In 2006, the state of Texas began detaining immigrant families and children at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, TX. The detention center did not stop housing immigrant children until 2009, after the ACLU of Texas sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Rather than turning to more humane and practical solutions like probation or home-like community shelters, however, Texas may soon reinstate the practice of detaining immigrant families. According to KUT, ICE recently requested 100 new family detention beds in the state.
We need to consider how the criminalization of immigration contributes to mass incarceration. We must also look at the looming possibility of family detention, the effects of which would be devastating to the physical and mental well-being of immigrant children and families in Texas. MW
Undocumented families waiting for their immigration status to be determined could soon be held in detention centers in Texas. The federal government is reviewing contracts from companies interested in running them.
Central Texas housed immigrant families in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor from 2006 to 2009, and some immigration rights advocates say they fear the practice of detaining families could return.
The ACLU of Texas sued the T. Don Hutto Center and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2007 for detaining immigrant children.
“The ICE field office started using its discretion a little more bit more wisely, allowing some of the bond-eligible families to bond out,” said Lisa Graybill, the legal director for the ACLU of Texas. “Others were placed in shelters like Casa Marianella, which is a shelter for immigrant families and immigrant women, and other sort of community-based alternatives.”
After that, the only detention center in the country still housing families was in Pennsylvania. That center will be closed in March. But last November, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement put out a request for proposal for 100 new family detention beds in Texas. (more…)
(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town. Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)
By Alan Bean
I had always assumed that the confederate memorial in Winona, Mississippi had been destroyed in 1978 along with the courthouse. It seemed a bit counter-intuitive, but there was no sign of Civil War nostalgia on the grounds of the new courthouse where Curtis Flowers was convicted of murder in the summer of 2010.
Curtis has been tried for the murder of four people in a Winona furniture store in July, 1996. He has been convicted four times. Two trials ended in hung juries. Three convictions were overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court, which is currently reviewing his most recent conviction.
Meanwhile, Curtis sits on Parchman prison’s death row.
Friends of Justice is convinced that Curtis Flowers is innocent, but you would be hard pressed to find a white resident of Winona, Mississippi who agrees with us. At Flower’s 2010 trial, it became apparent, perhaps for the first time, that District Attorney Doug Evans and his investigator, John Johnson, had decided Curtis Flowers was the killer less than three hours after the murder scene was discovered. The only evidence connecting Curtis with the crime at that time was a check for three days wages found on the desk of the slain Bertha Tardy. The check was made out to Curtis Flowers. Though this hardly constituted evidence of wrongdoing, Evans and Johnson centered their investigation on Flowers from the beginning; no other suspects or alternative theories of the crime were ever considered.
The former site of the Montgomery County Jail in Winona, Mississippi
Melanie Wilmoth and I were in Winona this Monday to visit with Archie and Lola Flowers, Curtis’s parents. We were driving home from a local restaurant when I asked about the location of the old county jail and courthouse.
In June of 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annell Ponder, Sue Johnson and Lawrence Guyot were savagely beaten by several local police officers and a state trooper at the county jail. A few days later, they were arraigned at the county courthouse. Their crime: demanding to be served in the white-only restaurant of Winona’s segregated bus depot two years after the federal government integrated bus depots, train stations and airports across the South.
Archie Flowers didn’t answer my question about the old courthouse, he just guided the car in the direction of downtown Winona. “The courthouse used to be right here,” Lola told me, pointing to the Montgomery County library.
There it stood, the conferate memorial that graces virtually every courthouse in the old South. This one had been erected in 1909, just 44 years after they drove old Dixie down. Southern pride still burned strong. The monument was dedicated “To the Confederacy President Jefferson Davis and the soldiers who fought for state rights.”
Even in 1909, southerners embraced the historical fiction that the War of Northern Aggression had nothing to do with the South’s “peculiar institution.”
The next morning, Melanie and I returned to the library. A Civil Rights display featuring pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. greeted us as we entered the room. I was impressed. Mississippi is one of three southern states where citizens can choose to celebrate Martin Luther King Day or Robert E. Lee Day, whichever floats your boat. A Civil Rights display was above and beyond the call of civic duty.
I moved to the desk and asked if the library had any information about the old courthouse and county jail. “I’m not sure,” the librarian told me. “If we have anything it will be in the book we’ve got on Montgomery County history.”
