| via http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_19637721 By JUDY LIN Associated Press | |
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Friday, December 30, 2011
Cities, lawmakers seek redevelopment compromise
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Stop LA Jail Expansion, Save LA County
This piece was originally posted on Ella’s Voice, the blog of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
by Emily Harris on Dec 19, 2011
In a few weeks, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors will vote on whether or not to approve Sheriff Baca’s latest plan to rob LA: a new jail that will cost $2.66 billion dollars($1.4 billion to build and $1.26 billion in interest to bankers). Los Angeles County is one of 25 counties that have been invited by the Corrections Standards Authority (CSA) to submit applications for AB 900 Phase II funding for construction or expansion of county jails.
“What is California doing?” asks Susan Burton, Executive Director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles. “Don’t we know by now it is bad for all Californians if we build more cages anywhere? This is a terrible investment of our resources, and we must stop it!”
Los Angeles County was ranked highest in priority to receive jail expansion money because it is the county that committed the largest percentage of prisoners to state custody in 2010. “With violent crime at an all time low, Los Angeles locks up more people then any place in the world, especially brown and Black youth, yet we have no money for jobs, youth centers, schools, libraries, and parks,” says Brandy Brown with the Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles.
With the resources Sheriff Baca already has, he has created an international disgrace in LA County jails, where the torture of inadequate medical and mental healthcare and pervasive brutal beatings are routine. It’s time to stop using LA jails as mental health hospitals and homeless shelters. The only sustainable solution to overcrowding is to send less people to jail.
Let’s send the Supervisors a simple and clear message: Vote No on Jail Expansion in LA.
Sign the petition urging LA Supervisors to vote NO on the jail expansion!
LA does not have $2.66 billion dollars to waste on harmful jails. 14.5% of LA residents are unemployed; 40% live without health insurance; and at least 51,000 people are homeless.
What could LA do with $2.66 Billion?
$55 million: hire 500 registered nurses
$50 million: hire 400 people in the Dept. of Mental Health
$55 million: hire 375 people for prevention and early intervention services
$366.4 million: Stop Medi-Cal, Mental Health Services, CalWORKs, In-Home Support Services cuts at the state level from hitting LA residents
$816 million:End homelessness in LA (rent 40,000 2 bedroom apartments for a year at $1700/month)
$1.3 billion: close LAUSD 2011-2013 anticipated budget gaps, save further cuts
Emily Harris is the Statewide Coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) a statewide alliance of over 40 organizations working to curb prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in California. To help us organize and plug into the work in Los Angeles contact Emily Harris!
by Emily Harris on Dec 19, 2011
In a few weeks, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors will vote on whether or not to approve Sheriff Baca’s latest plan to rob LA: a new jail that will cost $2.66 billion dollars($1.4 billion to build and $1.26 billion in interest to bankers). Los Angeles County is one of 25 counties that have been invited by the Corrections Standards Authority (CSA) to submit applications for AB 900 Phase II funding for construction or expansion of county jails.
“What is California doing?” asks Susan Burton, Executive Director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles. “Don’t we know by now it is bad for all Californians if we build more cages anywhere? This is a terrible investment of our resources, and we must stop it!”
Los Angeles County was ranked highest in priority to receive jail expansion money because it is the county that committed the largest percentage of prisoners to state custody in 2010. “With violent crime at an all time low, Los Angeles locks up more people then any place in the world, especially brown and Black youth, yet we have no money for jobs, youth centers, schools, libraries, and parks,” says Brandy Brown with the Youth Justice Coalition in Los Angeles.
With the resources Sheriff Baca already has, he has created an international disgrace in LA County jails, where the torture of inadequate medical and mental healthcare and pervasive brutal beatings are routine. It’s time to stop using LA jails as mental health hospitals and homeless shelters. The only sustainable solution to overcrowding is to send less people to jail.
Let’s send the Supervisors a simple and clear message: Vote No on Jail Expansion in LA.
Sign the petition urging LA Supervisors to vote NO on the jail expansion!
LA does not have $2.66 billion dollars to waste on harmful jails. 14.5% of LA residents are unemployed; 40% live without health insurance; and at least 51,000 people are homeless.
What could LA do with $2.66 Billion?
$55 million: hire 500 registered nurses
$50 million: hire 400 people in the Dept. of Mental Health
$55 million: hire 375 people for prevention and early intervention services
$366.4 million: Stop Medi-Cal, Mental Health Services, CalWORKs, In-Home Support Services cuts at the state level from hitting LA residents
$816 million:End homelessness in LA (rent 40,000 2 bedroom apartments for a year at $1700/month)
$1.3 billion: close LAUSD 2011-2013 anticipated budget gaps, save further cuts
Emily Harris is the Statewide Coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) a statewide alliance of over 40 organizations working to curb prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in California. To help us organize and plug into the work in Los Angeles contact Emily Harris!
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It's True
via Commondreams.org
Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It's True
by Paul Buchheit
Recent reports suggest that almost 50% of Americans are in poverty or at a "low income" level. The claim is based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that includes health care, transportation, and other essential living expenses in the poverty calculation.
The concept of "low income" is controversial. It has been defined as earnings between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, a claim which, if true, would place every American family making $50,000 or less at a near-poverty level.
Conservative organizations believe the whole 'poverty' issue is overblown. The Cato Institute blames LBJ and Obama for reversing a declining poverty rate. Forbes blames the calculations. The Heritage Foundation argues, "The average poor person, as defined by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines...In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave." The case for a growing "consumption equality" is alternately defended and denied.
With emotions running high on both sides, we need to take a balanced look at the available data to determine how well the highest-earning family of the poorest 50% -- a family with a $50,000 income -- can survive. (The maximum individual income for the poorest 50% is about $30,000.)
Start with taxes. It is frequently noted by conservatives that the richest 1% pay most of the federal income taxes, and indeed they paid about 37 percent in 2009, more than the poorest 90% of Americans. But only the richest 5% of Americans have experienced income growth since 1980. And during that time, their tax rate has dropped from 34% to 23%. As for the 3 percent rate paid by the poorest 50%, the Tax Policy Center sums it up nicely: "The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax."
More relevant to the poverty issue is that federal income tax is only a small part of the tax expense for lower-income families. According to a study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the poorest 50% paid about 10 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes (the richest 1% paid 5 percent). Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures reveal that the bottom 50% pays about 9 percent of their incomes toward social security (the top 1% pays just under 2 percent). CBO also shows that the bottom 50% is paying about 2 percent of their incomes on excise taxes, a negligible expense for the people at the top. Another year of Bush tax cuts will chop another 1-2 percent off the taxes of the very rich.
So total taxes for the poorest 50% are 24 percent of their incomes (3% + 10% + 9% + 2%), as compared to 29 percent for the richest 1% (23% + 5% + 2% - 1%).
Other significant expenses for low-income people, based on the most conservative estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the National Center for Children in Poverty, the Carsey Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute, include food (10%), housing (27%), transportation (6%), health care (5%), child care (8%), and household expenditures (5%). Expenses for insurance and savings and entertainment, although important to most households, are not being included here.
Energy costs hit low-income families especially hard, taking about 20% of their incomes. At the $50,000 income level the burden is closer to 12%, as generally agreed upon by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the American Gas Association.
Total expenses for the richest family in the bottom half of America?
24% taxes
27% housing
34% food, health care, child care, transportation, household needs
12% energy
That's 97% of their income. The richest family among 70,000,000 households is left with just $1,500 for a car, appliances, a TV, a cell phone, a loan repayment, an occasional night out. It comes to $30 a week, barely enough to take the family out for a pizza.
Critics bemoan the amounts of aid being lavished on lower-income Americans, making dubious claims about $16,800 in government funds going to every poor family and families with $90,000 incomes being classified as "near poor."
The fact is that only 4,375,000 families (out of 70,000,000 in the bottom half) received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 2010, for a total expense of about $36 billion. Current federal budgets include about $350 billion for food, housing, and traditional 'welfare' programs for needy children, elderly care, and energy assistance. This averages out to about $400 per month per family.
Another fact is that earnings have remained flat for most people while productivity has grown 80% since 1980. If a $50,000 family had received a fair share from their contribution to America's growth, they'd be making $90,000, and they wouldn't need a dime from government.
Conservatives complain about the TVs and refrigerators owned by low-income people. But it's the height of insensitivity to admonish people who are trying to survive in a perversely unequal society.
Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It's True
by Paul Buchheit
Recent reports suggest that almost 50% of Americans are in poverty or at a "low income" level. The claim is based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that includes health care, transportation, and other essential living expenses in the poverty calculation.
The concept of "low income" is controversial. It has been defined as earnings between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, a claim which, if true, would place every American family making $50,000 or less at a near-poverty level.
Conservative organizations believe the whole 'poverty' issue is overblown. The Cato Institute blames LBJ and Obama for reversing a declining poverty rate. Forbes blames the calculations. The Heritage Foundation argues, "The average poor person, as defined by the government, has a living standard far higher than the public imagines...In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave." The case for a growing "consumption equality" is alternately defended and denied.
With emotions running high on both sides, we need to take a balanced look at the available data to determine how well the highest-earning family of the poorest 50% -- a family with a $50,000 income -- can survive. (The maximum individual income for the poorest 50% is about $30,000.)
Start with taxes. It is frequently noted by conservatives that the richest 1% pay most of the federal income taxes, and indeed they paid about 37 percent in 2009, more than the poorest 90% of Americans. But only the richest 5% of Americans have experienced income growth since 1980. And during that time, their tax rate has dropped from 34% to 23%. As for the 3 percent rate paid by the poorest 50%, the Tax Policy Center sums it up nicely: "The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax."
More relevant to the poverty issue is that federal income tax is only a small part of the tax expense for lower-income families. According to a study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the poorest 50% paid about 10 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes (the richest 1% paid 5 percent). Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures reveal that the bottom 50% pays about 9 percent of their incomes toward social security (the top 1% pays just under 2 percent). CBO also shows that the bottom 50% is paying about 2 percent of their incomes on excise taxes, a negligible expense for the people at the top. Another year of Bush tax cuts will chop another 1-2 percent off the taxes of the very rich.
So total taxes for the poorest 50% are 24 percent of their incomes (3% + 10% + 9% + 2%), as compared to 29 percent for the richest 1% (23% + 5% + 2% - 1%).
Other significant expenses for low-income people, based on the most conservative estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the National Center for Children in Poverty, the Carsey Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute, include food (10%), housing (27%), transportation (6%), health care (5%), child care (8%), and household expenditures (5%). Expenses for insurance and savings and entertainment, although important to most households, are not being included here.
