Viviana Hurtado

By Alan BeanViviana Hurtado learned about immigration issues while working as a journalist in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.  She understands the desperation that drives men and women across the River and how tenuous the existence of the undocumented can be.  She understands that many extended families contain both the documented and the undocumented.  President Obama’s delay in pushing for meaningful immigration reform means that ”many of the estimated 12 million people who live and contribute millions of dollar to the economy will continue to live in fear that at any moment, La migra may pick up and deport a mom or dad, often times of a U.S. citizen”. During my recent trip to “the Valley” I was disturbed by the militarization of the area (I can’t think of a better word).  There was a time when Mexican citizens entered the United States on a seasonal basis, worked a few months in the fields, then headed back to Mexico.  Or they might live on the Mexican side of the border and work as a maid in a Texas border town.  That doesn’t happen anymore.  Once you are in the country, you stay in the country, even if that means being confined to virtual house arrest while documented members of the family venture out of the home to buy groceries.  If your child is picked up by La Migra and transferred to a county jail, you aren’t able to visit; you can’t leave the Rio Grande Valley without passing through the checkpoints that are located within 100 miles of the border on every highway.  Between 1994 and 2008, the overall number of individuals detained i the United States each year swelled from approximately 81,000 to around 380,000.  Thanks to the federal Secure Communities program that has spread to virtually every part of the United States, local law enforcement must put an “Ice Hold” on every person they detain if there is any chance they might be illegal.  At least 400,000 people are deported from the United States every year.

With these policies in place, it is hardly surprising that as many people now cross the border from the United States to Mexico as enter the US from the South.  When I hear critics of the Obama administration insisting that the federal government “get serious” about border security, I wonder what they are talking about.  The President is desperate to prove that he can be as punitive as any Tea Party Republican on the immigration issue; he certainly puts the relatively balanced policies of his predecessor to shame.

Mike Seifert, Equal Voice Network

Mike Seifert, head of the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, took me for a guided tour of the border fence.  “What do people who don’t live here need to know about the life experience of the undocumented?” I asked. Mike thought a moment.  “To tell the story of the world people live in down here,” he said at last, “you would need to invent a new vocabulary.” Most of us would admit that no border would stop us from giving our children a better life.  But we see the undocumented as problems, not people.  We don’t identify with their pain.  We think, incorrectly, that they are taking our jobs.  We think they are looking for handouts.  They aren’t.  Most work incredibly hard at jobs we don’t want to do and, collectively, end up paying far more in taxes than they receive in welfare and social services. What will it take to soften our hearts?  What will Mr. Seifert’s “new vocabulary” sound like?  I don’t know, but I’m working on it.  

Will Obama Deliver on Comprehensive Immigration Reform?

Viviana HurtadoFox News LatinoPresident Barack Obama’s coming out in support of same-sex marriage has left me wondering when Mr. Obama will finally wager serious political capital to overhaul our immigration system.

His announcement came days after the White House Cinco de Mayo celebration, which I attended. The president knows how to play to an audience: he stood before us, affirming his support for comprehensive immigration reform, rewarded with chants of sí se puede–Yes We Can! When he challenged congressional Republicans to approve and send him a DREAM Act to sign into law that legalizes and puts college and military-bound undocumented immigrant students on a path to citizenship, applause mixed with cries of “4 More Years!” You can read more about my White House Cinco de Mayo experience here.

Obama said that one of the reasons for this political “evolution” is not wanting to explain to his daughters that some Americans aren’t afforded the same legal protections as others. Yet, how does he explain to Sasha and Malia that days after his Cinco pledge of support for immigration reform, he won’t follow it up with a big gesture such as a one-on-one broadcast television interview that sets the news cycle on fire? How is he going to tell his daughters that we’re in year four since candidate Obama promised immigration reform and that this continued delay means many of the estimated 12 million people who live and contribute millions of dollar to the economy will continue to live in fear that at any moment, La migra may pick up and deport a mom or dad, often times of a U.S. citizen?

I witnessed how tricky immigration reform is early on in my career as a journalist in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley–one of the poorest regions in the country with a population that is 90 percent Hispanic. Undocumented immigrant labor fills an insatiable need of otherwise law-abiding American citizens: farmers need their crops picked, families need their houses built, restaurants owners must feed hungry workers, and working moms need their homes cleaned. Yet I also observed school systems and emergency rooms crushed by waves of undocumented immigrants needing services. Left to fend for themselves, communities have demanded more help from the federal government that promised it, but mañana-reform will be addressed tomorrow because of today’s gridlock in Washington.

It is within this context that the restrictive immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama are born. But a state-by-state approach to reform smacks more of, on one hand of racism and nativism or on the other, tolerance than an economically and socially viable policy. Neither comprehensively regulates the immigrants who come and those that hire them, making sure all who are here are accounted for and fully contributing to services provided. What we need is for the president to show the same leadership on immigration reform that he chose to demonstrate on same-sex marriage–totally missing from his likely Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Immigration ranks far behind the “pocketbook” issues of the economy and jobs, but matters to an emerging voting bloc that feels invisible and taken advantage of by both parties.

Mr. Obama we know where you stand on immigration reform. America needs you to deliver–now.

Viviana Hurtado’s blog The Wise Latina Club has won “Best Politics Blogger” awards by LATISM and Blogs by Latinas. She is a regular columnist for Fox News Latino.

A bill filed by California State Senator Mark Leno would shift the mere possession of small amounts of illegal drugs from felony to misdemeanor status.  This article in Capitol Weekly by Michelle Alexander and Alice Huffman summarizes the argument against mass incarceration and explains why Senator Leno’s bill is a step in the right direction.

Teeming Prisons Create a Permanent Underclass

It is no secret that our nation’s prison population has skyrocketed during the last forty years, thanks largely to the failed War on Drugs. The race to incarcerate has led to a quintupling of our prison population since 1980; more than two million people are behind bars today. What’s less well known, however, is that millions more are locked in invisible cages for which there is no key. These cages are not made of steel but of laws, policies, and practices that permanently relegate everyone labeled “felon” to an inferior second-class status.

