On February 23rd, several advocacy groups are sponsoring a briefing for congressional staff that shines a spotlight on Operation Streamline and the link between immigration policy and the private prison boom.
What is Operation Streamline, you ask? This helpful fact sheet will bring you up to speed. Pay particular attention to the recommendations at the very end. It’s good to see proponents of a sane and sensible immigration policy placing concrete policy recommendations on the table.
Bipartisan negotiations over immigration reform – which pit a “pathway to citizenship” against “more
enforcement” – could lead to an expansion of “Operation Streamline” and federal felony prosecutions
of people crossing the Mexican border into the US. Criminal prosecutions of migrants promote the
unnecessary growth of private prisons at a time when crime is down nationwide. Lucrative contracts
for 13 “Criminal Alien Requirement” (CAR) prisons only serve the interests of private prison
profiteers, not public safety. (more…)
This beautifully crafted story about an executioner turned death penalty abolitionist has the pacing of a crime novel. Jerry Givens has experienced every aspect of the criminal justice system, including time behind bars. If anyone has taken the full measure of the American gulag, he’s the guy. The bit where Givens is asked if he would have executed Jesus if the state gave him the death penalty literally took my breath away. Highly recommended.
His routine and conviction never wavered. He’d shave the person’s head, lay his hand on the bald pate and ask for God’s forgiveness for the condemned. Then, he would strap the person into Virginia’s electric chair.
Givens was the state’s chief executioner for 17 years — at a time when the commonwealth put more people to death than any state besides Texas.
“If you knew going out there that raping and killing someone had the consequence of the death penalty, then why are you going to do it?” Givens asked. “I considered it suicide.” (more…)
This story by Bob Allen of the Associated Baptist Press should excite Baptists who care about justice. The fact that the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship nominated a woman for the position of Executive Coordinator is itself reason for rejoicing. A woman like Suzii Paynter who possesses an unusually deep passion for justice is more than we had any right to hope for.
A few months ago, I wrote an opinion piece called “A Candle in Search of Darkness” after attending a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship gathering. “Every good story needs an antagonist, a villain,” I wrote, “and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship story doesn’t have one.”
Formed in the wake of the infamous fundamentalist takeover of Southern Baptist institutions, the CBF seemed determined to recreate a world in which “moderate”, politically savvy preachers could nuance their way to professional security. As a result, I said, Cooperative Baptists shy away from anything potentially controversial, including the immigration and criminal justice systems.
Paynter is smart enough to avoid my candle critique (that’s the role of independent voices like mine), but she clearly wants to lead the CBF upward to holy ground.
Suzii Paynter, executive coordinator nominee for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, sees advocacy on social-justice issues as consistent with the Fellowship’s longstanding dedication to ministry to the “least of these.”
By Bob Allen
A woman nominated to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s top leadership post says her extensive background in lobbying and public policy would bolster the Fellowship’s holistic missions strategy of targeting critical needs among the world’s most neglected peoples.
Suzii Paynter, director of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission, said in a Skype interview on EthicsDaily.com that if elected Feb. 21-22 by the CBF Coordinating Council, one of her primary interests as the group’s next executive coordinator would be “the intersection between our missions and justice.”
“In looking at our missions, we have eight communities of missions in CBF — poverty and transformation missions, disaster recovery, missions with internationals, economic development, missions around economic development, missions education, medical care — and in all these areas we have the opportunity not to just do hands-on missions on the ground but to also use the responses of our congregations and the interests of our many lay people to advance policies and to advance advocacy for issues that affect all of those areas,” she said.
As head of the ethics agency of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, Paynter has been assigned to speak on a wide variety of ethical issues including citizenship and public policy, family life, religious liberty, ethnic reconciliation, faith in the workplace, hunger and poverty, substance abuse, environmental justice and creation care, war and peace, gambling, bioethics and more.
She was Baptist representative for an international delegation to Africa sponsored by the Gates Foundation and Bread for the World and has worked on national think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations and Institute for American Values.
She has been recognized for her work on issues including immigration ministries, environmental stewardship, predatory gambling, underage drinking and prison reform. She has established interfaith and ecumenical relationships around common-good initiatives that she hopes to keep intact in the years to come.
Paynter cited Together for Hope, the Fellowship’s 12-year-old rural poverty initiative focused on breaking cycles of economic disparity in 20 of the nation’s poorest counties, as “a great example of places all over the country where we can match the love and experience we’ve had in missions with an advocacy word and voice on the national level.”
The Sentencing Project published this report over a year ago but it remains the single best introduction to the truly scary private prison industry on the web. Like everything put out by Marc Mauer’s organization, Too Good to be True: Private Prisons in Americais cautious, understated, balanced and authoritative.
Nationwide, about half the states have significant private prison populations and half do not. Some states dabbled with privatization, then gave it up; others have recently developed an unwarranted enthusiasm for selling their prisons to the private industry.
