Task Force to Host Historic Restorative Justice Conference at Harvard Law School

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By Pierre R. Berastain

Over the past year, the Massachusetts Restorative Justice Task Force has prepared to convene a daylong restorative justice summit at Harvard Law School. On November 3rd, 2012, Building Communities of Care Wherever We Are will seek to equip participants with tools to build restorative justice and transformative practices in their communities, schools, youth centers, domestic violence and sexual assault centers, faith communities, and prisons, among other contexts. The conference will be held from 8:30am to 5:00pm in Milstein East in Wasserstein Hall at Harvard Law School at 1585 Massachusetts Ave in Cambridge, Mass.

The initiative comes at a particularly important time given the alarming statistics that reflect the inefficiency of the criminal justice system, mainstream domestic violence and sexual violence programs, and the inimical zero tolerance policies implemented in school districts nation-wide. Today, for instance, the United States comprises five percent of the world population, but holds 25 percent of world prisoners. According to the NAACP, “Combining the number of people in prison and jail with those under parole or probation supervision, one in every 31 adults is in some form of correctional control.” The cost of these correctional programs amount to over seventy billion dollars annually. The system disproportionately impacts people of color — or people of the global majority. For instance, according to the NAACP, “five times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of Whites.” And according to The Sentencing Project, “African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months).” These issues have special implications in Massachusetts, which spends six times more per prisoner than per public school pupil — a greater disparity than in any other state. In 2007, Massachusetts spent $78,580 per prisoner and only $12,857 per pupil. The disparities in justice and the surging cost of our punitive criminal justice system demand new paradigms of addressing offenses in our society.

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Abortion and white evangelicals

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By Alan Bean

An article in the Guardian, a British paper, discusses the challenges the rising tide of Latino voters in the United States poses for the Republican Party.  Gary Younge argues that the ill-famed “Southern Strategy” made sense when white Americans comprised 85% of the electorate, but has become problematic in an age when the majority of babies born in the United States are non-white.  These babies are almost two decades from voting age, however, so 74% of voters are still white.  According to today’s Washington Post poll, Mitt Romney holds a commanding twenty-three-point lead among white voters.

This is the major dilemma for the Republican Party: racially loaded messages may appeal to many white voters, but they lose you minority votes.   You can win white votes by railing against the entitlement-addicted 47% and the crime-prone “illegals” who cross the border in search of welfare, but not without giving Latinos and African-Americans a bad name.  White racial resentment remains the greatest single force in American politics.  The economy tops everyone’s list as an election season concern, but these issues are viewed through a racial lens.  Black voters cannot be persuaded that Obama wrecked the American economy; white voters can.

Three-quarters of white evangelicals vote Republican.  If you ask them why, they certainly won’t tell you they feel more comfortable voting for a white man.  They may say that Obama is a free-spending socialist and we need a president who believes in American capitalism.  But most, I suspect, will say it’s all about abortion.  Republicans want to stop the Holocaust and Democrats don’t–simple as that. (more…)

Haunted by America

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By Alan Bean

It’s 3:41 am, but sleep eludes me.  I am haunted by America.

A few hours ago I walked from the Supreme Court building to the new Martin Luther King Jr Memorial and back.  Along the way, I stopped by the Lincoln Memorial, wandering among the perennial tourists.  A pudgy white boy of nine or ten, stood on the steps beside me.  “Hey, Larry,” he called to his friend, “‘I have a dream.'”

Looking back across the reflecting pond to the Washington Memorial, I remembered that day, almost fifty years ago now, when Mahalia Jackson and Peter, Paul and Mary sang and Martin delivered his iconic speech.  The great divide in American politics and religion is between those who remember that day in 1963 with a aching veneration, and those who regard Martin’s Dream Speech with an odd mixture of respect, dread and discomfort.

I grew up with King’s speeches.  In my native Canada, the great civil rights leader was regarded as latter day prophet, a civil rights hero.  My generation of Canadian youth defined itself in opposition to America and its war in Vietnam.  We were impressed by America, a nation with ten times our population and fifty times our military and economic clout.  There was no sense that the great nation to the south meant us any harm.  But we were mystified by Jim Crow, and Vietnam, and cold war zealotry.  At the height of the civil rights movement, two teachers from my home town of Yellowknife in the Canadian Northwest Territories took a summer trip through the American South.  They told us of an encounter with a lovely woman in Georgia who made her Negro maids eat in the kitchen because it was improper for white and black people to share a meal.  Our teachers were appalled by such sentiments.

