#while this is a good outcome the number of years in prison is disproportionate to other crimes

[hallohartje]

Reblogging this with a link to the article which was posted back in 2015.

Until bankers go to prison, the bailouts will get bigger and bigger.

[beardedmrbean]

Baseball bat-wielding gangs of children are mugging mothers and nannies on the school run in the latest crime wave to hit San Francisco.

Last week Noe Valley, also known as “stroller valley” because of the growing population of young families, endured 11 phone robberies that are believed to have been carried out by the same gang who are targeting women picking up children from school.

One woman was reportedly hit with a baseball bat, while another was punched in the face, before the offender ran to a getaway car and drove off.

On Thursday the police had arrested one minor in connection with the 11 robberies and were searching for the others.

Rafael Mandelman, who sits on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which is responsible for legislating, said there are a growing number of children “doing these really awful things”.

“I think, what happened with kids not being in school, I think there may be something going on with that, that we’re going to be experiencing for a while”, he said.

He added: “Those couple of years where school was erratic or non-existent, where everyone was under stress, parents and caregivers were under stress. That was probably impacting vulnerable communities more anyway. Sociologically. who knows what was going on, but I would not be surprised if we are going to be experiencing the lingering impacts of that for a generation.”

Homelessness 

The California city has slumped in recent years from one of the most desirable places to live to one crippled by opioid usage, a disproportionate rate of homelessness and rising crime.

Chesa Boudin, a former district attorney, who was ousted last year, introduced policies in office including refusing to prosecute children as adults, aggressively going after police officers who commit crime, and reducing the prison population.

There has been a 11 per cent increase in robberies for the first six months of the year when compared to the same period in 2022.

Violent robberies are being carried out in broad daylight in wealthy enclaves such as Noe Valley, a tight-knit community, where free yoga classes are held every Sunday in the town square.

One victim of the string of recent attacks, who only wished to be identified as CW, said the police appeared to have “zero interest” in investigating her attack.

She was thrown to the ground by a boy who stole her phone last Monday when she was on the way to collect her daughter from the nursery.

A neighbour’s security system caught the car on video and she was able to track her phone for 18 hours after the attack. But after she reported the crime, no investigator responded to the developments.

When she emailed a police officer to ask who she could contact to help “improve how these things get tackled”, she was told to “do some research yourself”.

The next day she was driving to the police station to complain about the response, when she saw a patrol car on the street where she had been robbed.

Punched in the face

It transpired another mother had been attacked, with the same getaway car, but this time she was punched in the face.

“For 24 hours, I had been trying desperately to get the police to engage with me to stop these guys. Zero response. And then it happened again in the same location,” she said.

Mr Mandelman said the city’s soft approach on crime has been good at “dismantling the systems” without fixing the underlying problems.

“I don’t think that our interventions for people who are committing petty crimes are particularly effective. I mean, fine, you don’t put people in jail, but what are you doing? Well, if you’re doing nothing, then what’s the outcome going to be? Not great.”

The San Francisco Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.

[antoine-roquentin]

IT’S A FACT that African-Americans are disproportionately represented in America’s prisons. In state prisons, where the majority of prisoners are held, African-Americans are incarcerated at 5.1 times the rate of white Americans.

But what remains an open question is what explains this racial incarceration gap; what needs to change to eliminate that gap? Is it a racist economic system that produces a disproportionate population of impoverished African-Americans who then are ground up by a criminal justice system that targets the poor? Or is it better explained by racial bias in policing and sentencing?

A new report from the People’s Policy Project argues that while both exist, it’s economic oppression that matters most — or, at least, matters first.

Researcher Nathaniel Lewis sought to examine the role of both race and class in male incarceration as they impact four different outcomes:

Whether or not men aged 24-32 years have ever been to jail or prison

Whether or not men are jailed after being arrested

Whether or not men have spent more than a month in jail or prison

Whether or not men have spent more than a year in jail or prison

In order to do this, he utilized data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (known as Add Health), which followed a nationally representative sample of Americans who were in grades seven through 12 between the years 1994 and 1995. The fourth wave of this sample was collected in 2008, when these Americans were between the ages of 24 and 32.

The dataset collected information on respondents that includes race, whether they have been incarcerated, and for how long. To compose his class variable, he created a composite that includes educational attainment, homeownership status, household income, and other similar categories. He also ran results through seven different models with the variables slightly differently composed.

His research found that “while class has a large and statistically significant effect on the first three outcomes, race — once one controls for class — does not.” In the fourth category, whether a man has spent more than a year in jail or prison, he found that race does have a significant impact.

Even in the fourth category, Lewis found that “though for all but one of the seven models the effect of being in the middle rather than bottom class level was stronger than the effect of being white rather than black.” In other words, middle-class and rich people were equally as likely to have served more than a year in prison regardless of race, but a poor black person was more likely than a poor white person to do so.

Lewis illustrated this relationship in a series of charts. As you can see, class quintile and the probability of incarceration track very closely except for the probability of being jailed more than a year, where this is a clear divergence for the lowest class quintile:

The results cut against the conventional wisdom on much of the political left, which argues that America’s system of mass incarceration is primarily built on racial bias and discrimination. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” when published in 2010, sat on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year and was dubbed “the secular bible for a new social movement” by philosopher and activist Cornel West. Alexander’s thesis, in its popular, simplified form, is that the modern criminal justice system in America is analogous to a “racial caste system,” similar to the Jim Crow-era South and other historical systems of racialized oppression.

But central to Alexander’s argument is the history of that oppression, beginning with her exploration of an economic system that drove blacks into poverty, undergirded by a system of racism intended to split poor whites from poor blacks, to prevent the formation of a transracial populist party of the working class. Alexander highlights the destruction of the post-Reconstruction Populist Party, which was a serious attempt at a trans-racial coalition. Its upper-class opposition used explicitly racist tactics to divide the white and black poor, helping to set off the trend that carries through to today.

Some of the tactics of racist economic exploitation present in the 19th century — particularly trapping blacks in crushing debt — are around today, as are others, such as simply refusing to give work to African-Americans, though it is done more subtly in the 21st century. By “whitening” a resume, a black applicant is much more likely to get a call back for a job interview. White high school dropouts are just as likely to land a job than black college students.

Lewis’s conclusion is similar to that of scholar Cedric Johnson (who is cited as the competing view to Alexander in the report). Johnson, a professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argues that “contemporary patterns of incarceration and police violence are classed in a manner that is not restricted to blacks and whose central dynamics cannot be explained through institutional racism.” Instead, Johnson sees the modern prison state in the United States as a means by which Americans who cannot find decent employment and living standards are discarded.

In an interview with The Intercept, Lewis attempted to explain why we may see a divergence over the fourth question.

“One aspect might be that this is where we would see the culmination of the race effect. That is, the study doesn’t find a ‘statistically significant’ racial effect for any of the other outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one there, just that it’s probably a lot smaller than most people think,” he said in an email. “If there is a small racial bias each step of the way (i.e. arrest rates, to initial incarceration rates, to sentencing terms), a study like this wouldn’t find it to be statistically significant at any given step, but when added together, as it is in the last question, we could see a significant effect, both in the technical sense and the common sense.”

That racial bias each step of the way expresses itself even in schools, where black students are four times more likely to be suspended, and on the sidewalks, where blacks are more likely to be stopped and searched. It all adds up.

The explanation around sentencing bias is particularly compelling in light of research released by the United States Sentencing Commission late last year. Its November 2017 report looked at federal sentencing data and concluded that “black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders” between fiscal years 2012 and 2016.

Ultimately, Lewis concluded that his data showed that the primary reason we see overrepresentation of African-Americans in the criminal justice system are factors related to poverty.

“I think that people are used to hearing the statistics about glaring racial disparities in the justice system, and police brutalization and the police murder of black individuals, plus the long history of stark racism in America, and they add this all up and, quite reasonably, the New Jim Crow framework of explaining mass incarceration as a racist system designed to oppress black people seems inarguably correct,” he told us. “But most of these studies and statistics don’t control for socioeconomic status, and the ones that do, I would say, do so inadequately. It could be that mass incarceration is primarily a system of managing poor people, rather than black people, and the racial disparities show up mostly because black people are disproportionately represented in the lower classes. This is what my study finds.”

Lewis concluded that his research suggests that one of the best ways to reduce the total prison population would be to embrace social democratic policy that would address poverty, the education gap, and other class divides.

“One implication, at least to me, is that policies aimed at alleviating class disparities may be the most effective way of helping black people, and all people, subject to being ground up by the criminal justice system,” he said.

the reason why it’s important to note that the prison population swelled with black people because black people were poor is because it helps to explain the origins of neoliberal policy. when america first tried to extricate itself from its commitment to keynesian policies in the late 60s and early 70s, it saw mass protest and strike action. workers were able to demand higher wages even as employment increased, which should have made workers too afraid of being fired to strike. in other words, stagflation. in response to this, nixon, ford, carter, and reagan ended their commitment to preserving labour peace and allowed private business to crush unions, deregulated industries and removed the cushions that prevented a race to the bottom in wages, moved the american dollar off the gold standard and made it the world’s reserve currency, which helped upper middle class americans afford consumer goods, loosened financial rules in order to allow complex derivatives to manage risk, militarized police and built up prisons, and initiated the drug war, in order to imprison the massive amount of workers at the bottom of the ladder who would be laid off. in turn, because black people are traditionally last hired and first fired, their numbers were the first to swell in prisons. the boon to prison corporations from prison labour was an ancillary effect, not the main motivation in and of itself. 

