Archive for category: Prisons/Police

NY Post: Gunfire explodes over seven bloody hours in NYC

It’s always possible to produce alarming headlines about crime—even in the safest year in New York City history, as the New York Post (7/30/18) demonstrated.

The stories were horrible.

A woman tied up and fatally shot in her own apartment. Her neighbor was killed in his apartment two days later in the same way. In another tragic episode, a young teenager was killed in a horrendous machete attack in the Bronx that made national headlines. The New York Post (7/30/18) reported on a violent stretch of seven hours where 16 people were shot, one fatally, in 10 separate incidents: “Gunfire Explodes Over Seven Bloody Hours in NYC.”

There were almost 300 reported murders in New York City that year, almost one per day. There were over 20,000 reported felony assaults, about 55 per day, and more than 12,000 robberies, 35 on an average day. The year was 2018, and it was the safest year in New York City’s recorded history. In a city of over eight million residents, crime, even in the safest times, will always be a headline.

Fast forward to 2021 as the city, and nation, begin to climb out of a pandemic that saw mass economic and social fallout—to say nothing of the lives lost. A historic, once-in-a-lifetime worldwide event destabilized the lives of countless people, and also led to an undeniable rise in shootings and homicide across the country. However, right-leaning media have used the uptick in certain crime categories to weaponize a counter-narrative to social justice movements, one that argues we need more cops and law enforcement to save our cities.

‘Fear City’

The narrative isn’t a new one, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be a genuine one. Local conservative tabloids, like the Post and the New York Daily News, have for years tried to stir fear of a city overrun by crime (FAIR.org, 6/21/21). As we’ve pointed out at FAIR (6/28/18), the local tabloids were apocalyptic in their predictions for the city when stop and frisk, a dragnet policing tactic, was ruled unconstitutional in its application by the NYPD. These papers have supported controversial police tactics like “broken windows”—a crackdown on minor offenses in poor communities, no matter the costs on vulnerable populations. (“Broken Windows ‘Works,’ and if It Hurts Immigrants—‘Too Bad,’” was how FAIR summarized the Daily News‘ position—3/8/17.)

The Post, which has been sounding the alarm bells since Democrat Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, has operated much like a media outlet that wants crime to increase. It seems to have an ideological drive to frame the city the way police unions in the 1970s once did: as “Fear City” The cartoonishly predictable newspaper’s pro-police bias is well-documented.

NY Post: With squeegee men back, NYC’s bad old days can’t be far behind

To the New York Post (2/18/20), “squeegee men” have long been a terrifying symbol of disorder.

Their fascination with squeegee workers (people that go up to cars to clean windshields for tips), for example, is in itself a master class in hyping a moral panic for a larger public policy goal. In 2014, Post headlines railed against squeegee workers making a “comeback” (the prevailing belief being they were run out of the city by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani) and “terrorizing” the city (8/7/14). In 2020, before Covid, the Post editorial board (2/18/20) was arguing that with squeegee workers “back,” “the bad old days can’t be far behind”—only to then run a story (5/31/21) declaring that the “pandemic gives way to return of NYC’s infamous squeegee men.”

Unable to decide whether squeegee workers are now “back” or had already “returned” (or perhaps never really left at all), the Post‘s reporting was never anything less than a naked attempt to signal a shadowy side of Gotham that is perpetually lurking around the figurative corner. With certain categories of city crime increasing from the previous year, media fearmongering has hit the ground running.

In the city, tabloid and television media have tried to explain crime increases—often described as “crime waves”—primarily in two ways. One, as a result of police reforms, notably New York state’s passage of legislation aimed to modestly reduce the use of cash bail (reforms that were watered down amid right-wing scare tactics). And secondly, to a “defunding” of police, as some municipalities have reduced official police spending. Quoting controversial former police commissioner William Bratton, the Post (6/10/21) made both arguments, claiming that city and state lawmakers (who make and maintain laws to make crime, well, illegal) “went too far to aid criminals.”

CCI: Percentage of Cases Receiving Bail or Detention at Arraignment

It’s unlikely that bail reform has had a major impact on crime, because bail reform hasn’t had all that much impact on bail. (Chart: Center for Court Innovation)

Data, however, doesn’t back the assertion that bail reform has led to crime increases. The Center for Court Innovation found “no evidence to support the claim” that bail reform was behind a spike in gun violence. In a more recent publication, the New York City–based non-profit that works closely with the state’s court system (not exactly a radical anti–law enforcement outfit) also found that more people have been in pre-trial detention, despite what the mayor and police commissioner were telling the public:

Beginning in May 2020, and increasing throughout the summer as some New York City public officials made unsupported claims linking bail reform to a spike in gun violence, judges reverted to setting bail more often. Combined with the effect of the July 2020 amendments to the original legislation—which made more cases again eligible for bail—this contributed to a steady, months-long rise in the number of people in jail awaiting trial.

‘Defunding’ police

Fox News: Dermot Shea: Defunding the police in NYC had a 'significant impact' on crime surge

A police commissioner telling you that you need more cops (Fox News, 9/25/20) should be treated with the same skepticism as a McDonald’s executive telling you that you need to eat more burgers.

