose Rios walked into a Bank of America branch last year, he hoped to open an account for the car repair shop he owned. He didn’t expect to end up with a prison sentence.

Days after Rios provided the bank with a home address and Social Security number, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents showed up at his house looking for him. (Rios said ICE agents later told him that Bank of America, which has acknowledged a policy of reporting undocumented immigrants to immigration officials, turned him in.) Rios wasn’t home. His wife, a pretty, sad-eyed woman of 38, answered the door.

“They said, ‘if we don’t find [Jose], we come back for you,’” she said, sitting outside her daughters’ elementary school on a gorgeous California day while her smiling 2-year-old brought us handfuls of dainty red geraniums. Her daughters, the agents warned, could end up in foster care. (more…)

Lehrer: The GOP is the Party of Prison Reform

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ICan we let some of them out? confess that I rarely feature articles in the Weekly Standard.  A few years ago, a lead article in the NeoCon magazine accused me of inventing the Jena 6 story out of whole cloth.  I was not amused.

But criminal justice reformers ignore the conservative movement at their own peril.  At heart, America remains a deeply conservative country.  Ergo, if you can’t get a few prominent conservatives to sign on to a reform agenda it’s going nowhere.  In fact, given the baleful impact of culture war polarization, associating the liberal brand with an idea, however noble, can be the kiss of death.  In this WS piece, libertarian Eli Lehrer argues that the Republicans have become the party of prison reform.  The vision is limited, he admits, but that’s what makes it work.  

I have long argued that true reform will require an eclectic mix of conservative and liberal ideas.  Still, any move away from mass incarceration is welcome, and there are plenty of good reasons on both sides of the ideological divide for making that move.  AGB

The Party of Prison Reform

Conservatives lead the way.

By Eli Lehrer

Michael Hough​—​a second-term Republican state legislator from Frederick County, Md.​—​is about as conservative as blue-state legislators come. He played a prominent role in opposing the state’s new gay marriage law, holds an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, and received a 100 percent score from the state’s business lobby. (more…)

Jason Collins walks in Jackie Robinson’s path

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Jason Collins

Apart from writing op-ed pieces for USAToday, David Person hosts an excellent talk show on WEUP Radio out of Huntsville AL each weekday.  David and I do a segment together every Thursday at 5:00 even when I’m on the road and in unlikely spots like prison parking lots or a roadside McDonalds.  He thinks Jason Collins will face the same kind of challenges that Robinson encountered back in the day.  We have accepted black athletes; in fact, in many popular sports the majority of competitors are black.  But are we ready for openly gay basketball and football players?

Jason Collins walks in Robinson’s path

David Person, USAToday

First openly gay active male athlete in a major sport can confront backlash like number 42.

At a moment when baseball Hall-of-Famer Jackie Robinson is being celebrated in the popular biopic 42, another professional athlete has taken a step that will break down social barriers.

Jason Collins, a free-agent center in the NBA, announced that he is gay in an essay that was published on the Sports Illustrated website on Monday.

As the first openly gay active male U.S. athlete in a major sport, Collins, 34, a 12-year veteran, is entering uncharted territory just as Robinson did 66 years ago. And though a lot has changed since the hostile Jim Crow-era in which Robinson entered the Major Leagues as the first African-American baseball player, the 21st century has not been very welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

Mixed reaction

Yes, NBA stars such as Kobe Bryant and Baron Davis tweeted their support to Collins. Yes,President Obama called him to express his admiration and support. And former president Bill Clinton tweeted he was proud to call Collins a friend.

But a few attaboys in cyberspace is not the locker room, where some teammates could be less accepting of Collins. Nor is it the arena, where some fans might shout their displeasure.

While the NBA, NHL and NFL have developed programs and partnerships to encourage tolerance of LGBT people, professional sports is still the last frontier for raw expressions of traditional masculinity.

The long-held aversion to gay athletes isn’t only in the locker room, as comments made Monday by ESPN basketball analyst Chris Broussard indicated.

“I’m a Christian,” Broussard said on his network. “I don’t agree with homosexuality. I think it’s a sin, as I think all sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman is.”

Because the NBA is not a theocracy, Broussard’s opinion will remain just that. And it should be noted that not all Christians address this issue the way Broussard has or agree with his conclusions. But the broadcaster’s jeremiad points to the challenge awaiting Collins, who by the way, is also a Christian.

In the Sports Illustrated essay, Collins wrote about a visit he made to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. “I was inspired and humbled,” he said. “I celebrate being an African American and the hardships of the past that still resonate today. But I don’t let my race define me any more than I want my sexual orientation to. I don’t want to be labeled, and I can’t let someone else’s label define me.”

Historical examples

The history of this great nation can’t be written without acknowledging that majorities have always tried to define minorities. Sometimes through laws, and other times through social mores and even brutality, groups and individuals have been labeled and forced into second-class status because their race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation was deemed inferior.

Whether it’s caustic, profane insults or biblical denunciations, Collins would do well to use Robinson as his role model once he signs a new NBA contract and plays next season. Just like No. 42, if Collins has the guts not to dignify bigotry with an angry or equally offensive response, he will empower other LGBT athletes who yearn to come out — and their straight allies who want to support them.