[cle-guy]

Race, Politics, and Baseball

Alright, I want to set a few ground rules about this post before I get into the meat and potatoes here:

1. NOTHING I say here is meant to attack any individual. If I insult anyone (and I am 100% confident I will) I say now: it is entirely unintentional. I want nobody to think they are being singled out or accused in this post.

2. I do not want anyone accusing anybody of anything in the comments. This post is for people prepared for reasoned discussion only. The only way political discussions work is if we keep things civil, focus on the facts, and attempt (with all our might) to place ourselves in one another's shoes. I will try to do this myself, but I will assuredly fail. Empathy is among the most difficult human traits to learn, and I am not immune from prejudice.

3. Although baseball contains a fascinating history: I will attempt to limit this post to the official history of Major League baseball, meaning I will start with 1904 and move forward.

Premise

The goal of this post is to answer several questions raised here, and elsewhere. Should baseball enthrall itself with politics? What role does baseball have in engaging in a societal conversation on race?

The Politics of Race in Baseball: a History

For over a century, baseball trail-blazed a history as a political sport, most notably over race. Infamously: baseball refused to employee people of color. What is interesting about the 'gentlemen's agreement' which kept baseball white, is the inconsistency. While African-Americans were not allowed to play, light skinned Latinos and Native Americans were allowed. Charles "Chief" Bender was born in the Chippewa Tribe, and played in the early game. Light skinned Cubans were also permitted to play, under the guise that they were truly white.

Despite some half-hearted attempts, baseball did not break the color line until Branch Rickey stubbornly forced integration on the Brooklyn Dodgers, and their minor league affiliates. Overcoming immense opposition, from players, fans and executives: Rickey and Robinson persisted. I have little to add here to the countless stories already written about Jackie Robinson, other than to say that whatever your opinions of Branch Rickey and integration: the act itself was inherently political. Rickey risked alienating fans, friends and fellow executives with his actions by cutting against the societal norms of his day, just as those who decry (or cheer) the kneelers today.

However, the story of integration does not end with Jackie Robinson: other teams required integration. The Cleveland Indians integrated almost simultaneously with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Bill Veeck brought Larry Doby & Satchel Page to Cleveland, in part of the World Series run. It is worth noting that while Jackie Robinson gained most of the fame for integrating baseball, the American League was far more racist than its National League counterparts. Following Robinson a flood of black players entered the National League. Roy Campanella would win several MVP awards as part of the Dodgers, Ernie Banks effectively defined the Cubs for generations, Willie Mays became arguably the greatest center fielder of all time for the Giants. The AL took longer. The Yankees resisted integration until 1955 with Elston Howard, the Tigers in 1958 with Ozzie Virgil, and infamously Tom Yawkey finally relented in 1959 with Pumpsie Green.

Overall: baseball both reflected the societal and political implications of its time, and rebelled against it. Greats from the nineteenth century, led by the great Cap Anson, refused to play with people of any color. Overall, baseball reinforced society during segregation, with the double standard of the Major Leagues for white players coinciding with the long struggles of the Negro Leagues. The integration of baseball also represented a pioneering aspect to society as well. The courage of Jackie Robinson inspired future civil rights leaders on their quests for greater societal equality. Thus, while it may seem at times that baseball remains conspicuously silent on matters in the political arena, politics walked hand and hand with baseball in its early history, and today.

Race and Baseball Today:

Society has changed massively in the past 50 years. Since Jim Crow's fall, African-Americans have increased in wealth and opportunity; overt racism is now considered evil and taboo nearly universally in the United States. And, notably, we have elected the first person who is NOT a White male to the Presidency. All of these accomplishments are notable, and worthy of celebration. However, we remain a long way from a post-racial society. Outcomes for minority children (besides Asian children) are worse than white ones. African-Americans are far more likely to experience police brutality, incarceration, and violence than white Americans. Despite some statements to the contrary: this is not controversial; all the evidence available to us paints the same story.

I will attach the links at the bottom, but the 2016 census indicated that the median income for white families in the United States was roughly $65,000. The same census indicated that the median income for black families was roughly $40,000. That difference in incomes is over 50% (1). If we consider the inmate population in the United States: African Americans comprise 37.9% of the prison population, despite only being roughly 15% of the American total population (2). It is also true African-Americans are disproportionately more likely to experience police violence. According to the Chicago Tribune African-Americans are over twice as likely to be shot by a police officer while unarmed (3). Overall: it is clear, while we have come so far, we can still improve equality in America.

Sports Respond:

The current controversy revolves around how sports stars should respond to today's crisis. The killing of unarmed African-American men by police has struck a chord in American society. From Ferguson, to Baltimore, to Tamir Rice in Cleveland: we have been wrecked by police violence against civilians. Rightly or wrongly: police largely escaped from these deaths without criminal punishment. The African-American community has understandably resulted with anger and fury. However, many Americans question the frustration and anguish displayed by blacks on the inequality in the United States. Have we not solved these problems with the passing of Civil Rights legislation? Have we not evicted the spirit of Jim Crow from society? What about affirmative action?

The answer given by most professional athletes has been: no. We should not. Beginning with Colin Kaepernick numerous athletes have knelt during the national anthem to protest police violence against minority citizens. Some liberal commentators have also criticized the National Anthem because of racist lines later in Francis Scott Key's poem: The Defense of Fort McHenry. The message from Kaepernick and others is simple: the American government does not respect the lives of colored people compared to the lives of white people, and this bares out in the statistics. Conservative backlash ensued, with many criticizing Kaepernick (and those who followed him) for dishonoring the American flag. Following the 2016 season Colin Kaepernick has been unable to land even an NFL tryout, despite many commentators believing him capable of at least a backup position. Although widespread in the NFL, only one player in MLB has knelt during the national anthem: Oakland A's Bruce Maxwell.

Baseball and Race Today

Baseball has radically changed since 1959: baseball now employs players from six continents, with a massive Latino and Asian presence on the field. Unlike the NFL and NBA: baseball employs significantly fewer African-American players (although many Latino players are dark skinned). Several of our modern stars are black. David Ortiz was unquestionably the biggest star in Boston when active. Derek Jeter is bi-racial. In Cleveland: Francisco Lindor and Michael Brantley are arguably the two most loved players on the team. Like society, baseball has come a long way, except in the front office and ownership.

Thus far, MLB has not taken a position on these issues. Most individual players remain silent, the conspicuous silence from MLB players, especially considering NBA & NFL players have staked out positions already, marks a change in trend for baseball. However, baseball has taken a stand on other racial issues: namely the lack of African-American executives and owners in the front office. To counteract this problem Major League Baseball is working on improving the number of African-American children playing baseball, in an effort to increase the number of black ballplayers. Bud Selig also instituted the 'Selig Rule' which mandates every Major League team must at least consider candidates of color for coaching and executive positions. On the player side: only Blake Maxwell has knelt during the national anthem.

Where Should Baseball Stand?

After 1,400 words of digital ink spent on the history of baseball and race, the few of you who made it this far are probably wondering: when am I going to get to how baseball should address race today? My answer: baseball already is addressing race. I do believe baseball could promote baseball among African-American communities better, and they should: for the good of the game diversity should remain a focus. However, addressing poor representation among the coaching staff and executives is a great way to start. I hope Rob Manfred is successful in changing baseball culture, right now there is not a single African-American GM in Major League Baseball. I do not believe MLB should take a specific stance of Black Lives Matter, or another political group: their actions (not their supporters) should drive MLB policy, as they have done in the past with integrating the game.

As for players, as I stated in the comments it is up to the individual player to determine what is best for them. I personally support those who kneel during the national anthem, but as a matter of private choice, and as a general support for reducing inequality. At first, I did not believe kneeling during the national anthem was the best way to garner support (and the negative response thus far has done little to convince me otherwise). However, I abhor the conservative response to those who believe professional athletes should remain silent. Nobody should ever fear for their job due to their political beliefs, and the continued collusion to keep Colin Kaepernick out of the NFL disgusts me. As such: I don't blame young players for choosing to remain silent. I can imagine a, say, Francisco Lindor who has not signed a guaranteed contract yet determining it is not in his best interests to risk his financial future for the sake of a political statement. I do not begrudge him that one bit. Overall: each individual should choose their best course of action.

Whether or not anyone here agrees, or disagrees, with the athletes who kneel during the national anthem, we should all respect everyone's first amendment rights. And while it may annoy some who think sports should remain a politics free zone: baseball (and no other professional sport) has ever bereft itself from politics. Deeply consider the plight of the African American community, as they are truly at a severe disadvantage compared to their white and Asian peers.

Conclusion

It is not the place of Major League Baseball, in my opinion, to take an official stance on racial inequality beyond the confines of the game. As MLB typically reflects the social circumstances of the society which surrounds it: addressing social issues in baseball typically will reflect social change in the greater society: hopefully MLB will address these issues proactively. I pray baseball can find a way to increase diversity on the field, and not just racially. It is long past due that MLB welcomes gay athletes as well to the field. However, as for MLB taking a stance either for, or against, those who believe it is their societal duty to speak out against racial inequality: no. MLB should allow each athlete to choose for themselves, and encourage free speech. I hope everyone here, and in the baseball community, can consider these issues seriously, and respectfully.