Energy costs hit low-income families especially hard, taking about 20% of their incomes. At the $50,000 income level the burden is closer to 12%, as generally agreed upon by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the American Gas Association.
Total expenses for the richest family in the bottom half of America?
24% taxes
27% housing
34% food, health care, child care, transportation, household needs
12% energy
That's 97% of their income. The richest family among 70,000,000 households is left with just $1,500 for a car, appliances, a TV, a cell phone, a loan repayment, an occasional night out. It comes to $30 a week, barely enough to take the family out for a pizza.
Critics bemoan the amounts of aid being lavished on lower-income Americans, making dubious claims about $16,800 in government funds going to every poor family and families with $90,000 incomes being classified as "near poor."
The fact is that only 4,375,000 families (out of 70,000,000 in the bottom half) received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 2010, for a total expense of about $36 billion. Current federal budgets include about $350 billion for food, housing, and traditional 'welfare' programs for needy children, elderly care, and energy assistance. This averages out to about $400 per month per family.
Another fact is that earnings have remained flat for most people while productivity has grown 80% since 1980. If a $50,000 family had received a fair share from their contribution to America's growth, they'd be making $90,000, and they wouldn't need a dime from government.
Conservatives complain about the TVs and refrigerators owned by low-income people. But it's the height of insensitivity to admonish people who are trying to survive in a perversely unequal society.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Jakada Imani on the Ella Baker Center, his port commission bid, and fighting for Oakland
Via Oakland North
By: Amna Hassan
December 20, 2011 – 11:01 am
When Jakada Imani stepped up to the speakers’ podium in the Oakland City Council chambers on October 4, he didn’t look a bit perturbed. Dressed immaculately in a dark suit, he bore an expression that did not betray emotion.
That night, 18 speakers preceded him at the podium. Two expressed support for him as a new commissioner for the Port of Oakland. The other 16 were indignant that Margaret Gordon was not being reappointed to the same position by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan to serve a second four-year term. Imani had been nominated by Quan, but the council still needed to confirm the appointment with a vote before he could be sworn in, turning the meeting into a debate over which candidate was right for the job.
“Tonight I want to share with you, even in this most awkward moment for me, uh…” Imani said into the microphone, stretching his arms and pausing.
Imani is the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland and a longtime community activist. He knew his appointment to the seven-member board that manages the port was a delicate affair. Gordon is a longtime health and environmental activist, and during her only term on the job, she spearheaded projects aimed at reducing diesel pollution and improving air quality, among others. That work had strengthened her position in many minds, including some present at the meeting, as “the true voice of West Oakland.”
“You know, Margaret Gordon’s a giant and there’s no denying it. You see it when you meet her,” Imani continued. “What makes me still willing to do this and be in this uncomfortable moment is because I came from fighting. I came through fighting.”
Imani has had to battle his entire life. As a child, he said, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, lived in a home with parents addicted to drugs, and was homeless for a brief period of time. He fought the odds to become a well-respected community leader, and strived to find ways to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. He said that was why he wanted to be a port commissioner – to fight for the people of West Oakland.
The chamber was teeming with people for the meeting on that early October evening — the council was also discussing the implementation of two controversial new gang injunctions, and a large crowd had shown up to voice their opinions. The rows of red velvet chairs were all occupied, and people lined up against the walls, with a few police officers positioned against the back wall in an effort to keep it clear.
As he finished his speech, he urged everyone to come together on principles that would allow everyone to win. “We need to come together,” he said. “And that’s what I want to stand with this people, this city, and this state for.”
But despite the fire and zeal with which Imani has fought for causes he believes in, he knew when it was time to stop and unite.
“Everybody in Oakland’s been fighting,” Imani said. “We’re fighting tonight and we’re going to be fighting later on tonight, and we’ve got nowhere by fighting. Nowhere!”
A little more than a month later, he took his name out of the running for the port commissioner position.
Imani grew up in what he calls a “nice little neighborhood” in East Oakland called Maxwell Park. “It was super, for a small kid,” he said.
In the fourth grade, doctors discovered he had dyslexia, a condition that he describes as “seeing some letters backwards.” Because he was tracked into special education classes, his mother was able to advocate for him to go to schools that lay outside his school district — Thornhill Elementary in Montclair, Maxwell Park. Montera Middle School. He went to Skyline High for a while, and graduated from Oakland High.
School was always a struggle for Imani. “Education wasn’t my thing,” he said, as he sat in a conference room at the Ella Baker Center, which is located on the eighth floor of an office building on Broadway.
“I graduated high school because my counselor took me around to all of my teachers who were failing me and explained to them that if they didn’t give me a passing grade, I would be back and she would put me in their class,” he said with a smile.
He stumbled into community work at the age of 17. While he barely scraped by in school, it was his “probing sensibility” and “racial consciousness” he said that changed his life. Some of that was from his mother, who had gone to school with Bobby Hutton, a member of the Black Panthers party who was later killed, and who had also grown up knowing Huey P. Newton. She instilled an awareness of racial issues in her boys, a trait that one of Imani’s teachers saw when she passed him a flyer for a youth leadership discussion for kids of various ages to come together to discuss issues they were dealing with.
“I saw young people really talking about race and class and liberation and oppression and sexual orientation for the first time, and I was completely blown away,” Imani said of the first leadership discussion he attended.
His life at home was difficult. His parents had started using drugs, he said, and their addiction was spiraling out of control. “Crack in particular,” Imani said. “That changed a lot of things for us. We lost our house for a while. For a while, we were homeless.”
He moved out of the house at the age of 18 when he found a job as a workshop leader focused on peer-to-peer education, teaching others about ways in which they could get involved in helping their communities, at a variety of venues in the Bay Area.“Basically hustling here and there, getting little one-off contracts and consulting gigs,” he said. He worked part-time until he found a more permanent job in San Francisco, doing youth leadership and development for The Kellog Koshland Youth leadership Program at Community Educational Services.
While working in San Francisco, Imani heard Oakland City Councilmember Nancy Nadel’s office was seeking someone with a background in organizing, and he applied for the job of constituent liaison in 1998.
Imani said he learned a lot about District 3 and how local government works during his time with Nadel’s office. He also learned about the health issues that people of West Oakland were dealing with on a regular basis because they live adjacent to a large and busy port complex. “I learned about pollution and brown fields and all the stuff that people in West Oakland were dealing with in terms of health issues,” he said.
Imani was living at the time near the post office in West Oakland, in a house that was just off the Highway 880 corridor, near the port. He remembers being confused by the excessive amounts of dust that would find its way in through the cracks in the doors and windows.
“Then I came to know that it was particulate matter,” he said, a mixture of acids, organic chemicals, metals and dust particles that polluted the area. “At the time, I was allowing one kid to breathe that in everyday.” Today, two of his four daughters have asthma, which he said he thinks may have been a result of exposure to toxins in West Oakland’s air.
As Nadel’s constituent liaison, he also had to respond to residents’ complaints about potholes and stop signs — a job which he said he respects but was never meant to do. Plus, he said, when he took the job, he really wanted to focus on work in West Oakland, and assumed Nadel would want him to do the same. “But that’s not the entire district, right?” said Imani with a chuckle. “It’s Jack London Square, and the lake and the downtown area.”
Much of his work became “liaison work,” he said; he coordinated between different departments and answered community requests instead of doing the kind of grass roots organizing he preferred. “That’s not what I was in it for at all,” Imani said. “So that led to me saying I’m going come to the Ella Baker Center.
“And that was 11 years ago,” he continued. “I became a youth organizer, worked my way up to being director of programs, later ran a campaign, because I wanted to be in the trenches, and four years ago became the executive director.”
In his early years at the Ella Baker Center, Imani campaigned against Proposition 21, legislation that allowed teenagers as young as 14 years old to be tried and charged as adults. While the proposition passed in 2000, Imani said he learned a lot from the experience and it affected his work at the Ella Baker Center. He then began to focus his work on reducing the number of juvenile prisons, and the number of inmates in California through a campaign he spearheaded called “Books not Bars.”
Books not Bars aims to transform the criminal justice system, by organizing families of incarcerated youth throughout the state to get involved in the rehabilitation of their children, and by advocating for the education of these children.
In 2006, Imani arranged for the group to take a guided tour and hold a press conference at a large juvenile correctional facility in Chino called H.G. Stark. Imani was part of the advance team sent to scout the area and meet with prison staff.
By the time he had flown to Los Angeles, and then driven to Paso Robles, the team had acquired the approval of numerous levels of prison bureaucracy. It had taken months of tedious requests and follow-ups to get various officials to sign off on the visit, and Imani’s team had to plow through bundles of red tape before they got everyone on board.
So when Imani drove into the sprawling facility, he did not foresee any more problems. He was wrong. “I got there and the shift sergeant is like, ‘No! You can’t go on tour. No, you can’t see this. No, you can’t do that. No, no, no, no.’”
Furious at being turned away, Imani strode back to his car, got inside, and began calling everyone he knew who could possibly help. “It made my blood boil,” he said. “I’m just fuming. I’m going, ‘They don’t understand that these are somebody’s kids, somebody’s son, brother, niece, nephew.’”
It was a Saturday morning, and Imani was trying to reach people who were not in their offices, but he still continued to dial every number he could come up with. Finally, he was able to reach various jail officials on the phone, and the jail’s superintendent showed up soon after and gave the group the OK to proceed as planned.
While he was waiting outside the prison, one of the guards, an older Latino man with a weathered face, drove out of the compound and sat next to Imani. Imani reckoned the man was in his late 50s or early 60s. Imani listened with increasing curiosity as the guard began to talk about the 30 years he had spent in the prison. Here was a man who had a son and daughter in college, who was getting close to retirement himself, Imani thought.
“He was talking about how when he first got here, they would take the kids on field trips, and now he’s standing there in a full military jumpsuit, with a giant bottle of mace on his hip, a panic button, a tazer, handcuffs, and a baton, right?” Imani said. “And you could just hear it in his voice that that’s not why he came here.”
For Imani, that was when a pivotal shift occurred. “That was the moment when I realized, that these guards too are somebody’s fathers, they’re somebody’s sons, they’re somebody’s children,” he said. “And as much as I want to fight for our children to get a fair shake, that I had not been present to fight for them to get a fair shake. While some of them have committed horrible atrocities, the same goes for some of our children in these facilities too.”
One of the ways that changed him, and the Ella Baker Center, was that they began to fight for the “jailed and the jailer.” He was able to connect with people on both sides of the fence.
“He is an incredible bridge-builder,” Esperanza Tervalon-Daumont, the Executive Director of Oakland Rising, an organization that works on social justice issues, with which Imani was also involved.
Daumont, who was recommended for the job at Oakland Rising by Imani more than three years ago, said this trait was what made Imani a strong leader. “He has a really bold vision,” she said.
