Former narcotics cop: “End the drug war, spend money on schools instead.”

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In the New York Times opinion piece below, former narcotics cop Neill Franklin discusses the need to end mass incarceration and the failed war on drugs. Franklin, now the executive director for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, was a police officer for 34 years with the Maryland State Police and the Baltimore Police Department. Alan and I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Franklin speak at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference this February. MWN

Spend Money on Schools Instead

by Neill Franklin

If we have any hope of healing the deep wounds of race in this country, we’ve first got to stop the bleeding caused by mass incarceration and the other ill effects of the failed “war on drugs.”

Thanks to our ramped up “war on drugs,” when I walk in my old neighborhood I see houses where one or both parents are behind bars or on probation or parole. It didn’t use to be that way.

Our prohibition policies, and the “us vs. the man” mentality they have caused in our communities, have badly damaged how young black men are perceived — and not just by white people. As an African-American narcotics cop in Baltimore, even I fell victim to fear and apprehension when I encountered a group of black teenagers on the street. Making drugs like marijuana illegal has made them incredibly lucrative, and it’s not hard to see why many teenagers choose to enlist in the dope game and play for the chance at moving up the chain and raking in tax-free money rather than donning a McDonald’s uniform.

Even if our drug policies aren’t successful in reducing drug use, they are successful in turning whole communities into criminals. Nearly one in three black men can expect to spend time behind bars. For many black teenagers, getting arrested is a rite of passage.

But it wasn’t always this way. (more…)

Getting Organized to Fix the Justice System

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by Lisa D’Souza

When I was an assistant public defender, friends and I would wonder what would happen if all the defense lawyers decided to protest the problems with the criminal justice system.  What if every criminal defense lawyer refused to represent people against whom the state sought the death penalty?  What if we agreed we would no longer represent anyone charged with “war on drugs” felonies?  The system can’t operate without defense lawyers.  Why do we let it operate with us?

Today, in the New York Times, Michelle Alexander offers another radical idea to force society to confront the problems in our criminal justice system.

I’m not sure what the best path forward is.  I am sure it is time for us to get organized.  It is time to start talking.  We all know there are serious problems with our criminal justice system.  And it is up to us to fix them.  How?

Beyond the New Jim Crow?

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By Alan Bean

When a book about the criminal justice system sells 175,000 books, something is afoot.  Something big.  As this article in the New York Times observes, the initial hardcover release of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness was only 3,000 copies.  That’s a realistic sales target for this kind of book. 

Nobody who has read the book is surprised to find it on the best-seller list.  Many of the facts professor Alexander cited were familiar to criminal justice reform advocates, but she writes better than most academics and her argument transcended the normal drug war critique.  This clip from the article says it best:

Today, Professor Alexander writes, nearly one-third of black men are likely to spend time in prison at some point, only to find themselves falling into permanent second-class citizenship after they get out. That is a familiar argument made by many critics of the criminal justice system, but Professor Alexander’s book goes further, asserting that the crackdown was less a response to the actual explosion of violent crime than a deliberate effort to push back the gains of the civil rights movement.

Was the drug war a response to crime (as folks like Bill Stuntz and David Kennedy argue) or was the real goal to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement?

Yes.

In a journal article called “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow“, professor James Forman Jr., son of the famed civil rights leader, makes two primary points.  First, Ms. Alexander doesn’t say enough about the relationship between urban crime and support for the drug war, and second, The New Jim Crow ignores the fact that civil rights leaders initially endorsed the idea of ramping up the drug war because drugs, and drug-related violence, was having a disastrous impact in poor black neighborhoods.

Forman makes some powerful arguments.  The war on drugs has always been a bipartisan disaster.  As Bill Stuntz suggested in his excellent The Decline of American Criminal Justice, liberal politicians had three choices when conservatives like Richard Nixon started demagoguing the drug war.  They could offer a progressive drug policy alternative, they could cede the drug issue to the conservatives, or they could out-tough the tough guys.  Democrats like Bill Clinton chose option number three and the drug war was transformed into a bipartisan bidding war. (more…)

Ernie Lopez: “Free, but not cleared.”

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Ernie Lopez

by Melanie Wilmoth Navarro

Last year, Friends of Justice wrote a post about the NPR and PBS Frontline research on child death cases. Based on the dozens of cases investigated, NPR and PBS Frontline found that flimsy evidence is often used to convict individuals in child death cases. They found numerous individuals who had been wrongfully convicted based on faulty forensic science.

Ernie Lopez was one of those individuals.