1. https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/259/tableA1.xls

2. https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp

3. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-police-shootings-race-20160711-story.html

[leftpress]

Exposing the Myths of Neoliberal Capitalism: An Interview With Ha-Joon Chang

Author and economics professor Ha-Joon Chang. (Photo: New America; Edited: LW / TO)

Wednesday, February 08, 2017 | C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout

For the part 40 years or so, neoliberalism has reigned supreme over much of the western capitalist world, producing unparalleled wealth accumulation levels for a handful of individuals and global corporations while the rest of society has been asked to swallow austerity, stagnating incomes and a shrinking welfare state. But just when we all thought that the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism had reached their penultimate point, culminating in mass discontent and opposition to global neoliberalism, the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election brought to power a megalomaniac individual who subscribes to neoliberal capitalist economics while opposing much of its global dimension.

What exactly then is neoliberalism? What does it stand for? And what should we make of Donald Trump's economic pronouncements? In this exclusive interview, world-renowned Cambridge University Professor of Economics Ha-Joon Chang responds to these urgent questions, emphasizing that despite Donald Trump's advocacy of "infrastructure spending" and his opposition to "free trade" agreements, we should be deeply concerned about his economic policies, his embrace of neoliberalism and his fervent loyalty to the rich.

Get your Latest News From The Leftist Front on LeftPress.tk → Help Us Gather News (Click for Details) ��

C. J. Polychroniou: For the past 40 or so years, the ideology and policies of "free-market" capitalism have reigned supreme in much of the advanced industrialized world. Yet, much of what passes as "free-market" capitalism are actually measures designed and promoted by the capitalist state on behalf of the dominant factions of capital. What other myths and lies about "actually existing capitalism" are worth pointing out?

Ha-Joon Chang: Gore Vidal, the American writer, once famously said that the American economic system is "free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich." I think this statement very well sums up what has passed for 'free-market capitalism' in the last few decades, especially but not only in the US. In the last few decades, the rich have been increasingly protected from the market forces, while the poor have been more and more exposed to them.

For the rich, the last few decades have been "heads I win, tails you lose." Top managers, especially in the US, sign on pay packages that give them hundreds of millions of dollars for failing -- and many times more for doing a decent job. Corporations are subsidised on a massive scale with few conditions -- sometimes directly but often indirectly through government procurement programs (especially in defense) with inflated price tags and free technologies produced by government-funded research programs. After every financial crisis, ranging from the 1982 Chilean banking crisis through the Asian financial crisis of 1997 to the 2008 global financial crisis, banks have been bailed out with hundreds of trillions of dollars of taxpayers' money and few top bankers have gone to prison. In the last decade, the asset-owning classes in the rich countries have also been kept afloat by historically low rates of interests.

In contrast, poor people have been increasingly subject to market forces.

In the name of increasing "labor market flexibility," the poor have been increasingly deprived of their rights as workers. This trend has reached a new level with the emergence of the so-called "gig economy," in which workers are bogusly hired as "self-employed" (without the control over their work that the truly self-employed exercise) and deprived of even the most basic rights (e.g., sick leave, paid holiday). With their rights weakened, the workers have to engage in a race to the bottom in which they compete by accepting increasingly lower wages and increasingly poor working conditions.

In the area of consumption, increasing privatization and deregulation of industries supplying basic services on which the poor are relatively more reliant upon -- like water, electricity, public transport, postal services, basic health care and basic education -- have meant that the poor have seen a disproportionate increase in the exposure of their consumption to the logic of the market. In the last several years since the 2008 financial crisis, welfare entitlements have been reduced in many countries and the terms of their access (e.g., increasingly ungenerous "fitness for work tests" for the disabled, the mandatory training for CV-making for those receiving unemployment benefits) have become less generous, driving more and more poor people into labor markets they are not fit to compete in.

As for the other myths and lies about capitalism, the most important in my view is the myth that there is an objective domain of the economy into which political logic should not intrude. Once you accept the existence of this exclusive domain of the economy, as most people have done, you get to accept the authority of the economic experts, as interlocutors of some scientific truths about the economy, who will then dictate the way your economy is run.

However, there is no objective way to determine the boundary of the economy because the market itself is a political construct, as shown by the fact that it is illegal today in the rich countries to buy and sell a lot of things that used to be freely bought and sold -- such as slaves and the labor service of children.

In turn, if there is no objective way to draw the boundary around the economy, when people argue against the intrusion of political logic into the economy, they are in fact only asserting that their own 'political' view of what belongs in the domain of the market is somehow the correct one.

It is very important to reject the myth of [an] inviolable boundary of the economy, because that is the starting point of challenging the status quo. If you accept that the welfare state should be shrunk, labor rights have to be weakened, plant closures have to be accepted, and so on because of some objective economic logic (or "market forces," as it is often called), it becomes virtually impossible to modify the status quo.

Austerity has become the prevailing dogma throughout Europe, and it is high on the Republican agenda. If austerity is also based on lies, what is its actual objective?

A lot of people -- Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Mark Blyth and Yanis Varoufakis, to name some prominent names -- have written that austerity does not work, especially in the middle of an economic downturn (as it was practised in many developing countries under the World Bank-IMF Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s and the 1990s and more recently in Greece, Spain and other Eurozone countries).

Many of those who push for austerity do so because they genuinely (albeit mistakenly) believe that it works, but those who are smart enough to know that it doesn't still would use it because it is a very good way of shrinking the state (and thus giving more power to the corporate sector, including the foreign one) and changing the nature of state activities into a pro-corporate one (e.g., it is almost always welfare spending that goes first).

In other words, austerity is a very good way of pushing through a regressive political agenda without appearing to do so. You say you are cutting spending because you have to balance the books and put the house in order, when you are actually launching an attack on the working class and the poor. This is, for example, what the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government in the UK said when it launched a very severe austerity program upon assuming power in 2010 -- the country's public finance at the time was such that it did not need such a severe austerity program, even by the standards of orthodox economics.

What do you make of all the talk about the dangers of public debt? How much public debt is too much?

Whether public debt is good or bad depends on when the money was borrowed (better if it were during an economic downturn), how the borrowed money was used (better if it was used for investment in infrastructure, research, education, or health than military expenditure or building useless monuments), and who holds the bonds (better if your own nationals do, as it will reduce the danger of a "run" on your country -- for example, one reason why Japan can sustain very high levels of public debt is that the vast majority of its public debts are held by the Japanese nationals).

Of course, excessively high public debt can be a problem, but what is excessively high depends on the country and the circumstances. So, for example, according to the IMF data, as of 2015, Japan has public debt equivalent to 248 percent of GDP but no one talks of the danger of it. People may say Japan is special and point out that in the same year the US had public debt equivalent to 105 percent of GDP, which is much higher than that of, say,South Korea (38 percent), Sweden (43 percent), or even Germany (71 percent), but they may be surprised to hear that Singapore also has public debt equivalent to 105 percent of GDP, even though we hardly hear any worry about public debt of Singapore.

A number of well-respected economists are arguing that the era of economic growth has ended. Do you concur with this view?

A lot of people now talk of a "new normal" and a "secular stagnation" in which high inequality, aging population, and deleveraging (reduction in debt) by the private sector lead to chronically low economic growth, which can only be temporarily boosted by financial bubbles that are unsustainable in the long run.

Given that these causes can be countered by policy measures, secular stagnation is not inevitable. Aging can be countered by policy changes that make work and child-rearing more compatible (e.g., cheaper and better childcare, flexible working hours, career compensation for childcare) and by increased immigration. Inequality can be countered by more aggressive tax-and-transfer policy and by better protection for the weak (e.g., urban planning protecting small shops, supports for SMEs). Deleveraging by the private sector can be countered by increased government spending, as the Japanese experience of the last quarter century shows.

Of course, saying that secular stagnation can be countered is different from saying that it will be countered. For example, the quickest policy that can counter ageing -- that is, increased immigration -- is politically unpopular. In many rich countries, the alignment of political and economic forces is such that it will be difficult to reduce inequality significantly in the short- to medium-run. The current fiscal dogma is such that fiscal expansion seems unlikely in most countries in the near future.

Thus, in the short- to medium-run, low growth seems very likely. However, this does not mean that this will forever be the case. In the longer run, the changes in politics and thus, economic policies may change policies in such a way that the causes of "secular stagnation" are countered to a significant extent. This highlights how important the political struggle to change economic policies is.

What is your professional opinion of Donald Trump's proposed economic policies, which clearly embrace neoliberalism and all sort of shenanigans for the rich but oppose global "free-trade" agreements, and what do you expect to happen when they collide with Ryan's austerity budget?

Mr. Trump's plan for American economic revival is still vague, but, as far as I can tell, it has two main planks -- making American corporations create more jobs [at] home and increasing infrastructural investments.

The first plank seems rather fanciful. He says that he will do it mainly by engaging in greater protectionism, but it won't work because of two reasons.