People with a felony conviction – even for a petty drug offense, such as being in possession of a small amount of drugs for personal use – can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, and access to education and public benefits.

The collateral consequences of a felony are severe and life-long. And they are meted out wildly inequitably. Studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates, yet our nation’s prisons and jails are overflowing with black and brown people convicted of low-level drug offenses.

Young black men, in particular, are targeted by police and ensnared by the drug war at early ages, sometimes before they are old enough to vote. Once branded a felon, they are ushered into a parallel social universe in which basic civil and human rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement no longer apply to them. This is not a minor phenomenon. If you take prisoners into account, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life.

In California every year, more than 30,000 people are convicted of a felony simply for possession a drug for personal use – and more than half of them are African American or Latino. The result is not only that thousands of African Americans and Latinos go to jail and prison every year in numbers far out of proportion with their representation in the general population – simply for possessing a small amount of drugs for personal use. They are also labeled “felons” for life.

A felony conviction is a form of societal branding which some commentators have rightly described as “internal exile.” For most people convicted of a felony, the punishment lasts far longer than any time served behind bars. Some people convicted of a felony serve no time in prison or jail and get “just” felony probation, but they find their punishment never ends. Their ability to find work, housing, and qualify for basic benefits is forever altered. Many find it difficult to survive once they have been branded a felon, contributing to the staggeringly high recidivism rate here in California and nationwide.

Branding people felons for minor crimes is wasteful in terms of both dollars and lives. That’s why Senator Mark Leno’s proposal to reclassify simple drug possession under California state law is so important. Senate Bill 1506 would revise the penalty for possession of a small amount of drugs for personal use from a felony to a misdemeanor.

The misdemeanor penalty is hardly a slap on the wrist. It’s a serious punishment: up to one year behind bars plus fines and probation. That is still too harsh for this petty offense, but it’s an important reclassification that we should all support. It will maintain the criminalization of drug use, but it will not relegate a person to permanent second-class status. For tens of thousands of Californians – particularly black and brown people who have suffered the most in the War on Drugs – this is a distinction that makes all the difference.

Efforts to reduce the number of people behind bars are gaining traction thanks largely to spiraling state budget deficits. SB 1506 wins on that count, too. It will save $200 million a year. But we must also demand – as SB 1506 does – a rethinking of the draconian and oppressive policies of the War on Drugs which has criminalized millions of black and brown Americans. No one – no matter what their race or ethnicity – should be relegated to a permanent second-class status simply because they were once caught with drugs.

Ed’s Note: Alice Huffman is President of the California State Conference of the NAACP. Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

By Alan Bean

Nearly 60 percent of African Americans report supporting marriage equality according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, up a remarkable 20 points from about 40 percent in similar polling earlier this year.

Pastor Defends NAACP Marriage Stance

By Bob Allen

Associated Baptist Press

A Baptist minister and board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said May 26 it would have been hypocritical for the 103-year-old civil-rights organization not to pass its recent resolution supporting marriage equality.

Amos C. Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and president of the city’s local NAACP branch, is a member of the organization’s national board of directors, which voted May 19 to oppose “any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens.”

Rev. Amos C. Brown

“We came to this conclusion because the NAACP has stood for 103 years for the sole objective of fighting, advocating for, equal protection under the law for all marginalized citizens of this nation,” Brown explained in an interview on Interfaith Alliance head Welton Gaddy’s State of Belief radio program.

“It would have been hypocritical for us — in the face of these debates and a lot of the brouhaha that has been going on — to have in the past stood for the rights and equal opportunity for blacks, who were different than the majority culture who were our oppressors, and then to turn around and do to other people who are marginalized for whatever reason, and though they are citizens of this nation are not accorded equality of opportunity and equal protection under the law,” Brown said.

“We made it also very clear that we respected those who because of religious beliefs do not affirm marriage equality,” he added. “That’s what makes us America. We are a diverse nation. We are not monolithic. We are not a theocracy. We are a democracy.”

According to the New York Times, just two of the board’s 64 members, many of whom are religious leaders, opposed the resolution, putting the NAACP in line with President Obama’s May 9 endorsement of same-sex marriage.

NAACP leaders said May 21 the resolution had nothing to do with Obama’s statement but was in response to political groups that have been using same-sex marriage as a “wedge issue.” Brown, a protégé of Martin Luther King Jr., said those groups often support their arguments by quoting from the Bible.

“We must remember that people have historically used holy books and used our Bible to buttress and support their personal, narrow positions,” he said. “For the longest [time] people have kept women out of the pulpit, and still do today, by taking out of context the words of Paul that a woman is not to speak, she’s not to teach and all that.”

“And then we know also that even in the Old Testament there are things that are said that we don’t take literally,” he continued. “It is said in the Book of Deuteronomy if your child disobeys you, kill him or her. Very explicitly it is stated there. Now common sense would cause all of us to realize that you would not kill your child because your child does not take out the garbage. So we must be careful about how we use the Bible and take things out of context, as someone said, to make it a pretext for whatever our mess is.”

Brown said Christians must interpret the Bible against a backdrop of Christ-centered theology, and recognize that Jesus said nothing about gays.

“He did not say anything negative about people who have different social orientation,” he said. “And if Jesus did not, I wonder why are we engaged in what I consider to be fear tactics to maintain control over people, to politicize this issue?”

Brown called it a red herring to say the issue is about defending marriage, because U.S. divorce rates are highest in the Bible Belt. He also said if Americans were as “Christian” as some say, they would not have kept slavery going for 300 years and segregation for 96 years under the “separate but equal” doctrine that stood until the NAACP won a landmark Supreme Court battle in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

It’s not the first time the NAACP has taken on the issue of marriage. The NAACP filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

Because they are more religious, blacks historically tend to be more conservative than the national average when it comes to same-sex marriage, but a recent poll found a record 59 percent of African-Americans now favor gay marriage.

