In Memoriam: Van Cliburn

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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…)

Immigration debate draws attention to Operation Streamline

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By Alan Bean

The immigration debate unfolding in the halls of Congress is directing increased attention to the nuts and bolts of American immigration policy.  Republicans insist on “securing the border”.  Democrats insist the border is already secure.  But what is the cash value of “border security” rhetoric and what price, in dollars and in human misery, are we willing to pay to achieve it.  As things presently stand, we are building border walls, establishing dozens of new immigration detention centers (half of them run by private prison companies), turning police officers into immigration agents and generally transforming the border region into a draconian police state.

It is very gratifying to see Operation Streamline getting a sliver of the publicity it deserves.  This program is highly controversial in federal legal circles because it is very costly, it deflects prosecutorial attention from serious crimes of violence, and it involves legal procedures that are tantamount to human rights abuse.  Until recently, Operation Streamline was rarely mentioned by the mainstream press.  If this ABC story is anything to go by, that might be changing.

ACLU: US Too Tough on Illegal Immigrants

By  (@JimAvilaABC) and  (@SerenaMarsh)

Feb. 22, 2013

The American Civil Liberties Union says United States border security treats people crossing the border illegally to look for work as criminals instead of as desperate people trying to feed their families.

Border security continues to be a central point of the ongoing immigration reform debate, with Republican saying they won’t move forward without it and Democrats arguing the borders are already secure. (more…)

The two phases of the prison-industrial complex: the war on drugs and the war on immigrants

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By Alan Bean

This essay was presented at the recent Samuel DeWitt Proctor conference in Dallas, Texas.

I went from being a Baptist preacher to my current work as a justice advocate in July of 1999.  A massive drug bust hit the little farming community of Tulia, Texas, putting forty-seven people, most of them black, in jails and prisons.  Some of us didn’t think it was wise to let a gypsy cop with a reputation for dishonesty send men and women to prison for up to 300 years on nothing but his uncorroborated say-so.

As the long battle for justice evolved, I started asking how it had come to this.  The locals assured me that Tulia hardly had a single black resident in 1950 when they figured out how to pump the waters of the Ogallala Aquifer up to the dry prairie.  Suddenly, Swisher County was blooming like the proverbial rose and share croppers from Deep East Texas were migrating westward.  They were forced to live in little shanty towns on the wrong side of the tracks.  There was hardly any running water or police protection and everyone, especially the children, suffered through the winter months.  But there was more than enough work to go around.  It didn’t pay well, for sure, but it was enough to keep food on the table and the young folk out of trouble.  Most of the time, anyway. (more…)

Did SNL commit blasphemy?

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By Alan Bean

Saturday Night Live has everybody talking.  Actually, the sketch described below has folks beating their chests, rending their garments and howling at the moon.

Is it blasphemy to portray Jesus as a revenge-seeking action hero from a Quentin Tarantino movie?

It all depends.  If you portrait of Jesus is primarily culled from the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) then the SNL spoof will make you wonder what these guys were thinking.  On the other hand, if your vision of Jesus is a cross between the more graphic bits of the book of Revelation, a Jesus-is-a-badass Carmen number, and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series (more on this below), then SNL is pretty much on target.  Fred Clark, who has been writing a running commentary on the Left Behind books for edification and laughs, has some insights that will amaze and horrify you.

SNL’s ‘DJesus’ is a pacifist compared to Tim LaHaye’s lethal Death Jesus

February 20, 2013

Here’s the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, as envisioned by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in The Glorious Appearing [note: this is R-rated graphic violence]: (more…)

Controversy erupts as Florida university names its football stadium after a private prison company

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By Alan Bean

Florida Atlantic University didn’t know what it was getting into when it agreed to name it’s football stadium after the private prison giant GEO Group.  George Zoley, the CEO of GEO Group calls FAU his alma mater and was willing to hand over a $6 million donation.  The good folks at FAU who gladly took Zoley’s money didn’t realize that private prisons are highly controversial.

As the article below makes clear, GEO Group, like every other private prison company, has been dogged by a long list of abuse allegations in places like Broward County, FL, Walnut Grove, MS, and Jena, LA.  Immigrant rights and DREAM Act groups immediately sprang into action, linking to GEO Groups Wikipedia article to corroborate their unflattering portrait of the private prison company.  In a desperate attempt at damage control, GEO Group gave the Wikipedia article a radical edit, replacing all the unflattering facts with its own corporate propaganda.

I first learned about the FAU-GEO Group connection on Tuesday morning at the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference in Dallas.  I had just finished my presentation on the private prison industry when a woman in the audience stood to announce the breaking news.  This morning, my Google Alert on Walnut Grove led me to the article below.

Private prisons are cheap because they cut corners at every turn, diverting tax dollars into corporate coffers and massive bonus checks for men like George Foley.  They must understaff their prisons to remain in the black.   (more…)

George Will: solitary confinement as torture

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Alan Bean

Thanks to Gene Elliott for bringing this column to my attention.  George Will generally writes from a conservative perspective, but he thinks independently and writes as well as anybody in the business.  Having spoken to inmates like Ramsey Muniz who have been subjected to prolonged stretches of solitary confinement, I know just how cruel and usual it can be.  It is particularly encouraging to see that opposition to mass incarceration has recently become bipartisan.  If anything, folks on the right have been more inclined in recent years to inveigh against the warehousing of US citizens than avowed liberals. This piece is highly recommended.

Alone and suffering: Solitary confinement is its own form of torture

By George Will

 

“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.” (more…)