Category: Criminal justice reform

Ira Glass exposes the drug war in a small Georgia town

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By Alan Bean

If you’re like me, Ira Glass is the seductive, soft-spoken storyteller you occasionally encounter while working in the garage on a Saturday afternoon.  This America Life is captivating radio.  Ira Glass pulls us into a story with unadorned language.  He speaks without exclamation points or rhetorical flourishes, but you can’t stop listening.  The other day I was painting some lawn furniture I had rescued from a neighbor’s lawn (he was throwing it out, I promise!) when This America Life came on.  I was disappointed to learn that Ira Glass had ceded his microphone to a guest storyteller and pictured the unassuming Ira catching a few rays in the Bahamas.  But I was wrong.  Ira was down in Georgia, putting the finishing touches to an hour-long expose of Amanda Williams, a Superior Court judge who suffers from a peculiarly American form of madness.

Here’s a summary of the Part 1: (more…)

Tulia-style drug bust draws suspicion in Wichita Falls

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Alleged Tulia kingpin, Joe Welton Moore

The good folks in Wichita Falls, Texas are celebrating the arrest of 44 drug kingpins, with four or five additional arrests waiting in the wings. 

“It’s a good number of arrests, but the reality is there are probably still five-times as many of these types of criminals out there,” Sheriff David Duke told the Wichita Falls Times Record News. “It’s a scary thing to think that this stuff is being sold in our neighborhoods, near our children. A lot of these dealers are armed because of competition with other dealers. And many will steal, rob and commit financial crimes to facilitate their operations.”

No one associated with the infamous Tulia drug sting of 1999 can read these words without recalling the proud pronouncements of Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart and his undercover man, Tom Coleman. (more…)

The fine art of testilying

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By Charles Kiker

The ninth of the ten commandments: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16)

In his “Grits for Breakfast” blog, Scott Henson has a recent post (March 16) on “testilying” raised to new heights of infamy: “Police prevarication in Austin overlooked with wink and a nod.” It regards an incident from a couple of years ago in which an Austin police officer manufactured out of whole cloth a probable cause affidavit for unlawful trespassing. The officer described in detail the area in which the defendant was charged with trespassing. It was described as a heavily wooded area with numerous signs against trespassing. In fact, the area described was a multi-unit rental area devoid of “no trespassing” signs with only one tree in view. The defense attorney took pictures of the area and the prosecutor, at the pre-trial conference, decided that it was in the best interests of justice to dismiss the case. Hurrah for the prosecutor. (more…)

They built it, but nobody came: private prisons face bleak future

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Prison outside Jena, Louisiana

For decades now, private prisons have been thrown up across America, often at the expense of the taxpayer, on the assumption that the policy of mass incarceration would eventually supply the needed bodies. 

As I relate in Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas, the prison west of Tulia was built on this basis.  One scam offered to Swisher County residents was so flimsy it disintegrated before construction could begin.  The second wave of con artists used junk bonds to finance a building that sat empty for years before being picked by the state for half of its original construction cost. 

The prison outside Jena, Louisiana was built on the same basis, this time with the larcenous cooperation of then-Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards.  The same Houston outfit was responsible for the speculative private prisons built in Tulia, Jena and a dozen other little towns.

If we built it, folks reasoned, they will come.  And come they did.  For a time.

The Tulia prison was eventually filled to capacity.  The Jena prison filled up tool, but was closed on two separate occasions in response to racially-tinged allegations of inmate abuse (it now serves as a massive ICE lock-up). 

But as the rate of incarceration has slowed in response to low crime rates and the financial crisis currently afflicting state and federal governments, more and more communities are paying the bills for superfluous prisons.  (more…)

Quinn signs Illinois death penalty ban

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Pat Quinn did it!  The death penalty is dead in Illinois!  (If you would like to congratulate the Illinois governor, Amnesty International has a nifty little form to fill out.)

Illinois becomes the fourth state to abolish the death penalty–the others are New York, New Jersey and New Mexico.

This was a tough call for a governor who has been aggressively lobbied by folks on both sides of the death penalty debate.  The tipping point appears to have been the 20 innocent defendants convicted in the state of Illinois.  “To have a consistent, perfect death penalty system … that’s impossible in our state,” Quinn explained. “I think it’s the right and just thing to abolish the death penalty and punish those who commit heinous crimes — evil people — with life in prison without parole and no chance of release.” (more…)

San Antonio Current reviews Taking out the Trash in Tulia, Texas

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Greg Harman of the San Antonio Current has published a review of my Tulia book.   “Taking Out the Trash is a complex narrative,” Harman says, “demonstrating that even in the starkest morality tales, human nature inevitably harbors innumerable shades and shadows. An indispensible offering in the growing Tulia canon.”