The president of the Iowa and Nebraska branch of the NAACP, Pastor Keith Ratliff of Maple Street Missionary Baptist Church in Des Moines, said he might resign over the national board’s endorsement of same-sex marriage.

“I’m praying over the matter,” Ratliff, a vocal opponent of gay marriage, told the Des Moines Register, “and I have to make a decision for myself as to whether I’m going to stay in the organization or not.”

Brown said NAACP directors are aware that not all African-Americans agree on the issue.

“There are those in the black community and in the churches who disagree with our position, but we cannot afford to be an organization that feels the pulse, tests the waters,” he said. “We’ve got to do what is right.”

Charles Blow

By Alan Bean

If you really wanted to read the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s eight-part series on the state prison system, but only have time for one part, columnist Charles Blow has what you need: a quick summary of the high points. 

Here’s his conclusion:

Louisiana is the starkest, most glaring example of how our prison policies have failed. It showcases how private prisons do not serve the public interest and how the mass incarceration as a form of job creation is an abomination of justice and civility and creates a long-term crisis by trying to create a short-term solution.

As the paper put it: “A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.”

The T-P’s groundbreaking series provides a “thick description” of a tragic interplay between a tragic racial history, shrinking agricultural economy and tax base, a paranoid electorate, underpaid and under-resourced sheriffs, and a craven political class.  This is the kind of description I attempted in my Taking out the trash in Tulia, Texas and it is great to see the mainstream media, even in these belt-tightening times, taking their responsibility, and their readers, this seriously.

Plantations, Prisons and Profits

By Charles Blow

“Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”

That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it.

The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.

First, some facts from the series:

• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.

• More than 50 percent of Louisiana’s inmates are in local prisons, which is more than any other state. The next highest state is Kentucky at 33 percent. The national average is 5 percent.

• Louisiana leads the nation in the percentage of its prisoners serving life without parole.

• Louisiana spends less on local inmates than any other state.

• Nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners are nonviolent offenders. The national average is less than half.

In the early 1990s, the state was under a federal court order to reduce overcrowding, but instead of releasing prisoners or loosening sentencing guidelines, the state incentivized the building of private prisons. But, in what the newspaper called “a uniquely Louisiana twist,” most of the prison entrepreneurs were actually rural sheriffs. They saw a way to make a profit and did.

It also was a chance to employ local people, especially failed farmers forced into bankruptcy court by a severe drop in the crop prices.

But in order for the local prisons to remain profitable, the beds, which one prison operator in the series distastefully refers to as “honey holes,” must remain full. That means that on almost a daily basis, local prison officials are on the phones bartering for prisoners with overcrowded jails in the big cities.

It also means that criminal sentences must remain stiff, which the sheriff’s association has supported. This has meant that Louisiana has some of the stiffest sentencing guidelines in the country. Writing bad checks in Louisiana can earn you up to 10 years in prison. In California, by comparison, jail time would be no more than a year.

There is another problem with this unsavory system: prisoners who wind up in these local for-profit jails, where many of the inmates are short-timers, get fewer rehabilitative services than those in state institutions, where many of the prisoners are lifers. That is because the per-diem per prisoner in local prisons is half that of state prisons.

In short, the system is completely backward.

Lifers at state prisons can learn to be welders, plumbers or auto mechanics — trades many will never practice as free men — while prisoners housed in local prisons, and are certain to be released, gain no skills and leave jail with nothing more than “$10 and a bus ticket.”

These ex-convicts, with almost no rehabilitation and little prospect for supporting themselves, return to the already-struggling communities that were rendered that way in part because so many men are being extracted on such a massive scale. There the cycle of crime often begins again, with innocent people caught in the middle and impressionable young eyes looking on.

According to The Times-Picayune: “In five years, about half of the state’s ex-convicts end up behind bars again.”

This suits the prison operators just fine. They need them to come back to the “honey holes.”

Furthermore, the more money the state spends on incarceration, the less it can spend on preventive measures like education. (According to Education Week’s State Report Cards, Louisiana was one of three states and the District of Columbia to receive an F for K-12 achievement in 2012, and, this year, the state, over all, is facing a $220 million deficit in its $25 billion budget.)

Louisiana is the starkest, most glaring example of how our prison policies have failed. It showcases how private prisons do not serve the public interest and how the mass incarceration as a form of job creation is an abomination of justice and civility and creates a long-term crisis by trying to create a short-term solution.

As the paper put it: “A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.”

By Alan Bean

It is good to see Human Rights Watch tackling the issue of aging prisoners.  I will never forget talking to Joe Moore, a brittle diabetic with bad knees, through the Plexiglass in the visitation room of a Texas prison.  The folks handling the medical contract for the state prison system were trying to cut expenses.  A doctor decided to take Joe off his insulin to see if he really needed the medication.  First Joe lost his balance; then his tongue doubled in size, then his eyesight went.  When Joe told the guards he was too sick to work, they forced him to dress and join the kitchen detail.  Joe tried to comply, but he fell unconscious to the floor of his cell and came within a whisker of death.  Without influential supporters in the free world, Joe would have died behind bars.

Joe Moore died a few years after being exonerated and released from prison.  His friends were with him and he was able to buy a little farm and work his own cattle after release.  He left this world with his dignity intact.

And then I think of Ramsey Muniz, the Latino politician and civil rights legend currently housed in a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas.  Ramsey is 70 years old and can’t walk without the help of a cane.  Like Joe Moore, Muniz is the victim of a shady drug bust and a rigged trial.  But what if, like most prisoners, Joe and Ramsey were guilty as charged?  Does it make any sense to warehouse aging men and women, at an average cost of $50,000 a year, who no longer represent a threat to public safety?