First, the US is bound by all sorts of international trade agreements -- the WTO, the NAFTA, and various bilateral free-trade agreements (with Korea, Australia, Singapore, etc.). Although you can push things in the protectionist direction on the margin even within this framework, it will be difficult for the US to slap extra tariffs that are big enough to bring American jobs back under the rules of these agreements. Mr. Trump's team says they will renegotiate these agreements, but that will take years, not months, and won't produce any visible result at least during the first term of Mr. Trump's presidency.

Second, even if large extra tariffs can somehow be imposed against international agreements, the structure of the US economy today is such that there will be huge resistance against these protectionist measures within the US. Many imports from countries like China and Mexico are things that are produced by -- or at least produced for -- American companies. When the price of iPhone and Nike trainers made in China or GM cars made in Mexico go up by 20 percent, 35 percent, not only American consumers but companies like Apple, Nike and GM will be intensely unhappy. But would this result in Apple or GM moving production back to the US? No, they will probably move it to Vietnam or Thailand, which is not hit by those tariffs.

The point is that, the hollowing out of American manufacturing industry has progressed in the contexts of (US-led) globalization of production and restructuring of the international trade system and cannot be reversed with simple protectionist measures. It will require a total rewriting of global trade rules and restructuring of the so-called global value chain.

Even at the domestic level, American economic revival will require far more radical measures than what the Trump administration is contemplating. It will require a systematic industrial policy that rebuilds the depleted productive capabilities of the US economy, ranging from worker skills, managerial competences, industrial research base and modernised infrastructure. To be successful, such industrial policy will have to be backed up by a radical redesigning of the financial system, so that more "patient capital" is made available for long-term-oriented investments and more talented people come to work in the industrial sector, rather than going into investment banking or foreign exchange trading.

The second plank of Mr. Trump's strategy for the revival of the US economy is investment in infrastructure.

As mentioned above, the improvement in infrastructure is an ingredient in a genuine strategy of American economic renewal. However, as you suggest in your question, this may meet resistance from fiscal conservatives in the Republican-dominated Congress. It will be interesting to watch how this pans out, but my bigger worry is that Mr. Trump is likely to encourage "wrong" kinds of infrastructural investments -- that is, those related to real estate (his natural territory), rather than those related to industrial development. This not only will fail to contribute to the renewal of the US economy but it may also contribute to creating real estate bubbles, which were an important cause behind the 2008 global financial crisis.

C.J. POLYCHRONIOU is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism's politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout's Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Related Stories on LeftPress:

► UNDERSTANDING BASIC INCOME: AN OPSEU POSITION PAPER

► FROM THE WOMEN’S MARCH TO THE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S STRIKE

► DEMOCRACY IN EXILE AND THE CURSE OF TOTALITARIANISM

[teachanarchy]

“Smoke was everywhere — as we got closer, the flames got bigger and bigger. It scared me to death,”says Bilal Chatman as he recalled fighting his first fire. The team worked for 12 hours straight in 125-degree heat against the Southern California blaze and, after the shift was over, he slept on the open ground.

But Chatman wasn’t a firefighter by trade — he was a prisoner of the State of California. For his work that night, Chatman received 45 cents an hour after paying the state restitution. By comparison, the average career firefighter earns about $23 per hour.

Across the U.S., millions of prisoners are forced to work and are paid a pittance for it — or nothing. Conditions can be harsh, and prison workers lack most labor protections. What makes this possible is a clause in the 13th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1865 to abolish slavery. It allows for involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

The clause effectively legalized forced labor, legal scholars say, allowing the South to arrest former slaves en masse after the war to create an unpaid work force to rebuild its economy. “To talk about how we got where we are today, we have to start with slavery and see how the justice system took over as a system of social control,” says Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of criminal justice programs at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Today, the country's incarcerated population of 2.3 million people is disproportionately black — 38 percent versus 13 percent in the overall population — and social researchers describe our prison system and its supply of “free labor” as a new form of slavery. This subjugation often continues after release, as formerly incarcerated individuals can’t ever fully re-enter society; some are denied access to housing and other benefits, even an identity card. “I had to open a bank account with a prison ID. That’s the only thing you have with your picture on it,” says Chatman, who was in prison on a drug offense. “So you’re still in jail.”

The toll of a prison sentence can extend well beyond the individual. “Prisons and our system of mass incarceration have a way of erasing entire communities, entire populations,” says Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” who is featured in “13TH,” the Oscar®-nominated documentary exploring racial inequality in the U.S. through the lens of mass incarceration.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.—AMENDMENT XIIIMichelle Alexander on mass incarceration and racismA WORK FORCESome freed slaves became prisoners, essentially re-enslaving them.

ollowing emancipation, Southern states devised a system known as “convict leasing.” In this “convenient” arrangement, private contractors paid fees to the government and fed, housed and clothed convicts. In return, they used these convicts — almost all black — as workers in labor-intensive industries such as mining and farming. While slaves had cost up to $2,500 apiece at the time, after 1865 prisoners could be purchased for pennies.

SLAVES IN 1850TerritoriesSlavery Illegal0K-39K40K-87K88K-245K246K-343K344K-452KIn 1850, slavery was common throughout the Southern United States, with concentrations in Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi. A similar pattern is reflected in the number of African Americans incarcerated in 2000.AFRICAN AMERICAN PRISONERS IN 2000<1K1K-3K4K-9K10K-20K21K-68K

If there was a shortfall in the work force, local law enforcement authorities simply made more arrests, whether a crime was actually committed or not. “Once the system of mass incarceration began to grow, it became quickly apparent that a lot of money could be made,” says Alexander. The system proliferated throughout the 20th century as successive administrations — Republican and Democratic — tried to outdo each other in being tough on crime.

The “War on Drugs” was a key driver of swelling prison populations, disproportionately affecting black communities. “African American and white youth use [illegal] drugs at about the same rate. And yet, African Americans are six times more likely to wind up in prison,” says Van Jones, president and cofounder of #cut50, an initiative to safely halve the number of people in U.S. prisons and jails.

Similar crimes often result in harsher punishments for blacks than whites. For example, conviction for selling crack cocaine (more heavily sold and used by people of color) can result in a sentence 100 times more severe than for selling the same amount of powdered cocaine (more heavily sold and used by whites).

Tougher sentencing compounded racial imbalances in prison populations. In California, the 1994 “Three Strikes” law doubled the time a defendant with a prior conviction of a serious felony served for a second offense. For those with two or more prior strikes, the law mandated a prison term of 25 years to life. The result of policies such as these created a surge in the number of African Americans in prison. By 1993, the incarceration rate of blacks was seven times that of whites.

“Mass incarceration has to be viewed as a manifestation of our longer history of racial inequality,” says Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, who is featured in “13TH.”

INCARCERATION ECONOMYAs in the 19th century, prison labor generates millions, but those incarcerated never benefit.

uring his many years in prison, Shaka Senghor — who began a sentence at the age of 19 after being convicted of second-degree murder — was also part of the prison labor force. He worked in the prison kitchen for 17 cents an hour.

PRISONS IN 19950-67-1011-1920-2829-93Throughout the 20th century, as incarceration rates climbed, so did the number of prisons in the U.S. Prison growth was especially prevalent in the South. (The latest prison information from the Bureau of Justice Census of Federal and State Correctional Facilities is from 2005.)

Senghor — featured in “13TH” and now an author and director's fellow of the MIT Media Lab — was lucky because he was highly literate. “I learned quickly that I had no desire to do hard labor for 17 cents an hour, so I figured out how to utilize my skill set in ways that would be helpful,” he explains. However, for many of those in prison, this is impossible. “Unfortunately, the average reading level in prison is about third grade,” he says. For those without educational, artistic or other opportunities, the experience was “one big warehouse of misery,” he says.

Private companies are taking advantage of this labor pool, too — in part because it’s cheap, but also because incarcerated workers can help secure federal contracts. “Corporations are once again exploiting people who have been labeled criminals and paying them wages that we condemn in third-world countries,” says Alexander.

The system itself has also produced cottage industries that benefit from its continued operation. In public prisons, guard unions push for “tough on crime” policies to ensure job security for their members. Prisons are economic hubs, requiring supplies of goods and services. “It's like having a massive hotel in the middle of your town,” says Jones, who is featured in “13TH.”

With incarceration supporting an $80 billion a year industry, he argues that the profit motive is a big part of the problem. “There are a lot of people who make money,” he says. “That has now infected our criminal justice system in a very pernicious way.”

U.S. INCARCERATION RATE

During the Civil Rights Movement, incarcerations began to skew disproportionately against African Americans. By the '70s, stronger drug laws and longer prison sentences for repeat offenders increased the numbers. Recently, rates have dropped as postrelease support and alternative sentencing options have become more popular.FOREVER ENSLAVEDIn many cases, release from prison doesn’t mean freedom.

ncarceration’s effects often persist after a prisoner is released. Depending on the state, former inmates can be denied everything from public housing and welfare to college loans and the right to vote. A criminal record makes it harder to get a job, especially one that pays well.

“You're willing to benefit from a captive population, you're so-called ‘helping’ them with their rehabilitation, but then you won't hire people who are convicted of a felony for a job in the real world,” says Jones. “That is incredibly unjust.”

To explain the stigma faced by people with felony convictions — and particularly African Americans — Jones uses an analogy: When you see something coiled up under a bush, “You jump because it might be a snake — turns out it was just a garden hose, but it's that instant reaction,” he says.