The full review appears below.

Tulia besieged: ‘Taking our the Trash in Tulia, Texas’

 By Greg Harman

The story of Tulia has propelled the careers of a handful of journalists and documentary filmmakers. And the now-infamous 1999 drug sting in the small Panhandle town that put 16 percent of the town’s black residents in jail on manufactured evidence by a crooked lawman was to be is being produced as a full-length feature film starring Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry. But the public story has been mostly the domain of outsiders, where out-of-state crusaders are able to unpack all the worst preconceptions of rural Texas — notions not challenged in the least by the obvious racism on display in Tulia a decade ago. (more…)

Hymns, prayers and earthquakes

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By Charles Kiker

On Sunday part of the scripture for the Sunday School class Patricia and I lead was from the sixteenth chapter of Acts, starting with the conversion of Lydia in Philippi, then to the exorcism of the spirit that possessed a slave girl. Now that slave girl and her spirit of divination was the source of considerable profit to her owners. So they were more than a little unhappy with Paul and Silas regarding this turn of events. The girl’s owners complained to the police, who arrested Paul and Silas, beat them, and threw them in the calaboose. So how did Paul and Silas respond? They had a prayer meeting and a hymn sing. (more…)

Osler: The death penalty replicates the actions of the killer

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Illinois Governor Pat Quinn

The Illinois legislature has passed legislation that would end the death penalty in that state; now Governor Pat Quinn must either sign or veto the bill.  At this point, it’s a jump ball.  As Quinn weighs his options, Attorney General Lisa Madigan has submitted a letter brimming with horror stories.  Message: the sacred memory of the innocent victims demands a life for a life. 

Former prosecutor, Mark Osler, believes Madigan has the issue exactly wrong.   “The more heinous and despicable the crime committed by the offender,” he writes, “the more these victims’ family members wish to have nothing in common with him. They do not want to sink to his level, to replicate his actions by killing.”

Why the Legislature Is Right and Lisa Madigan Is Wrong About the Death Penalty

By Mark Osler

As Illinois Governor Pat Quinn continues to ponder a bill to abolish the death penalty, one document before him is a letter from Attorney General Lisa Madigan. In that letter, Madigan refers to several pending cases and urges the governor to veto that bill.

As a former prosecutor who now trains future prosecutors and works with family members of murder victims, I disagree with the Attorney General, even in the face of the gruesome circumstances she cites in her letter. The death penalty has failed in Illinois, and should not be resuscitated based on briefly-described anecdotes. (more…)

Stories we believe in: learning from Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm

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By Alan Bean

American liberals can’t fathom the appeal of the Tea Party phenomenon.  Here we are, struggling to recover from a recession created by massive tax cuts, military adventurism, and an under-regulated financial sector and what are they asking for: more tax cuts, even less government regulation, and more military spending.

Moreover, this message sells in the heartland, big-time.

By every standard of rationality, progressive politics should be enjoying a renaissance.  The alternative has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  And yet politicians aligned with Tea Party rhetoric are winning elections and shaping the political agenda.  How can these things be? (more…)

Adapting reality to the white viewer

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The New York Times recently ran an article lamenting the all-white list of nominees for this year’s Oscars.  Randy Shaw (see below) points out that it ain’t just the movies; television offers few characters or programs aimed at the non-white audience. 

Shaw references David Simon’s The Wire as a blessed exception to the rule and wonders why such a critical success hasn’t been emulated (except by HBO’s Treme, and that show is also produced by David Simon).

It’s simple; The Wire was always more popular with critics than with viewers.  It held its own; but Simon’s programs received only a fraction of the audience that followed The Sopranos, for instance.  Why is that?  

The answer isn’t pleasant.  White audiences don’t relate well to non-white protagonists.

Early on in the Tulia fight, several producers showed a tentative interest in bringing the story to the silver screen.  I didn’t pay much attention to the let’s-make-a-movie phenomenon because we were years away from resolution.  Secondly, I figured the story was too morally ambiguous for Hollywood.  I remember being asked if my family would be interested in playing the starring role in a film.  When I protested that the affected community should be at the center of the movie I was assured that the American viewing public would have little interest in poor black people living in an isolated Texas town. (more…)