The excellent eight-part series on Louisiana incarceration in the Times-Picayune emphasized the growing geriatric wing of the state’s notorious Angola prison.  Decades of life without parole sentencing have created a pitiless system bereft of compassion and common sense.

In her summary of the 110-page report she produced for Human Rights Watch, Jamie Fellner underscores the senseless horror of forcing thousands of elderly offenders to die behind bars.

Among the more than 26,000 state and federal prisoners aged 65 or older are some who have severe physical and mental impairments.  One 87-year-old I met last year while conducting research on older prisoners could not tell me his name. He had been in prison for 27 years, 20 of them in a special unit because of his severe cognitive impairments.  I met prisoners who were dying and could not breathe without assistance; prisoners so old and frail they needed help getting up from their bed and into their wheelchairs; prisoners who lacked the mental and physical ability to bathe or eat or go to the bathroom by themselves.

Frail and Elderly Prisoners: Do They Still Belong Behind Bars?

As the US confronts a growing population of geriatric prisoners, it is time to reconsider whether they really need to be locked up. Prison keeps dangerous people off the streets. But how many prisoners whose minds and bodies have been whittled away by age are dangerous?

According to prison statistics, hardly any.

In Ohio, 26.7 percent of former prisoners commit new crimes within three years of their release from prison. But only 5.6 percent of those released between the ages of 65 and 69—and 2.9 percent of those released between the ages of 70 and 74—commit new crimes. Of those released at age 75 or older, none revert to criminal behavior.

In New York, you can count on two hands the number of older prisoners who have gone on to commit violent crimes after release.

Of 1,511 prisoners aged 65 and older when released between 1995 and 2008, only 8 were returned to prison for committing a violent felony. Among the released older prisoners were 469 who had originally been sent to prison because of a violent crime. Only one has returned to prison because of a new crime of violence.

These statistics quantify what criminal justice professionals know from experience: as a group, released older prisoners are not likely to pose much of a risk to the public. The risk is no doubt even less if the released prisoners are ill or infirm.

Among the more than 26,000 state and federal prisoners aged 65 or older are some who have severe physical and mental impairments.

One 87-year-old I met last year while conducting research on older prisoners could not tell me his name. He had been in prison for 27 years, 20 of them in a special unit because of his severe cognitive impairments.

I met prisoners who were dying and could not breathe without assistance; prisoners so old and frail they needed help getting up from their bed and into their wheelchairs; prisoners who lacked the mental and physical ability to bathe or eat or go to the bathroom by themselves.

In theory, of course, a deathly ill or feeble prisoner could suddenly rise from his bed and commit a serious crime. But it isn’t likely.

Noting the forgetfulness that can come with old age, one prisoner told me that by the time one of “these guys manages to get up from his wheelchair he’ll have forgotten what he was going to do.”

Wholly apart from the effects of age and infirmity, years in prison also leave older prisoners with little desire to pick up a gun or hit the streets looking for trouble even if they were physically able to do so. They want to spend their remaining time on earth with family and friends. They do not want to die behind bars.

Ensuring just deserts for those who harm others is a legitimate criminal justice goal. But age and infirmity can change the calculus of when the time served is long enough.

At some point in a prisoner’s life, parole supervision and perhaps restrictions on movement (e.g. home confinement) may suffice as a cost-effective and sensible punishment. It won’t satisfy those who think prisoners who have killed or maimed should only leave prison in a pine box. But, while understandable, this “eye for an eye” perspective is not a sound basis for determining how to use scarce prison resources.

The growing number of prisoners who use walkers and wheelchairs, are tethered to oxygen tanks or completely bedridden, is forcing the country to ask why we keep people in prison into their dotage

Most states and the federal government have laws permitting the early release of prisoners who are terminally ill, permanently incapacitated , or in some cases, simply old, as long as public safety would not be jeopardized.

Unfortunately, the laws exclude certain prisoners based on the nature of their crimes (e.g. those convicted of murder); or officials making release decisions decide to exclude them because of those crimes. In either case, the public is being short-changed. Past crimes—even brutal ones—should not be automatically conflated with current risk.

Protecting public safety does not require turning prisons into old-age homes.

Jamie Fellner is Senior Advisor to the US Program of Human Rights Watch and author of Old Behind Bars: The Aging Prison Population in the United States

By Alan Bean

America’s punitive consensus is counter-productive.  We don’t want to be victimized by ex-offenders, so we exclude them from the job market and bar access to low-income housing.  Left without viable options, they re-offend.  Maybe they write a hot check, or they resort to nickel-and-dime drug dealing, or they break into the neighbor’s home and haul the loot to the nearest pawn shop.  Policies designed to lower exposure to ex-offenders, breed criminal behavior.  Street crime rises, recidivism rates soar, and incarceration rates are stuck in the stratosphere.

Mitch Mitchell, a crime reporter with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, does a terrific job of documenting the plight of the ex-offender.  For decades, politicians have been competing to see who can be toughest on crime; gradually, Mitchell’s article, suggests, they are beginning to grapple with the consequences of their punitive policies.  

Mitchell should be applauded for emphasizing the housing issue, a piece of the puzzle that is often overlooked.  Here’s the thesis paragraph: 

Finding housing and employment are crucial to an ex-offender’s successful reintegration into society, experts say. But after serving their time, many ex-offenders find that they cannot get a job without a home address and cannot find a place to live without the money to pay rent. So they may end up roaming the streets.

Ex-offenders in Texas often can’t find housing or work

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

By Mitch Mitchell

mitchmitchell@star-telegram.com

For a brief moment, Tim Baker considered that death might improve his situation.

“Suicide is natural for someone who is depressed,” Baker said.

Baker had a number of scrapes with the law, ending with felony convictions on two charges of driving while intoxicated. After an eight-year prison stay, he was released. He got a job as a heating and air-conditioning technician and reunited with his family.