Imani said that interaction with the jail guard made him remember a saying from Gandhi — that justice was wide and deep. “And I think that changed me as an activist, it made me a lot less angry, and I think it made me a lot more wise,” he said.”
On November 15, the final day of the mail ballot-only special election, the council was to have another meeting and vote on Imani’s appointment again.
In the preceding month, Imani’s appointment had become increasingly complicated. On Oct 18, the council approved him as the next port commissioner, only to have that decision overturned soon after by the city attorney. The reason: the president of the council, Larry Reid (District 7) had encouraged audience members to give up their chance to speak on the issue and allow the council to vote, which the city attorney then said made the vote invalid. And then the recasting of the vote was delayed more than once for different reasons.
But before the council could vote again – hours before the Nov. 15 meeting took place — Imani sent out a press release stating that he had withdrawn his nomination.
For many people who do not know Imani personally, the withdrawal came as a shock, and seemed to be related to other defections from Quan’s administration – City Attorney John Russo, Police Chief Anthony Batts, Deputy Mayor Sharon Cornu, and unofficial legal advisor Dan Siegel all who quit between June and November of this year.
But Imani made it clear that his decision had nothing to do with any falling out with Quan, who at the time was facing a lot of criticism for the city’s handling of the Occupy Oakland encampment that had been set up in front of city hall.
For Imani, this was not a fight worth fighting anymore.
“I’ve been engaged in the nomination process since September, and it became clear to me over time, that the opportunity had little to do with me and Margaret,” he said. “It had to do with the mayor and her opposition,” he continued, hinting that some councilmembers had opposed his nomination.
With the port commissioner nomination debacle behind him, Imani said he will now focus his energies on the Ella Baker Center and Oakland Rising and continue to do the work he has enjoyed doing for so long. “I know this is a critical juncture in our state and our country, so I’m going to focus most of my energies at the Ella Baker Center,” he said.
Imani did not apply for the job so he could put another title under his belt, according to his friends, and he thought the debate over the next port commissioner was detracting from the real issues in West Oakland that needed solving. “He’s not in the work that he’s in for public recognition,” said Eric Gurna, the godfather to Imani’s eldest daughter, and one of his closest friends. Gurna met Imani almost 27 years ago in a seventh grade classroom at Montera Middle School, when their teacher seated the class in alphabetical order.
Gurna remembers Imani as someone who was always willing to engage in a political discussion, and the two friends often would stay up nights talking about politics. But he knew that this was not a debate Imani wanted to be a part of – he preferred doing what he did best, fighting for the disenfranchised at his current job.
“He is not interested in the conversation being on him,” Gurna said. “He’s more focused on standing with the people of Oakland.”
By: Amna Hassan
December 20, 2011 – 11:01 am
When Jakada Imani stepped up to the speakers’ podium in the Oakland City Council chambers on October 4, he didn’t look a bit perturbed. Dressed immaculately in a dark suit, he bore an expression that did not betray emotion.
That night, 18 speakers preceded him at the podium. Two expressed support for him as a new commissioner for the Port of Oakland. The other 16 were indignant that Margaret Gordon was not being reappointed to the same position by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan to serve a second four-year term. Imani had been nominated by Quan, but the council still needed to confirm the appointment with a vote before he could be sworn in, turning the meeting into a debate over which candidate was right for the job.
“Tonight I want to share with you, even in this most awkward moment for me, uh…” Imani said into the microphone, stretching his arms and pausing.
Imani is the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland and a longtime community activist. He knew his appointment to the seven-member board that manages the port was a delicate affair. Gordon is a longtime health and environmental activist, and during her only term on the job, she spearheaded projects aimed at reducing diesel pollution and improving air quality, among others. That work had strengthened her position in many minds, including some present at the meeting, as “the true voice of West Oakland.”
“You know, Margaret Gordon’s a giant and there’s no denying it. You see it when you meet her,” Imani continued. “What makes me still willing to do this and be in this uncomfortable moment is because I came from fighting. I came through fighting.”
Imani has had to battle his entire life. As a child, he said, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, lived in a home with parents addicted to drugs, and was homeless for a brief period of time. He fought the odds to become a well-respected community leader, and strived to find ways to protect the rights of the disenfranchised. He said that was why he wanted to be a port commissioner – to fight for the people of West Oakland.
The chamber was teeming with people for the meeting on that early October evening — the council was also discussing the implementation of two controversial new gang injunctions, and a large crowd had shown up to voice their opinions. The rows of red velvet chairs were all occupied, and people lined up against the walls, with a few police officers positioned against the back wall in an effort to keep it clear.
As he finished his speech, he urged everyone to come together on principles that would allow everyone to win. “We need to come together,” he said. “And that’s what I want to stand with this people, this city, and this state for.”
But despite the fire and zeal with which Imani has fought for causes he believes in, he knew when it was time to stop and unite.
“Everybody in Oakland’s been fighting,” Imani said. “We’re fighting tonight and we’re going to be fighting later on tonight, and we’ve got nowhere by fighting. Nowhere!”
A little more than a month later, he took his name out of the running for the port commissioner position.
Imani grew up in what he calls a “nice little neighborhood” in East Oakland called Maxwell Park. “It was super, for a small kid,” he said.
In the fourth grade, doctors discovered he had dyslexia, a condition that he describes as “seeing some letters backwards.” Because he was tracked into special education classes, his mother was able to advocate for him to go to schools that lay outside his school district — Thornhill Elementary in Montclair, Maxwell Park. Montera Middle School. He went to Skyline High for a while, and graduated from Oakland High.
School was always a struggle for Imani. “Education wasn’t my thing,” he said, as he sat in a conference room at the Ella Baker Center, which is located on the eighth floor of an office building on Broadway.
“I graduated high school because my counselor took me around to all of my teachers who were failing me and explained to them that if they didn’t give me a passing grade, I would be back and she would put me in their class,” he said with a smile.
He stumbled into community work at the age of 17. While he barely scraped by in school, it was his “probing sensibility” and “racial consciousness” he said that changed his life. Some of that was from his mother, who had gone to school with Bobby Hutton, a member of the Black Panthers party who was later killed, and who had also grown up knowing Huey P. Newton. She instilled an awareness of racial issues in her boys, a trait that one of Imani’s teachers saw when she passed him a flyer for a youth leadership discussion for kids of various ages to come together to discuss issues they were dealing with.
“I saw young people really talking about race and class and liberation and oppression and sexual orientation for the first time, and I was completely blown away,” Imani said of the first leadership discussion he attended.
His life at home was difficult. His parents had started using drugs, he said, and their addiction was spiraling out of control. “Crack in particular,” Imani said. “That changed a lot of things for us. We lost our house for a while. For a while, we were homeless.”
He moved out of the house at the age of 18 when he found a job as a workshop leader focused on peer-to-peer education, teaching others about ways in which they could get involved in helping their communities, at a variety of venues in the Bay Area.“Basically hustling here and there, getting little one-off contracts and consulting gigs,” he said. He worked part-time until he found a more permanent job in San Francisco, doing youth leadership and development for The Kellog Koshland Youth leadership Program at Community Educational Services.
While working in San Francisco, Imani heard Oakland City Councilmember Nancy Nadel’s office was seeking someone with a background in organizing, and he applied for the job of constituent liaison in 1998.
Imani said he learned a lot about District 3 and how local government works during his time with Nadel’s office. He also learned about the health issues that people of West Oakland were dealing with on a regular basis because they live adjacent to a large and busy port complex. “I learned about pollution and brown fields and all the stuff that people in West Oakland were dealing with in terms of health issues,” he said.
Imani was living at the time near the post office in West Oakland, in a house that was just off the Highway 880 corridor, near the port. He remembers being confused by the excessive amounts of dust that would find its way in through the cracks in the doors and windows.
“Then I came to know that it was particulate matter,” he said, a mixture of acids, organic chemicals, metals and dust particles that polluted the area. “At the time, I was allowing one kid to breathe that in everyday.” Today, two of his four daughters have asthma, which he said he thinks may have been a result of exposure to toxins in West Oakland’s air.
As Nadel’s constituent liaison, he also had to respond to residents’ complaints about potholes and stop signs — a job which he said he respects but was never meant to do. Plus, he said, when he took the job, he really wanted to focus on work in West Oakland, and assumed Nadel would want him to do the same. “But that’s not the entire district, right?” said Imani with a chuckle. “It’s Jack London Square, and the lake and the downtown area.”
Much of his work became “liaison work,” he said; he coordinated between different departments and answered community requests instead of doing the kind of grass roots organizing he preferred. “That’s not what I was in it for at all,” Imani said. “So that led to me saying I’m going come to the Ella Baker Center.
“And that was 11 years ago,” he continued. “I became a youth organizer, worked my way up to being director of programs, later ran a campaign, because I wanted to be in the trenches, and four years ago became the executive director.”
In his early years at the Ella Baker Center, Imani campaigned against Proposition 21, legislation that allowed teenagers as young as 14 years old to be tried and charged as adults. While the proposition passed in 2000, Imani said he learned a lot from the experience and it affected his work at the Ella Baker Center. He then began to focus his work on reducing the number of juvenile prisons, and the number of inmates in California through a campaign he spearheaded called “Books not Bars.”
Books not Bars aims to transform the criminal justice system, by organizing families of incarcerated youth throughout the state to get involved in the rehabilitation of their children, and by advocating for the education of these children.
In 2006, Imani arranged for the group to take a guided tour and hold a press conference at a large juvenile correctional facility in Chino called H.G. Stark. Imani was part of the advance team sent to scout the area and meet with prison staff.
By the time he had flown to Los Angeles, and then driven to Paso Robles, the team had acquired the approval of numerous levels of prison bureaucracy. It had taken months of tedious requests and follow-ups to get various officials to sign off on the visit, and Imani’s team had to plow through bundles of red tape before they got everyone on board.
So when Imani drove into the sprawling facility, he did not foresee any more problems. He was wrong. “I got there and the shift sergeant is like, ‘No! You can’t go on tour. No, you can’t see this. No, you can’t do that. No, no, no, no.’”
Furious at being turned away, Imani strode back to his car, got inside, and began calling everyone he knew who could possibly help. “It made my blood boil,” he said. “I’m just fuming. I’m going, ‘They don’t understand that these are somebody’s kids, somebody’s son, brother, niece, nephew.’”
It was a Saturday morning, and Imani was trying to reach people who were not in their offices, but he still continued to dial every number he could come up with. Finally, he was able to reach various jail officials on the phone, and the jail’s superintendent showed up soon after and gave the group the OK to proceed as planned.