David Person hosts the WEUPTalk radio program in Huntsville, Ala., and is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.

Grits begs Texas legislators to close unneeded prisons

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The state of Texas is poised to make some really bad choices and Scott Henson of Grits for Breakfast is sounding the alarm.

A plea to Texas budget conferees: Close two prison units, don’t buy empty cells we don’t need

 This is a plea to the ten conference committee members on the budget from both chambers of the Texas Legislature, who for the record are:
  • House: Pitts, Crownover, Otto, S. Turner, Zerwas
  • Senate: Williams, Duncan, Hinojosa, Nelson, Whitmire

Let’s talk for a moment about prisons. First the House and Senate have both agreed in the base budget to fund 5% employee raises for correctional workers. Please don’t start slashing at those wage hikes to pay for prison units you don’t need. Including the extra money to bail out Jones County, the House decision to buy a prison instead of closing two will cost Texans an extra $116.8 million in incarceration costs over the biennium for those line items compared to the Senate budget. Close the privately-run Dawson State Jail and Mineral Wells pre-parole units as suggested by Senate-side budget writers and tell the folks in Jones County they’re on their own, just like so many other counties that built speculative prisons and jails they now can’t fill. (more…)

How about a federal-only death penalty?

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Curtis Flowers at trial

Doug Berman is a law professor, sentencing expert and ardent blogger.  He could be described as a pragmatic progressive who wants to reform the criminal justice system but advocates policy proposals with a real chance of being implemented.  Berman notes that most people have moral problems with the death penalty but still want it available for “the worst of the worst”.  One solution is to restrict the ultimate penalty to the federal system and take it out of the hands of states courts altogether.

Unlike Berman, I am not a death penalty agnostic.  When I think of the death penalty I immediately envision Curtis Flowers, a demonstrably innocent man locked away in solitary confinement in Mississippi’s Parchman prison.  If the conviction in his record-setting sixth trial fails to hold (as is likely) and there is no way to retry Flowers at the state level without punting on the death penalty, District Attorney Doug Evans would have a dilemma on his hands.  The investigation of this case was so flawed, and the “evidence” presented to six juries has been so shamelessly manufactured that it would never withstand federal scrutiny.

Prosecutor Doug Evans’ intimate ties to the proudly racist Council of Conservative Citizens provides a partial explanation for his decision to build a case around the perjured testimony of a lying opportunist who is in federal prison for tax fraud using threats and the false promise of a $30,000 reward.  This case would disintegrate in minutes if it was handed to a competent federal prosecutor and the same could be said for dozens of other weak cases involving black defendants and racially biased prosecutors that have been tried before predominantly white juries in little towns like Winona, Mississippi.

Here’s Berman’s argument:

Does Boston bombing provide still more support for my federal-only death penalty perspective?

As long-time readers know, I like to describe myself a “death-penalty agnostic” concerning the theoretical and empirical arguments that traditionally surround the the criminal punishment of death.  But while I have long been uncertain about the “meta” arguments for and against capital punishment, as a matter of modern US policy and procedures I have a firm and distinctive view: given (1) persistent public/democratic support for death as a possible punishment for the “worst of the worst,” and given (2) persistent evidence that states struggle in lots of ways for lots of reasons with the fair and effective administration of capital punishment, I believe that (1+2=3) as a policy and practical matter we ought to consider and embrace an exclusively federal death penalty.

Regular readers have seen and surely remember various prior post in which I have talked through this idea a bit, and I have linked some of these posts below.  But, as the title of this post is meant to highlight, I think the soundness and wisdom of my distinctive view on the best modern way to administer capital punishment in the United States is now on full display in the wake of the Boston bombings.

Massachusetts, of course, does not have death as an available punishment.  And yet, I have already seen reports of many local and state officials (not to mention Massachusetts citizens) who now say they are open to (if not eager to) have the bombing suspect(s) prosecuted in federal court in part because federal law includes the possibility of the death penalty.  Moreover, there is every reason to view terror bombings like these, whether or not they have direct international connections and implications, as the kinds of crimes that ought to be investigated and prosecuted primarily by national authorities (assisted, of course, by state and local official and agents).

Stated in slightly different terms and with the events in Boston now making these ideas especially salient and timely, I believe that essentially by definition in our modern globally-wired and national-media-saturated American society (1) every potential “worst of the worst” murder is of national (and not just local) concern, and (2) every potential “worst of the worst” murder merits the potential involvement of federal investigators, and (3) federal authorities have constitutional and practical reasons for wanting or needing to be the primary “deciders” concerning the investigation and prosecution of every potential “worst of the worst” murder, and (4) state and local officials typically will welcome being able to “federalize” any potential “worst of the worst” murder, and thus (1+2+3+4=5) we should just make death a punishment only available at the federal level so that the feds know they can and should get involved if (and only when?) federal interests and/or the value of cooperative federalism are implicated by any potential “worst of the worst” murder.