But he was let go after the company began working for a school district, which prohibits convicted felons from being on school property.

Soon Baker was on the streets.

“I get the sense that most people don’t care,” he said. “We’re put in this mold of being once a convict, always a convict.”

Baker, 52, now lives at the Salvation Army in Fort Worth and spends his days putting out dozens of résumés in an effort to find work. He and Brian Shaw, who is also looking for work, often run into each other at Texas Re-Entry Services, which tries to give them the tools they need to find employment and housing.They are among about 75,000 inmates whom the Texas Department of Criminal Justice releases every year. This year about 7,000 are expected to return to Tarrant County.

In the three years after release, about 32 percent of Texas state jail offenders and 24 percent of the prison population will be re-incarcerated, according to a Sunset Advisory Commission review of the Texas prison system released this month. Taxpayers bear the burden when offenders are re-incarcerated at an average cost of $50.79 per day, the review says.

Finding housing and employment are crucial to an ex-offender’s successful reintegration into society, experts say. But after serving their time, many ex-offenders find that they cannot get a job without a home address and cannot find a place to live without the money to pay rent. So they may end up roaming the streets.

During a 2011 homeless survey in Tarrant County, more than 76 percent of the 410 people surveyed said their criminal records were the main reason they were unemployed, according to Cindy Crain, executive director of the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition.

Kay Smith, founder of Texas Re-Entry Services, said: “If you are coming out of state prison you get $100, a bus ticket home and a suit of clothes. If they have a place to go they’re lucky. If they aren’t lucky they end up homeless.”

During the past three fiscal years, funding cuts have curtailed Re-Entry Services’ reach, Smith said. Funding for the Directions Home Program, which helps ex-offenders needing housing, has dwindled from a high of $140,700 in 2010 to $51,600 this year, Smith said. Two case managers lost their jobs because of the funding cuts.

Cindy Wright, supportive housing case manager for Re-Entry Services, said, “I’ve got 36 clients right now and I cannot effectively manage any more than that.”

Efforts to help

Several initiatives have been launched to try to help offenders transition back into communities.

Last month, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that it had updated its criminal background check policy, saying employers should not base employment decisions solely on an arrest record when there is no subsequent conviction.

The new EEOC policy also says employment policies with blanket exclusions against hiring people with criminal backgrounds have disparate racial impacts. The commission cited data indicating that about 1 in 17 Anglo men is expected to serve time in prison during his lifetime, compared with 1 in 6 Hispanic men and 1 in 3 African-American men.

In 2009, the Legislature made key changes in state law to try to improve the planning and strategies of the Criminal Justice Department to help prepare offenders for release and reduce the likelihood they’ll commit more crimes. But the sunset report says the department has not carried through, hindering efforts to reduce recidivism. The law created a new Re-Entry Task Force, for example, but it has not reported any findings or coordinated with local providers to improve services. And the report says the department has yet to draft a re-entry plan, as required by law.

At the local level, Tarrant County Commissioner Roy Brooks said that in 2005, he helped bring together people to create the Tarrant County Re-Entry Initiative, in hope of increasing the reach of nonprofits that are working on the problem. “Everyone needs a place to live in order to be a productive citizen,” Brooks said. “It costs more money to maintain a person in the criminal justice system than it does to provide services to them in a community that will give them a chance to succeed.”

The initiative has had success, he said.

“Since we’ve started the initiative, we’ve seen the recidivism rate go down in Tarrant County by approximately 1,500 people a year,” Brooks said. “We’ve coordinated the efforts of 15 nonprofits and maybe 60 churches, and that has helped make a tremendous community impact during the past five years.”

A long, hard road

But the road that returns ex-offenders to respectability remains tough.

Very few people who are not involved in the criminal justice system know the difference between burglary, robbery and larceny, said Otis Thornton, Fort Worth homelessness program director. Yet employers make hiring decisions based on their idea of what they mean, and landlords may require criminal background checks and reject applicants with a record, he said.

“If we believe in the criminal justice system then we need to stop continually penalizing people,” Thornton said. “I think it’s appropriate for landlords and employers to have a risk model. I think they should write it down and be honest about what are their legitimate risks. If you have a risk model and you have met the person, people can then examine their willingness to provide a person with an opportunity.”

The issue for landlords and property owners is not money, but liability, said John Mitchell, executive director of the Apartment Association of Tarrant County. Landlords who rent to ex-offenders, whatever the crime, increase the likelihood that they will be sued if that person commits another crime that harms a tenant, Mitchell said.

“There are a lot of great people out there who are trying to get their feet back under them, but their housing options are limited,” Mitchell said. “If their risks could be limited, I’m sure landlords and property owners would open up their portfolios to some nonviolent ex-offenders.”

Most public housing is also out of the reach of ex-offenders. Last year, top Housing and Urban Development Department officials wrote an open letter asking the owners of HUD-assisted properties to do more to open their properties to ex-offenders. The letter said that about 7.5 million people nationwide are released from prisons and jails each year and that allowing ex-offenders to reunite with relatives provides people with incentives for staying out of prison.

HUD officials asked owners to “seek a balance between allowing ex-offenders to reunite with families that live in HUD subsidized housing and ensuring the safety of all residents of its programs.”

About three years ago, the Fort Worth Housing Authority loosened its criteria for renting to ex-offenders, allowing those with certain criminal backgrounds to be eligible for assistance if they stay out of trouble for five years after the offense, instead of requiring that they have clean records for 10 years, said Selarstean Mitchell, the authority’s vice president of assisted housing.

Public housing authorities, however, must abide by guidelines set by Congress regarding potential renters with criminal histories.

The Fort Worth authority denies aid to families with histories of drug-related or violent crime by any household member, as well as to registered sex offenders.

While protecting the public is essential, public safety is compromised if offenders can’t transition back into society, Brooks said.

“Unless the community is willing to provide alternatives the ex-offender will re-offend,” Brooks said. “For those who want to be taxpaying citizens, they deserve our help.”