While he was waiting outside the prison, one of the guards, an older Latino man with a weathered face, drove out of the compound and sat next to Imani. Imani reckoned the man was in his late 50s or early 60s. Imani listened with increasing curiosity as the guard began to talk about the 30 years he had spent in the prison. Here was a man who had a son and daughter in college, who was getting close to retirement himself, Imani thought.
“He was talking about how when he first got here, they would take the kids on field trips, and now he’s standing there in a full military jumpsuit, with a giant bottle of mace on his hip, a panic button, a tazer, handcuffs, and a baton, right?” Imani said. “And you could just hear it in his voice that that’s not why he came here.”
For Imani, that was when a pivotal shift occurred. “That was the moment when I realized, that these guards too are somebody’s fathers, they’re somebody’s sons, they’re somebody’s children,” he said. “And as much as I want to fight for our children to get a fair shake, that I had not been present to fight for them to get a fair shake. While some of them have committed horrible atrocities, the same goes for some of our children in these facilities too.”
One of the ways that changed him, and the Ella Baker Center, was that they began to fight for the “jailed and the jailer.” He was able to connect with people on both sides of the fence.
“He is an incredible bridge-builder,” Esperanza Tervalon-Daumont, the Executive Director of Oakland Rising, an organization that works on social justice issues, with which Imani was also involved.
Daumont, who was recommended for the job at Oakland Rising by Imani more than three years ago, said this trait was what made Imani a strong leader. “He has a really bold vision,” she said.
Imani said that interaction with the jail guard made him remember a saying from Gandhi — that justice was wide and deep. “And I think that changed me as an activist, it made me a lot less angry, and I think it made me a lot more wise,” he said.”
On November 15, the final day of the mail ballot-only special election, the council was to have another meeting and vote on Imani’s appointment again.
In the preceding month, Imani’s appointment had become increasingly complicated. On Oct 18, the council approved him as the next port commissioner, only to have that decision overturned soon after by the city attorney. The reason: the president of the council, Larry Reid (District 7) had encouraged audience members to give up their chance to speak on the issue and allow the council to vote, which the city attorney then said made the vote invalid. And then the recasting of the vote was delayed more than once for different reasons.
But before the council could vote again – hours before the Nov. 15 meeting took place — Imani sent out a press release stating that he had withdrawn his nomination.
For many people who do not know Imani personally, the withdrawal came as a shock, and seemed to be related to other defections from Quan’s administration – City Attorney John Russo, Police Chief Anthony Batts, Deputy Mayor Sharon Cornu, and unofficial legal advisor Dan Siegel all who quit between June and November of this year.
But Imani made it clear that his decision had nothing to do with any falling out with Quan, who at the time was facing a lot of criticism for the city’s handling of the Occupy Oakland encampment that had been set up in front of city hall.
For Imani, this was not a fight worth fighting anymore.
“I’ve been engaged in the nomination process since September, and it became clear to me over time, that the opportunity had little to do with me and Margaret,” he said. “It had to do with the mayor and her opposition,” he continued, hinting that some councilmembers had opposed his nomination.
With the port commissioner nomination debacle behind him, Imani said he will now focus his energies on the Ella Baker Center and Oakland Rising and continue to do the work he has enjoyed doing for so long. “I know this is a critical juncture in our state and our country, so I’m going to focus most of my energies at the Ella Baker Center,” he said.
Imani did not apply for the job so he could put another title under his belt, according to his friends, and he thought the debate over the next port commissioner was detracting from the real issues in West Oakland that needed solving. “He’s not in the work that he’s in for public recognition,” said Eric Gurna, the godfather to Imani’s eldest daughter, and one of his closest friends. Gurna met Imani almost 27 years ago in a seventh grade classroom at Montera Middle School, when their teacher seated the class in alphabetical order.
Gurna remembers Imani as someone who was always willing to engage in a political discussion, and the two friends often would stay up nights talking about politics. But he knew that this was not a debate Imani wanted to be a part of – he preferred doing what he did best, fighting for the disenfranchised at his current job.
“He is not interested in the conversation being on him,” Gurna said. “He’s more focused on standing with the people of Oakland.”
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
“This is Where I’m Going To Be When I Die,” Say Prisoners Sentenced For Juvenile Crimes
By William Fisher
The Public Record
Dec 3rd, 2011
Amnesty International is calling on the US justice system to stop sentencing young men and women to “life in prison without the possibility of release” for crimes they committed when were under 18 years old. More than 2,500 prisoners are currently serving such sentences in US prisons today.
In a new report, “‘This is where I’m going to be when I die’: Children facing life imprisonment without the possibility of release in the United States,” Amnesty charges that children as young as 11 at the time of the crime have faced life imprisonment without parole in the United States – the only country in the world to impose this sentence on children.
The report says, “Sentencing children to die in prison flouts a principle of international human rights law recognized and respected across the world, except by the USA. No other country is currently known to impose life imprisonment” without the possibility of parole for crimes, however serious, committed when they were children.
“In the United States, people under 18 cannot vote, buy alcohol or lottery tickets or consent to most forms of medical treatment, but they can be sentenced to die in prison for their actions. This needs to change,” says Natacha Mension, U. S. campaigner at Amnesty International (AI).
In the United States, life without parole can be imposed on juvenile offenders as a mandatory punishment – without consideration of mitigating factors such as history of abuse or trauma, degree of involvement in the crime, mental health status, or amenability to rehabilitation.
“We are not excusing crimes committed by children or minimizing their consequences, but the simple reality is that these sentences ignore the special potential for rehabilitation and change that young offenders have,” said Mension.
In May 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court said life without parole is “an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile,” as the young offender will serve, on average, more years and a greater percentage of his life in prison than an older offender. “A 16-year-old and a 75-year-old each sentenced to life without parole receive the same punishment in name only,” the Court said.
Eighteen months after prohibiting this sentence for non-homicide crimes committed by under-18-year-olds, on November 8, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to consider this issue in relation to crimes involving murder. It will not issue a decision until the second quarter of 2012 at the earliest.
The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entered into force more than two decades ago, expressly prohibits the imposition of life imprisonment without the possibility of release for offenses, however serious, committed by people under 18 years old. All countries except the United States and Somalia have ratified the Convention.
“It is long past time for the United States to ratify the Convention without reservations or other limiting conditions and to fully implement its prohibition on the use of life imprisonment without release against children, including in relation to the cases of those already sentenced,” said Mension.
But the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the USA did ratify in 1992, acknowledges the need for special treatment of children in the criminal justice system and emphasizes the importance of procedures that take account of their age and facilitate their rehabilitation.
The report says this international prohibition “does not stem from any inclination to excuse crimes committed by children or to minimize the consequences of such crimes for the victims and their families. It stems, rather, from recognition that children, who are still developing, are not fully mature, and hence not fully responsible for their actions.”
These “offenders have a special potential for rehabilitation and change. It is not that young people should not be held accountable for their actions. It is that this accountability must be achieved in ways that reflect the offender’s young age and his or her is utterly incompatible with basic principles of juvenile justice.”
Amnesty International’s 34-page report illustrates the issue through the stories of Christi Cheramie, Jacqueline Montanez and David Young.
On November 30, Christi Cheramie, who is serving life without parole in Louisiana, will submit an application for executive clemency with the state Board of Pardons. Christi was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release in 1994, when she was 16 years old for the killing of her 18-year-old fiancé’s great aunt.
She pleaded guilty just before her trial in adult court began, fearing she could be sentenced to death if the trial went ahead. Her guilty plea prevents her from directly appealing her conviction or sentence.
A psychiatrist who saw Christi prior to her trial said that she was a “depressed, dependent, and insecure” 16-year-old who “seems to have been fearful of crossing” her fiancé, who she maintains committed the crime. Christi’s childhood was marked by sexual abuse. At the age of 13, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic after trying to commit suicide on at least two occasions.
After spending half of her life in prison, Christi believes she has changed in many ways. She has obtained a high school equivalency diploma, a degree in agricultural studies, and teaches a number of classes at the prison. A warden has stated that she is “worthy of a second chance.”
A clemency campaign is also pending for a second person whose case is profiled in AI’s report. Jacqueline Montanez is the only woman in Illinois serving a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a crime committed as a child. A victim of child abuse, Jacqueline began abusing drugs and alcohol at the age of nine. Jacqueline’s abuser was her step-father, a gang leader, who also involved her in the drug trade as a very young child and groomed her to be his “little soldier.” After running away from home and joining a rival gang, she and two older women shot and killed two adult male members of her step-father’s gang.
Because she was 15 at the time of the crime and charged with first degree murder, she was automatically tried in adult criminal court. This denied the court system the opportunity of conducting a transfer hearing to determine whether her case ought to have been tried in juvenile court where factors such as her young age, home environment or amenability to rehabilitation would have been considered. Jacqueline was also automatically sentenced to life without parole due to her conviction; the sentencing court had no discretion to consider her history, her age, the circumstances of the offense or her potential for rehabilitation.
Now 35 years old, she expresses deep remorse for her actions and believes that she has grown into a very different person. She has obtained a high school equivalency diploma and has become a certified trainer of service dogs for disabled people. She grieves for her victims and the pain that their families have suffered.
In Illinois, 80 percent of children in prison for life without parole received mandatory sentences; about 82 percent are prisoners of color. That number is even higher in Cook County, where the Montanez case originated. These findings were published by the Illinois Coalition on the Fair Sentencing of Children in its 2008 report, “Categorically Less Culpable, Children Sentenced to Life Without Parole in Illinois.”
Jacqueline’s petition for executive clemency will be submitted to the Illinois governor and the Prisoner Review Board in January 2012.
David Young is one of two teenagers arrested and charged for the murder of Charles Welch in 1997. He was automatically charged in adult criminal court as required by North Carolina law for any criminal offense committed by anyone age 16 or older. Young’s co-defendant, who shot the victim, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 19 to 23 years in prison. David was convicted of first-degree felony murder and was sentenced to life without parole.
Young grew up in a hostile community environment where his parents abused drugs and his stepfather physically abused him and his mother. Now 32 years old, Young obtained his high school equivalency diploma and is in solitary confinement after being stabbed by two prisoners.
William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.
The Public Record
Dec 3rd, 2011
Amnesty International is calling on the US justice system to stop sentencing young men and women to “life in prison without the possibility of release” for crimes they committed when were under 18 years old. More than 2,500 prisoners are currently serving such sentences in US prisons today.
In a new report, “‘This is where I’m going to be when I die’: Children facing life imprisonment without the possibility of release in the United States,” Amnesty charges that children as young as 11 at the time of the crime have faced life imprisonment without parole in the United States – the only country in the world to impose this sentence on children.