What about “defunding” the police? Since those three magic words were seen on protest signs of George Floyd demonstrators last year—and become the fascination of right-wing pundits (and even establishment Democrats, as I wrote about last year—Medium, 11/16/20)—some have claimed that not only have the police been defunded, but that that defunding is to blame for increases in violence.

The New Republic (5/26/21) did a rather succinct job last month of bursting that bubble, showcasing the National Fraternal Order of Police’s twitter graphic of “SKYROCKETING MURDER RATES,” which claimed elected leaders in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles “turned the keys over to the ‘Defund the Police’ mob.” The FOP, the New Republic‘s Matt Ford pointed out, actually

took care not to link the rise in homicides explicitly to actual material declines in police budgets. That’s because some cities did not actually “defund the police” in any meaningful way.

In other words, the very premise that reducing, even moderately, police spending caused a crime increase was flawed, because the asserted cause didn’t really happen in some cities.

In fact, that’s the case in New York City, a city that conservatives have breathlessly complained “defunded” the police (with help from the police commissioner: “Dermot Shea: Defunding the Police in NYC Had a ‘Significant Impact’ on Crime Surge”—Fox News, 9/25/20). New York did reshuffle some school police spending. However, the much-hyped decrease in the police budget by $1 billion annually was found by an independent budget watchdog to be only about a third of that. Any of the so-called cuts wouldn’t figure into the policing puzzle, because increases in shootings began early last summer, before the “defunded” budget would have even been felt in the police department.

In fact, the city saw crime increases as its police department was still far and away the largest and most expensive urban police department in the history of mankind. (This, of course, begs the question as to why the police themselves aren’t blamed for the increase in violent crime, because they certainly are given the credit when there is decrease in crime.) Further undermining the supposed causal relationship between “defunding” police and increases in crime is the fact that several cities saw increases in violent crime even as they increased police spending (Chicago Tribune, 6/10/21).

National outlets pile on

Fox: The Ingraham Angle on the Radicals Behind America's Crime Wave

Fox News‘ Laura Ingraham (6/10/21) explains how criticizing racist police violence causes crime to increase.

While local media has been increasingly reporting about crime for more than a year, national outlets have also piled on. Fox News host Laura Ingraham (6/10/21) ranted against activists in Minneapolis recently: “Now, a year after the ruinous deadly riots that ripped apart America, we see the corrupt poisonous fruits of BLM’s work.” The show, framed as Ingraham’s analysis of “the radicals behind America’s crime wave,” also included an interview with right-wing pundit Heather MacDonald—who was promoting a crime wave six years ago, when there was no crime wave (FAIR.org, 6/10/15).

MacDonald’s visceral hatred of the Black Lives Matter movement led her to complain to Ingraham that “thanks to this phony, racist attack on law enforcement, Black lives are the ones that are lost.” MacDonald, who is frequent contributor to the Post, the Wall Street Journal and City Journal (the magazine of the right-wing Manhattan Institute), has also claimed that “No, the Cops Didn’t Murder Sean Bell” (City Journal, Winter/07) after cops murdered Sean Bell, so you have to take what she says with several mountains of salt.

Attempts to tie violent crime to the racial justice movement has been an ongoing theme for the right since Black Lives Matter entered mainstream national discourse. MacDonald’s initial attempt to do so was with the conservative fairy tale known as the “Ferguson Effect” back in 2015, when several media outlets, including the New York Times (6/4/15), opened their pages for her to argue that the “vitriol” of protesters and police critics led to cops not being “proactive” enough to stop crime.

Columbia University professor Bernard Harcourt, a critical theorist who countered the Broken Windows theory of policing and also debunked MacDonald’s “Ferguson Effect” fiction, notes the historical parallels:

The attacks on the movement to defund policing or reform bail come straight out of the conservative playbook. It’s the same script from the 1960s and the reactionary response to the civil rights movement.

Harcourt notes conservatives see easy political opportunities from high crime or increases in crime. “It’s what turned crime into a national priority with Goldwater and Nixon.”

Politicization of crime

Pew: US Violent and Property Crime Rates Have Plunged Since the 1990s

Rudy Giuliani took credit for a decline in crime that was going on all over the country. (Chart: Pew Research, 11/20/20)

New York City—where our crime increases, notably in reported shootings and murders, still only result in a fraction of city crime levels in the early 1990s—has experienced this before. Former mayor Rudy Giuliani was elected twice on a law and order platform that seized on fear of crime and laid the groundwork for decades of mass arrests and stops of mostly Black and Latino New Yorkers.

After his election, in a sort of inverse of what is happening today, Giuliani took credit for declines in crime in the ’90s that began a year before Giuliani became mayor and were part of a nationwide crime decrease. “The same politicization of crime happened in the 1990s with broken windows policing. Each time, it’s just manipulation to score a political point,” Harcourt reminds me. That crime decrease benefited not only Giuliani and law and order Republican politics, it also gave police leaders like William Bratton, Giuliani’s commissioner, political power by defining them as saviors of the city.