Canadians, of course, have our own species of bigotry but, like the woman from Georgia, we were largely blind to the sins that beset us. (more…)

Can You Spare Some Compassion?

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By Pierre R. Berastain

I walked through the streets of New York City where incessant noises stand as the backdrop of everything that occurs. “You don’t know what it’s like to be homeless!” screamed a voice painfully, breaking the indistinctiveness of noises, “I hope it never happens to you! I am just hungry.” The woman was responding to a man who had berated her and her plead for money. He had shouted something degrading without looking at her and continued to walk undisturbed.

I hope it never happens to you. The words echoed in my mind as I walked down an entire block.

I hope it never happens to you.

The determined voice in my head insisted on a response, like a nightmare interrupting my sleep or a crying baby pleading for human warmth. I had just been confronted by the other, and that other engaged me with compassion rather than anger. She did not reproach me. She just wished me well. She had called me, named me, and demanded I turn around.

As I walked back to the woman, I recalled the homeless in Harvard Square. How often do we pretend to be busy on our cellphones so that we do not have to engage? How often have we heard, “Can you spare some change?” and avoided the gripping eyes of a person in need, pretending the words fell on inattentive ears? With our actions, the most visible humans in the streets become the most invisible ones in our hearts.

Yet, the woman in New York did not respond to this human neglect with anger; she responded with compassion. She extended it to the man, to me, to everyone around her. Where, I wondered, in the midst of her hunger, did she find the energy and love to show it? Sometimes, the ones who need compassion the most are the ones most willing to extend it.

“May I buy you something from this restaurant?” I asked.

I soon learned she could only have soup because she had lost all her teeth. I soon learned she had not always been homeless, that amidst economic struggles and distressing circumstances, she had lost everything and had no one to turn to. “We are a landscape of all we have seen,” once said Isamu Noguchi, Japanese American artist and architect. If we ignore those gripping eyes, what landscapes and narratives are we missing?

I am not suggesting we give money to all homeless individuals or that it is our duty to feed everyone around us. It is our response-ability, however, to recognize the humanity in others. The man did not have to say something disparaging to the woman. He could have simply looked at her and said, “I’m sorry.” We do not have to ignore a ‘good morning’ or ‘hello’ from homeless individuals. We can choose to smile and wish them a good day. Sometimes, recognizing the humanity in others is worth more than what money can buy.

Shelley recognized the man’s humanity — his vulnerability and the possibility of his homelessness — and she extended compassion. That Thursday afternoon, as I walked to the subway station, I wondered how much compassion Shelly would extend the rest of the day. And how much she would receive.

Originally posted on the Huffington Post.

Follow Pierre R. Berastaín on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pberast

Why Billy Graham is down with a Mormon president

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Romney and the Grahams work things out

By Alan Bean

Evangelist Billy Graham has tacitly endorsed Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and his website no longer characterizes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) as a cult.  This is just another sign that a major realignment is underway in American religion.

Evangelicals defined themselves in opposition to Roman Catholicism until the late 1970s when activist-preachers like Francis Schaeffer and Jerry Falwell built a new evangelical coalition around an unreconstructed version of Catholic pro-life theology.  This informal evangelical-Catholic coalition was driven by a fear of liberalism in both its secular and religious expressions.

Throughout the 1970s few evangelicals gave much thought to the abortion issue.  In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention essentially endorsed Roe v. Wade at its annual conventions as late as 1976.  A decade later, a thoroughgoing pro-life position had become a litmus test among American evangelicals. (more…)

Presidential Debate: Top 10 Questions That Weren’t Asked

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By Alan Bean

The folks at New American Media put their heads together and came up with ten questions you didn’t hear at the first two presidential debates and aren’t likely to encounter at debate number three.  Debates are extended pandering sessions in which the candidates compete to see who can appeal most effectively to the enthusiasms, bias and fears of the American middle class.  The candidates’ indebtedness to corporate funding is generally ignored and, as these questions suggest, the plight of the poor is hardly ever mentioned.  Thus far, Governor Romney has made a few references to poverty (usually suggesting that the president’s policies are creating more of it) while Obama has studiously avoided the subject (so he won’t feed the impression that he is indebted to the welfare-addicted 47%).  What questions would you ask the presidential candidates if you got the chance?

Presidential Debate: Top 10 Questions That Weren’t Asked

As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney squared off in the second presidential debate last night, New America Media editors posed 10 questions that have largely gone unasked — and unanswered – in their campaigns.

1. U.S.-Mexico Border
Mitt Romney has pledged to finish the wall on the border with Mexico. What will that mean for U.S. relations with the country that gave his grandfather sanctuary as a polygamist?