“Once you're branded a criminal or a felon, you often find it difficult or nearly impossible to work.”—MICHELLE ALEXANDER

Likewise, “You walk down the street and see a black guy walking toward you ... you may have that instant apprehension,” he adds. Multiplied out through countless life moments — from job interviews to police stops — “that split second of apprehension gives you a certain set of outcomes.”

This discrimination not only harms former prisoners but also broader society, since without access to social services, they are more likely to re-engage in criminal behavior. Children and family members suffer, too.

“Once you're branded a criminal or a felon, you often find it difficult or nearly impossible to work, which means that you're not going to be able to support your children,” says Alexander. “It has devastating impacts for children, who are far more likely to be incarcerated [later in life] if their parent has been.”

Even if former prisoners manage to develop successful careers, they continue to be denied rights given to other citizens. Senghor discovered this when he was prevented from visiting Canada to give a TED Talk because his prior conviction made it illegal to leave the country. He cites the case of a friend who, for the same reason, was barred from chaperoning his daughter on a school trip.

In this way, former prisoners are never fully free. “You start serving a different sentence,” says Senghor. “And it's a sentence that appears to be much more permanent than the one that we actually served on the inside.”

A WAY FORWARDHope is emerging as new initiatives help prisoners better reintegrate into society.

hatman’s story demonstrates that a successful postprison life is possible. Once sentenced to six life sentences plus 125 years for armed robbery and drug offenses under the “Three Strikes” law, he is now an operations manager in a company of more than 4,000 people. He says that, once released, many formerly incarcerated individuals are hungry to take part in society. “A lot of people, given the opportunity, just want to be good citizens,” he says. But to allow more people to take this path, help is needed.

To be sure, fundamental reform — in laws, sentencing and prison practices — is key to ending the cycle of forced labor that disproportionately affects blacks.

Yet as awareness of the problem of prison labor increases, the appetite for change is growing, with a range of initiatives emerging along with evidence of their success. For example, 75 percent of graduates of drug courts that provide sentence alternatives like treatment with supervision never see another pair of handcuffs.

Some options, from drug treatment courses to mental illness programs, address the underlying causes of crime. “I can't tell you enough how incredibly successful doing that little piece is,” says Jessica Jackson, national director of #cut50.

Jackson also sees great potential in re-entry programs. She cites The Last Mile program, another California-based nonprofit working to teach people behind bars to code. Another example is Florida's Operation New Hope — which, by providing employment, parenting and life-skills training, and family counseling — aims to reunify families and improve outcomes for children of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated parents.

For Chatman, who was featured in the film “The Return,” his key support tools were Alcoholics Anonymous, which he was able to access while incarcerated, and Homes of a Loving Father, a spiritual recovery program for men just out of prison.

Meanwhile, financial incentives still need to be changed, says Jones, so that rather than paying to incarcerate people, payments reward successful rehabilitation. “If we're going to be a free-market system, then let's have real competition for these different models and allocate the dollars based on who's giving us the most community safety,” he says.

Jackson sees firsthand the effects of rehabilitation. Her organization hires formerly incarcerated people who, she says, are the hardest workers on staff: “They are really excited to have a second chance.” She sees potential in everything from bipartisan support for rehabilitation programs to companies' willingness to develop best practices for hiring formerly incarcerated individuals. “There is a lot of stuff to be hopeful for,” she says.

Illustration by Brian StaufferSources:

Bureau of Labor Statistics

,

NAACP

,

U.S. Census

,

One Dies, Get Another Convict Leasing in the American South

,

The New York Times

,

National Bureau of Economic Research

,

The Effects of Mass Incarceration on Communities of Color

,

The State of California

,

U.S. Department of Justice

,

Shaka Senghor

,

The Return Project

,

The New York Times

[rolandfontana]

Wisconsin Probation, Parole Policies Fuel Racial Disparities: Study

For thousands of justice-involved people in Wisconsin, the musty halls of the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility (MSDF) are a grueling pitstop on the road to reincarceration.

According to a report from the Columbia University Justice Lab, more than 65 per cent of the individuals stranded in technical limbo between probation and prison in 2017 were African American, and 62 percent were diagnosed with a mental health condition.

They are confined to overcrowded cells without sunlight, fresh air, exercise or visitations for 20 hours a day, and those who fail to satisfy the many conditions of probation or parole are placed on “hold” without judicial review, as they await hearings for their reincarceration without bail.

At the end of 2017, 86 percent of individuals warehoused at MSDF had not committed a new crime.

Their offenses?

Technical violations such as failure to pay onerous fines and fees for their own supervision, or vague notions such as engaging in conduct “not in the best interest of public welfare or rehabilitation.”

The report calls the MSDF a prime example of how Wisconsin’s byzantine probation and parole policies are driving mass incarceration in the state, and cites recommendations from the nation’s leading probation and parole administrators for bucking the state’s current trends.

“[C]ommunity-based mechanisms [such as probation and parole], which originated as alternatives to incarceration, are actually contributing to its rise in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the United States at the very time when the foundations of mass incarceration have been rejected by many on both sides of the aisle,” the report said.

“The good news is that states around the country have begun to safely and effectively reduce their rates of both supervision and revocation, as well as return to prison for violations.”

Truth in Sentencing

To understand the depth and complexity of Wisconsin’s community supervision woes, the report said, one must begin with Wisconsin’s Truth in Sentencing statutes.

Enacted in 2000, Truth in Sentencing is a cluster of laws and policies ensuring that those convicted of crimes serve 100 percent of their sentence with little hope for early release for good behavior.

Among the most punitive statutes in the nation, Wisconsin’s Truth in Sentencing mandates extended supervision after time served, which places returning citizens on probation for at least 25 percent of the duration of their completed sentence. Violation of any of the conditions of supervision can send individuals back to prison without credit for time served.

There are at least 18 conditions with which those under community supervision must comply.

Some are clear-cut, such as regularly reporting to a supervisory agent, offering a blanket consent to search of person and property, and regular drug tests. Others are left to the discretion of the supervising officer, such as avoiding conduct “not in the best interest of public welfare or rehabilitation.”

Individuals under community supervision are also subject to a litany of fees, including annual supervision fees amounting to $240-$720 depending on income, drug test fees, and payments for their own electronic monitoring devices. Failure to pay can result in violation of the conditions of supervision and result in reincarceration or an extension of supervision.

Mass Supervision by the Numbers

The Justice Lab offered empirical evidence from state-level data to argue that Wisconsin’s community supervision policies have spurred a net-widening relative to other states’ incarceration trends at a time when most states are seeing a net decrease in incarceration.

The first indicator is outcomes for people exiting supervision. In Wisconsin in 2013 (the most recent year with available data), 39 percent of these individuals were returning to prison, compared to the national average of 28 percent.

Of those reincarcerated in Wisconsin that year, a technical, non-criminal violation had led to 75 percent of all revocations.

The second indicator is a static count, or snapshot, of the proportion of incarcerated people in Wisconsin who had formerly been under community supervision: roughly 12,000 of the 23,000 individuals at the end of 2017.

This figure is technically an under-count, as it does not take into consideration individuals with shorter sentences for technical violations not present during the snapshot. Thus, when calculating based on total annual admissions to prison, the share of individuals formerly under community supervision rose to 60 percent in 2017.

The third indicator is the number of individuals incarcerated without judicial approval on “hold” from violating the conditions of probation or parole, who are not counted in the prior figures. An additional 3,700 individuals were admitted to Wisconsin Department of Corrections facilities in 2017 under these conditions.

The Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility is one state facility created precisely to house these people and to ease the burden of overcrowding on county-level jails.

A fourth indicator is the overall growth of Wisconsin prisons relative to national averages. Since 2009, states have seen an average decline of 5.9 percent in total incarcerated individuals. While the Justice Lab did not offer a concurrent statistic for Wisconsin since 2009, it noted:

Wisconsin’s community supervision numbers and the impact they are having on incarceration are best understood in the context of the overall growth of Wisconsin’s prison system. Wisconsin’s prison population has more than tripled since 1990, when there were 6,788 people incarcerated. By 2000, there were 20,612, and by 2016 there were 22,975 people incarcerated in Wisconsin, a state with only 17,742 total prison beds.

Wisconsin is bucking the national trend in this respect. Since 2009, the absolute number of people incarcerated in the United States has declined by 5.9%, or 135,300 people, while the rate of U.S. incarceration has declined by 12.2%. Even conservative states like Texas and Mississippi have seen their imprisonment numbers decline by 13% and 11%, respectively.

Importantly, the Justice Lab argued that the population explosion in Wisconsin prisons is likely not attributable to an increase in crime, noting that property crimes have steadily decreased since 2013 and are 27 percent below national averages.

Violent crimes, still 21 percent below national averages, have slightly increased over recent years.

Finally, Wisconsin exhibits a strikingly skewed racial impact in its community supervision and incarceration outcomes. African Americans, comprising just 7 percent of the state’s population, make up 41 percent of state prisoners and 65 percent f all those held at the MSDF.

They also represent 76 percent of all supervision revocations issued to those at MSDF.

These racial disparities highlight that while community supervision is a major pipeline for reincarceration, it most acutely and disproportionately affects people of color in the state.

The Justice Lab argues that these disparities begin in part with uneven enforcement of the law in contact with police officers, such as in traffic stops and the issuance of municipal warrants.

