A well-loved columnist has taken to the airwaves again, Continue reading #BernieSanders’ #PBSDebate Promise On Mass-Incarceration | #PoliticalRevolution #BLM on Blog#42
Tag Archives: Jail
How we imprison and abuse our own children | in#Justice on Blog#42
I’ve written about BlackLivesMatter and police killings in general, as well as the cases of Kalief Browder and Carlos Montero, Continue reading How we imprison and abuse our own children | in#Justice on Blog#42
Close Angola and Rikers prisons: End long-term solitary confinement | Justice on Blog#42
In Hellhole, Dr. Atul Gawande writes:
“Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.”
William Jefferson Clinton was not our first Black president, Hillary won’t be the second
To set the mood for the subject of this piece, the things we think we hear versus the things that are actually said Continue reading William Jefferson Clinton was not our first Black president, Hillary won’t be the second
Kalief Browder, a “desaparecido” in Jim Crow’s jails | #BlackLivesMatter on Blog#42
While I don’t think America’s cruel prison-industrial complex has gotten to the point where prisoners are mass-murdered and buried in mass graves, we have gotten to the point where we urgently need to be openly engaged in a conversation about how children and adults of both sexes, particularly African Americans, are whisked off the streets and “disappeared” into jails like Rikers for years at a time, without a trial, for no good reason, left to the whims of a system that is capricious in the way it metes out justice to those who don’t have the means to put up a legal defense. Continue reading Kalief Browder, a “desaparecido” in Jim Crow’s jails | #BlackLivesMatter on Blog#42
These seven charts explain how Ferguson—and many other US cities—wring revenue from black people and the poor – Quartz
“Offender-funded”
In its violent crackdowns on demonstrations since a white police officer shot 18-year-old Michael Brown in early August, Ferguson police revealed a fresh proclivity for abusing its citizens. However, the city’s finances suggest the St. Louis suburb’s criminal justice system has been stealthily exploiting residents—particularly those who are black or poor—for years. Ferguson’s economy steadily withered over the last decade, as did its population. Yet even as the number of adult residents fell 11% between 2010 and 2013, fines collected by the city’s court system surged 85%, hitting $2.6 million last year.
Race and the Execution Chamber |The Atlantic
By Matt Ford
After a seven-week freeze following Clayton Lockett’s botched execution in Oklahoma, three states executed three death-row inmates in less than 24 hours last week. Georgia, Missouri, and Florida had tangled with defense lawyers for months over the secrecy surrounding their lethal-injection cocktails and where they were obtained, a key issue in Lockett’s death. Florida also addressed concerns about its inmate’s mental capacity; his lawyers claimed he had an IQ of 78. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected all appeals, however, and the three inmates—Marcus Wellons, John Winfield, and John Henry, respectively—were successively executed without apparent mishap.
In addition to their fates, Wellons, Winfield, and Henry have something else in common: They are among the disproportionate number of black Americans to have been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
In the three states where they were executed, blacks constitute a disproportionate share of the death-row population relative to the state population. In Oklahoma and Missouri, black Americans are overrepresented on death row by nearly a factor of four. Continue reading Race and the Execution Chamber |The Atlantic
Book Review: Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment by Robert Ferguson
By Richard A. Posner, The New Republic
Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment by Robert A. Ferguson (Harvard)
Robert Ferguson is a distinguished professor of law at Columbia University, with a deep interest in literature and in American culture. (He has a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization.) He has written an eloquent and learned book about the American criminal justice system today, with emphasis on imprisonment. He argues that prison sentences are too long and that prison conditions are abominable. And that is just the beginning.
Statistics confirm that a much higher fraction of Americans are prison inmates than was the case historically or is the case now in other civilized countries. As Ferguson notes, the per capita imprisonment rate is seven times greater in the United States than in Europe. Our inmates also are inmates for a longer period, because American prison sentences are longer than they used to be and longer than the sentences meted out in those other countries, although it is misleading to say as Ferguson does that “the United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world.” The United States is the third-most populous country in the world, and many countries do not publish accurate prison statistics (does anyone know the size of China’s prison population?). Many countries are unable or unwilling to punish most criminals, and in some countries crime is dealt with largely by extra-legal killing of criminals. Continue reading Book Review: Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment by Robert Ferguson