2. Drugs
Our prisons are overcrowded with people who were arrested on non-violent drug offenses. Street violence in American inner cities is largely a result of an illegal drug economy. Meanwhile, abuse of prescription drugs is a growing crisis. What would you change about current drug policy to alleviate these problems?  (more…)

The Penalty is Exile

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By Alan Bean

The criminalization of immigration, or “crimmigration” as it is sometimes known, is a recent development.  Michelle Fei lays out the basic problem,

The issue that immigrants face is that, now there is this increasing collaboration between the criminal justice system and the deportation system.  So, for basically, all kinds of immigrants, including green-card holders, undocumented immigrants, people with visas.  This means that once you enter the criminal justice system, often times you are on a fast-track to deportation, usually with no chance of ever coming back to the United States.

There is more crimmigration information packed into this radio program than I have previously discovered in any single source.

The Penalty is Exile: How Immigration and Criminalization Collide

Written by Cory Fischer-Hoffman

Under President Obama more than 1 million people have been deported from the United States. We’re told many of those people are criminals who’ve broken more than just immigration law. On this edition, producer Cory Fischer-Hoffman takes a closer look at how immigration and the criminal justice system work together, to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Transcript:

Cory Fischer-Hoffman: Have you ever traveled on Greyhound Bus Before?  Do you know the feeling of standing in the station, looking around to see if your bus will be full and hoping that after a smooth and uneventful journey, you will safely arrive to your destination?

In January of 2010, Alex Alvarez boarded a greyhound bus in Lawrence, Kansas and then got off his bus in Orlando to transfer to Immokalee, Florida,  but he never arrived to his final destination.

Alex:, I was entering the bus station, and I entered calmly but there was someone who detained me and asked, “where are you going?” I said “to Florida, to work.” and then they asked me for my papers.  I didn’t present any documentation and so, they immediately handcuffed me and they took me to a room, and they said, “sorry you can’t travel because you don’t have papers from here.” In this bus station, it was two of us who were detained, because we were the only ones who were immigrants. But, we didn’t commit any crime, absolutely none

Cory Fischer-Hoffman: Alex Alvarez is from Guatemala, and like so many others he left his country in search of way to provide for his family back home.  Alex worked in a bakery in Florida for four years and then traveled to Kansas.  Since he was unable to find reliable work, he decided to return to Florida and see if he could get his old job back.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement stopped him, solely based on “looking like an immigrant,” Alex said.  They handcuffed and arrested him and then took him to an immigrant detention center.

Alex: I was in an immigrant detention center.  They asked me a lot of questions, “what’s your name, what is this, what is that?” as you were a criminal, even though, I didn’t do anything.  Then they took me to another detention center, where there were more people, and throughout the whole time we were handcuffed.  It enrages me to think about how they treat people, I am not a criminal that they should treat me like that, with chains ties around my wrists, ankles and waist. (more…)

Yard signs, hurt feelings and hope

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By Alan Bean

Driving through a prestigious neighborhood a few days ago, I was accosted by dozens of political yard signs.  I use the word “accosted” because the signs were all for candidates I won’t be voting for. If the signs were celebrating my people, I would have felt reassured and motivated.

Surprised by my strong visceral reaction, I got to the root of the matter: the signs hurt my feelings.

I thought of the yard sign I planted on my own front lawn a couple of weeks ago.  The intention was to encourage my neighbors to vote for the good guys, but how do people who don’t share my political outlook feel when they drive past my home?  Am I hurting their feelings? (more…)

How the US government used a Mexican drug lord to convict an innocent man

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Ramsey Muniz runs for Texas governor in 1970

By Alan Bean

Ramsey (Ramiro) Muniz is a man of seventy who hobbles on a bad hip, but his spirit grows stronger with each passing day.  Ramsey has now spent two full decades in federal prisons (including three years in solitary confinement) for participating in an alleged narcotics conspiracy.  Supporters feel that a septuagenarian with a broken body and a vibrant heart is a sterling candidate for a presidential commutation.  I agree.  But first we must face a troubling question.  Somebody entered into a conspiracy with a Mexican drug lord, but was it Ramsey Muniz or was it the federal government?

Eager for a big media splash and an easy conviction, the Houston office of the DEA treated their counterparts in Dallas to a series of carefully staged events while intentionally obscuring the truth.  Those who testified at trial had no idea what was going on; those who knew the truth did not testify.  The DEA got a big media win, a drug lord got a plane ticket back to Mexico, and Ramsey Muniz got a life sentence.  (more…)