Mitch Mitchell, 817-390-7752

By Alan Bean

Peter Laarman speaks what every honest historian knows to be true: America was founded by white Protestant males for white Protestant males.  The conservative movement has made modified this stance in modest ways, but the older view has never been repudiated–you just can’t talk about it in public anymore.  So what happens to these United States white folks no longer form a majority of the population?

We may be a long way from finding out.  In Texas, white folks will no longer comprise a majority of eligible voters by 2020, but since Texas Democrats refuse to celebrate their party’s diversity (for fear of offending white voters) it could be a long time before theoretical electoral advantages translate into electoral power.

Nationally, the shift will take longer still.  Laarman reminds us that white babies are now in the minority, but, at 59, I likely won’t live to see the day when the American population (cradle to grave) is less that 50% white, and I certainly won’t be around to celebrate when the majority of voters become non-white.

In states like California, Arizona and Miami, the Hispanic vote can no longer be ignored by either major party.  But money talks in politics and in 2050 the big money will still be controlled by the white tribe.  Prosperous people understand the importance of voting and can always be counted on to vote their interests.

How will white people react, Laarman asks, when the nation they love is no longer majority white? 

They are reacting already, he suggests, if the immigration debate, the birther movement and the growing demonization of public education is anything to go by.

Laarman isn’t convinced that even white liberals are overjoyed by the rising non-white tide.  Aren’t those people more conservative on issues like gay rights, women’s rights and abortion than we are?  White liberals, Laarman suggests, primarily want to see more white liberals.  Predicting the future is a fool’s game, but I can make a confident prediction: that ain’t gonna to happen.

Red White and Blue No Longer
Religion and a Non-White American Future

By Peter Laarman

Originally published by Religious Dispatches

The U.S. Census Bureau, never one to rush to judgment, has now made it official: fewer than 50% of the babies born in the United States during the year ending in July of last year were white.

That’s right: among the nursery set, certifiably white bundles of joy are now in the minority, and this trend is considered irreversible in view of the higher fertility rates among immigrant groups already living here and a virtual end to the in-migration of whites from abroad.

The New York Times reported this in Column One noting only that, in respect to potential future conflict, at some point active workers of color will at some point support, via their payroll taxes, Social Security payments that are made primarily to white retirees.

This observation implies that younger people of color might take counsel among themselves and decide that it’s not such a great idea to subsidize old white people. Myself, I think it’s much more likely that the old white people will use their undue political influence to squeeze more from those whom they were once pleased to refer to as “the minorities” (and other less polite terms).

I say this as a Californian, where non-Hispanic whites ceased to be the majority group in 1999 but where whites still very much rule the political roost in ways that have terrible consequences for younger Californians of color. Seeing the end in sight, conservative white Californians began more than three decades ago to implement a series of voter-enacted restrictions on the raising of any new taxes or fees.

Taken together, these restrictions created the ironclad supermajority requirements that now block the California legislature and all local elected bodies in this state from raising adequate revenue to support the education of kids who (surprise!) don’t look like “us” anymore. The effects of the revenue chokehold are plain to see: K-12 schools in California now rank at or near the bottom on various national scales, and California’s once-vaunted high-quality, low-cost public higher education system has been almost entirely trashed.

This chart (courtesy of Prof. Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s peerless Program for Environmental and Regional Equity) shows how non-Hispanic whites from throughout the entire United States will soon be following those from the Golden State into minority status; it may take another 30 years for the whole country to get there, but it’s coming.

In a sane culture—i.e., a culture in which social participation and social belonging had nothing to do with race or ethnic origin—the coming eclipse of white majority status wouldn’t mean a thing. It might even be celebrated, democratically, by whites themselves.

America’s most visionary spirits (e.g., Walt Whitman in “Democratic Vistas”) always expected the idea of American democracy and the idea of a new and blended population to lift people above any form of tribalism. Alas, this is not that kind of sane culture. Tribalism, especially white tribalism, still runs deep. And as religion has everything to do with this particular form of insanity, religion is where we should look, both to gauge the scope of the problem and to scan for possible pathways to sanity.

The Old Religion of Whiteness Persists in New Forms

The distinctly American hierarchical system, the comprehensive system of economic and social control that James Lawson tellingly refers to as “plantation capitalism,” has long been thoroughly bonded to a white supremacist ideology. Bad religion functions as the binding agent, sanctifying hierarchy and validating racial subordination. No one, then or now, seems to catch the irony of Christianity—a distinctly un-tribal religion in its origins—becoming a primary vector for raw white tribalism on American soil.

You don’t need the likes of me to walk you down these familiar byways, but just consider (if you please) the seamlessness lying within the old expression “white Christian nation.” When world-bestriding figures like Theodore Roosevelt spoke of “the nation” or “the national interest,” he did not need to spell out (although he often did) that he was referring to white Christian people, particularly white Christian men. Roosevelt’s view, completely consonant with the view of others of his era who had laced their Christian perspective with a dash of Darwinism, was that white people and people of color had simply evolved to different levels of civilization, with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. Roosevelt considered himself enlightened and progressive and a “friend” to lesser peoples. In 1901 he even invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House (a political mistake he never repeated after the incident provoked a tremendous white backlash).

More than a century beyond Roosevelt’s day, one does not often hear the words “white Christian nation” uttered out loud any longer. What one does hear, however, amounts to code for the same thing. Thus, R.J. Rushdoony’s still-influential ideas about forging a godly nation—a nation organized according to biblical law—take it pretty much for granted that godly social organization has whites on top. Rushdoony, who lived into the current century, condemned interracial marriage as “unequal yoking.”

Un-dead David Barton, another hugely influential figure and hero to the religious right, doesn’t really need to say anything at all about retaining white hegemony, even if he hasn’t spoken at a white supremacist event in two decades. But it’s there by implication when Barton assaults church-state separation as a heathenish imposition upon the Founders’ original plan to build the new nation on Christian principles and to keep (white) Christians in charge.