The report says, “Sentencing children to die in prison flouts a principle of international human rights law recognized and respected across the world, except by the USA. No other country is currently known to impose life imprisonment” without the possibility of parole for crimes, however serious, committed when they were children.
“In the United States, people under 18 cannot vote, buy alcohol or lottery tickets or consent to most forms of medical treatment, but they can be sentenced to die in prison for their actions. This needs to change,” says Natacha Mension, U. S. campaigner at Amnesty International (AI).
In the United States, life without parole can be imposed on juvenile offenders as a mandatory punishment – without consideration of mitigating factors such as history of abuse or trauma, degree of involvement in the crime, mental health status, or amenability to rehabilitation.
“We are not excusing crimes committed by children or minimizing their consequences, but the simple reality is that these sentences ignore the special potential for rehabilitation and change that young offenders have,” said Mension.
In May 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court said life without parole is “an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile,” as the young offender will serve, on average, more years and a greater percentage of his life in prison than an older offender. “A 16-year-old and a 75-year-old each sentenced to life without parole receive the same punishment in name only,” the Court said.
Eighteen months after prohibiting this sentence for non-homicide crimes committed by under-18-year-olds, on November 8, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to consider this issue in relation to crimes involving murder. It will not issue a decision until the second quarter of 2012 at the earliest.
The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entered into force more than two decades ago, expressly prohibits the imposition of life imprisonment without the possibility of release for offenses, however serious, committed by people under 18 years old. All countries except the United States and Somalia have ratified the Convention.
“It is long past time for the United States to ratify the Convention without reservations or other limiting conditions and to fully implement its prohibition on the use of life imprisonment without release against children, including in relation to the cases of those already sentenced,” said Mension.
But the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the USA did ratify in 1992, acknowledges the need for special treatment of children in the criminal justice system and emphasizes the importance of procedures that take account of their age and facilitate their rehabilitation.
The report says this international prohibition “does not stem from any inclination to excuse crimes committed by children or to minimize the consequences of such crimes for the victims and their families. It stems, rather, from recognition that children, who are still developing, are not fully mature, and hence not fully responsible for their actions.”
These “offenders have a special potential for rehabilitation and change. It is not that young people should not be held accountable for their actions. It is that this accountability must be achieved in ways that reflect the offender’s young age and his or her is utterly incompatible with basic principles of juvenile justice.”
Amnesty International’s 34-page report illustrates the issue through the stories of Christi Cheramie, Jacqueline Montanez and David Young.
On November 30, Christi Cheramie, who is serving life without parole in Louisiana, will submit an application for executive clemency with the state Board of Pardons. Christi was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release in 1994, when she was 16 years old for the killing of her 18-year-old fiancé’s great aunt.
She pleaded guilty just before her trial in adult court began, fearing she could be sentenced to death if the trial went ahead. Her guilty plea prevents her from directly appealing her conviction or sentence.
A psychiatrist who saw Christi prior to her trial said that she was a “depressed, dependent, and insecure” 16-year-old who “seems to have been fearful of crossing” her fiancé, who she maintains committed the crime. Christi’s childhood was marked by sexual abuse. At the age of 13, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic after trying to commit suicide on at least two occasions.
After spending half of her life in prison, Christi believes she has changed in many ways. She has obtained a high school equivalency diploma, a degree in agricultural studies, and teaches a number of classes at the prison. A warden has stated that she is “worthy of a second chance.”
A clemency campaign is also pending for a second person whose case is profiled in AI’s report. Jacqueline Montanez is the only woman in Illinois serving a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a crime committed as a child. A victim of child abuse, Jacqueline began abusing drugs and alcohol at the age of nine. Jacqueline’s abuser was her step-father, a gang leader, who also involved her in the drug trade as a very young child and groomed her to be his “little soldier.” After running away from home and joining a rival gang, she and two older women shot and killed two adult male members of her step-father’s gang.
Because she was 15 at the time of the crime and charged with first degree murder, she was automatically tried in adult criminal court. This denied the court system the opportunity of conducting a transfer hearing to determine whether her case ought to have been tried in juvenile court where factors such as her young age, home environment or amenability to rehabilitation would have been considered. Jacqueline was also automatically sentenced to life without parole due to her conviction; the sentencing court had no discretion to consider her history, her age, the circumstances of the offense or her potential for rehabilitation.
Now 35 years old, she expresses deep remorse for her actions and believes that she has grown into a very different person. She has obtained a high school equivalency diploma and has become a certified trainer of service dogs for disabled people. She grieves for her victims and the pain that their families have suffered.
In Illinois, 80 percent of children in prison for life without parole received mandatory sentences; about 82 percent are prisoners of color. That number is even higher in Cook County, where the Montanez case originated. These findings were published by the Illinois Coalition on the Fair Sentencing of Children in its 2008 report, “Categorically Less Culpable, Children Sentenced to Life Without Parole in Illinois.”
Jacqueline’s petition for executive clemency will be submitted to the Illinois governor and the Prisoner Review Board in January 2012.
David Young is one of two teenagers arrested and charged for the murder of Charles Welch in 1997. He was automatically charged in adult criminal court as required by North Carolina law for any criminal offense committed by anyone age 16 or older. Young’s co-defendant, who shot the victim, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 19 to 23 years in prison. David was convicted of first-degree felony murder and was sentenced to life without parole.
Young grew up in a hostile community environment where his parents abused drugs and his stepfather physically abused him and his mother. Now 32 years old, Young obtained his high school equivalency diploma and is in solitary confinement after being stabbed by two prisoners.
William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.
California prison population drops by 8,000 since realignment
Dec. 16, 2011 | By Julie Small | KPCC
The number of inmates in California prisons has dropped by 8,000 since “realignment” took effect Oct. 1. Court papers state officials filed Thursday indicate the change. Officials reported the new numbers Thursday under a federal court order to reduce crowding in the prisons.
In its monthly status report to the court, officials said the state prison population dropped by 8,218 between Oct. 5 and Dec. 7.
California prison officials say the transfer of low-level felons to county officials that began in October will allow the state to meet a court-ordered reduction a month after a Dec. 27 deadline.
In its monthly status report to the court, officials said the state prison population dropped by 8,218 between Oct. 5 and Dec. 7.
California prison officials say the transfer of low-level felons to county officials that began in October will allow the state to meet a court-ordered reduction a month after a Dec. 27 deadline.
The state’s prison population has declined from a record high of 173,000 in 2006 to the current population of 135,000. But many prisons remain packed with almost twice the number of inmates they were designed to hold.
About two years ago, attorneys at the Prison Law Office convinced a panel of three federal judges that crowded conditions prevented inmates from getting basic medical care. The judges ordered California to reduce the state inmate population within two years.
About two years ago, attorneys at the Prison Law Office convinced a panel of three federal judges that crowded conditions prevented inmates from getting basic medical care. The judges ordered California to reduce the state inmate population within two years.
In March this year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that order.
The court order and state budget deficits convinced state lawmakers to enact Gov. Jerry Brown's historic "realignment" plan that shifts responsibility for non-serious, non-violent, non-sex offenders to counties. The Legislature also diverted some sales tax and vehicle licensing revenues in the next fiscal year to help local government pay for the new responsibility. The law took effect Oct. 1.
The court order and state budget deficits convinced state lawmakers to enact Gov. Jerry Brown's historic "realignment" plan that shifts responsibility for non-serious, non-violent, non-sex offenders to counties. The Legislature also diverted some sales tax and vehicle licensing revenues in the next fiscal year to help local government pay for the new responsibility. The law took effect Oct. 1.
Michelle Alexander on The New Jim Crow and the school-to-prison pipeline
December 20, 2011 by rethinkingschoolsblog
by Jody Sokolower
Last spring I went to hear Michelle Alexander, the dynamic author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She spoke to an overflow audience at a primarily African American church.
We were transfixed as she described how difficult it had been for her, as a civil rights attorney, to face the current realities of what is happening with prisons in this country and its impact on people of color. It was the stories of one formerly incarcerated person after another that finally broke through her long-held beliefs about the justice system. She went on to explain her thought-provoking and disturbing thesis: Mass incarceration, justified and organized around the war on drugs, has become the new face of racial discrimination in the United States.
At that point, we were in the midst of planning the winter issue of Rethinking Schools—available the first week in January—which focuses on the school-to-prison pipeline. I realized how important Michelle’s perspective is in understanding how the criminalization of youth fits into the larger social picture. So we asked her to provide a context for our readers by sharing her thoughts about the implications of her work when applied to education and the lives of children and youth. She agreed. Here is the interview:
RS: What is the impact of mass incarceration on African American children and youth?
MA: There is an extraordinary impact. For African American children, in particular, the odds are extremely high that they will have a parent or loved one, a relative, who has either spent time behind bars or who has acquired a criminal record and thus is part of the under-caste—the group of people who can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives. For many African American children, their fathers, and increasingly their mothers, are behind bars. It is very difficult for them to visit. Many people are held hundreds or even thousands of miles away from home. There is a tremendous amount of shame with having a parent or other family member incarcerated. There can be fear of having it revealed to others at school.
But also, for these children, their life chances are greatly diminished. They are more likely to be raised in severe poverty; their parents are unlikely to be able to find work or housing and are often ineligible even for food stamps.
For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated.
When young black men reach a certain age—whether or not there is incarceration in their families—they themselves are the target of police stops, interrogations, frisks, often for no reason other than their race. And, of course, this level of harassment sends a message to them, often at an early age: No matter who you are or what you do, you’re going to find yourself behind bars one way or the other. This reinforces the sense that prison is part of their destiny, rather than a choice one makes.
A Birdcage as a Metaphor
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
RS: At one point in The New Jim Crow, you refer to the metaphor of a birdcage as a way to describe structural racism and apply that to mass incarceration. How does what is happening to African American youth in our schools fit into that picture?
MA: The idea of the metaphor is there can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don’t have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function. Certainly youth of color, particularly those in ghetto communities, find themselves born into the cage. They are born into a community in which the rules, laws, policies, structures of their lives virtually guarantee that they will remain trapped for life. It begins at a very early age when their parents themselves are either behind bars or locked in a permanent second-class status and cannot afford them the opportunities they otherwise could. For example, those with felony convictions are denied access to public housing, hundreds of professions that require certification, financial support for education, and often the right to vote. Thousands of people are unable even to get food stamps because they were once caught with drugs.
The cage itself is manifested by the ghetto, which is racially segregated, isolated, cut off from social and economic opportunities. The cage is the unequal educational opportunities these children are provided at a very early age coupled with the constant police surveillance they’re likely to encounter, making it very likely that they’re going to serve time and be caught for committing the various types of minor crimes—particularly drug crimes—that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle-class white communities but go largely ignored.
