Randy Shaw: The big mystery is why Housing California and the many health and human services groups are not demanding bigger cuts in California’s massive prison industrial complex.
Prisonomics 101: How ALEC and the Prison Industry Got Arizona’s SB1070 onto Gov. Jan Brewer’s Desk
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Seth Hoy: private prison corporations, who stand to make hundreds of millions in profits from the detention of immigrants, not only had a hand in drafting Arizona’s controversial immigration enforcement law, SB1070, but contributed millions to the bill’s cosponsors and continue to push the legislation in other states.
Fast 4 Freedom
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Diane Lefer: AB900 was a huge victory for the prison-industrial complex. “People are making a profit out of putting people in cages,” said Geri Silva.
Blacks Prison and Unemployment
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Sherwood Ross: Slumlords charge exorbitant rents. “Convenience” stores charge higher prices. Military recruiters have their pick of jobless youth desperate for work. And the for-profit, private prisons increase their head count (and income) as the judicial system hands off the young drug peddlers caught in the legal web. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported, African-Americans fill 40 percent of the nation’s prison cells. Yet they make up just 13 percent of the nation’s population.
First Solve Prison Crisis, Then Fix California’s Budget
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Dick Price: To get a handle on the damage California’s current approach to incarceration is having on its citizens, consider this: In a recent 23-year period, California erected 23 prisons—one a year, each costing roughly $100 million dollars annually to operate, with both Democratic and Republican governors occupying the statehouse—at the same time that it added just one campus to its vaunted university system, UC Merced.
African-Americans Have Seven Times Greater Chance of Imprisonment
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Sherwood Ross: It is far more likely that in the late twentieth century, in contrast to earlier time, patterns of discrimination reflect unconscious biases rather than blatant attempts to oppress African Americans.
School to Prison Pipeline
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Public forum: Is There a School to Prison Pipeline at the Pasadena Unified School District? Soaring dropout rates, rising suspensions and expulsions, police on campus, overly harsh one-size-fits-all discipline policies, high poverty rates, court involvement and juvenile detention all suggest the pipeline to prison is present at the Pasadena Unified School District. Join us to [...]
Is Obama Serious About Ending Failed War on Drugs?
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Efforts by President Obama to put an end to the nation’s failed “War on Drugs” can’t come an hour too soon—if that’s his intent. From his actions, it’s hard to know. Drug offenses account for about half the 200,000 Federal prison inmates behind bars, compared to just 15% of prisoners convicted of violent crimes involving [...]
Prisoners’ Rights: An Oxymoron?
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More than 100 people of all races and all ages traveled to Watts from several California counties on Saturday May 30, sharing a single desire: Bring our loved ones homes. They weren’t talking about family members serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. These are the families torn apart when someone is sent to prison with an [...]
How to Combat Mexican Drug Cartels—Legalize Their Activities
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While the U.S. superpower has meddled in many far-flung nations around the globe in the name of enhancing its security, as prior to 9/11, it has ignored a threat much closer to home. In recent years, the Bush administration blithely blamed Mexico for the flow of illegal drugs into the United States and virtually ignored [...]
Color of Law: U.S. Drug Policy Has Gone to Pot
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In a recent online town hall meeting at the White House, President Obama was asked by the online audience whether he thought legalizing marijuana would create jobs and help the economy. It was the most popular question asked at the meeting.
Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons Making Thousands Psychotic
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The United States today is housing tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement, a form of numbing mental torture that drives about one-third of them psychotic, induces irrational anger in 90%, and ups the likelihood they will commit violent crimes upon release. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” U.S. Senator John McCain once wrote [...]
Close Down Guantanamo? What About Our Own Hellholes?
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As Tom Paine once opined on this subject: “When it shall be said in any country in the world, ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive’— when these things can be said then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.” Folks, we gotta ways to go.
Color of Law: Please Don’t Feed the Prison Monster
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At its worst, America’s criminal justice system represents the place where racism, greed and corruption intersect. At its best, it is inherently flawed, unjust, and unreliable, and little better than its worst. The engine that drives this injustice system is known as the prison industrial complex. It is the theater in which the nation’s foremost [...]