Charting a Path Forward

In August 2017, the nation’s leading probation and parole administrators signed and released a statement in which they acknowledged the central role of community supervision in perpetuating mass incarceration, noting that:

“[I]ncreasingly sophisticated research has shown that we can responsibly reduce probation and parole populations. […] [I]t is possible to both significantly reduce the footprint of probation and parole and improve outcomes and public safety.”

Later, in February 2018, they released a collaborative report setting the ambitious goal of reducing the community corrections population by half to focus on individuals with “the greatest need.”

The Justice Lab’s report ends with multiple recommendations for accomplishing a similar feat in Wisconsin.

Close the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility, as it offers a perverse incentive to continue reincarcerating individuals due to technical violations of their conditions of supervision.

Support the development of localized Alternative to Revocation programs which provide incentives for individuals to comply with the terms of their supervision while helping them to reintegrate successfully into their communities.

Revise the Truth in Sentencing statutes to allow for shorter probation and parole sentences and to permit individuals to accrue “merit time” or earned compliance credits that would allow them to end their sentences early for good behavior.

The Justice Lab report was prepared by Jarred Williams, Director of Research at the Katal Center for Health, Equity and Justice; Vincent Schiraldi, Co-Director of the Columbia Justice Lab; and Kendra Bradner, Senior Staff Associate with the Columbia Justice Lab.

 A full copy of their report can be downloaded here.

Roman Gressier is a TCR news intern. He welcomes readers’ comments.

Wisconsin Probation, Parole Policies Fuel Racial Disparities: Study syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

[djgblogger-blog]

Juneteenth: Freedom's promise is still denied to thousands of blacks unable to make bail

http://bit.ly/2yqGgjG

Black men occupy a disproportionate share of prison cells in the U.S. sakhorn/Shutterstock.com

June 19 marks Juneteenth, a celebration of the de facto end of slavery in the United States.

For hundreds of thousands of African-Americans stuck in pretrial detention – accused but not convicted of a crime, and unable to leave because of bail – that promise remains unfulfilled. And coming immediately after Father’s Day, it’s also a reminder of the loss associated with the forced separation of families.

On a very personal level, I know how this separation feels. Every Father’s Day since 2011, I’ve been reminded of the unexpected death of my dad at the age of 48. But also on a professional level, as a criminologist who has been researching mass incarceration for the past decade, I understand the disproportionate impact it’s had on African-Americans, destabilizing black families in the process.

Blacks behind bars

Juneteenth is a celebration of African-Americans’ triumph over slavery and access to freedom in the U.S., which occurred in Galveston, Texas, in June of 1865, over two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

While Juneteenth is a momentous day in U.S. history, it is important to appreciate that the civil rights and liberties promised to African-Americans have yet to be fully realized. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander forcefully explains, this is a consequence of Jim Crow laws and the proliferation of incarceration that began in the 1970s, including the increase of people placed in pretrial detention and other criminal justice policies.

There are 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in American prisons and jails – including those not convicted of any crime. Black men comprise 40 percent of them, even though they represent just 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Protesters march through Harlem in the March for Justice. Rainmaker Photo/MediaPunch/IPX

Not yet guilty but not free

More troubling is the number of incarcerated individuals currently held in jail for crimes of which they have not yet been convicted.

In March, the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on mass incarceration, reported that over a half million citizens are languishing in pretrial detention. And like most criminal justice outcomes, the burden of this disproportionately falls on minorities, especially black men and women.

In local jails alone, over 300,000 people are awaiting trial for property, drug or pubic order crimes. And again, these disproportionately black defendants are confined and separated from their families, friends and jobs simply because they lack the means to post cash bail – the only reason they can’t get out.

Toll on families

It should be no surprise, then, that 1 in 9 black children now has a parent behind bars, compared with the national rate of 1 in 28.

And many of these children are at an increased likelihood of experiencing physical and mental health issues, academic struggles and a range of other behavioral problems. Children of incarcerated mothers are also at heightened odds of ending up in foster care and being exposed to other traumas.

Being the partner of an incarcerated individual is another often stressful experience that also falls disproportionately on black citizens, particularly women.

Some good news

The good news is that such injustices are receiving growing attention nationwide.

Just City, a nonprofit organization working to reduce the harms of the criminal justice system, recently campaigned to raise funds and promote awareness of its Memphis Community Bail Fund project for Father’s Day – in part because nearly half a million of the black men behind bars are dads.

The aim of the project is to provide both financial and legal support for defendants lacking resources to independently secure their pretrial release, with the goal of the recent campaign being the release of jailed fathers so that they could be with their kids for the holiday.

Bail funds similar to Just City’s have proliferated throughout the U.S.

On one hand, the multiplication of these organizations is encouraging and reason for optimism. On the other, their growth is another reminder that many of the freedoms celebrated on Juneteenth remain unrealized.

A long road continues

In cities like Detroit, where 1 in 7 adult males is under some form of correctional control in some communities, it is a monumental task to make sense of the short- and long-term impacts of incarceration for black families.

Children suffer. Parents struggle. Relationships deteriorate. And as a result, so too do so many African-American communities. Lost wages matter to families, but they also matter to communities. The lower tax base that results makes it more difficult for struggling public institutions, like schools, to progress. And with such a large share of individuals removed from some communities due to incarceration, and branded as felons upon their release, these communities lose potential voters and the political capital they carry. They are too often disenfranchised and stripped of their full power and potential.

Juneteenth celebrates the freedom of black Americans and the long, hard road they were forced to traverse to gain that freedom. But as criminologists like me have maintained time and again, the U.S. criminal justice system remains biased, albeit implicitly, against them.

Matthew Larson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

[i-am-very-very-tired]