Lopez, a child care provider, was watching six-month old Isis Vas in October 2000 when the baby collapsed. Lopez called 911 and Isis was rushed to the hospital, but she died the next day. Baby Isis was bleeding and bruised when she arrived at the hospital, and forensic scientists testified that Isis had been abused before her death. According to NPR, “Lopez was indicted on capital murder and sexual assault charges. Prosecutors tried him on the sexual assault count, and he was convicted and sentenced to 60 years in prison.”

The extensive research conducted by NPR and PBS Frontline, however, uncovered a previously unknown factor in Lopez’s case: “Isis Vas had a severe blood clotting disorder, one that caused bruising and bleeding that mimicked the signs of physical and sexual abuse.” (more…)

Bryan Stevenson on our “Stunning Silence” about Injustice

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By Lisa D’Souza

If you care about justice in America, please take 24 minutes to listen to Bryan Stevenson’s TED talk. 

In less than half an hour, Mr. Stevenson eloquently and compellingly discusses the problem of mass incarceration, its impact on poor communities of color, and our nation’s resistance to honestly examining our history and our present. 

He offers painful data and asks hard questions.  Why are we comfortable with a justice system in which “wealth not culpability shapes outcomes.” 

Why are we the only country in the world in which children as young as 13 can be sentenced to live their natural lives and die in prison?  How have we allowed the disenfranchisement of vast numbers of men of color?

We allow it because we don’t think this is “our problem.”  Mr. Stevenson reminds us that none of us is free until all of us are free and that our society will be judged by our treatment of the marginalized.  He asks us to start talking about these justice issues and to commit ourselves to truth and reconciliation.

There is no time like the present.  Will you commit to thinking and talking about injustice today?  I will.

Did the Religious Right enable Guatemalan genocide?

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Pat Robertson

In January, former Guatemalan military dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt was ordered to stand trial for his role in almost 2,000 deaths and 1,400 human rights abuses that occurred during his rule as de-facto president from 1982-1983. Montt, according to the New York Times, faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for his part in Guatemala’s brutal 36-year civil war which resulted in the deaths of nearly 200,000 people.

According to Bill Berkowitz of Talk2Action.org, televangelist Pat Robertson enabled the Guatemalan genocide.

Montt was a favorite among conservative evangelicals, including Robertson who “praised Montt for his ‘enlightened leadership.'” Berkowitz argues that the Religious Right played a large role in U.S.-Central American relations during the 1980s. In an attempt to end communism and expand evangelical Protestantism in Central America, the Religious Right supported military dictators and policies that were “responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.”

Take a moment to read Berkowitz’s enlightening essay posted below. MWN

Guatemala’s Former Leader Charged with Genocide. Pat Robertson Enabled It.

by Bill Berkowitz

Nearly thirty years ago, Guatemala’s ruthless dictator, José Efraín Ríos Montt and televangelist Pat Robertson were practically tied at the hip. Now, Guatemala’s judicial system is debating how to handle charges of genocide against the former military dictator, while Robertson, who had praised Ríos Montt for his `enlightened leadership,’ appears to have turned his back on his old friend.

In the early 1980s, José Efraín Ríos Montt, a military general was a favorite of the Reagan Administration and U.S. Christian conservative evangelical leaders – particularly televangelist Pat Robertson — and organizations. Ríos Montt was one of a series of military dictators that masterminded the murders of perhaps as many as 200,000 Guatemalans — including tens of thousands of Mayan people — as well as the destruction of a numerous Mayan villages. (more…)

Locking Children Up and Throwing Away the Key

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By Lisa D’Souza

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the death penalty may not be used against someone for a crime committed before the age of 18.  Scientific studies affirm the experience of parents and teachers the world over:  adolescent brains are not fully developed.  It makes sense that we would not mete out the ultimate punishment to a child whose decision-making capabilities are not that of an adult.

There is another punishment just one step shy of the death penalty: life without the possibility of parole.  A life without parole sentence means that a person will spend the entirety of their natural life in prison and die there.  Sadly, there are members of our society for whom this sentence is appropriate.  But can it ever be appropriate for a child?  For someone whose brain is not yet fully developed?  For someone who still has the capacity to learn and to change?

The Equal Justice Initiative has identified 73 children under the age of 15 who have been sentenced to spend their entire life in prison.  Nearly two-thirds of these are children of color.  Many were involved in crimes where older teens or adults were the primary actors.  Some were convicted for crimes in which no one was killed or injured.  Why are these children sentenced to die in prison?

Soon, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider this very issue.  On March 20, 2012 Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson will argue two cases before the Supreme Court in which children were sentenced to live and die in prison.  Human Rights Watch has filed an amicus brief and has published a harrowing 47-page report on the prison conditions that face young offenders who have been sentenced to spend their entire natural life in prison.

