Category: war on drugs

Crucified with Christ: Holy Week through a prisoner’s eyes

April 21, 2011April 21, 2011 · 5 Comments ·

Enrique Salazar, Irma Muniz, Ramsey Muniz, Alan Bean, Ernesto Fraga — Enrique Salazar, Irma and Ramsey Muniz, Alan Bean, Ernesto Fraga

By Alan Bean

Friends of Justice was introduced to Ramiro (Ramsey) Muniz by Ernesto Fraga, a ember of our board who publishes the Tiempo newspaper in Waco, Texas. Ramsey ran for governor of Texas on two occasions in the early 197os for La Raza Unida party and worked with Mr. Fraga and other members of the Chicano movement. Ramsey was a standout with the Baylor football team in the late 1960s and graduated from Baylor Law School in 1971. After his brief sojourn in the world of Texas politics, Muniz returned to south Texas where he worked as an attorney. You can find more biographical information at FreeRamsey.com.

Ramsey Muniz sees himself as a political prisoner. The Texas Anglo establishment had no problem with the Latino presence in the 1960s and 70s–somebody had to work the fields and mow the lawns. But the Texas power structure had no place for a charismatic Latino football hero with a law degree who had the gall to run for governor.

Texas was firmly in the grip of the Democratic Party in the early 1970s. La Raza Unida was formed because Latino activists believed (correctly) that the Democratic establishment had no interest in running Latino candidates or sharing political power with the Hispanic community. If the Democrats represented the white population, the reasoning went, Latinos needed to create a separate party to represwent the interest of Chicanos.

It is difficult to exaggerate the sense of outrage and resentment the Chicano movement generated among Texas Democrats. Ramsey Muniz was commonly viewed as a wild-eyed revolutionary, little more than a terrorist. Shortly after beginning his post-politics legal career, the federal government charged Muniz with engaging in a narcotics conspiracy with some of the accused drug dealers he was defending. The only evidence was the uncorroborated testimony of an inmate who agreed to testify for the government in exchange for lenient treatment. Believing he had no chance before an all-white jury, Muniz accepted a plea agreement and served five years in an Alcatraz-like federal prison off the coast of Washington State. (more…)

Right-winger + hard time = compassion

April 11, 2011 ·

By Alan Bean

Why are so many right-wingers suddenly arguing the case for criminal justice reform? In this fascinating piece in Salon, Justin Elliot of Salon directs this question to Doug Berman, author of the influential Sentencing Law and Policy blog.

Here are the highlights:

1. Prison is far more brutal than most people believe it to be

2. Most of the conservatives currently leading the smart on crime crusade have been locked up: Duke Cunningham, Charles Colson, Pat Nolan, Conrad Black

3. The religious concept of redemption generally plays a large role in these conversions.

4. Historically, mass incarceration required the enthusiastic cooperation of the political left

5. When you do hard time you realize that harsh penalties are typically applied to crimes disproportionately committed by minorities

6. Busting budgets and historically low crime rates make this a good time for reform, but . . .

7. The political forces that drove mass incarceration are always lurking. (more…)

Ira Glass exposes the drug war in a small Georgia town

April 1, 2011April 4, 2011 · 3 Comments ·

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…)

ACLU report focuses on Mississippi drug war

April 1, 2011 · 1 Comment ·

For years now, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas have been competing for the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in America. A new report commissioned by the ACLU of Mississippi asks why the Magnolia state’s prison population has exploded in recent years. According to the report:

Mississippi has the second highest incarceration rate in the nation, at 749 prisoners per 100,000 residents. Between 1994 and 2007 the state’s incarceration rate ballooned by 105 percent, compared to just 46 percent for the nation as a whole and 51 percent for the Southern region. During that same period, prison expenditures by the state of Mississippi grew by 155 percent. By mid year 2008, Mississippi’s prison population had reached a record high of 22,764. (more…)

Tulia and the spell of mass incarceration

March 29, 2011April 12, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

Gary Gardner, moments before heading down to a protest at the state capital with Friends of Justice and a bus full of Tulia residents, September 2000

By Alan Bean

This is the text of a speech delivered at a Friends Committee on Legislation of California banquet in Whittier, California, March 26, 2011.

When I arrived in Tulia in the summer of 1998, I didn’t know very much about mass incarceration and the war on drugs. I had no idea that Texas, the state we had just moved to, had almost quadrupled its prison population between 1988 and 1998, or that the number of prisons had grown from 16 in 1980 to 108 in 2000.

Nor did I realize that the average family income of America’s poorest 20 percent increased 116% between 1947 and 1979 and had given back half of those gains between 1983 and 1998.

I didn’t realize that the American incarceration rate once mirrored western democracies like Canada, Great Britain and Germany, but had recently grown to six times the size of other nations.

For twenty years our family had been shuffling around the United States and Canada, and Nancy wanted our children to experience the love and support of family. Everything was going according to plan until we saw the headline in the local newspaper, “Tulia streets cleared of garbage.” (more…)

Tulia-style drug bust draws suspicion in Wichita Falls

March 28, 2011March 28, 2011 · 5 Comments ·

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 drug war is a long way from over

March 11, 2011March 11, 2011 · 4 Comments ·

When the Wall Street Journal endorses the growing shift from mass incarceration to rehabilitation and diversion programs, something is in the wind. But let’s not pop the champagne corks too quickly. Politicians are beginning to understand that long prison terms for drug offenses have failed to deter drug abuse or the illegal drug trade. Furthermore, prisons, even if run on the cheap, are unspeakably expensive. All of this is good.

Mass incarceration is primarily a function of the war on drugs, a slash and burn campaign that–its own propaganda notwithstanding–was never about getting drugs and drug dealers off the streets. The drug war is about social control. When a nation turns its back on its poorest citizens (as American did in late 197os) bad things are bound to happen. Desperate people take desperate measures. Those with little access to legitimate work will turn to illegitimate work–like selling drugs. Middle class addicts can fund their habits, but poor addicts sling drugs and commit property crime to keep the supply flowing. Entire neighborhoods become economically dependent on the trade in illegal drugs even as they are afflicted by unbearably high crime rates. (more…)

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

March 4, 2011March 4, 2011 · 3 Comments ·

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…)

Adapting reality to the white viewer

February 18, 2011 · 8 Comments ·

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…)