End Mass Incarceration

[SPECTRE1]

http://www.yourblackworld.net/

CHICAGO, IL (April 24, 2013) — Roughly two weeks after a coalition of more than 175 celebrities, Civil Rights activists, scholars, and athletes signed a letter to urge President Obama to end the failed War On Drugs, the White House announced on Wednesday that the Obama Administration is dismantling the War On Drugs by enforcing policies that will prevent drug abuse and treat drug addiction as a health issue. The powerful coalition, organized by hip-hop and business mogul Russell Simmons and respected scholar Dr. Boyce Watkins, includes NAACP president Ben Jealous, Rev. Al Sharpton, Jennifer Hudson, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Hudson, the presidents of Morehouse and Spelman, Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow), Chris Rock, LL Cool J, Dr. Wilmer Leon, Justin Bieber, Dr. Julianne Malveaux and 175 other scholars, celebrities, activists and public figures who believe in the cause.

Dr. Watkins, whose team reached out to Simmons about starting the initiative, stated that ending the War On Drugs is a critical move toward protecting families across America.

“This is a great first step in implementing policy that will help to restore millions of families that have been decimated by the war on drugs and the epidemic of mass incarceration,” said Dr. Boyce Watkins, who is also on the faculty at Syracuse University. “I get emails every other day from the children of parents who’ve been given dozens of years for non-violent drug offenses, and we must realize that by not being smart on crime, we are simply creating another generation of inmates. Our world is NOT safer when we are so determined to lock up heads of households.”

Gil Kerikowske, director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, is scheduled to release Obama’s 2013 blueprint for drug policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore on Wednesday.

NAACP President Ben Jealous wrote on the matter last week, stating that the nation must begin to be smart on crime.

Our nation leads the world in the incarceration of our own citizens, both on a per capita basis and in terms of total prison population. The problem stems from the decades-old “tough on crime” policies from the Nixon/Reagan era. We are stuck in a failed “tough on crime” mind state that is characterized by converting low-level drug addicts into hardened criminals by repeatedly locking them up when they should be sent to rehab for drug treatment.

Jealous goes on to note that a nearly one out of every four (500,000 out of 2.3 million) incarcerated Americans is there for a drug-related offense, and 40% of them are African American. Also, one out of every nine black children has a parent in prison, compared to on out of every 57 for whites.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, who is also a member of the coalition, said that he is pleased that the Obama Administration has taken the first steps toward fixing the crisis. On his way to South Africa to accept the Freedom Award, Rev. Jackson said that drug and incarceration policies must focus on rehabilitation instead of simple punishment. Rev. Jackson says that current policies only focus on perpetuating and worsening problems, rather than fixing them.

“It is cheaper to heal than to recycle sickness and spread it,” he said.

To find out more about the coalition formed by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Russell Simmons and 175 Celebrities, Scholars and Activists, please visit

YourBlackWorld.net/EndMassIncarceration.###

 

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<iframe width="640" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/2K45uEeLbmo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I don't know why this guy was given 20 years. I have never been approached, marketed, or pushed into buying drugs from anybody in my entire life. Are they running prescription drug type commercials on TV during 60 minutes? Has anybody been approached to buy drugs from a person? You would have to actively seek out these individuals on a street corner somewhere to get these items. Why are these people given 20 years for fulfilling a demand from people that approach them?

 

[SPECTRE1]

A major contributor to the high incarceration rates is the length of the prison sentences in the United States. One of the criticisms of the United States system is that it has much longer sentences than any other part of the world. The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would warrant at most 6 months in jail.[54] Mandatory sentencing prohibits judges from using their discretion and forces them to place longer sentences on nonviolent offenses than they normally would do.

Even though there are other countries that commit more inmates to prison annually, the fact that the United States keeps their prisoners longer causes the total rate to become higher. To give an example, the average burglary sentence in the United States is 16 months, compared to 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.[19]

Looking at reasons for imprisonment will further clarify why the incarceration rate and length of sentences are so high. The practice of imposing longer prison sentences on repeat offenders is common in many countries but the three-strikes laws in the U.S. with mandatory 25 year imprisonment — implemented in many states in the 1990s — is very extreme compared to countries in Europe.

Drug sentencing laws

Another contributing factor to United States' spike in the number of prisoners is the War on Drugs, formally initiated by Richard Nixon with the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and avidly pursued by Ronald Reagan.[55]

Comment: Two criminally unindicted presidents that pursued these policies, one bugged their political opponents offices and sanctioned break in, yet the policies they pursed are allowed to stand...