Juvenile justice courts operate on the rehabilitative principal that children can be shaped and educated.  Scientific studies confirm that children’s brains are still developing well into their teens.  To sentence a child to life without parole is to say that society is willing to consider that child useless and unfit for our society.  Surely such a sentence meted out to a child is cruel and unusual.

Franklin Graham and the black-white gap in American evangelicalism

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Franklin Graham impersonates his famous father

By Alan Bean

I have never met Lisa Sharon Harper, but she’s been reading my mail.

Why, she asks, was Franklin Graham unwilling to apply the term “Christian” to president Obama?

Graham has trouble seeing the president as a fellow believer, Sharon Harper argues, because white Christians are rarely forced to wrestle with systemic injustice and are therefore uncomfortable with Christians who make this issue front and center.

I have a few minor quibbles with the argument below.

Many, perhaps most, black evangelical churches are just as fixated on personal salvation as white evangelicals.  Martin Luther King didn’t enjoy the enthusiastic support of most black Baptist churches in the South, and his social gospel remains suspect in many corners of the black church.

Secondly, Franklin Graham’s daddy, the iconic American evangelist Billy Graham, wasn’t quite as racially advanced as this post suggests.  True, he did open his crusades to black worshippers before most white evangelicals were comfortable with integrated evangelism, but as Darren Dochuk points out in his excellent study of California evangelicalism, Graham realized that segregation was becoming an embarrassment in America and thus an impediment to evangelism.  (more…)

Victory for Walnut Grove

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According to a federal consent decree, the state of Mississippi will no longer house juveniles at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. The juvenile facility, located in Walnut Grove, MS, is run by GEO Group, the second largest private prison corporation in the U.S.

In November 201o, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit against GEO Group when reports emerged of sexual abuse, improper medical care, extended prisoner isolation, and violence among inmates at Walnut Grove. According to the ACLU press release, youth at the facility were “forced to live in barbaric and unconstitutional conditions and [were] subjected to excessive uses of force by prison staff.”

The consent decree requires the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) to remove all youth under the age of 17 from the privately-run Walnut Grove facility and house them in a publicly-operated facility instead. The state is required to provide rehabilitative services for the youth and implement measures to protect them from sexual and physical abuse. Under this decree, the state of Mississippi is also prohibited from placing any youth in solitary confinement. MWN

Ground-Breaking Federal Consent Decree Will Prohibit Solitary Confinement of Youth Convicted as Adults, and Bar Their Incarceration in Violence-Ridden, For-Profit Prison Run by GEO Group

By KAREN WILSON

Children under the supervision of the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) will no longer be housed in a privately run prison or subjected to brutal solitary confinement under the terms of a groundbreaking settlement of a federal class action lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The lawsuit charged that conditions at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, which houses youth convicted as adults, are unconstitutional. The facility is operated by GEO Group Inc., the nation’s second largest private prison corporation.

“This represents a sea change in the way the MDOC will treat children in its custody,” said Sheila Bedi, deputy legal director for the SPLC. “As a result of this litigation, Mississippi’s children will no longer languish in an abusive, privately operated prison that profits each time a young man is tried as an adult and ends up behind bars.” (more…)

Requiem for Catrina

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Caseptla Bailey and Catrina Wallace

By Alan Bean

On June 29, 2009, the Jena 6 saga reached an unheralded conclusion at the LaSalle Parish courthouse.  The terms reflected DA Reed Walter’s desire to move beyond a controversy that had enveloped his existence for over two years.  Each of the five remaining defendants in this case pleaded “no contest” to a misdemeanor charge of simple battery and after completing a week of non-supervised probation their records were expunged.

Two weeks later, more than 150 officers, including a SWAT team and helicopters, stormed into Jena’s small black community and arrested over a dozen individuals.

According to Sheriff Scott Franklin, the primary target of the raid was 37-year-old Darren “Nunni” DeWayne Brown, a man Franklin described as the narcotics kingpin responsible for supplying 80% of the narcotics sold in LaSalle, Grant and Catahoula parishes.  The raid also targeted Brown’s partners in crime and a few and other low-level dealers.

During the pre-raid briefing, Franklin spelled out the consequences of the raid for his troops.  The bad guys “will get put in handcuffs, put behind bars today and never see the light of day again unless they are going out on the playground in prison.”

Catrina Wallace, one of the key organizers behind the Jena 6 movement, was among those arrested.

As her three young children looked on, Catrina was arrested at gun point, handcuffed, and hauled off to the LaSalle Parish Jail. A search of her home turned up no evidence of drug use or drug dealing.  In fact, none of the Rambo-style raids conducted that day produced any drugs.  Scott Franklin had predicted that his raid would make the black end of Jena look like Baghdad.  Maybe so, the 150 men assembled for Operation Third Option didn’t find the WMD. (more…)