However, more than a quarter century later, there is no consensus of what caused that crime decline. Similarly, the causes of this current crime increase probably won’t be clear for a long time—although the pandemic’s destabilizing effects on society are a very likely culprit—so the voices that claim to immediately know the causes are saying so based on a predetermined agenda. “If there are national trends in crime and strong variations in policing across jurisdictions,” Harcourt notes, “it’s likely that police strategy has little to do with those trends. And that applies when crime is going down, as well as when it is going up.”

The media, unfortunately, tend to gravitate to quick assessments rather than correct ones. As such, the industry’s tendency to rely on police for answers—which they habitually do in everyday crime blotter journalism (Washington Post, 6/30/20)—subtly works to center police expertise, and therefore power.

CNN’s ‘bloody summer’

CNN: How US cities are preparing for a potentially bloody summer of gun violence

What makes this a CNN headline (6/9/21) is that Fox News would have left out “potentially.”

CNN (6/9/21) did its part with coverage warning its audience of a “bloody summer,” featuring an interview with a representative of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. The network didn’t focus on why crime has gone up, but rather on the police response to it. In fact, CNN quoted four police leaders and one former police commissioner, which narrowed the entire concept of crime to something that only police are experts at addressing. This sort of journalism, while not as inflammatory as the New York Post or Fox News, reinforces the politics that favor police as saviors.

Chuck Wexler, spokesperson for the policy group, told CNN, “It’s challenging to be a police officer right now but it’s also from a police chief’s standpoint. They’re not getting much sleep.”

CNN‘s Jim Sciutto followed up with a police ride-along piece (6/22/21) where they quite literally jumped into police cars so that cops could explain to them the crime situation. “Here’s what they told us about spiking crime in the city,” which was part of the story’s headline, is in fact what any reasonable person would identify as police stenography—uncritically regurgitating police talking points. CNN apparently likes to embed themselves with cops. In 2014, CNN‘s Jake Tapper agreed with the police chief’s request for the network to report alongside cops after initially reporting on how militarized police were attacking protesters (FAIR.org, 8/19/14).

If one doesn’t simply take the police’s word on what is causing crime, there are numerous factors to consider. For example, in addition to the pandemic’s social economic and human toll, there has been an unprecedented surge in gun sales across America that can often work their way into urban centers.

Whatever the reason for certain crime increases—and again, while some violent crimes, like shootings, have increased, overall crime in America has not (FAIR.org, 6/21/21)—the media’s fascination with crime and crime-fighters embraces simplistic, digestible police-provided soundbites (e.g., “NYPD Blames Police Reform for Violent Holiday Weekend“—NY1, 7/6/20) and ready-made police heroes.

This form of journalism completely omits the idea that social and socio-economic stability profoundly affects crime—which might make people want to address crime by addressing those underlying conditions, rather than reflexively relying on police. By hyping a crime trend and platforming police experts in how to deal with it, the media show that they aren’t neutral observers but actually providing a journalistic cover to the idea that police—or the “thin blue line“—are the only thing standing between us and bloody carnage.

The post The Thin Blue Lies Behind Crime Wave Hype appeared first on FAIR.

On June 16, 2021, the late rap icon Tupac Shakur would have turned 50 had he survived a still unsolved drive-by shooting in Las Vegas 25 years ago. Few knew that behind his “gangsta rap” façade, Tupac was an activist leader who worked to counter CIA drug trafficking through street gangs.

The post Tupac Shakur Would Have Turned 50 Today–If He Hadn’t Threatened Deal Between Drug Traffickers and U.S. Banks Making Billions Laundering CIA Drug Money appeared first on CovertAction Magazine.

Report from so-called Minneapolis, where a non-profit funded by the City attempted to evict and shut down George Floyd Square. from stolen Dakota Land Since the murder of George Floyd, while radicals continue to struggle for liberation, we have also seen a disturbing yet albeit predictable wave of counter-insurgency fronts in the Minneapolis area. The… Read Full Article

Police arrest a pro-Palestinian demonstrator at a rally against recent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and repression of Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem on May 14, 2021, in New York City.

Following the global wave of demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, Republican state legislatures mounted a counterattack, introducing a deluge of “anti-riot” bills designed to make it easier for law enforcement to clamp down on demonstrations perceived as disorderly.

According to a PEN America report from late April, Republicans have proposed at least 100 “anti-riot” bills in 33 states from last June to this March. These measures aim to address protest-related activities by greatly expanding the definition of “riot,” granting criminal immunity to drivers who hit “rioters” with their cars, suspending state benefits for those who participate in a “riot” and increasing penalties for demonstrators who block traffic.

Over the past several months, the bills have sparked progressive pushback over the perception that they grant the police unchecked power to crack down on nonviolent protests and chill free speech rights. Indeed, reports now make clear that police organizations and their allies have played an outsized role in introducing and supporting these measures, often by advocating and lobbying for them behind the scenes.

According to new research released this month, police officers, police unions and law enforcement lobbyists have supported one or more “anti-riot” bills in at least 14 states since last June. “Anti-riot” bills in 19 states have been sponsored by legislators with backgrounds in law enforcement. Because lobbying records are inconsistent from state to state, these figures may be underestimates.