Figures like Rushdoony and Barton may be dismissed as pseudo-intellectuals with crank followings, but I am quite sure that millions of white Americans who have never heard of these guys would still nod their heads in solemn agreement upon hearing the basic line: “God gave this fair continent to white people to occupy and populate. God has clearly blessed and prospered white people here. Others are certainly welcome to scoop up the crumbs from the table of American abundance, but no one who isn’t white should kid themselves about whose table it really is.”

To be clear, again: this openly racist view is no longer trumpeted in the public square in the plain light of day. So, for example, laws and practices known to subjugate and suppress the political voice of millions of African Americans via mass incarceration remain, on their surface, race-neutral. Legislators in Alabama and elsewhere who enact what amount to immigrant-exclusion acts, and legislators in many of these same states who craft laws aimed at voter suppression, will cite all kinds of reasons why they judge these measures to be necessary. But does anyone doubt that the threat to white hegemony (both economic and cultural) plays a major role in creating such legislative monuments?

Methinks the implied continuing linkage of “American” to “white Christian” also accounts for a good bit of the obsession with Obama as an outsider: neither a true American (where is that birth certificate?), nor a true Christian. If you doubt that whiteness counts for more than the doctrine part, consider this: white Protestants who were taught to believe that Mormonism is a dreadful false religion will nevertheless treat Willard Mitt Romney as an honorary Christian for purposes of giving Barack Hussein Obama the boot.

For White Religious Progressives, Learning Real Servant Leadership

It is, of course, unbecoming for people like me to to sit in judgment of the poor benighted white Christians who fall for subtle or not so subtle appeals to racial identity and racial solidarity. Sitting in judgment may be the classic posture of white liberals, but it’s hardly good enough when so much is at stake over the next 30 years of momentous demographic change. Singing our little paeans to diversity while remaining remarkably un-diverse in our own pods; wagging our fingers from our ivory towers in response to ugly attacks on immigrants communities; not nearly good enough.

It’s not quite true that white religious progressives have remained totally on the sidelines. For a brief time some white congregations lived out a radical welcome by joining the New Sanctuary Movement—sheltering individual immigrant families from deportation—but these gestures were so little reported and remained so incomprehensible to most on the outside that they barely made a dent in the wider public consciousness. In addition, New Sanctuary’s focus was mainly on hospitality for immigrants who are here without documents; it did little to help the vastly greater number of immigrant community members today who were born in this country but who are still often treated as though they are here illegally.

Here’s a proposition: if breaking the grip of plantation capitalism and its political enablers requires the empowerment of immigrant communities and communities of color, then white liberals who are serious about wanting a significant progressive shift in the way this country is governed must offer maximum strategic support for the organization and mobilization of non-white people and non-white movements.

There is no shortage of ways to channel such support: fight voter disenfranchisement moves, call out anti-tax conservatives on the racial/ethnic subtext of their anti-tax campaigns, attack America’s thoroughly racialized system of mass incarceration, support union representation drives that bring greater income and dignity to immigrant workers and all people of color, and take an active role in local and regional organizing to maintain adequate funding for schools and public colleges serving students of color and the children of immigrants.

The truth is that many white religious progressives understand, in a theoretical way, that these are our proper tasks. But we are more than a little ambivalent about taking a supporting role rather than directly orchestrating things or preaching from on high. We haven’t learned the discipline or the grace of ethically-based accompaniment. And at some level we are anxious about what might happen to cherished values like LGBT equality as the active electorate gains greater pigmentation. (I would say, as an aside, that anyone who remains aloof from the existential struggles faced by immigrant and non-immigrant communities of color really has no business lecturing the leaders of those communties on the finer points of social inclusion and social justice).

To my mind, there’s no shame in being ambivalent or anxious if one acknowledges it—and also acknowledges openly, and rejects openly, the shamefulness of still wishing to run the world and keep the course of events under one’s control. But it’s not easy for those accustomed to to step out of the saddle and agree to to take the role of foot soldier in a march toward the unknown. White skin privilege among educated elites is every bit as persistent as white tribalism among non-elites—and in some ways more destructive.

Ethical accompaniment is a learned discipline. But it occurs to me that it’s a discipline that at least some white progressives—including religious progressives—did manage to learn and put to honorable use during the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Those of us who already are, or will soon be, members of the new white minority could do worse than to study and learn from that still-resonant experience.

Dr. Harold Dean Trulear

As a pastor, a scholar, and an ex-prisoner, Harold Dean Trulear has earned the right to talk about prison ministry from the outside in and from the inside out.  I last saw Dr. Trulear in Washington DC when we were both part of a convening of faith leaders interested in ending mass incarceration.  Pat Nolan of Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship also attended that gathering.  Like Trulear, Nolan has seen both sides of the prison wall and we had some good, frank conversation about the future of reform.  In this honest appraisal written for the Center for Public Justice, Dr. Trulear evaluates the mixed legacy of Nolan’s old boss, Charles Colson, and points the way to a viable relationship between Prison Fellowship and the Black Church.

Prison Ministry in the Post-Colson Era

Joe Moore feeds his cattle before being arrested in Tulia

This story in the Fort Worth Weekly uses my take on the tragedy of Tulia, Texas as a metaphor for a failed war on drugs.

Jim Crow Redux:
War on drugs or on minority communities

Matthew McGowan

Fort Worth Weekly

Alan Bean couldn’t miss the headline splashed across the top of his hometown paper one summer morning in 1999. It spoke of big news for the 5,000-person burg in West Texas: a big drug bust that landed a sizable portion of the town’s black community behind bars.

“Tulia streets cleared of garbage,” the banner headline read. Like many aspects of the American war on drugs, the wording smacked of insidious racism.