So, for many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they’re born into. Middle-class white children, children of privilege, are afforded the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes and still go on to college, still dream big dreams. But for kids who are born in the ghetto in the era of mass incarceration, the system is designed in such a way that it traps them, often for life.
RS: How do you define and analyze the school-to-prison pipeline?
MA: It’s really part of the large cage or caste that I was describing earlier. The school-to-prison pipeline is another metaphor—a good one for explaining how children are funneled directly from schools into prison. Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.
It’s important for us to understand how school discipline policies have been influenced by the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement. Many people imagine that zero tolerance rhetoric emerged within the school environment, but it’s not true. In fact, the Advancement Project published a report showing that one of the earliest examples of zero tolerance language in school discipline manuals was a cut-and-paste job from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration manual. The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement really flooded our schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive. We began viewing the youth in schools as potential violators rather than as children needing our guidance.
The Mythology of Colorblindness
RS: In your book, you explain that the policies of mass incarceration are technically “colorblind” but lead to starkly racialized results. How do you see this specifically affecting children and young people of color?
MA: The mythology around colorblindness leads people to imagine that if poor kids of color are failing or getting locked up in large numbers, it must be something wrong with them. It leads young kids of color to look around and say: “There must be something wrong with me, there must be something wrong with us. Is there something inherent, something different about me, about us as a people, that leads us to fail so often, that leads us to live in these miserable conditions, that leads us to go in and out of prison?”
The mythology of colorblindness takes the race question off the table. It makes it difficult for people to even formulate the question: Could this be about something more than individual choices? Maybe there is something going on that’s linked to the history of race in our country and the way race is reproducing itself in modern times.
I think this mythology—that of course we’re all beyond race, of course our police officers aren’t racist, of course our politicians don’t mean any harm to people of color—this idea that we’re beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what’s going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest. We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it’s our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we’ve left behind.
RS: We are in the midst of a huge attack on public education—privatization through charters and vouchers; increased standardization, regimentation, and testing; and the destruction of teachers’ unions. Much of it is justified by what appears to be anti-racist rhetoric: Schools aren’t meeting the needs of inner-city children, so their parents need choices. How do you see this?
MA: People who focus solely on what do we do given the current context are avoiding the big why. Why is it that these schools aren’t meeting these kids’ needs? Why is it that such a large percentage of the African American population today is trapped in these ghettos? What is the bigger picture?
The bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education. We are in a social and political context in which the norm is to punish poor folks of color rather than to educate and empower them with economic opportunity. It is that political context that leads some people to ask: Don’t children need to be able to escape poorly performing schools? Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what “is” that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?
The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they’re in silos. But the reality is we’re not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we’re wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system. Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it’s going to building prisons and police forces.
RS: And fighting wars?
MA: Yes, and fighting wars. And where there is so much hopelessness because of the prevalence of mass incarceration.
At the same time, we’re foolish if we think we’re going to end mass incarceration unless we are willing to deal with the reality that huge percentages of poor people are going to remain jobless, locked out of the mainstream economy, unless and until they have a quality education that prepares them well for the new economy. There has got to be much more collaboration between the two movements and a greater appreciation for the work of the advocates in each community. It’s got to be a movement that’s about education, not incarceration—about jobs, not jails. A movement that integrates the work in these various camps from, in my view, a human rights perspective.
Fighting Back
RS: What is the role of teachers in responding to this crisis? What should we be doing in our classrooms? What should we be doing as education activists?
MA: That is a wonderful question and one I’m wrestling with myself now. I am in the process of working with others trying to develop curriculum and materials that will make it easier to talk to young people about these issues in ways that won’t lead to paralysis, fear, or resignation, but instead will enlighten and inspire action and critical thinking in the future. It’s very difficult but it must be done.
We have to be willing to take some risks. In my experience, there is a lot of hesitancy to approach these issues in the classroom out of fear that students will become emotional or angry, or that the information will reinforce their sense of futility about their own lives and experience. It’s important to teach them about the reality of the system, that it is in fact the case that they are being targeted unfairly, that the rules have been set up in a way that authorize unfair treatment of them, and how difficult it is to challenge these laws in the courts. We need to teach them how our politics have changed in recent years, how there has been, in fact, a backlash. But we need to couple that information with stories of how people in the past have challenged these kinds of injustices, and the role that youth have played historically in those struggles.
I think it’s important to encourage young people to tell their own stories and to speak openly about their own experiences with the criminal justice system and the experiences of their family. We need to ensure that the classroom environment is a supportive one so that the shame and stigma can be dispelled. Then teachers can use those stories of what students have witnessed and experienced as the opportunity to begin asking questions: How did we get here? Why is this happening? How are things different in other communities? How is this linked to what has gone on in prior periods of our nation’s history? And what, then, can we do about it?
Just providing information about how bad things are, or the statistics and data on incarceration by themselves, does lead to more depression and resignation and is not empowering. The information has to be presented in a way that’s linked to the piece about encouraging students to think critically and creatively about how they might respond to injustice, and how young people have responded to injustice in the past.
RS: What specifically?
MA: There’s a range of possibilities. I was inspired by what students have done in some schools organizing walkouts protesting the lack of funding and that sort of thing. There are opportunities for students to engage in those types of protests—taking to the streets—but there is also writing poetry, writing music, beginning to express themselves, holding forums, educating each other, the whole range. For example, for a period of time the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Calif., was focused on youth engagement and advocacy to challenge mass incarceration. They launched a number of youth campaigns to close youth incarceration facilities in northern California. They demonstrated that it is really possible to blend hip-hop culture with very creative and specific advocacy and to develop young leaders. Young people today are very creative in using social media and there is a wide range of ways that they can get involved.
The most important thing at this stage is inspiring an awakening. There is a tremendous amount of confusion and denial that exists about mass incarceration today, and that is the biggest barrier to movement building. As long as we remain in denial about this system, movement building will be impossible. Exposing youth in classrooms to the truth about this system and developing their critical capacities will, I believe, open the door to meaningful engagement and collective, inspired action.
http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/michelle-alexander-on-the-new-jim-crow-and-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/
by Jody Sokolower
Last spring I went to hear Michelle Alexander, the dynamic author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She spoke to an overflow audience at a primarily African American church.
We were transfixed as she described how difficult it had been for her, as a civil rights attorney, to face the current realities of what is happening with prisons in this country and its impact on people of color. It was the stories of one formerly incarcerated person after another that finally broke through her long-held beliefs about the justice system. She went on to explain her thought-provoking and disturbing thesis: Mass incarceration, justified and organized around the war on drugs, has become the new face of racial discrimination in the United States.
At that point, we were in the midst of planning the winter issue of Rethinking Schools—available the first week in January—which focuses on the school-to-prison pipeline. I realized how important Michelle’s perspective is in understanding how the criminalization of youth fits into the larger social picture. So we asked her to provide a context for our readers by sharing her thoughts about the implications of her work when applied to education and the lives of children and youth. She agreed. Here is the interview:
RS: What is the impact of mass incarceration on African American children and youth?
MA: There is an extraordinary impact. For African American children, in particular, the odds are extremely high that they will have a parent or loved one, a relative, who has either spent time behind bars or who has acquired a criminal record and thus is part of the under-caste—the group of people who can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives. For many African American children, their fathers, and increasingly their mothers, are behind bars. It is very difficult for them to visit. Many people are held hundreds or even thousands of miles away from home. There is a tremendous amount of shame with having a parent or other family member incarcerated. There can be fear of having it revealed to others at school.
But also, for these children, their life chances are greatly diminished. They are more likely to be raised in severe poverty; their parents are unlikely to be able to find work or housing and are often ineligible even for food stamps.
For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated.
When young black men reach a certain age—whether or not there is incarceration in their families—they themselves are the target of police stops, interrogations, frisks, often for no reason other than their race. And, of course, this level of harassment sends a message to them, often at an early age: No matter who you are or what you do, you’re going to find yourself behind bars one way or the other. This reinforces the sense that prison is part of their destiny, rather than a choice one makes.
A Birdcage as a Metaphor
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
RS: At one point in The New Jim Crow, you refer to the metaphor of a birdcage as a way to describe structural racism and apply that to mass incarceration. How does what is happening to African American youth in our schools fit into that picture?
MA: The idea of the metaphor is there can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don’t have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function. Certainly youth of color, particularly those in ghetto communities, find themselves born into the cage. They are born into a community in which the rules, laws, policies, structures of their lives virtually guarantee that they will remain trapped for life. It begins at a very early age when their parents themselves are either behind bars or locked in a permanent second-class status and cannot afford them the opportunities they otherwise could. For example, those with felony convictions are denied access to public housing, hundreds of professions that require certification, financial support for education, and often the right to vote. Thousands of people are unable even to get food stamps because they were once caught with drugs.
The cage itself is manifested by the ghetto, which is racially segregated, isolated, cut off from social and economic opportunities. The cage is the unequal educational opportunities these children are provided at a very early age coupled with the constant police surveillance they’re likely to encounter, making it very likely that they’re going to serve time and be caught for committing the various types of minor crimes—particularly drug crimes—that occur with roughly equal frequency in middle-class white communities but go largely ignored.
So, for many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they’re born into. Middle-class white children, children of privilege, are afforded the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes and still go on to college, still dream big dreams. But for kids who are born in the ghetto in the era of mass incarceration, the system is designed in such a way that it traps them, often for life.
RS: How do you define and analyze the school-to-prison pipeline?
MA: It’s really part of the large cage or caste that I was describing earlier. The school-to-prison pipeline is another metaphor—a good one for explaining how children are funneled directly from schools into prison. Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.
It’s important for us to understand how school discipline policies have been influenced by the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement. Many people imagine that zero tolerance rhetoric emerged within the school environment, but it’s not true. In fact, the Advancement Project published a report showing that one of the earliest examples of zero tolerance language in school discipline manuals was a cut-and-paste job from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration manual. The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement really flooded our schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive. We began viewing the youth in schools as potential violators rather than as children needing our guidance.
The Mythology of Colorblindness
RS: In your book, you explain that the policies of mass incarceration are technically “colorblind” but lead to starkly racialized results. How do you see this specifically affecting children and young people of color?
MA: The mythology around colorblindness leads people to imagine that if poor kids of color are failing or getting locked up in large numbers, it must be something wrong with them. It leads young kids of color to look around and say: “There must be something wrong with me, there must be something wrong with us. Is there something inherent, something different about me, about us as a people, that leads us to fail so often, that leads us to live in these miserable conditions, that leads us to go in and out of prison?”