“Almost nobody knows right now that police are pushing for these bills,” Connor Gibson, an opposition researcher who compiled the data, told Salon in an interview. “People are not surprised that police are lobbying for bills that let police off the hook and push the blame to protesters. But I don’t think that should be the measure of why this trend is important.”

Consider H.B. 445 in Alabama, which broadens the definition of “riot” and heightens the legal penalties against protesters who block traffic. The bill, which has been indefinitely postponed, was sponsored by at least nine state lawmakers who are or were affiliated with various police departments and/or organizations. The bill’s primary sponsor, GOP Rep. Allen Treadway, is a retired Birmingham assistant police chief. Two co-sponsors, Reps. Allen Farley and Phillip Pettus, respectively served as police chief in Satsuma Police Chief and an Alabama state trooper.

In North Carolina, a similar bill is being considered that was sponsored by a total of seven police-affiliated lawmakers. The bill’s two primary sponsors, Reps. Charles Miller and Allen McNeill, respectively served as deputy chief of the Brunswick County sheriff’s office and chief deputy of the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office.

“Police culture is deeply embedded in our state legislatures,” Gibson said, observing that “many legislators have conflicts of interest when it comes to holding the police accountable.”

These bills are also heavily influenced by police organizations like Fraternal Order of Police and the Sheriffs Association, whose state chapters have lobbied for several different “anti-riot” bills throughout the country since June.

Consider Florida’s H.B. 1, which became law in April. The comprehensive measure – which makes “aggravated rioting” a felony, denies bail to those charged of a misdemeanor during a protest and grants civil legal immunity to motorists who drive through demonstrators blocking a road — was supported by the Florida Sheriffs Association, the Florida Police Chiefs Association and Florida Smart Justice Alliance, a broad coalition of organizations focused on the state’s criminal justice and corrections system.

Barney T. Bishop III, the CEO of Florida Smart Justice Alliance, explained his organization’s stance in an interview with Salon, disputing the notion the H.B. 1 would embolden those on the far right to retaliate against social justice protesters.

“It’s not about emboldening anybody,” he said. “Florida is as opposed to the Proud Boys and the far-right groups as we are to the far-left groups.”

His explanation of the bill’s aims, however, suggest otherwise. “Protesters today feel that they can go anywhere they want, do anything they want — beat on cars, cuss and try to incite violence from police by screaming in their face,” Bishop added. “There are people that will incite violence. Most of the time it will be the people in the protests themselves or the people behind the protests, like George Soros and antifa and BLM.”

There is little evidence, however, that last year’s wave of social justice demonstrations after the Floyd murder was plagued by violence. According to a report last September by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), about 95% of all demonstrations from last May to last August were peaceful. By comparison the report notes that “authorities have used force — such as firing less-lethal weapons like tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray or beating demonstrators with batons — in over 54% of the demonstrations in which they have engaged.”

Nora Benavidez, director of PEN America’s U.S. Free Expression Programs, affirmed ACLED’s findings, telling Salon that the Republican-backed “anti-riot” bills “are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Legislators are predicating their bills on a circumstance that characterizes protests as somehow inherently criminal.”

As in the Florida case, a newly-enacted “anti-riot” bill in Iowa, S.F. 342, was backed by various police-affiliated organizations, including the Iowa Peace Officers Association, the Iowa State Police Association, the Iowa Fraternal Order of Police, the Iowa State Patrol Supervisors Association and the Iowa State Sheriffs’ & Deputies’ Association, according to state lobbying records.

Interestingly, the Iowa Peace Officers Association and the Iowa State Sheriffs’ & Deputies’ Association were initially “undecided” on the bill after it was introduced in February. At the time, the bill simply sought to prevent police officers “from being discharged, disciplined, or threatened with discharge” if their names appeared on the “Brady list,” which tracks officers who might lack credibility in certain legal cases involving the police.

Since then the bill has morphed into full-fledged “anti-riot” legislation, which won the support of the two law enforcement associations.

Adam Mason, state policy organizing director for the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund, told Salon that the Iowa bill reflects the overrepresentation of police interests in the state’s legislature.

“We absolutely believe in having a citizen legislature,” Mason said, “but that also means we need to have a diversity of opinions. That would mean having legislators from all walks of life. It seems these legislators feel like they don’t have to listen to community members because they’re coming from concentrated backgrounds in law enforcement.”

Bishop disagreed. “There’s no more conflict of interest than a doctor selected to the legislature proposing medical legislation,” he told Salon.

A major reason why “anti-riot” bills are controversial are their provisions which specifically grant civil and criminal immunity to drivers attempting to flee “riots” — especially given the violent counterattacks social justice protesters have seen in recent years. In 2017, during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, an alleged white supremacist rammed his car into a throng of counter-protesters, killing a woman named Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. The driver was later convicted of first-degree murder. More recently, in February of this year, an admitted Klansmen drove his truck into a group of peaceful protesters near Richmond, Virginia, though nobody was seriously injured.