She plucked an imposing tome from the library shelves. It was one of those local histories that most rural counties produce every half century or so. This one had been published in 1994, three decades after Fannie Lou Hamer and friends were savagely beaten at the county jail and three years before Curtis Flowers went on trial the first time.
Like most county histories, the book began with a section on local history. Although there was an extensive section on the Native American people who occupied the county before the arrival of white settlers, there was no discussion of slavery.
The book featured articles on every white family with roots in the county and several hundred pictures, but although Montgomery County is 45% African-American, not a single black face appeared anywhere. Melanie and I weren’t the first readers to notice this. One reader had scrawled his disgust on the table of contents page. “Sorry people,” the message read, “us black folks are not listed in family histories. Apparently we don’t exist though the copyright is 1994. Go figure racist white folks. Go Obama!”
The book’s extensive section on the Civil War merely reproduced documents from the war era with not even a passing reference to slavery. The war was all about Abraham Lincoln’s desire to “destroy all the institutions of the South and withdraw from her people the constitutional guarantees for the protection to property and the right to enjoy the same.”
A visitor to Montgomery County would have no idea that black people had ever lived there or that slavery and Jim Crow segregation were integral to the county’s legacy. No wonder the note writer was confused and angry.
But that was 1994 and this is 2012. I doubt you would have seen a civil rights display in the Winona library back when Curtis Flowers was first arrested in 1997.
At first blush, historical myopia and denial have little relevance to the fairness of the Montgomery County criminal justice system. Fannie Lou Hamer, Annell Ponder, June Johnson and the other civil rights leaders arrested at Winona’s bus depot in 1963 weren’t simply denied justice; their captives took sadistic pleasure in their ability to beat and sexually humiliate the men and women in their control. Thanks to pressure from the Kennedy White House, the officers were tried in federal court, but an all white, all-male jury acquitted them after deliberating for a matter of minutes. The law of the land did not apply to black people (especially black civil rights activists) in 1963.
How much had changed when Curtis Flowers went to trial for the first time 34 years later?
A lot. When Doug Evans illegally kept black residents off the jury, the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the verdict. When, at a subsequent trial, five black jurors were selected, all five voted to acquit Mr. Flowers while all seven white voted to acquit.
These facts suggest radical change mixed with a disturbing degree of historical continuity. Things have changed for the better; but not nearly enough. That is why the case of Curtis Flowers and hundreds of other Mississippi defendants must be viewed through the lens of the Magnolia State’s troubled racial history. Did Curtis Flowers get a fair trial in 1997, in 2010, or at any time in between? You be the judge.
It’s not just journalists and academics who have been inspired by Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness.” Having worked as an assistant public defender, I find the book speaks a truth that I have already witnessed. My former boss, Dawn Deaner, the elected Public Defender for Nashville and Davidson County, studied the data and found that although African-Americans constitute 20% of the population in Davidson County, Tennessee, 60% of the people in Davidson County jails are black. Even more shocking, 80% of the children held in jail waiting to be tried as adults are African-American.
I echo Ms. Deaner’s words in an editorial published in The Tennessean today, “Everyone who cares about equality and fairness in our criminal justice system owes it to themselves to read her book, and to make their own evaluation of how and why 1 in 3 young African-American men is currently in prison or jail, or on probation or parole.”
Dawn Deaner
Disproportional incarceration emerges as a civil-rights issue
Dawn Deaner
As Nashville’s public defender, I applaud Jim Todd’s Jan. 18 article about the unfair sentences meted out under Tennessee’s Drug Free School Zone Act (DFSZA), and his call for a legislative remedy to that problem.
I write, however, to shine a light on another disparity created by the Act that goes beyond the sentences imposed, and represents a much more serious inequity permeating our American criminal justice system — the mass incarceration and criminalization of minority individuals.
In 2010, 73 percent of adults charged in Nashville with violating the Drug Free School Zone Act were African-American, even though African-Americans represented only 20 percent of Nashville’s adult population that year, according to U.S. Census data. These disproportionate numbers are even more troubling when you realize they are not limited to DFSZA arrests. On an average day in 2010, the Davidson County Jail held an adult inmate population that was 61 percent African-American, 6 percent Hispanic, and 33 percent Caucasian — a mixture wildly different than our city’s adult population that year (roughly 20 percent African-American, 6 percent Hispanic and 70 percent Caucasian). The numbers are even more disparate for our children. In December 2011, 80 percent of juveniles held in Nashville’s jail pending trial as adults were African-American.