Bean recalled his reactions to that news story a few days ago, to a roomful of people at a Fort Worth hotel. The event, examining the 40-year-old war on drugs and its disproportionate impact on minority communities, was hosted by the Tarrant County Libertarian Party but drew speakers from several parts of the political spectrum.

At the podium, Bean acknowledged that he’d known nothing of the lopsided statistics when he picked up the paper that morning. The drug bust in his small town would change all that, though, and suddenly push him to the front lines of a war that locks up seven black men for every white man incarcerated in the United States, devastating minority neighborhoods while white enclaves, where drugs are every bit as prevalent, are left mostly unscathed. The more Bean read and researched, the clearer the drug war’s racism became to him.

But that drug bust was the eye-opener. On that July 23 morning, dozens of police officers in tactical gear swarmed the black neighborhoods of South Tulia and pulled 47 people, many still in their underwear, out of their homes and arrested them on charges of selling powder cocaine to undercover officer Tom Coleman, a sheriff’s deputy who had posed as a drifter. Thirty-eight of the defendants were African-American, representing roughly 15 percent of the town’s black community.

Bean wondered how a town Tulia’s size could have enough drug users to sustain 47 drug lords. And powder cocaine? That’s a drug of affluence, something you’re more likely to find in Dallas high-rises than in dusty neighborhoods where crack is far cheaper and more prevalent. Also he’d never heard of Tom Coleman.

Bean, an ordained Baptist minister and Canadian native who was relatively new to town, shared his misgivings about the sting later that week at church. A white businessman pulled Bean off to the side and offered some local context.

“The sting was all about these young black males who were sports stars in high school but never left town after graduation,” Bean said the businessman told him. “They think they can do drugs, mess with our girls, and get away with it.”

He’d heard enough. Early meetings with local sympathizers became the Friends of Justice, a group that now operates out of Bean’s office in Arlington. The group initially aimed to get to the bottom of the Tulia busts, even if the effort got him run out of town.

“The Tulia defendants weren’t being prosecuted for selling drugs, I realized,” Bean said. “They were going down for not having a job, not paying a mortgage, not maintaining a marriage, and not tucking their children in at night. So long as they were demonstrably deficient as parents and breadwinners, the fact issues of a particular case were irrelevant.”

The facts did eventually come out in the Tulia case, but only after a district judge handed down extremely harsh sentences, like the 50-something-year-old man slapped with 90 years for allegedly selling a few grams of coke to Coleman. Civil rights lawyers and journalists who flocked to Tulia unearthed a litany of flaws in Coleman’s investigation. The officer’s own checkered past came into question too. By the time the dust settled a few years later, Gov. Rick Perry had pardoned most of the Tulia defendants, and in 2005 a jury found Coleman guilty of perjury. A visiting district judge sentenced him to 10 years probation.

To many like Bean in the civil rights trenches, Tulia offered chilling evidence that the federal war on drugs had devolved into a thinly veiled race war that’s had basically zero effect on drug consumption, availability, and related crime.

“Tulia was America writ small,” he said. “The drug war was a public policy response to conditions in economically starved inner-city neighborhoods, but the social dynamics are more visible in small, pissant towns like Tulia, because everything is small, and therefore simple.”

A 2010 federal survey found almost identical rates of drug use among whites and African-Americans. Yet minorities — particularly African-American males — make up a staggering majority of drug-war inmates.

The Drug Policy Forum of Texas estimated, based on federal numbers, that whites represented 74 percent of U.S. drug users in 2010 but only 19 percent of drug-related inmates. That year, blacks, representing about 11 percent of total drug users, made up 56 percent of drug-war inmates. Latinos were 10 percent of users and 22 percent of inmates.

“The war on drugs is really a war on black and brown people,” said Jasmine Tyler, deputy director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “We aren’t worried about drugs. If we were worried about the effects of drugs, we’d stop them from entering the country at the border. What we have is a tactic that’s used under a guise of public health and safety which really has nothing to do with either of those two areas. The drug war really is the new Jim Crow.”

Tyler believes the disproportionate effect on minorities stems from both subconscious discrimination and outright racism.

Other reformers, like Carl Veley, a Drug Policy Forum speaker from Houston, attribute much of the apparent racism to convenience: Drug dealers in low-income neighborhoods conduct business on street corners and other open places like public parks, where it’s easy for police to make arrests.

“Police are rewarded for the number of busts they make,” Veley said. “It’s much easier to make a $5 bust over in the black neighborhood than a $5 million bust over in the white neighborhood or even a $50 bust in the white neighborhood.”

He cited conversations with police officers who told him they look at the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated blacks as clear evidence that crime is more common in black communities, which the statistics seem to call into question.

“They operate on the assumption that the justice system is absolutely fair and perfect,” Veley said. “I look at that data and say there’s clearly something wrong with the justice system.”

Critics from across the political landscape have been saying for years that Washington is losing the drug war. Drug usage levels have barely changed since Richard Nixon declared the war in 1971.

The only drug for which usage rates have dropped during the past 40 years is tobacco, as Drug Policy Forum activist Suzanne Wills dryly noted at the Fort Worth gathering.

Gil Kerlikowske, President Barack Obama’s drug czar, told the Associate Press in 2009 that the drug war has “not been successful” and that “40 years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”

That’s why critics are calling for a return to the drawing board and a new national debate about how state and federal officials can more effectively attack a problem that many see as better addressed by doctors than law enforcement. They’re also worried that what they see as the institutionalized racism involved is doing long-term harm to minority communities.

Every arrest means more cost to taxpayers for prosecutions and prisons, the speakers pointed out, as well as costs to the overall economy from the self-perpetuating cycle of usage, crime, and imprisonment.

Veley said it’s crucial that minority leaders, above all, are brought into that debate.

“Black leaders look around them and say, ‘Oh my God, drugs are terrible. They’re ruining our country,’ ” he said. “Then they make the logical leap and say drugs are terrible, they must be illegal. That doesn’t follow.”