By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. The result, 31 million people have been imprisoned on drug related charges. [56]

After the passage of Reagan's Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, incarceration for non-violent offenses dramatically increased The Act imposed the same five-year mandatory sentence on users of crack as on those possessing 100 times as much powder cocaine..[55][57] This had a disproportionate effect on low-level street dealers and users of crack, who were more commonly poor blacks, Latinos, the young, and women.[58]
Prison privatization

In the 1980s, the rising number of people incarcerated as a result of the War on Drugs and the wave of privatization that occurred under the Reagan Administration saw the emergence of the for-profit prison industry. Prior to the 1980s, private prisons did not exist in the US.[66]

In a 2011 report by the ACLU, it is claimed that the rise of the for-profit prison industry is a "major contributor" to mass incarceration, along with bloated state budgets.[67] Louisiana, for example, has the highest rate of incarceration in the world with the majority of its prisoners being housed in privatized, for-profit facilities. Such institutions could face bankruptcy without a steady influx of prisoners.[68]

Corporations who operate prisons, such as the Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group, spend significant amounts of money lobbying the federal government along with state governments.[67] The two aforementioned companies, the largest in the industry, are active members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which lobbies for policies that would increase incarceration, such as three-strike laws and “truth-in-sentencing” legislation.[69][70][71] This influence on the government by the private prison industry has been referred to as the Prison–industrial complex.[70]

The industry is well aware of what reduced crime rates could mean to their bottom line. This from the CCA's SEC report in 2010:
"Our growth … depends on a number of factors we cannot control, including crime rates …[R]eductions in crime rates … could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities."

 

[QueEx]

A New Development in Prison Reform

​

by Carla Murphy
Thursday, January 30 2014


There’s not much that Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats agree on these days. Surprisingly, one of them happens to bescaling back mass incarceration, the subject of a live-streamed meeting today of the senate judiciary committee.

The motives vary among and between key legislative leaders as ideologically disparate as Republican senators Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ken.) and Democrats Patrick Leahy (Vt.) and Dick Durbin (Ill.). But whether motivated by concern for civil liberties, unsustainable state and federal budgets, or a New Testament-inclination for giving second chances, one fact trumps all differences: The United States houses by far the largest incarcerated population in the world at 2.2 million people as of year-end 2011. That smudge, as well as unsubtle championing of sentencing reform by attorney general Eric Holder, has galvanized a relatively quiet bipartisan effort over the past five years. Advocates say Congress is taking on mass incarceration one reform at a time. The latest are tucked into the 1,582-page FY2014 omnibus spending bill and, other reforms are coming down the pike. Below, a guide to these new developments.

What stands out in the 2014 omnibus spending bill? Advocates are excited about the creation of the $1 million Charles Colson Task Force, an independent, nine-member panel of experts tasked with issuing recommendations on federal prison reform. A similar idea for a bipartisan commission, at least on Capitol Hill, dates back to 2009[/b]. And although the scope of this current incarnation is federal prisons, the bill’s somewhat broad remit suggests that the commission could potentially issue the first comprehensive report since 1965 on criminal justice in America.

“The Bureau of Prisons [now] sucks up 25 percent of the Department of Justice’s budget,” Molly Gill, government affairs counsel at Washington, DC-based Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), says. “It means more is being spent on prisons and less on prosecution, cops, victim services or rehabilitation—all things that are important for keeping public safety high.”


How will Colson treat nonviolent offenders? Nonviolent offenders make up more than 90 percent of the roughly 215,000-member federal prison population at a cost of $20,000 to $30,000 per inmate. Forty percent are in for drugs and 30 percent for immigration-related offenses. Gill says that the Colson task force will figure out fairer sentences—like, not locking people up for a decade because of a period of drug addiction. The feds are taking the lead from states like Georgia and South Carolina, she says, “who were way ahead in looking at sentencing reform and setting up commissions.

Another plus: The task force will have lots of discretion in deciding what aspects of the system they want to focus on, says Jessica Eaglin, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law—which means state prisons may get attention, too.