Last year, NPR reported that there had been “at least 50 vehicle-ramming incidents since protests against police violence erupted nationwide in late May,” a marked increase from prior years.

Gibson told Salon that the uptick in vehicle-related violence against protesters is precisely what makes the recent surge in “anti-riot” bills so concerning. “You can’t be a politician and not be aware that there is an undercurrent of informal vigilante justice,” he explained, “where the police are emboldening white supremacists to take things into their own hands.”

Most of the driver immunity provisions are predicated on two conditions: that the driver was fleeing a “riot” in order to protect themselves and that they exercised “due care” in the course of colliding with demonstrators. But the reality in court might not be so straightforward.

Sgt. Fred Lepley, senior director of the Iowa State Police Association, which supported S.F. 342, told Salon that incidents in which protesters threaten drivers are often “difficult to comprehend” without proper context.

Lepley said that the provisions are designed to “assist citizens that are attempting to remove themselves from a dangerous situation but find that protesters are purposely forcing their hand by standing in front of the vehicle refusing to let them leave and possibly attempting to get at the driver to do harm. In many of these cases the driver is driving very slow and the protesters intentionally get in front of the vehicle, placing themselves in harm’s way.”

Oklahoma Rep. Justin Humprey, a Republican who sponsored H.B. 1674 — which also contains a driver immunity provision — echoed Leple, saying by email that “this bill is about protecting the public” and that it “enables a person to protect their family and themselves from criminals who demonstrate intent to commit harm.”

Salon could not find evidence that recent demonstrators have deliberately impeded traffic in an effort to provoke or harm drivers.

Other states where police organizations have actively supported “anti-riot” bills include Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Idaho, Connecticut, Arkansas and Arizona.

Though most of these bills have surfaced within the last couple of years, Gibson told Salon that the Republican sense of urgency for their implementation has no logical or historical basis. “Rioting was already a dangerous, illegal type of behavior,” he said, “but people still did it. These politicians are deluding themselves if they think that making rioting extra-illegal is going to change anything. They’re trying to throw peaceful protesters in jail because that is more of a thorn in their side than the riots are.”

U.S. police officers have killed at least 1068 people since the killing of African-American George Floyd by physical force by an officer a year ago, a report by a police watchdog group indicates.

May 28, 2021 | Newswire

The U.S. prison system is a crime against humanity. Here are just some of the reasons why.

By Lee Camp
Scheerpost
May 10th, 2021

By Lee Camp / Original to ScheerPost

In a few minutes time you’ll want to abolish prisons. If you’re not ready for that intellectual and emotional transformation, then please stop reading now. Or put on your thunder shirt.

If you grew up in the United States, like I did, then you probably think prisons are a fact of life. We just go through our day-to-day assuming that a huge chunk our population must be hardened criminals (which is very different from hard criminals: scalawags involved in burgling while aroused) and that without prisons these delinquents would be running everywhere, breaking things, kicking squirrels in the face, and urinating in your car window while you’re at a stoplight. We just assume prisons have been around forever — as if back in caveman times they had one of the caves walled off with sticks and vines where they kept Blartho because he was a real a-hole.

Yet, the truth is that large prisons were not a thing in America or really anywhere in the world until the 1800s. That’s the first in this list of 13 facts about American prisons that will blow your mind. (Pared down and adjusted from my previous list of 1,234 facts about American prisons that will give you liver damage.)

Number 1 – Prisons are relatively new.

The earliest penitentiary in America was Walnut Street Prison in Philadelphia, which opened in 1773. Even in Europe before that time — despite having a few dungeons where they had one or two guys they really hated sitting there for 40 years, living off termite stew — there were no jails holding millions or even thousands of people. This means that in the history of humanity, locking large percentages of your population in a penitentiary ranks as a rather new advent. We lived hundreds of thousands of years without doing it, and somehow we got by. Prisons are kinda like nuclear weapons and nipple clamps: We’ve gone basically the entirety of human history without them, but now that they’re here, we think we must have them or all is lost.

Number 2 – Prisons and capitalism go hand-in-hand.

Angela Davis makes the point in her book Are Prisons Obsolete? that the exponential growth of prisons correlated with the rise of industrial capitalism, which began around the 1830s. Once a man’s worth was measured in labor hours, taking that away from him could be viewed as a punishment. Furthermore, even though prisons became common during the 1800s and 1900s, America didn’t become the world’s largest prison state until the 1980s. (Ronald Reagan and the racist Drug War truly are the gifts that keep on giving.)

Before the 19th century, there were other punishments for breaking laws. This is not to say that 40 lashes for stealing a loaf of bread is the correct punishment, but if you were to ask modern day prisoners if they would prefer five years behind bars living in a bunk bed with a gassy roommate named Lars or 40 lashes, I bet 90% would take the whip.

We act as if we’re morally superior to those who came before us, but shall we not consider that locking someone away for 20 or 50 years is 100 times worse than some whipping? I’m not saying let’s start beating the shit out of everyone who runs a stop sign. I’m saying that a truly moral society would find alternative punishments, such as community service, instead of destroying lives.

Number 3 – The Land of The Free holds 22% of the world’s prisoners.