But it is the federal prison system, thanks largely to almost invisible programs like Operation Streamline, that is the real sugar daddy for one of America’s creepiest industries. Since 2005, when the feds started prosecuting the folks detained at the border for illegal entry or illegal re-entry, 400,000, largely Latino detainees spend time in federal prisons and detention centers every year. Latinos comprise 16% of the American population and over 50% of federal prisoners. (more…)
The graph to the left shows how the prison population exploded after 1980. Part of the blame for this nightmarish experiment with big government must be laid at the feet of Wayne LaPierre and the NRA.
The goal was to raise money for the cash-strapped anti-gun regulation organization. Accusing the Clintons (both of them) of being soft-on-crime was a great way to catch the attention of conservative Americans shocked by the apparent demise of the Reagan revolution. Banging the drum for more prisons, mandatory minimum sentences, and the defunding of rehabilitation, re-entry and alternatives-to-prison programs fit the tenor of the times.
In 1992, when the NRA’s “lets-build-more-prisons” campaign got underway, Bill Clinton, like every other American politician, was doing his best to talk tough on crime. The NRA’s goal was to talk tougher, even if that meant spewing utter nonsense and supporting ruinous policies. You rarely see mass incarceration identified as a massive tax grab, but that’s exactly what it is. (more…)
I am re-posting this review of David Kennedy’s Don’t Shootbecause it addresses the issue of gun violence in realistic, practical and non-ideological terms that make sense to me. America is obsessed with guns and violence. The reform movement is right about the need for common sense gun reform. The NRA is right about the toxic impact of violent movies and video games. But when you ask why the murder rate in this country is six times as high as most other western democracies, you’re talking about several hundred inner city neighborhoods.
If you want to know how these neighborhoods turned into killing fields, the best place to begin is with William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears. If you want a primer on felon disenfranchisement and the horror of the war on drugs, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. But if you just want the shooting to stop, David Kennedy’s Don’t Shoot is by far the best advice going. Here’s my summary of his argument.
David M. Kennedy: Don’t Shoot: The End of Violence in Inner-City America
David Kennedy
David Kennedy directs the Center for Crime Prevention and Control and teaches criminal justice at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is bright, intense, and haunted by the horrors he has witnessed on the streets of inner-city America. He doesn’t place his hope in the conversion of white suburbanites; his focus is on a perception gap that keeps police officers and residents of high-crime neighborhoods from really seeing one another.
Kennedy isn’t dreaming of a drug-free utopia; he just wants children to be able to walk to school without encountering open air drug markets. He isn’t trying to build crime-free communities, he just wants the killing to stop. “The killing’s wrong,” he says. “The killing’s terrible, it’s got to stop. Even the street guys, almost all of them, think that.” (more…)
There were 506 homicides in Chicago last year, a 16% increase over 2011. That amounts to 10.83 homicides per year per 100,000 population. The rate in New York City is 2.72, which is just over half the national average of 4.8.
Homicide rates fluctuate wildly, historically and regionally. Chicago’s homicide rate is about one-third as high as New Orleans (America’s true murder capital). The Crescent City was plagued with 32.65 homicides per 100,000 population last year, and Detroit (27.38) and Baltimore (18.22) weren’t far behind. These rates make Chicago look downright pacific.
Speaking of the Pacific, the homicide rate in Los Angeles last year was 4.19 but Oakland’s rate was over three times as high (15.89).
Homicide rates also vary radically by nation and continent. Some Central America countries have rates in the 90s, while European countries hover between 1 and 2 homicides per 100,000. Canada is 1.6; Mexico is 22.7. (more…)
In The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, Steven Teles describes how the conservative movement was able to undermine and largely replace what he calls the Liberal Legal Network (LLN for short). By the late 1960s, liberal ideas inspired by New Deal politics and the civil rights movement were deeply entrenched within the American legal establishment. To change this picture, Teles says, conservative counter insurgents had to realize that they were dealing with a hegemonic regime.
A regime is most likely to endure when it can make its ideas seem natural, appropriate, and commonsensical, consigning its opponents to the extremes . . . A regime that has achieved hegemony makes its principles seem like ‘good professional practice,’ ‘standard operating procedure,’ ‘the public interest,’ or ‘conventional wisdom.’ Those who fail to affirm these principles are stigmatized, and their arguments are dismissed.
In order to overcome this kind of hegemonic reality, Teles suggests, “intellectual entrepreneurs” must “‘denaturalize’ the existing regime, by exposing the hidden normative assumptions embedded in seemingly neutral professional, scientific, or procedural standards and practices, forcing those assumptions to be justified and alternatives to them entertained.”