BY MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY @MHARRISPERRY September 15, 2016 Nobody drops a game-changer like the Carter family. Beyoncé unveiled an entire visual album at the stroke of midnight, got us into Formation on the eve of the Super Bowl and redefined lemonade for a generation. This morning it was Jay Z. Hova strolled onto the homepage of The New York Times with a four-minute narration of illustrated video exploring the racialized ravages of America’s drug war and was like, “I’ma just leave this here.” The fire collaboration is the latest from the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the most respected change agents in the multidecade struggle for sentencing reform and sane drug policy. Progressive journalist, writer, and studio artist Molly Crabapple is the swift arm bringing life to the pen and ink representations of three decades of poor drug policy, mandatory sentencing, and explosive incarceration rates. Jay’s distinctive voice traces the trajectory of American imprisonment from 1986 to 2016, moving deftly from President Ronald Reagan’s shredding of the social safety net to President Bill Clinton’s crime bill to the new economy of legal marijuana that now excludes African-Americans and Latinos. dream hampton’s production genius brings the piece together. Much respect to the alliance, dream, Molly, and Jay for this effort. It is a necessary intervention in this electoral season when the media seems determined to ignore any substantive discussion of policies impacting the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. It is important, but it is only half the story. If Jay has given us a “History” of the War on Drugs, allow me to offer a “Herstory” of the War on Drugs. Don’t get it twisted, this ain’t beef. I ain’t the real Roxanne. And this ain’t exactly Rap Genius either. My goal here isn’t to annotate the piece as it stands. Although a good syllabus could emerge from quality citations on this piece. Get on it, Professor Dyson! I offer these lines to expand our understanding of how black communities were distorted and destroyed by the politics, policies, and philosophies of America’s misguided drug war. We need a bigger frame to ensure sisters are in the picture. This is that intersectional expansion. Let’s begin at the beginning, where Jay begins. In 1986, when I was coming of age, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the war on drugs that was started by Richard Nixon in 1971. Drugs were bad. Fried your brain. Drug dealers were monsters. The sole reason neighborhoods and major cities were failing. No one wanted to talk about Reaganomics and the ending of social safety nets, the defunding of schools, and the loss of jobs across America. — Jay Z President Richard Nixon’s drug war is the older sibling of hip-hop, born just two years before that Sedgwick Avenue house party that would ultimately birth its own most prescient cultural critic. Like hip-hop, public policy needs rhetorical strategy. Even as black Americans were pressing for full citizenship in the civil rights revolution, lawmakers were stepping into the cipher to test “cultural deviance” as a battle strategy for public opinion. Citing pathology, they could shift public attention away from structural inequities burdening poor black communities. Jay recalls being labeled a monster in his own neighborhood when he was just a young man. He wasn’t alone; leaders from both political parties discovered that a sure route to public notoriety was to climb the ladder of black women’s bent and broken backs. Take Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, written when it was legal to deny housing on the basis of race, legal to pay workers different wages on the basis of race, and routine to deny school admission to black students. Despite the overwhelming barriers facing black folk, Moynihan concluded, black women were the main problem in our own communities. “A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife,” and he added, “There is probably no single fact of Negro American life so little understood by whites.” Come on, everyone knows black women’s hair is the single fact of black American life least understood by whites. Can you feel posthumous side-eye sir? Moynihan’s conclusions granted permission to generations of policymakers to imagine poor black women as domineering household managers whose unfeminine insistence on control both emasculated their potential male partners and destroyed their children’s futures. Instead of engaging black women as creative citizens doing the best they could in tough circumstances, the report labeled them as unrelenting cheats unfairly demanding assistance from the system. This made it easier for Reagan to turn black women into Cadillac-driving welfare queens in the 1980s. It was simple for the American public to believe sensational headlines and popular movies in the 1990s blaming black mothers as the cause of social and economic decline through the epidemic of “crack babies.” Listen. Halle Berry got caught out there with this madness. Nah, we didn’t forget Losing Isaiah. We are going to let it slide because we know you had to work, but we did not forget. The reality is these so-called crack babies were a myth. What seemed to be the living, squealing, suffering, embodied evidence of pathological black womanhood turns out to be a media creation. Twenty-five years later, there is no evidence that use of crack actually causes abnormal babies, even though the media insisted this link was true. The crack baby was and is a racial myth – a myth with very real consequences. Hustle became the sole villain and drug addicts lacked moral fortitude. In the 1990s, incarceration rates in the U.S. blew up. Today we incarcerate more people than any other country in the world. — Jay Z Crack babies are a myth, but alcohol and tobacco have well-documented and extremely negative effects during pregnancy. Alcohol and tobacco have something else in common — good lobbyists representing in Washington and in state capitals across the country. Maybe that is why you can’t be arrested for arriving to give birth drunk, but in many states you can be arrested if you have illicit drugs in your system when you give birth. Arrested. Not offered drug counseling or prenatal care. Arrested. Many of those states have, in turn, seen a substantial decline in poor women seeking prenatal care. Perhaps since, no surprise, 70 percent of women charged with fetal abuse are women of color. I wonder why they are the ones being tested. While we are dragging pregnant black women off to jail, no one is held accountable for the one factor that has been shown consistently to have lasting effects on the health and life outcomes of mothers and children — poverty. Nearly a quarter of American children live in poverty, black infants are far more likely to be born into poverty, more likely to die in their first year, and more likely to suffer the health effects of poverty for a lifetime. A 2015 report by Save the Children also ranked the United States last among developed nations for maternal health outcomes, largely because of the racial disparities for black women. And maybe I missed it, but has anyone been charged for poisoning the children of Flint, Michigan, with lead yet? But as Jay says. No one wants to talk about that. The war on drugs exploded the U.S. prison population, disproportionately locking away blacks and Latinos. — Jay Z Once the public has been convinced that culture and choices, not structures or policies, are to blame for bad outcomes, solutions coalesce around individual punishments rather than systemic change. Let’s lock up the bad guys instead of changing the bad laws. The prison population exploded and the effects of that explosion were not gender-neutral. The war on drugs was especially pernicious for black women. Even though the total number of men behind bars is larger than the total number of women, the rate of growth for women has been faster. According to data from the Sentencing Project, between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 700 percent. These are disproportionately black women. The Department of Justice reports the rate of incarceration is almost twice as high for black versus white women, 113 per 100,000 compared with 51 per 100,000. Given that nearly 60 percent of these women are mothers who were caring for minor children before their sentencing, the jailing of black women has a devastating effect on black children and communities. Research suggests maternal incarceration can have a particularly acute effect on children’s mental and emotional well-being. Judges’ hands were tied by tough-on-crime laws and they were forced to hand out mandatory life sentences for simple possession and low-level drug sales. My home state of New York started this with Rockefeller laws. — Jay Z Most women in federal prison are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses, often conspiracy charges. The public hears drug conspiracy and thinks of large-scale organizations operating across borders. Think instead of a woman living with an infant and her boyfriend. Given that the overwhelming majority of incarcerated women are survivors of domestic abuse, sexual violence, and childhood trauma, it is likely this woman is in a situation where she or her children may experience abuse. If her boyfriend sells drugs from the apartment and she is arrested and asked if she knows anything, she has two choices. She can confirm her knowledge of the drug sales or deny it. If she confirms, she can be evicted. She may suffer violence. If she refuses to cooperate, she faces harsh mandatory minimum sentencing. Jay tells us to remember his home state of New York’s Rockefeller laws. I ask you to remember the story from my home state of Virginia, Kemba Smith. Kemba is poster child for how these drug laws swept up black women who were guilty of little more than being victims. She was seven months’ pregnant, had no criminal record, was charged with a nonviolent offense, and was in an abusive relationship with a man who ran a major drug ring. Still, Kemba was sentenced to 24 years in prison as a result of mandatory minimum drug laws. It is Kemba’s graduation photo on the cover of Emerge magazine that haunts the nightmare of those college-bound girls whose suburban childhoods didn’t look like Jay’s Brooklyn upbringing. Her story said this was a war with weapons powerful enough to lay to ruin the Different World dreams of black girls. Long after the crack era ended, we continued the war on drugs. — Jay Z In 1999, Sharanda Jones was 23 and had an 8-year-old daughter when she was arrested and convicted on one count of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. Conspiracy. She was given a life sentence. Life without the possibility of parole. At 23. For a single count of a nonviolent offence. In May 2014, having already spent 15 years in a maximum security prison, she wrote a heart-wrenching letter, trying to help the world see the madness of this injustice. “There is no reduction, no good behavior, that will ever reduce my sentence and allow me to return to society. I know that, unless President Obama (or one of his successors) commutes my sentence, I will die in prison. A life sentence in the federal system is just a very slow death.” Clinton granted clemency to Kemba Smith in 2000. President Barack Obama granted clemency to Sharanda Jones in 2016. They are finally free, but these are just two stories out of the hundreds of thousands of women still suffering in a system where our national response to black women who are guilty of being victims of poverty, of structural inequality, of abuse, and of trauma, to lock them away; strip them of parental rights; permanently damage their ability to seek education, secure housing, start businesses, and choose their elected representatives. And it begins when they are girls. Black girls are suspended, criminalized, pushed out of school and into a juvenile system where they receive disproportionately harsh sentences, often in the wake of severe emotional and sexual trauma. The war on drugs is an Epic Fail. — Jay Z Jay and his collaborators have drawn our attention back to this critical issue. We must look and listen and grapple with the cost of this war — not just the $51 billion the United States wastes annually. (Dollars that could be spent infrastructure, education, or really anything else.) This abbreviated history asks us to calculate the cost of lost genius, broken families, hollow communities, and stolen futures caused by decades of ill-advised policing and draconian sentencing. We should do the math this video is asking of us. Then multiply it.

[type2diabetestreatments-blog]

Poor health is keeping US men out of the workforce

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-research/poor-health-is-keeping-us-men-out-of-the-workforce/

Poor health is keeping US men out of the workforce

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina—John LaRue is having a tough time of it these days. He used to move things for people, advertising his services on Craigslist. But work slowed up, and he became homeless and started sleeping in his truck, until, that is, someone stole it.

Now, he told me, he’s fighting alcoholism and his health is deteriorating from living on the streets. I met LaRue at a Social Security office outside of Charlotte, where he was hiding his belongings in the bushes because he didn’t have anywhere to keep them and wasn’t allowed to bring them inside. “I feel like there’s a cloud over my head,” he told me. “It’s just been one thing after another.”

LaRue is one among many. In 1957, 97 percent of men in America ages 25 to 54 were either working or looking for work. Today, only 89 percent are. Italy is the only OECD country with a lower labor-force participation rate for men in their prime years. Just why there are so many men who aren’t working is a matter of debate. In a 2016 report, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers examined the declining labor-force participation rate and suggested that a drop-off in good jobs for low-skilled men was part of the explanation. Wages, the report theorized, are so low for many jobs that don’t require a college education that men don’t find it worth it to seek out bad jobs. A lack of job training and job-search assistance—when compared to other OECD countries—makes it more difficult for men to move into more lucrative fields. And a surge in incarceration has made it more difficult for men to find work when they leave prison, according to the report.

Conservative scholars have a different view. In his 2016 book, Men Without Work, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute put forward two arguments: First, that as social welfare programs have gotten more generous, they’ve lured men away from trying to find a job, and, second, that a large share of the men who are not working are ones with criminal records who have not been able to find a job, and have thus given up. To some degree, Eberstadt puts the blame on American men themselves. “It is impossible to imagine any earlier generation in which such a huge swath of prime-age men would voluntarily absent themselves from the workforce, living instead on the largesse of women they knew and taxpayers they did not,” he writes.

In all likelihood, men’s labor-force participation is declining because of a combination of the reasons mentioned above. But there’s another theory that deserves mentioning, especially because it fits with recent research about the declining health outcomes among American men. That theory suggests that American men are dropping out of the workforce because they are suffering from serious health conditions that make it difficult for them to work. As their health deteriorates, they’re getting on pain medications, which then make it even more difficult to re-enter the workforce.

Princeton economist Alan Krueger argued this theory late last year at a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and in an October 2016 paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research. In his research, he found that almost half of working-age men who were not in the labor force were taking pain medication on a daily basis, and that two-thirds of those men were taking prescription medication. These men also reported more functional disabilities: Krueger found that 43 percent of prime-aged men who are out of the labor force report their health as fair or poor, compared with 12 percent of employed men and 16 percent of unemployed men. Health-related problems “are a substantial barrier to work that would have to be addressed to significantly reverse their downward trend in participation,” Krueger writes.