The mythology of colorblindness takes the race question off the table. It makes it difficult for people to even formulate the question: Could this be about something more than individual choices? Maybe there is something going on that’s linked to the history of race in our country and the way race is reproducing itself in modern times.
I think this mythology—that of course we’re all beyond race, of course our police officers aren’t racist, of course our politicians don’t mean any harm to people of color—this idea that we’re beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what’s going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest. We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it’s our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we’ve left behind.
RS: We are in the midst of a huge attack on public education—privatization through charters and vouchers; increased standardization, regimentation, and testing; and the destruction of teachers’ unions. Much of it is justified by what appears to be anti-racist rhetoric: Schools aren’t meeting the needs of inner-city children, so their parents need choices. How do you see this?
MA: People who focus solely on what do we do given the current context are avoiding the big why. Why is it that these schools aren’t meeting these kids’ needs? Why is it that such a large percentage of the African American population today is trapped in these ghettos? What is the bigger picture?
The bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education. We are in a social and political context in which the norm is to punish poor folks of color rather than to educate and empower them with economic opportunity. It is that political context that leads some people to ask: Don’t children need to be able to escape poorly performing schools? Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what “is” that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?
The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they’re in silos. But the reality is we’re not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we’re wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system. Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it’s going to building prisons and police forces.
RS: And fighting wars?
MA: Yes, and fighting wars. And where there is so much hopelessness because of the prevalence of mass incarceration.
At the same time, we’re foolish if we think we’re going to end mass incarceration unless we are willing to deal with the reality that huge percentages of poor people are going to remain jobless, locked out of the mainstream economy, unless and until they have a quality education that prepares them well for the new economy. There has got to be much more collaboration between the two movements and a greater appreciation for the work of the advocates in each community. It’s got to be a movement that’s about education, not incarceration—about jobs, not jails. A movement that integrates the work in these various camps from, in my view, a human rights perspective.
Fighting Back
RS: What is the role of teachers in responding to this crisis? What should we be doing in our classrooms? What should we be doing as education activists?
MA: That is a wonderful question and one I’m wrestling with myself now. I am in the process of working with others trying to develop curriculum and materials that will make it easier to talk to young people about these issues in ways that won’t lead to paralysis, fear, or resignation, but instead will enlighten and inspire action and critical thinking in the future. It’s very difficult but it must be done.
We have to be willing to take some risks. In my experience, there is a lot of hesitancy to approach these issues in the classroom out of fear that students will become emotional or angry, or that the information will reinforce their sense of futility about their own lives and experience. It’s important to teach them about the reality of the system, that it is in fact the case that they are being targeted unfairly, that the rules have been set up in a way that authorize unfair treatment of them, and how difficult it is to challenge these laws in the courts. We need to teach them how our politics have changed in recent years, how there has been, in fact, a backlash. But we need to couple that information with stories of how people in the past have challenged these kinds of injustices, and the role that youth have played historically in those struggles.
I think it’s important to encourage young people to tell their own stories and to speak openly about their own experiences with the criminal justice system and the experiences of their family. We need to ensure that the classroom environment is a supportive one so that the shame and stigma can be dispelled. Then teachers can use those stories of what students have witnessed and experienced as the opportunity to begin asking questions: How did we get here? Why is this happening? How are things different in other communities? How is this linked to what has gone on in prior periods of our nation’s history? And what, then, can we do about it?
Just providing information about how bad things are, or the statistics and data on incarceration by themselves, does lead to more depression and resignation and is not empowering. The information has to be presented in a way that’s linked to the piece about encouraging students to think critically and creatively about how they might respond to injustice, and how young people have responded to injustice in the past.
RS: What specifically?
MA: There’s a range of possibilities. I was inspired by what students have done in some schools organizing walkouts protesting the lack of funding and that sort of thing. There are opportunities for students to engage in those types of protests—taking to the streets—but there is also writing poetry, writing music, beginning to express themselves, holding forums, educating each other, the whole range. For example, for a period of time the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Calif., was focused on youth engagement and advocacy to challenge mass incarceration. They launched a number of youth campaigns to close youth incarceration facilities in northern California. They demonstrated that it is really possible to blend hip-hop culture with very creative and specific advocacy and to develop young leaders. Young people today are very creative in using social media and there is a wide range of ways that they can get involved.
The most important thing at this stage is inspiring an awakening. There is a tremendous amount of confusion and denial that exists about mass incarceration today, and that is the biggest barrier to movement building. As long as we remain in denial about this system, movement building will be impossible. Exposing youth in classrooms to the truth about this system and developing their critical capacities will, I believe, open the door to meaningful engagement and collective, inspired action.
http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/michelle-alexander-on-the-new-jim-crow-and-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/
Monday, December 19, 2011
"The Failed American Dream," by Kim Carter
Via Huffington Post
At one point in its history the Southern Californian city of San Bernardino was named an "All-America" city. Business was booming and people were moving in from across the nation to get a piece of the American Dream. In 2007 however, it was labeled as the 14th poorest city in America. Today it is the rated the second in the nation for poverty, right after Detroit. Whatever happened?
The city that was once thriving with middle-wage earning blue-collar workers is now home to frightening statistics on homeless, joblessness, and poverty. The decline traces back to several events, including the closure of the Norton Air Force Base, which took 10,000 military and civilian jobs in the 1970s. Forty years later to date, San Bernardino is suffering from job-loss in areas like construction, and other related fields.
The numbers provided by the U.S. Census Bureau are eye-opening to say the least. Currently, it is the second poorest large-sized city in the United States. The current figures show that 34.6 percent fall below the poverty line. This means that almost 1/3 of the city residents are classified as poor, an estimate of 72,000 residents.
To make matters worse, home values have plummeted, and unemployment rates are in the double digits. Recent statistics show that 18 percent of the workforce remains jobless. Our homelessness statistics aren't any better: the San Bernardino County Homeless Partnership reported an increase of 66 percent from 2009 to 2011. The conditions are worsening, and there is no end sight.
While the economy as a whole may be out of our control, for those of us within the community, there are new opportunities to serve those in need. If we talk about the investment or allocation of funds that could be put into re-using the foreclosed home stock to provide transitional living programs that include independent living skills, and financial education and money management... Having an increase in stable housing enables a person to focus on other crucial necessities like employment and healthcare. In addition, it would be very advantageous for the local government to establish guidelines for those persons living outside of the area and wishing to contract for our local dollars, that would insist that a certain percentage of those jobs go directly to local talent. I would suggest anybody contracting for a million or more should have this type of stipulation. We have got to invest in our own.
I was recently interviewed on American Public Media's show, Marketplace, on the subject of the recent housing boom and bust, and about the worsening conditions of our local economy. Although the City of San Bernardino has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the entire nation, I stated in my interview that society would rather keep facilities closed and abandoned than to provide a place for homeless families to thrive, even though the number of foreclosed properties is staggering. This is an extremely sad situation. The necessity for those in poverty and homelessness to have access to essential resources is greater than ever. The need for programs and supportive services to not only mend broken families, but to restore the fabric of society is monumental. The time for investment in infrastructure, and programs, is now.
At one point in its history the Southern Californian city of San Bernardino was named an "All-America" city. Business was booming and people were moving in from across the nation to get a piece of the American Dream. In 2007 however, it was labeled as the 14th poorest city in America. Today it is the rated the second in the nation for poverty, right after Detroit. Whatever happened?
The city that was once thriving with middle-wage earning blue-collar workers is now home to frightening statistics on homeless, joblessness, and poverty. The decline traces back to several events, including the closure of the Norton Air Force Base, which took 10,000 military and civilian jobs in the 1970s. Forty years later to date, San Bernardino is suffering from job-loss in areas like construction, and other related fields.
The numbers provided by the U.S. Census Bureau are eye-opening to say the least. Currently, it is the second poorest large-sized city in the United States. The current figures show that 34.6 percent fall below the poverty line. This means that almost 1/3 of the city residents are classified as poor, an estimate of 72,000 residents.
To make matters worse, home values have plummeted, and unemployment rates are in the double digits. Recent statistics show that 18 percent of the workforce remains jobless. Our homelessness statistics aren't any better: the San Bernardino County Homeless Partnership reported an increase of 66 percent from 2009 to 2011. The conditions are worsening, and there is no end sight.
While the economy as a whole may be out of our control, for those of us within the community, there are new opportunities to serve those in need. If we talk about the investment or allocation of funds that could be put into re-using the foreclosed home stock to provide transitional living programs that include independent living skills, and financial education and money management... Having an increase in stable housing enables a person to focus on other crucial necessities like employment and healthcare. In addition, it would be very advantageous for the local government to establish guidelines for those persons living outside of the area and wishing to contract for our local dollars, that would insist that a certain percentage of those jobs go directly to local talent. I would suggest anybody contracting for a million or more should have this type of stipulation. We have got to invest in our own.
I was recently interviewed on American Public Media's show, Marketplace, on the subject of the recent housing boom and bust, and about the worsening conditions of our local economy. Although the City of San Bernardino has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the entire nation, I stated in my interview that society would rather keep facilities closed and abandoned than to provide a place for homeless families to thrive, even though the number of foreclosed properties is staggering. This is an extremely sad situation. The necessity for those in poverty and homelessness to have access to essential resources is greater than ever. The need for programs and supportive services to not only mend broken families, but to restore the fabric of society is monumental. The time for investment in infrastructure, and programs, is now.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
'Dismal' prospects: 1 in 2 Americans are now poor or low income
WASHINGTON - Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.
The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.
"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."
Congressional Republicans and Democrats are sparring over legislation that would renew a Social Security payroll tax cut, part of a year-end political showdown over economic priorities that could also trim unemployment benefits, freeze federal pay and reduce entitlement spending.
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, questioned whether some people classified as poor or low-income actually suffer material hardship. He said that while safety-net programs have helped many Americans, they have gone too far, citing poor people who live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.
"There's no doubt the recession has thrown a lot of people out of work and incomes have fallen," Rector said. "As we come out of recession, it will be important that these programs promote self-sufficiency rather than dependence and encourage people to look for work."
Mayors in 29 cities say more than 1 in 4 people needing emergency food assistance did not receive it. Many middle-class Americans are dropping below the low-income threshold — roughly $45,000 for a family of four — because of pay cuts, a forced reduction of work hours or a spouse losing a job. Housing and child-care costs are consuming up to half of a family's income.
States in the South and West had the highest shares of low-income families, including Arizona, New Mexico and South Carolina, which have scaled back or eliminated aid programs for the needy. By raw numbers, such families were most numerous in California and Texas, each with more than 1 million.
The struggling Americans include Zenobia Bechtol, 18, in Austin, Texas, who earns minimum wage as a part-time pizza delivery driver. Bechtol and her 7-month-old baby were recently evicted from their bedbug-infested apartment after her boyfriend, an electrician, lost his job in the sluggish economy.