Beyond statistics, a trip to the A.A. Birch Criminal Court Building reveals the same reality — the faces of our city’s criminal defendants are predominantly faces of color, regardless of whether they are charged with minor offenses or serious felonies. Unfortunately, Nashville is not alone in this racial disparity, as civil-rights advocate Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. In the book, Alexander explains how — primarily as a result of American’s “war on drugs” — minorities have come to be overrepresented in the criminal justice system, even though they are not committing a higher share of crime. She goes on to make a case for how a wide variety of American laws, institutions and practices — ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement and legalized discrimination — trap African-Americans in a virtual (and often literal) cage.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. is inspired by Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
In fact, he is so inspired that he will give you a copy of the book so long as you want one and promise to read it. All you have to do is send him an email at lpitts@miamiherald.com with the subject line “I want it. I’ll read it.” At the end of the month, Pitts will draw 50 names and send an autographed copy of the book (free of charge) to those 50 individuals.
Pitts isn’t doing this as some publicity scheme. He isn’t getting reimbursed by his employer or Michelle Alexander’s publisher. He is paying for the books out of his own pocket. “I chose to do it that way,” Pitts says, “in order to impress upon you how vital I personally feel it is that you read this book.”
If you have not yet read “The New Jim Crow,” now is the time! MW
In June of 2010, I wrote in this space about a book, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, which I called a “troubling and profoundly necessary” work. Alexander promulgated an explosive argument. Namely, that the so-called “War on Drugs” amounts to a war on African-American men and, more to the point, to a racial caste system nearly as restrictive, oppressive and omnipresent as Jim Crow itself.
This because, although white Americans are far and away the nation’s biggest dealers and users of illegal drugs, African Americans are far and away the ones most likely to be jailed for drug crimes. And when they are set “free” after doing their time, black men enter a legal purgatory where the right to vote, work, go to school or rent an apartment can be legally denied. It’s as if George Wallace were still standing in the schoolhouse door.
The New Jim Crow won several awards, enjoyed significant media attention, and was an apparent catalyst in the NAACP’s decision last year to call for an end to the drug war. The book was a sensation, but we need it to be more. We need it to be a movement.
As it happens and not exactly by coincidence, Alexander’s book is being reissued in paperback this week as we mark the birthday of the man who led America’s greatest mass movement for social justice. In his battle against the original Jim Crow, Martin Luther King, in a sense, did what Alexander seeks to do: pour sunlight on an onerous condition that exists just beyond the periphery of most Americans’ sight.
I want to help her do that. So here’s the deal. I’ll give you a copy of the book — autographed by the author, no less — free of charge. You don’t even have to pay for shipping. All you have to do is tell me you want it and promise me you’ll read it. (more…)
Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat, should heed the example of conservative Republican Hailey Barbour. In this Washington Post op-ed, Barbour explains why he pardoned 215 people during his last days as Mississippi Governor. Barbour believes people can change, that even murders can be rehabilitated.
Contrast that with Mitt Romney’s tough-on-crime criticism of Rick Santorum’s willingness to give ex-felons the vote. Contrast that with Barack Obama’s play-it-safe refusal to put his pardon pen to meaningful use.
There is a Nixon-goes-to-China aspect to all of this, or course. Conservatives like Barbour won’t be mistaken for bleeding heart liberals when they make compassionate gestures. Given Haley’s record of racial insensitivity, his good-ol’-boy reputation will survive a little criticism from self-serving Mississippi Democrats. If Barack Obama followed suit he could be portrayed as soft on crime, especially if his compassionate intervention benefited a disproportionate number of African-American felons (which, given the skewed demographics of our American Gulag, it almost certainly would).
Or is Obama simply afraid of his own shadow? (more…)
Timothy George had recently departed Southern Seminary in Louisville when I arrived as a doctoral student in the summer of 1989, but people still spoke of him in hushed tones of respect. At the time, George was a leading member of a new breed of Southern Baptist Calvinists who believed, among other things, that we are all born destined for heaven or hell and there ain’t a damn thing we (or God, it appears) can do about it.
Calvinism appeals to egghead evangelicals in search of a rigorously intellectual theological system draped in the mists of history. And John Calvin, like the judgin’ exam in Peter Cooks Coal Miner sketch, is noted for his rigor.