Krueger’s work looks specifically at pain medication, but the health problems keeping Americans out of the workforce may be broader than that. Millions of Americans are increasingly struggling with obesity and with diabetes, as well as with alcoholism. A 2015 paper by husband-and-wife team Anne Case and Angus Deaton in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that while the mortality rates for people aged 45 to 52 in most rich countries declined by 2 percent per year, mortality rates for U.S. whites rose by half a percent each year starting in 1998. “Deaths of despair” such as suicide, alcohol and drug poisoning, and alcohol-related liver disease killed many of these men, the paper found.

As my colleague Olga Khazan has written, a subsequent analysis by the Commonwealth Fund found that things like heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory disease were contributing to some of the increased mortality among middle-aged Americans. There are now 30 million Americans living with diabetes, more than three times the number living with the disease in the early 1990s. And a recent study has suggested that diabetes might be more of a factor in American mortality than was previously thought—perhaps the third leading cause of death in America, after cancer and heart disease. (Diabetes is prone to under-counting because the official cause of death is often something else.) Obesity and diabetes have been shown to disproportionately affect people with a high-school education or less—the same group who are disappearing from the labor force.

“Obesity and diabetes are disabling, and they are one explanation for reduced labor-force participation,” Andrew Stokes, a Boston University professor and one of the authors of the diabetes study, told me.

Indeed, of the half a dozen men (and one woman) in North Carolina I talked to who had dropped out of the labor force, many told me of physical challenges that have made it difficult to work a regular job. Charles Lucas, 52, said that he had worked in fast food for a decade until his body got to a place where he could no longer stand. He’s had a few heart attacks, he told me, wheezing as he stood in line to apply for disability benefits. He’s been rejected for disability before. “I don’t know what I could do anymore” for work, he told me. He lives with his father, who gets Social Security.

John Crain, 43, used to work in construction, until alcoholism, divorce, and a death in his family led him to drop out of the workforce. Crain, who is currently homeless, is trying to get his life back together, but spends most of his days holding a sign by the side of the road asking for money. (He makes about $50 a day, he said.)

What is making men sicker than they used to be? I had thought it might be that the difficult jobs worked by Americans over their lifetimes might have worn them down physically, especially after I talked to Sandra White, 49. She could barely walk, and has had multiple surgeries on her back. She spent most of her life waiting tables and doing cleaning jobs on construction sites. The work has impacted her body, she told me. “It’s strenuous work, and it took a toll on my back,” she said.

But Krueger says that jobs are less physically demanding than they used to be, and so it doesn’t make sense that jobs would now be exacting a worse toll. What’s more, he said, workplaces have gotten safer over time, so Americans should be experiencing fewer work-related ailments.

What’s changed may be how people have reacted to pain, he said. Before, they worked through it. Now, they go to their doctors and get on pain medications. Doctors may be prescribing these pain medications too frequently: Recent studies have shown that doctors who prescribe opioids are more likely to have patients that use the drugs chronically.

“One of the things I conclude from my research is that if we are going to turn this around, we need to address the epidemic of widespread use of pain medication,” Krueger told me.

What has also changed is Americans’ eating habits. Obesity is on the rise in part because Americans now eat more ultra-processed foods that are high in sugar, and drink more sugar-sweetened beverages. One study has suggested that more than half of Americans’ calories now come from these “ultra-processed foods.” Part of this is because unhealthy foods are, by and large, cheaper than healthy ones; they also require little to no preparation, and many people enjoy how they taste. Some scientists argue that government policies have played a role in increasing how much sugar Americans consume—by providing farm subsidies, they say, the U.S. government encourages the production of cheap corn that ends up in high-fructose corn syrup, which is used in many processed foods.

Of course, this may be a mutually reinforcing cycle: Changes in the labor market over the last half-century may also be contributing to the declining health outcomes of Americans. More Americans now work in the service industry and in jobs with unpredictable schedules. Such workers may find it more difficult to exercise and eat a healthy diet. “Your occupation does really make an imprint on your health status,” said Stokes, the Boston University professor. Long-term night-shift work, for example, has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease and obesity. And some jobs are not conducive to healthy living: Around 86 percent of U.S. truck drivers are overweight or obese. Then again, people who aren’t in great shape may go into trucking, because it doesn’t require all that much physical activity. So it’s difficult to tease out what is a cause and what is an effect.

Likewise, the state of the economy may also be pushing people to turn to alcohol and drugs, which makes them less healthy. As jobs disappear, working-age men may drink or do drugs, as entertainment, to self-medicate their unhappiness, or both. They then find it hard to find and hold jobs. They are unhealthier because they don’t have something like a job motivating them to stay engaged and substance-free.

Most policymakers thinking up prescriptions for fixing declining labor-force participation focus on jobs. They suggest investing in public infrastructure to increase demand for workers and subsidizing programs that pay people to work temporarily. But this research suggests that gains could also come from investing in public-health programs that seek to encourage better eating, less smoking, and frequent exercise. In other words, policies may need to respond to the idea that the American man is in a state of despair not just because his labor prospects have dimmed but because his chance at good health has dimmed, too.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

[freespeechradionews]

New Post has been published on FSRN

New Post has been published on https://fsrn.org/2017/02/black-immigrants-in-u-s-fear-profiling-may-drive-up-deportation-rates/

Black immigrants in U.S. fear profiling may drive up deportation rates

The Trump administration maintained its rapid fire pace of rolling back Obama era policies this week. Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked a Justice Department directive to reduce and eventually end the government’s use of private prisons. The reversal comes as ramped-up immigration enforcement actions are likely to dramatically increase the number of detainees in federal custody. The racial profiling that leads to disproportionate incarceration rates for African-Americans is also true for black immigrants, which may drive their deportation rates even higher under the new framework. Lena Nozizwe has more.

Download Audio

Immigrants make up almost 10 percent of the black population living in the United States, according to the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, or BAJI. Most of them are from Africa and the Caribbean.

And in the New York City, Newark, Jersey City area alone, almost one third of the black population is foreign-born.

“Some of these differences are real. Some of our clients, for example, come from the countries listed on the travel ban currently being litigated,” Mauricio Noroña, a staff attorney at the Harlem-based African Services Committee, says new immigration policies impact the community he serves in different ways. “These differences have caused actual barriers in our client’s’ path for becoming actual permanent residents of the U.S.”

Noroña adds that more aggressive enforcement by ICE worries black immigrants who, like African-Americans, are subjected to disproportionately high rates of stops, searches and arrests by the police.

“We have gotten a lot of calls, emails, visits from worried community members who are undocumented. They are concerned about whether they will be picked up and detained. We have even gotten calls from permanent residents and U.S. citizens with their own sets of concerns,” Noroña points out. “These fears don’t necessarily reflect the reality of what is going on, at least for now. But they are real to the extent that they are causing harm to the quality of life.”

Ramped-up enforcement targets undocumented immigrants in particular, but Trump’s executive orders were written so broadly that even visa holders charged with a criminal offense can be deported – regardless of a conviction.

As is, legal residents can be stripped of their visas for non-violent offenses.

“That includes even minor convictions, such as disorderly conduct convictions. When you consider that, this is according to a report published by the Police Reform Organizing Project, 80 to 95 percent, 95 percent, of arrests, tickets and stops in 2015 in New York were issued to black and Hispanic individuals, then you can see the disproportionate enforcement of local laws is now directly linked to disproportionate impact for immigration issues,” Noroña explains. “For example, We have many clients have plead guilty for disorderly conduct charges for the simple reason they were selling food on the street without a license. Now these people will be considered dangerous and unworthy and will be targeted for removal. It’s important to clarify that this administration isn’t saying that they will remove people for minor convictions, rather that would require a change in the law. Rather, what is going on is ICE is now saying they will focus their efforts, that will spend more money and resources for going after people like that now.”

Many immigrant rights groups, including the African Services Committee and BAJI have kicked into high gear in response to the policy shifts with advocacy efforts, outreach and know-your-rights workshops.

While most black immigrants do speak English as a first or fluent second language, it is not the mother tongue of what is believed to be the largest group of black immigrants in detention by nationality: Haitians. During a teleconference town hall meeting hosted by BAJI on President’s Day, a caller said the need for Creole translators is acute.

A wave of Haitian nationals came to the U.S. last year, seeking to qualify for an Obama-era family reunification program. Many are made to wait in detention centers pending the outcome of their petitions.

BAJI programs manager Carl Lipscombe told town hall participants that conditions for detainees are unnecessarily harsh:

“What folks should know is that immigrant detention is not supposed to be punitive per se. Ideally and under law immigrant detention is civil detention, not criminal detention. That being said, about 90 percent of detention, well all detention centers are effectively prisons. Many of them are housed within prisons. A good 75 to 90 percent of them are housed within prisons and so the conditions are prison-like conditions,” Lipscombe explains. “One is is being monitored by officers 24/7. Officers direct what one does throughout the day at any giving time. There is limited access to the outdoors and to recreational activities. Even though the Obama Administration really advertised this notion of family detention centers, those are also prisons where women and children are housed.The conditions in these detention facilities mirror those of prisons.”

The Trump administration plans to expand its already extensive capacity for immigrant detention. Thursday, the Justice Department reversed a directive aimed at reducing the federal government’s dependence on for-profit prisons. Private prison company stocks – already soaring since Donald Trump’s election – shot up after the announcement.

As with the border wall, it’s up to Congress to decide on funding. But when it comes to the human costs, immigration rights advocates say non-citizens are already paying a high price.