Two-point-three million people now inhabit U.S. prisons every year out of a global total of nine million. That means 22% of the world’s prisoners are in the Land of The Free. The U.S. is the largest prison state in the world (which means we’re also the largest prison state in the galaxy) with 698 prisoners per 100,000 people. According to a report published by The Institute for Criminal Policy Research (ICPR) in 2018, the next closest country is El Salvador at 572 per hundred thousand. Some other countries of note: Rwanda has 511 per hundred thousand, Russia has 331, and China has 121 per 100,000. So next time someone tells you we need to place sanctions on China because they don’t treat their people well, you might want to mention that China has essentially one-fifth the imprisonment rate of the U.S. As a wise man once said, “He who has stones shouldn’t throw glass houses.” …Don’t quote me on that.

Number 4 – Prisons are Slavery 2.0.

It may seem like the complexity of prisons and their interconnectedness with our societal fabric make them intractably crucial—one cannot even imagine a society without human cages—but there have been other institutions in America’s past that seemed crucial. Many thought society could not function without slavery. It turned out — wait for it — we could. (Another example is chamber pots. We thought we couldn’t live without those, but it turns out shitting in a soup bowl by your bed is not the best plan.)

So when America first ended slavery, the people accustomed to owning slaves exclaimed, “Why I dare say, I don’t fancy this one bit! I need an incredibly cheap form of labor that I can heavily abuse and for which I’ll not pay a buffalo penny!” Well, guess where they found their new slaves? Prisons. Which brings us to:

Number 5 – The 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery and legalized it.

The 13th amendment has a big, juicy loophole. It reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” That “except” has impacted millions of lives for the worse.

As Davis wrote, “Southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves. Black people became the prime targets of a developing convict lease system, referred to by many as a reincarnation of slavery. … [Authorities often declared unlawful anyone who was] guilty of theft, had run away [from a job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money carelessly, and . . . all other idle and disorderly persons.”

So Black folks found themselves imprisoned for behaviors that usually weren’t illegal and that white people often partook in freely. I can verify that 53% of my white friends are regularly idle. (In fact, it’s their defining characteristic.) And how many white people are careless with money? I heard Charlie Sheen once gave a guy $10,000 in exchange for $9,000.

Point being — authorities arrested people of color for non-crimes and then threw them in prison where they could be bought for pennies in the convict lease program. Why does this sound familiar? Oh, that’s right. It basically continues to this day.

Number 6 – Prison Labor Continues Today

Currently inmates are still used for jobs like sewing “Made in America” labels on clothing that’s not made in America or fighting California wildfires because the state only has to pay them $3 per day. State officials generally claim such programs are different from the convict lease program of the 1800s in the same way the people behind Firecracker pops claim they’re different from Bomb Pops. We know they’re the same goddamn thing. I know sugar water mixed with red-40 when I taste it!

The U.S. differs from other countries. Since most other countries didn’t have to solve their “Black people problem,” they didn’t need to invent reasons to lock up all the people of color. Therefore in other countries theft, for example, is indeed illegal, but it won’t result in years in prison because then the punishment is morally worse than the crime. Yet, here in the Land of Liberty, you can end up serving twenty years for stealing candy. Angela Davis points out, these false crimes “also served as subterfuge for political revenge. After emancipation, the courtroom became an ideal place to exact racial retribution.In this sense, the work of the criminal justice system was intimately related to the extralegal work of lynching.”

In other words, the courtroom became the more bureaucratic and polite / elite / erudite way of lynching people.

Number 7 – A few people get filthy rich off of imprisoning millions of people.

Companies collect billions of dollars from the Prison Industrial Complex now, which gives them all the more reason to make sure it keeps going. These companies in turn fund many of our politicians — both federally and in many states. Some states have contracts with private prisons guaranteeing their prisons will remain up to 90% full. That makes as much sense as having a contract with the fire department guaranteeing a certain number of terrible fires. And it’s not just private prisons — companies make money from all forms of prisons and jails.

Number 8 – Black Americans are the most imprisoned people in the world.

Remember when I said the U.S. has 698 prisoners per 100,000 compared to China having 121? Well, if prison rates of African American were listed in the same way, they would have an incarceration rate of 1,501 per 100,000 (down from 2,300 a decade ago). Please pause a minute to try to wrap your brain around that number. Black Americans have a rate of imprisonment that is over 12 TIMES that of China. One in three Black men between 20 and 29 are in some way subjected to our prison system right now. If prison rates of African Americans were listed alongside countries, they would have the highest rate of any country.

Let me see if I can simplify this a little. …Our prisons are WILDLY racist.

Did I clear that up? Our prison system has racist origins, a racist past, a racist present, and a racist future (one can assume). So if you say to yourself, “I think our prison system is working great,” then you’re really saying, “I’m super racist.”

The inmates in our carceral state are made up of 21% Hispanics and 38% Blacks even though the American population is only 18% Hispanic and 13% Black. Once you add in other non-white races, our insane prisons are filled with over 65% people of color.

Number 9 – Police departments have admitted to targeting people of color.