Timothy George stirred a bit of excitement in 2009, when, in collaboration with luminaries like Charles Colson, he published a Manhattan Declaration, subtitled as “a call of Christian conscience”. With a prison reformer like Colson on board, you might expect the declaration to touch, however briefly, on the shame of mass incarceration. But no, the only topics deemed worthy of discussion were (you guessed it) abortion, gay marriage, and the purported persecution of the American Church.
Now, professor George is claiming that the 500,000 signatories to his bold confession are akin to the German churchmen who signed the Barmen Declaration opposing Hitler in the darkest days of the Third Reich.
Over at the Sojourner’s God’s Politics Blog, New Media Director Cathleen Falsani struggles to define the word “evangelical”. A recent conclave of purported “evangelical leaders” met in Texas over the weekend to ordain an alternative to Mitt Romney (they settled, after three contentious ballots, on Rick Santorum). Does it matter? Was anybody listening? Or is “evangelical” too elastic a term to work as demographic shorthand? AGB
As someone who self-identifies as an evangelical Christian, I often begin to feel like the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary, particularly in the midst of a heated presidential election cycle.
It’s Evangelical Week here on Discovery! Travel with us as our explorers track the elusive evangelical in its native habitats. Watch as evangelicals worship, work and play, all captured on film with the latest high definition technology. And follow our intrepid documentary team members as they bravely venture into the most dangerous of exotic evangelical locations — the voting booth!
I understand the interest in us evangelicals, I really do. The way much of the mainstream media covers our communities in the news can make us seem like a puzzling subspecies of the American population, not unlike the Rocky Mountain long-haired yeti.
Over the past decade, federal and state governments have increasingly turned to prison privatization. A report released this week by The Sentencing Project highlights the rise of private prisons in the U.S. and the consequences of privatization.
Private prisons now hold approximately 8% of the entire prison population in the U.S. This shift toward privatization, The Sentencing Project reports, began with public policies enacted in the 1970s and 1980s:
“The War on Drugs and harsher sentencing policies, including mandatory minimum sentences, fueled a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population. The resulting burden on the public sector led private companies to reemerge during the 1970s to operate halfway houses. They extended their reach in the 1980s by contracting with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to detain undocumented immigrants.”
Private prison corporations are in the business of warehousing prisoners. They contribute to and profit from mass incarceration. With the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for-profit prison companies have lobbied for mandatory minimum sentences, three strikes laws, truth-in-sentencing policies, and immigrant detention centers. As a result of increasing prison privatization, two of the largest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, have combined annual revenues exceeding $2.9 billion. (more…)
Should we consider a candidate’s religion when we vote? For many of us, the instinctive answer is “of course not!” To do so seems somehow contrary to the idea of separation of church and state, or prejudiced, or something like that. Examined more closely, though, that instinctive reaction may not be the best answer. Faith influences action, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise when we go to the polls.
The American repulsion to considering faith when voting is in large part rooted in a famous speech given by John F. Kennedy when he was running for President in 1960. Addressing a convention of Baptist ministers in Houston, he defended himself from the accusation that his Catholic faith would lead him to “take orders from the Pope.” There is no doubt that what Kennedy was addressing was prejudice against Catholics. It was a masterful speech, of the sort that makes one wistful for that time. However, it is important to recognize what Kennedy did and did not say.
What he did say, forcefully, was that he would not take orders from the Church, and that he would make his decisions “in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.” (more…)
In a recent episode of Fresh Air on NPR, Dave Davies interviews attorney and author Michelle Alexander. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander argues that, as a result of the war on drugs, the U.S. has created a system of mass incarceration which disproportionately targets people of color.
“The war on drugs,” Alexander states, “was part of a grand Republican Party strategy, known as the Southern Strategy, of using racially coded get-tough appeals on issues of crime and welfare to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were resentful of, anxious about, threatened by many of the gains of African-Americans in the civil rights movement.”
The “wave of punitiveness” and get-tough policies that followed the declaration of the war on drugs had an incredible impact on communities of color. Although African-Americans make up about 13% of the general population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. “In major American cities today,” Alexander points out, “more than half of working-age African-American men either are under are correctional control or are branded felons.” (more…)
In 2006, the state of Texas began detaining immigrant families and children at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, TX. The detention center did not stop housing immigrant children until 2009, after the ACLU of Texas sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
By Alan Bean
Over at the Sojourner’s God’s Politics Blog, New Media Director Cathleen Falsani struggles to define the word “evangelical”. A recent 
By Mark Osler
Friends of Justice 