This analysis got me thinking. Friends of Justice is encouraging American churches to embrace a biblical “common peace” perspective on immigration and criminal justice issues. This agenda makes perfect sense to most Latino and African American Christians, but is greeted with a mixture of bewilderment, suspicion and hostility in Anglo religious circles. I’m not talking about conservative evangelical congregations or the religious right; the churches I’m describing are a mix of standard issue evangelicalism and big steeple Protestantism. People in these churches value niceness above all other virtues, but they have a hard time wrapping themselves around the concept of a Common Peace Community.
We are dealing with a hegemonic regime rooted in deeply embedded assumptions that, in Anglo churches at least, have attained the status of the ‘good professional practice,’ ‘standard operating procedure,’ ‘community interest,’ or ‘conventional wisdom’ Steve Teles talks about. Why does a politically irrelevant religion seem natural, appropriate, and commonsensical to so many white Christians, and why do I so often feel stigmatized and dismissed when I do my thing?
If Friends of Justice is serious about exposing the conventional wisdom at work in white churches these assumptions must be identified. Here is my first stab at culling out the assumptions that make it hard for people like me to apply biblical norms to immigration and criminal justice. If you think I’m being unfair, please tell me why in the comment section below.
Six assumptions that keep white churches from applying biblical norms to immigration and criminal justice
The immigration and criminal justice systems should be left to lawyers and politicians. It doesn’t really matter what Christians think about these issues because we lack the expertise and standing to form a credible opinions or impact public policy decisions.
Churches should avoid partisan politics. Institutional tranquility demands that the political implications of our religion must never be discussed in religious settings.
Crime and illegal immigration threaten my personal security, so I am reassured by political tough talk.
Religion is about saving souls, promoting a sense of personal well-being, nurturing personal relationships, and sustaining a spiritual family. Public policy issues conflict with these priorities.
It’s great that racial minorities attend churches and have religious ideas. But American Christianity has always been a white person’s religion and should be restricted to issues directly affecting white people.
It’s great that racial minorities are taking an interest in politics. But American politics is designed to maximize the prosperity and personal happiness of white people.
Attorneys representing a group of inmates at the Idaho Correctional Center are alleging that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is attempting to cover up serious deficiencies in staffing by falsifying staff logs. The lawsuit brought by the plaintiffs also alleges that CCA tries to cut costs by aligning itself with violent prison gangs who, one assumes, have their own ways of maintaining discipline. Let’s hope the allegations are inaccurate, because, if I was locked up, I wouldn’t want the “the Aryan Knights and the Severely Violent Criminals” running my prison. I doubt the tax payers of Idaho had that in mind either when politicians decided to privatize the state’s largest prison.
Originally published 04:42 p.m., January 22, 2013
Updated 08:05 p.m., January 22, 2013
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Attorneys for inmates at Idaho’s largest private prison say Corrections Corporation of America is falsifying staff logs to hide chronic understaffing.
The allegation was raised Friday in an amended lawsuit filed in Boise’s U.S. District Court.
Attorneys for the Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA have not yet responded to the amended lawsuit in court, and CCA spokesman Steve Owen said he couldn’t discuss details of the litigation. (more…)
If you think the immigration debate will be sane and smooth, consider these paragraphs from Christian Parenti, one of the most thoughtful and responsible authorities on crime and punishment in America. Lots of big words, but if you want to understand the immigration debate read and re-read these words until you get his drift.
I have been told that the extreme anti-immigrant legislation proposed in the last session of the Texas Legislature was beaten back by a coalition comprised of immigrant rights activists and business owners. The owners didn’t want their supply of cheap labor drying up. But how will they react if their workers are no longer subject to deportation?
“What keeps agricultural labor so amazingly inexpensive, unorganized, and efficient, if not a pervasive culture of fear among immigrant laborers? To the extent that raids ‘reproduce’ a supply of poorly remunerated agricultural labor, then the economic damages suffered by individual employers are simply the diseconomies and political externalities of maintaining the interests of employers in general.
It is axiomatic that owners of capital need labor to be inexpensive relative to the price of labor’s product if profits are to remain healthy, and that impoverished people, driven by desperation, will generally labor for lower wages than people with some degree of social power and wealth. But sometimes poverty is not enough. In many dangerous and dirty low-wage labor markets–such as food processing, agriculture, and apparel manufacturing–employers seem to prefer not just poor workers, but criminalized workers. A labor supply of undocumented, ideologically demonized, and literally hunted immigrants is to American capitalists what drugs are to America’s consumers: an essential import.”
The usefulness, if not necessity, of criminalizing immigrant labor became apparent in the wake of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which gave green cards to 1.2 million undocumented farm workers. As soon as these laborers received this slightest of legal protections, the vast majority of them evacuated the fields in search of better employment. As soon as these migrant laborers were ‘legal’ they had a degree of upward mobility; poverty alone was not enough to ‘keep them down on the farm.’ Only police terror can assure that. To remain passively trapped at the very bottom run of the labor market, immigrants must be legally and ideologically constructed as criminals.” (Lockdown America, pp. 153-154)
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean
By Alan Bean 
Friends of Justice 