On Monday, January 6, 2014, journalist Amy Goodman interviewed Dr. Carl Hartman, tenured professor at Columbia University, member of the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse, and research scientist in the Division of Substance Abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Hartman is also the author of High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society. View the embedded video below or click on the link to watch the interview and/or to read the transcript. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/6/drugs_arent_the_problem_neuroscientist_carl
Showing posts with label racial inequities in arrests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racial inequities in arrests. Show all posts
Monday, January 6, 2014
Thursday, January 2, 2014
"Locked out of America": Bill Moyers Speaks with Michelle Alexander
At the end of the old year, on December 20, 2013, the television news program Moyers and Company began with some very disturbing statistics about the United States. "In the past 30 years," Bill Moyers tells his audience, "the number of inmates in federal custody has
grown 800%, and half of them are serving sentences for drug offenses." He goes on to cite a statistic from the Sentencing Project, an organization that "works for a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system by promoting
reforms in sentencing policy, addressing unjust racial disparities and
practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration." According to The Sentencing Project, "more than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities." These kinds of statistics should wake us all up to the tremendous disparities in our criminal justice system and encourage us to work for change.
What better way to begin the new year than to become committed to making our country a more just and equal place to live? To get inspired, listen to Bill Moyers interview Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The program concludes with the story of Susan Burton, an ex-offender who "now helps formerly-incarcerated women rebuild their lives."
Incarceration Nation from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
The Moyers and Company website also includes more disturbing "Facts and Figures on Incarceration in America" as well as an excerpt from Michelle Alexander's book, "Understanding the New Jim Crow."
What better way to begin the new year than to become committed to making our country a more just and equal place to live? To get inspired, listen to Bill Moyers interview Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The program concludes with the story of Susan Burton, an ex-offender who "now helps formerly-incarcerated women rebuild their lives."
Incarceration Nation from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
The Moyers and Company website also includes more disturbing "Facts and Figures on Incarceration in America" as well as an excerpt from Michelle Alexander's book, "Understanding the New Jim Crow."
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative, and Steven Colbert
On December 4th, Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and professor at New York University School of Law, appeared with Steven Colbert on Comedy Central's Colbert Report to talk about the challenges of mass incarceration. (The Equal Justice Initiative is a private, non-profit organization headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama.) Mr. Stevenson begins the interview citing some statistics that illustrate how mass incarceration affects our society: "The Bureau of Justice reported that at the start of this century that one in fifteen people can expect to go to jail or prison, but one in three black males can expect to go to jail and prison." Statistics such as these should convince the American people, no matter what their political affiliations, that our country needs prison reform.The short interview is worth a listen.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
A Cause for Action
On a Sunday afternoon in July of this year, Rosana Cruz, then a representative of Voice of the Ex-Offender (V.O.T.E.) in New Orleans, spoke to a group of people gathered at the Northshore Unitarian Universalist church in Lacombe, Louisiana. The main purpose of V.O.T.E., she told the group, was to support formerly-incorporated persons (FIPs) and their families, to help the formerly incarcerated reintegrate in society and to regain their civil rights, the primary one being the right to vote.The prison system, especially in the South, she said, is deeply dysfunctional, and she provided a lot of information to support that claim.
One of the most disturbing details she mentioned, however, was that over 60% of the people incarcerated in Orleans parish are jailed for low level offenses, such as public urination, obstructing the sidewalk, loitering, and such like. It doesn't take too much of an imagination to see how such policing can be abused, with the same people in the same areas being arrested over and over, accumulating rap sheets that make them look like serious criminals unless one examines the details.
One store owner in Miami Gardens, Florida, set out to demonstrate just how police can abuse their right to arrest. Observing over and over how his store, a Quickstop in a poor and predominantly black neighborhood, was the center of police harassment, Alex Saleh installed video cameras--not to catch criminals, but to catch images of local police harassing his customers and workers. In a year, he had collected a couple of dozen tapes, many of which, according to the Miami Herald:
It's these kinds of stories, the stories of over-zealous policing of predominantly poor, black, urban neighborhoods; the statistics illustrating the high percentage of African-Americans in our federal, state, and local jails; the reports that demonstrate how the War on Drugs has failed abysmally; the unequally distributed justice of our criminal justice system that prompted the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) to offer as the Common Read for 2012-2013, Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist (GNOUU), under the leadership of Leslie Runnels of First Unitarian Universalist, opted to offer this book and related discussions to area congregations.