New York’s stop-and-frisk program is perhaps one of the best known efforts to abduct young men of color who were doing nothing wrong and try to find a reason to put them in jail. So please disabuse yourself of the liberal polite view of policing — “Let’s arrest this guy for having an open beer. Oh, he happens to be Black.” The way it really works is — “Let’s arrest this guy for being Black. Oh, he happens to have a beer with him. How convenient for us. It makes the paperwork easier.” New York City is 43% white, but only 7% of arrests for open alcoholic beverages are on white people. (And trust me, as a white guy who used to live in NYC and walk around with open alcoholic beverages all the time, the lack of arrests is not because white people don’t break this law.)

Number 10 – Prisons are not about rehabilitation.

The goal of American prisons is no longer rehabilitation (if it ever was). Now their only goal is incapacitation. Many prisons have little to no education programs and very few books. Internet access is often rare or expensive. Current inmate and longtime political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal said, “What societal interest is served by prisoners who remain illiterate? What social benefit is there in ignorance? How are people corrected while imprisoned if their education is outlawed? Who profits — other than the prison establishment itself — from stupid prisoners?”

Number 11 – So much for #MeToo.

While the #MeToo movement has swept across the country, the Prison Industrial Complex not only tolerates sexual assault, it perpetrates it. Female inmates almost always find themselves the victims of strip searches by guards, and often internal searches — which means exactly what you think it means. Here’s another way to phrase this: State-sanctioned sexual assault.

It’s used in much the same way sexual assault has been used over the years — to make people feel humiliated and powerless. So it’s time to do the same thing to the Prison State that we did to Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Les Moonves, and 900 other sleaze balls — Cancel it.

Number 12 – Prisoners have long been used for medical research and it is not over.

As Laura Appleman of Willamette University wrote, “The standard narrative of human medical experimentation ends abruptly in the 1970s, with the uncovering of the Tuskegee syphilis study. My research shows, however, that this narrative is incorrect and incomplete. The practice of experimenting on the captive and vulnerable persists.”

We can all sleep soundly at night knowing that we still have human guinea pigs in this country.

Number 13 – The mainstream media gets in on the action too.

Corporate media perpetuates the idea that crime is always raging out of control, which then creates a fervor for harsher sentences among both the population and lawmakers. “Even during years when homicide rates were cut in half, stories about homicides multiplied exponentially,” writes Davis.

So our media doesn’t just manufacture consent for war, they manufacture consent for our catastrophic prison state.

I’ll let Angela Davis sum this all up: “The prison functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited… This is the ideological work that the prison performs — it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

The American prison system is not a way to deal with crime. It is a crime.

It’s not a way to deal with harm to society. It is a harm to society.

One hundred years from now, no one will remember what this particular small-time law-breaker did or that one did, but they’ll remember that the United States was the largest prison state in the world, perpetrating a forever war against our own people.

Bullet Points and Punch Lines: The Most Important Commentary Ever Written On the Epic American Tragicomedy

Bullet Points and Punch Lines: The Most Important Commentary Ever Written on the Epic American Tragicomedy

The post 13 Facts About American Prisons That Will Blow Your Mind appeared first on PM Press.

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The online angst among white nationalists and other far-right extremists was neck-deep Tuesday following Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the murder of George Floyd.

“God help you if you’re a white male in this anti-white country,” wrote Andrew Torba, founder of the white nationalist-friendly chat site Gab, to his 3.2 million followers.

Many of the reactions were collected by Chuck Tanner at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, who noted that “the response across the far right and white nationalist movement demonstrated its base lack of compassion and lack of mooring in reality.”

“Does anyone really see a way out except Civil War/secession?” asked Peter Brimelow, founder/publisher of the white-nationalist site VDare, on Twitter. Brimelow quote-tweeted an article he wrote in 2017 predicting that “it will come to blood.”

Michelle Malkin, the so-called “Groyper mommy,” wrote on Telegram: “Chauvin was sacrificed.” Another Groyper figure, America First students head Jaden McNeil, chimed in: “He never stood a chance.”

The police murder of George Floyd added jet fuel to a nationwide push to defund the police. We go to Minneapolis to speak with Kandace Montgomery, co-executive director of Black Visions Collective, about their response to the guilty verdict for former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd and an update on the push to divest from Minneapolis police and invest in communities.

Brett Wilkins, staff writer

Rep. Cori Bush, the amendment’s author, noted that “97 Democrats stood up for our community members who are incarcerated” and vowed to “keep up this fight.”

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The U.S. tops any other country in the world for its number of prisoners – over 2,300,000. China, by contrast, has roughly 200,000 prisoners. But the U.S. general population is only 330 million, while China’s is 1.4 billion. American prisoners constitute a much larger percentage of the population than those in any other nation. The U.S. has clung to this dubious distinction for decades.

Equaling the Soviet gulag at its height in the 1950s in numbers of prisoners, the U.S. also locks away 61,000 of them in the torture called solitary confinement and 2700 in the terror called death row. These are not the policies and actions of a civilized society. This is barbarism. As long as this continues, any American politician who climbs up on a high horse about government abuse of citizens in another country is a pathetic hypocrite who deserves to be laughed out of public life.