Color of Law: Now the Robber Barons Replace the Welfare Queens (and Rightly So)
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Gordon Gecko had a long run of it, but now the party is over. I’m talking, of course, about the character in the film Wall Street, that conniving titan of finance who would sell his mother for a buck and a quarter, and there is scant evidence that he had not already accomplished that goal. [...]
Friday Feedback: Methadone Maintenance Does Work
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Every Friday the LA Progressive features a comment that was particularly noteworthy. This week we are featuring a comment submitted by Zenith in response Eric Schneider’s “The War on Drugs Redux.” Zenith writes: I have to disagree that the methadone experiemnt prved less promising than expected, or that it was “failing”. In fact MMT is [...]
Troy Davis: The Case Continues
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by Dr. Alan Bean – The Troy Davis case indicates just how subjective the legal system really is. The federal 11th Court of Appeals deals with cases in Florida, Alabama and Georgia. A panel of three judges, selected from this court, considered the Davis case yesterday.
Update: Troy Anthony Davis
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After the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Davis’ case, the Federal Appeals Court in Atlanta, Ga granted Troy Anthony Davis a temporary stay of execution. This stay was granted just days before he was scheduled to be executed on Monday, October 27, 2008. “Upon our thorough review of the record, we conclude that [...]
It Is Likely We Have Executed Innocent People
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Troy Anthony Davis, the Death Penalty and Innocent Men Most Americans have limited contact with the judicial system. For the most part, our contact with the courts usually amounts to an occasional interaction in traffic court or small claims court. Unless you are an attorney, law student, or are in some other way associated with [...]
Elections Have Consequenses – Can We Sit By and Let This Happen?
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The United States Supreme Court won’t consider Troy Davis’ appeal. Troy Davis was scheduled to be executed last month in Georgia but the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay of execution just two hours before the execution was to occur in order to determine whether it the justices would hear his appeal. This case has [...]
U.S. Supreme Court Issues a Stay of Execution for Troy Anthony Davis
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Troy Anthony Davis was granted a last-minute reprieve today, September 23, 2008, according to a report by Rusy Domin of CNN International. This morning, before going to work, Dick and I joined hands in prayer for the life of Troy Anthony Davis. He was scheduled to be executed tonight at 7:00pm ET in Georgia for [...]
Senator Cox Speaks Of Crime and Government
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In his latest constituent newsletter, California State Senator Dave Cox confuses coincidence with causation by connecting imprisonment with lower crime rates. He also rejects the notion that California imprisons too many, saying: “California’s incarceration rate [is] very ordinary with at least 20 other states reporting more inmates per 100,000 residents.”
Occassionally, We Get Feedback
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I love doing surveys and polls. We put questions out on the Web, people answer, we post their responses. It’s a pretty simple process. But this simple process yields a big payoff. It results in us hearing from you. For me, getting your reponse is what makes the survey process rewarding. Everyday, Dick and I [...]
Are Progressives Blind to the Prison-Industrial Complex?
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ver the summer, my husband Dick and I attended one of the first meetings of the Downtown Los Angeles Chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America. Amid the high rises and lofts of the rapidly growing middleclass demographic of LA’s Civic Center, a modest sized group of progressive activists gathered on the patio of the [...]
Healing the Black-Brown Divide
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African American and Latino Communities Must Unite. Traditional allies and friends in a common struggle for equal opportunity, the African American and Latino communities of Los Angeles have grown apart in recent years. Where once blacks and browns stood shoulder to shoulder in the decades-long fight to correct the social injustices they both faced and [...]
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Media, Revolution, and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party: An Interview with Kiilu Nyasha
Kiilu Nyasha is a San Francisco-based journalist and former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Kiilu hosts a weekly TV program, “Freedom Is A Constant Struggle,” on SF Live (Comcast 76 and AT&T 99), which can be viewed live at www.accessf.org every Friday at 7:30 pm (PST), and rebroadcast Saturdays at 3:30 p.m., and [...]