Leslie Runnels, along with co-facilitators Bonnie Schmidt and Terry Vanbrunt, both of the Northshore Unitarian Universalist Society, planned scheduled meetings with church members and the public to discuss Michelle Alexander's book, to view several related documentaries, and to listen to speakers involved in the movement to reform the criminal justice system.
Over the next eight months, this group coelesced into the Northshore New Jim Crow Task Force, which meets on a monthly basis. The goal of the group is to educate ourselves and our community about the need to change a system that destroys people's lives, their families, and their communities. A mission statement setting out these goals was drafted and approved by the Northshore Unitarian Universalist Board of Trustees in October, 2013.
We may read news reports of people like Earl Sampson and tell ourselves that these abuses happen in other states, in other cities, to other people, but Rosana Cruz's report reminds us that we are all part of the system, that what happens in Miami Gardens, Florida, affects us here in Orleans parish, in Jefferson parish, in St. Tammany parish. The burgeoning criminal industrial complex, the targeting of poor communities, and the over-zealous arrests and incarceration of people who offer little or no threat to society should concern us all.
One of the most disturbing details she mentioned, however, was that over 60% of the people incarcerated in Orleans parish are jailed for low level offenses, such as public urination, obstructing the sidewalk, loitering, and such like. It doesn't take too much of an imagination to see how such policing can be abused, with the same people in the same areas being arrested over and over, accumulating rap sheets that make them look like serious criminals unless one examines the details.
One store owner in Miami Gardens, Florida, set out to demonstrate just how police can abuse their right to arrest. Observing over and over how his store, a Quickstop in a poor and predominantly black neighborhood, was the center of police harassment, Alex Saleh installed video cameras--not to catch criminals, but to catch images of local police harassing his customers and workers. In a year, he had collected a couple of dozen tapes, many of which, according to the Miami Herald:
show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of Saleh’s business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests.One 28-year-old man, Earl Sampson, has been stopped and questioned by police 258 times in four years, "searched more than 100 times . . . [a]nd arrested and jailed 56 times." He has been arrested 62 times for trespassing at the Quickstop owned by Alex Saleh, where Sampson works as a clerk. One of Saleh's videos shows police arresting Sampson for trespassing when he was stocking coolers on the job!
It's these kinds of stories, the stories of over-zealous policing of predominantly poor, black, urban neighborhoods; the statistics illustrating the high percentage of African-Americans in our federal, state, and local jails; the reports that demonstrate how the War on Drugs has failed abysmally; the unequally distributed justice of our criminal justice system that prompted the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) to offer as the Common Read for 2012-2013, Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist (GNOUU), under the leadership of Leslie Runnels of First Unitarian Universalist, opted to offer this book and related discussions to area congregations.
Leslie Runnels, along with co-facilitators Bonnie Schmidt and Terry Vanbrunt, both of the Northshore Unitarian Universalist Society, planned scheduled meetings with church members and the public to discuss Michelle Alexander's book, to view several related documentaries, and to listen to speakers involved in the movement to reform the criminal justice system.
Over the next eight months, this group coelesced into the Northshore New Jim Crow Task Force, which meets on a monthly basis. The goal of the group is to educate ourselves and our community about the need to change a system that destroys people's lives, their families, and their communities. A mission statement setting out these goals was drafted and approved by the Northshore Unitarian Universalist Board of Trustees in October, 2013.
We may read news reports of people like Earl Sampson and tell ourselves that these abuses happen in other states, in other cities, to other people, but Rosana Cruz's report reminds us that we are all part of the system, that what happens in Miami Gardens, Florida, affects us here in Orleans parish, in Jefferson parish, in St. Tammany parish. The burgeoning criminal industrial complex, the targeting of poor communities, and the over-zealous arrests and incarceration of people who offer little or no threat to society should concern us all.
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