After an 18-month job search, Bechtol's boyfriend now works as a waiter and the family of three is temporarily living with her mother.
"We're paying my mom $200 a month for rent, and after diapers and formula and gas for work, we barely have enough money to spend," said Bechtol, a high school graduate who wants to go to college. "If it weren't for food stamps and other government money for families who need help, we wouldn't have been able to survive."
About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.
The new measure of poverty takes into account medical, commuting and other living costs. Doing that helped push the number of people below 200 percent of the poverty level up from 104 million, or 1 in 3 Americans, that was officially reported in September.
Broken down by age, children were most likely to be poor or low-income — about 57 percent — followed by seniors over 65. By race and ethnicity, Hispanics topped the list at 73 percent, followed by blacks, Asians and non-Hispanic whites.
Even by traditional measures, many working families are hurting.
Shrinking paychecks
Paychecks for low-income families are shrinking. The inflation-adjusted average earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have fallen from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000, and earnings for the next 20 percent have remained flat at $37,000. In contrast, higher-income brackets had significant wage growth since 1979, with earnings for the top 5 percent of families climbing 64 percent to more than $313,000.
Shrinking paychecks
Paychecks for low-income families are shrinking. The inflation-adjusted average earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have fallen from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000, and earnings for the next 20 percent have remained flat at $37,000. In contrast, higher-income brackets had significant wage growth since 1979, with earnings for the top 5 percent of families climbing 64 percent to more than $313,000.
A survey of 29 cities conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors being released Thursday points to a gloomy outlook for those on the lower end of the income scale.
Many mayors cited the challenges of meeting increased demands for food assistance, expressing particular concern about possible cuts to federal programs such as food stamps and WIC, which assists low-income pregnant women and mothers. Unemployment led the list of causes of hunger in cities, followed by poverty, low wages and high housing costs.
Across the 29 cities, about 27 percent of people needing emergency food aid did not receive it. Kansas City, Mo., Nashville, Tenn., Sacramento, Calif., and Trenton, N.J., were among the cities that pointed to increases in the cost of food and declining food donations, while Mayor Michael McGinn in Seattle cited an unexpected spike in food requests from immigrants and refugees, particularly from Somalia, Burma and Bhutan.
Among those requesting emergency food assistance, 51 percent were in families, 26 percent were employed, 19 percent were elderly and 11 percent were homeless.
"People who never thought they would need food are in need of help," said Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, Mo., who co-chairs a mayors' task force on hunger and homelessness.
The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.
"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.
"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."
Congressional Republicans and Democrats are sparring over legislation that would renew a Social Security payroll tax cut, part of a year-end political showdown over economic priorities that could also trim unemployment benefits, freeze federal pay and reduce entitlement spending.
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, questioned whether some people classified as poor or low-income actually suffer material hardship. He said that while safety-net programs have helped many Americans, they have gone too far, citing poor people who live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.
"There's no doubt the recession has thrown a lot of people out of work and incomes have fallen," Rector said. "As we come out of recession, it will be important that these programs promote self-sufficiency rather than dependence and encourage people to look for work."
Mayors in 29 cities say more than 1 in 4 people needing emergency food assistance did not receive it. Many middle-class Americans are dropping below the low-income threshold — roughly $45,000 for a family of four — because of pay cuts, a forced reduction of work hours or a spouse losing a job. Housing and child-care costs are consuming up to half of a family's income.
States in the South and West had the highest shares of low-income families, including Arizona, New Mexico and South Carolina, which have scaled back or eliminated aid programs for the needy. By raw numbers, such families were most numerous in California and Texas, each with more than 1 million.
The struggling Americans include Zenobia Bechtol, 18, in Austin, Texas, who earns minimum wage as a part-time pizza delivery driver. Bechtol and her 7-month-old baby were recently evicted from their bedbug-infested apartment after her boyfriend, an electrician, lost his job in the sluggish economy.
After an 18-month job search, Bechtol's boyfriend now works as a waiter and the family of three is temporarily living with her mother.
"We're paying my mom $200 a month for rent, and after diapers and formula and gas for work, we barely have enough money to spend," said Bechtol, a high school graduate who wants to go to college. "If it weren't for food stamps and other government money for families who need help, we wouldn't have been able to survive."
About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.
The new measure of poverty takes into account medical, commuting and other living costs. Doing that helped push the number of people below 200 percent of the poverty level up from 104 million, or 1 in 3 Americans, that was officially reported in September.
Broken down by age, children were most likely to be poor or low-income — about 57 percent — followed by seniors over 65. By race and ethnicity, Hispanics topped the list at 73 percent, followed by blacks, Asians and non-Hispanic whites.
Even by traditional measures, many working families are hurting.
Shrinking paychecks
Paychecks for low-income families are shrinking. The inflation-adjusted average earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have fallen from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000, and earnings for the next 20 percent have remained flat at $37,000. In contrast, higher-income brackets had significant wage growth since 1979, with earnings for the top 5 percent of families climbing 64 percent to more than $313,000.
Shrinking paychecks
Paychecks for low-income families are shrinking. The inflation-adjusted average earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have fallen from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000, and earnings for the next 20 percent have remained flat at $37,000. In contrast, higher-income brackets had significant wage growth since 1979, with earnings for the top 5 percent of families climbing 64 percent to more than $313,000.
A survey of 29 cities conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors being released Thursday points to a gloomy outlook for those on the lower end of the income scale.
Many mayors cited the challenges of meeting increased demands for food assistance, expressing particular concern about possible cuts to federal programs such as food stamps and WIC, which assists low-income pregnant women and mothers. Unemployment led the list of causes of hunger in cities, followed by poverty, low wages and high housing costs.
Across the 29 cities, about 27 percent of people needing emergency food aid did not receive it. Kansas City, Mo., Nashville, Tenn., Sacramento, Calif., and Trenton, N.J., were among the cities that pointed to increases in the cost of food and declining food donations, while Mayor Michael McGinn in Seattle cited an unexpected spike in food requests from immigrants and refugees, particularly from Somalia, Burma and Bhutan.
Among those requesting emergency food assistance, 51 percent were in families, 26 percent were employed, 19 percent were elderly and 11 percent were homeless.
"People who never thought they would need food are in need of help," said Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, Mo., who co-chairs a mayors' task force on hunger and homelessness.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
The new face of American poverty is often a child's
OAKTOWN, Ind. (RNS) Eleven-year-old Sarai Camacho of Donna, Texas, tears up when she tells why her mother let go the baby sitter for her and her younger sister this summer. It's the same reason her father brought the family to Indiana so he could work the melon fields for a season.
"Last December, my mom didn't get paid for one month, and we started having problems," said Sarai, at Oaktown First Christian Church, which hosted free classes for children of migrant workers. "My mom said for us to come here (to the church) so she doesn't have to give money to the baby sitter because we're running out of it."
For churches, it's become an all-too-familiar sight: working families that aren't able to make ends meet. As household resources get tapped out, churches are often the first to see the changing face of poverty — and it's often a young one.
"We're seeing younger families come in," said Ken Campbell, food coordinator for Lazarus House, a Christian ministry to help the needy in Lawrence, Mass. "They're coming forward because one member in the household got laid off or had their hours cut, and now they're just barely making it."
"We're seeing younger families come in," said Ken Campbell, food coordinator for Lazarus House, a Christian ministry to help the needy in Lawrence, Mass. "They're coming forward because one member in the household got laid off or had their hours cut, and now they're just barely making it."
Across the United States, rising numbers of children are coping with the stressors of economic hardship:
•Child poverty rates reached 22 percent in 2010, up from 20.7 percent in 2009 and 16.2 percent in 2000, according to a September report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of children living in poverty increased from 13.1 million to 15.5 million, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
•The Casey Foundation also reported that 4 percent of American children had been affected by home foreclosures since 2007, and 11 percent had at least one unemployed parent in 2010.
•Catholic Charities USA, which serves about one in four Americans who live in poverty, served 2.7 million children in 2010, up from 2.4 million in 2006. The steepest increase came in food-related services, as Catholic Charities fed 56 percent more children (935,000) in 2010 than in 2006 (600,000).
As families cycle in and out of poverty, faith-based service programs tend to catch people who fall through the cracks of other safety nets, according to Robert L. Fischer, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty & Community Development at Case Western Reserve University.
When emergency needs arise, people often turn to churches first.
"The most disadvantaged families oftentimes don't go to formal settings to receive services, but they will go into a church," said Taniesha Woods, senior research associate at the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University. "Churches can provide information and reach families and children who wouldn't know about (public) services otherwise."
On the front lines, religious workers see signs of growing desperation. Four years ago at Torrente De Cedron Pentecostal Church in Lynn, Mass., the weekly food pantry stayed open for two hours as about 75 families came through for a few days' worth of groceries. Today the line begins forming hours before the pantry opens, according to Senior Pastor Oscar Ovalles, as more than 200 families come from city neighborhoods and affluent suburbs alike. Even with smaller bags to stretch supplies, everything is gone within 30 minutes.
"Families are in crisis," Ovalles said. "What used to be saved for a rainy day is now the main course because dad lost his job or mom is no longer working."
Similar signs of stress are visible in nearby Lawrence, Mass. The overnight shelter at Lazarus House is always filled to capacity, Campbell said, and needs for food continue to increase. In early 2010, the weekly pantry gave a few days worth of groceries to about 300 individuals who were, in most cases, picking up for families with children. This fall, the weekly pantry is serving about 800 on average.
Many who now need help aren't used to receiving any sort of church-based assistance. Sarai's family, for example, until recently had lived stably on income from her mother's teaching job and her father's work in agriculture and food processing. Now they depend on the church's help with child care to make ends meet.
"Because of what we're going through right now with money, I would love to help my family," Sarai said. "I would love to go to college," she said, and earn enough afterward to support her parents.
To meet growing needs, religious groups are trying to be resourceful despite slumping donations in uncertain economic times. This summer, for example, Catholic Charities enlisted more of its local agencies to participate as distribution sites for federally subsidized summer food programs for children. After starting the program last year, Catholic Charities in Chicago this summer served more than 300,000 kids.
Still, meeting needs in lean times remains an uphill challenge.
Torrente De Cedron used to run its pantry on $3,000 raised from parishioners' donations, but now the congregation can't afford the $10,000 that's needed to run the program. This fall, the church began hosting regular fundraisers, including an upcoming yard sale, to sustain the pantry.
"The food pantry is no longer just something that we want to do on a volunteer basis for the community," Ovalles said. "Now it's a mandatory thing that we have to have because of the need that we can see in these families and in these kids."
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