Will the Colson task force take on race? “I can’t imagine any objective analysis of incarceration that didn’t take a look at the racial and cultural make-up of who is in prison,” Republican and Justice Fellowship president, Craig deRoche, says. Justice Fellowship is the public policy arm of Prison Fellowship, the prison ministry founded 40 years ago by disgraced Nixon aide-turned-evangelical Christian, Charles “Chuck” Colson. (The task force is named for Colson, who championed prison reform until his death in 2012.) The disparities are staggering. According to Yale professors Jason Stanley’s and Vesla Weaver’s New York Times op-ed this week:

“Just from 1980 to 2006, the black rate of incarceration (jail and prison) increased four times as much as the increase in the white rate. … In 1968, 15 percent of black adult males had been convicted of a felony and 7 percent had been to prison; by 2004, the numbers had risen to 33 percent and 17 percent, respectively.”​

Still, based on his time as speaker of Michigan’s House of Representatives, deRoche argues that racism isn’t the only or main reason producing racially disparate outcomes. Perverse financial incentives built into the criminal justice system itself may play the largest role of all, he says. One example is Michigan’s indigent defense system, which as of 2013 is being overhauled. A perverse financial incentive rewarded underpaid indigent defense attorneys for their volume of clientele, not thier time-consuming trial preparation or competent defense. The racial outcome: guilty rulings for a largely African-American and poor clientele.


What role are conservatives playing? FAMM worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to craft legislative language exempting certain offenders from harsh mandatory minimums. That’s ALEC, the conservative group best known for advancing the “Stand your ground” law that helped exonerate George Zimmerman. “So far we haven’t taken a lot of fire and I hope we don’t,” Gill says of FAMM’s bipartisan work with ALEC. “It’s not a bad thing to engage with people from a wide variety of places. That’s what it’s going to take to get anything done and there are people in Congress who know that.”


But don’t conservatives champion mass incarceration? “Traditionally the right was probably the most fervent advocate of ‘tough on crime’ policies that got us to more than two million people in prison,” says David Dagan, freelance journalist and Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University. But now, he writes in a January journal article, undoing mass incarceration is becoming as orthodox on the Right as building it was just a few short years ago. And that, Dagan says, “opens up political space that wasn’t there before.”


What else is in the 2014 spending bill? Funding increases went to the Second Chance Act, the 2008 law passed under President George W. Bush that supports re-entry and rehabilitation programming for former prisoners as well as drug courts.


Are there any other reforms coming? The senate judiciary committee met January 30, 2014 to merge three bipartisan bills. Together they currently expand judicial discretion for certain non-violent drug offenses, lower mandatory minimums for the next generation of offenders and incentivize prisoners to tackle addiction. Of particular interest for families of imprisoned men and women is the Smarter Sentencing Act. It takes up retroactive sentence reduction, which the unanimously passed Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 did not address. “More than 9,000 people are still imprisoned simply because of a date,” Gill says of the FSA, which reduced the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity for future but not past offenders. “Getting fair punishment shouldn’t depend on a date that you went to court.”​

​

SOURCE: http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/01/a_new_development_in_prison_reform.html

 

[QueEx]

Justice Department backs reduced penalties
for low-level drug offenses​

Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday urged the U.S. Sentencing Commission to reduce the recommended prison time for certain low-level drug offenses.

Citing prison overcrowding, and the fact that nearly half of the nation’s 216,000 federal prisoners are incarcerated on drug charges, Holder said sentencing reform is desperately needed.

“ Modestly reducing the quantity-based guideline for drug offenses, while continuing to ensure higher penalties for drug offenders involved violence, or who are career criminals, or who use weapons in their offenses is consistent [with] the Attorney General's Smart on Crime initiative and will help further our current need for efficient and strategic criminal justice reforms,” the Justice Department’s written testimony stated.​

The department’s 31-page prepared statement, though spanning a wide array of sentencing topics, placed particular weight on the drug sentencing question. The proposed reform would affect those convicted of possessing 500 grams or more of powdered cocaine or 28 grams or more of crack cocaine.

“ It has become clear that we must find ways to control federal prison spending order to better focus limited resources on combating the most serious threats to public safety,” the department’s statement declared.

The seven-member sentencing commission was also scheduled to hear from other supporters of reform, such as Families Against Mandatory Minimums, as well as a representative of the National District Attorneys Association, who argues against reducing sentences.

“ Despite the myth being promulgated by the U.S. Department of Justice that ‘America’s federal prison system is bloated with first-time, low level drug offenders’, the vast majority of prisoners in the Federal prison system have been very bad actors for a long time,” Raymond F. Morrogh, director at large of the district attorneys association, stated. ​

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/13/221114/justice-department-backs-reduced.html#storylink=cpy