Privatization of prisons has made things worse. Of federal prisoners, 19.1 percent are in private prisons, as are 6.8 percent of those in state prisons. These privately run hellholes turn a profit by jacking up fees for inmates from everything from phone calls to mail to video-conferencing with a lawyer. They also make money by skimping on decent food and proper medicines and have lots of other ingenious ways to squeeze dollars out of their captives. Politically, private prisons are a reactionary force, promoting, naturally, tougher crime laws and longer sentences. Because that’s how they make money – for them, the more prisoners, the better. Private prisons contributed to the 408 percent increase in the U.S. prison population from 1978 to 2014.

Originally, Quakers advanced prisons, as a reform, an alternative to the horrors of corporal and capital punishment. But, as abolitionist Mariame Kaba argues in her new book, We Do This Till We Free Us, prisons became their own kind of nightmare. The introduction quotes Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “We live in the age of human sacrifice.” Prisoners are our human sacrifice: people locked away in tiny cages for decades. In response, Kaba would abolish prisons and the police. She advocates transformative and restorative justice, which would impose consequences on those who harm – such as reparations, public apologies, loss of any position of power or privilege, counseling, etc. – but not destroy them. Kaba writes: “Prison is simply a bad and ineffective way to address violence and crime.”

Unsurprisingly, her prescriptions would necessitate a social and economic revolution, for which Kaba, who is anti-capitalist, has worked for years. “Harm originates from situations dominated by stress, scarcity and oppression,” she writes. “Our punishment system, which is grounded in genocide and slavery and which has continued the functions and themes of those atrocities, can never be made just.”

Like many abolitionists, Kaba drew hope from the George Floyd rebellion last summer and joined those calling for defunding the police. Here’s her list of police “reforms” to be avoided: “1) reforms that allocate more money for the police; 2) reforms advocating for more police; 3) technology-focused reforms; 4) individual dialogues with individual cops funded by tax dollars.” Instead she supports: “1) reparations to victims and families of police violence; 2) decreasing policing and prison funding and redirecting it to other social goods; 3) elected independent civilian police accountability boards with power to investigate, discipline and fire cops and administrators; 4) disarming the police; 5) simplifying dissolving police departments; 6) data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, etc.)”

Kaba is against police or prison reform. She does not describe policing as broken, because that reaffirms reform and undercuts abolition. Police kill about 1000 people a year, she notes, but since 2005, there have been only 110 prosecutions of officers who shot people, with convictions in less than 42 cases. But Kaba also notes abolitionists’ successes: removing former Illinois state’s attorney Anita Alvarez; helping to win reparations for torture victims during the reign of “infamous police commander Jon Burge in Chicago – a city that has, over the past two decades, become a hub of abolitionist organizing;” and several campaigns to free women imprisoned for self-defense against sexual abusers.

Women’s right to self-defense against abuse, whether it’s a wife and her husband or a sex worker and a client, is central to Kaba’s thinking. In fact, she titled one chapter, “Organizing to End Sexual Violence Without Prisons.” She describes the abuse survivor’s position thus: “I was hurt. Somebody did it. I want them to know that they did it. I want to see that they have some remorse for having done it.” That’s a far cry from tossing the abuser in a cage for decades, so that by the time he’s free, he’s elderly and unemployable.

But the even deadlier consequence of the current criminal justice approach is that women who defend themselves land in prison. “Prosecuting and incarcerating survivors of violence,” Kaba writes “puts courts and prisons in the same punitive role as their abusers.” Here she reviews several prominent cases, for instance, Cyntoia Brown who, aged 16, “shot and killed Johnny Allen, a 43-year-old Nashville resident who picked her up for sex.” Brown explained she shot him in self-defense. She was “tried as an adult and was convicted of first degree premeditated murder and ‘especially aggravated robbery.’” With concurrent life-sentences, she would have been eligible for parole after 51 years in prison. However, Brown’s case drew much media attention, and she was pardoned. Kaba cites other such cases.

“In 2017, there were 219,000 women in U.S. prisons and jails, most of them poor and of color,” Kaba writes, observing that the incarceration rate for black women is double that for white women. She argues that abuse survivors are systematically punished “for trying to protect themselves and their children,” that it is “hurt people who hurt other people,” and that prison simply should not figure in the equation.

This book recounts terrible stories of women punished for defending themselves, but one, from Florida, presents a very bitter irony: Marissa Alexander fired a warning shot into the air to force her violent husband to back off. For this, she faced 60 years in prison. She would have seemed a likely candidate for Florida’s infamous “stand your ground law” – right? But the judge said no, because she had not demonstrated fear. She was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. (After three years in prison and two under house arrest, she was released, thanks to a national campaign to free her and to some very effective lawyers.)

One cannot help wondering, had Marissa Alexander been male and white, like George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin – how would the judge have ruled then? Would he have let her go, like the judge who let Zimmerman off? Because apparently, at least in Florida, what’s self-defense for a man is outright attempted murder for a woman.

The post American Gulag appeared first on CounterPunch.org.