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A Mother’s Outrage

Advocacy

Aug 162015

This essay comes from a friend of a friend. I do not know who she is. However, I have heard many stories from people who believed in the criminal justice system in this country, until they or a member of their family learned first hand that their experience was the polar opposite of what they had believed. This is one mother’s reaction to such an experience.

July 26, 2015

What I want people to know is what I’ve learned over the past two years – how my life is upside down both philosophically and emotionally. Philosophically, because what I learned, believed about our justice system is just thrown under the bus. I am angry. Angry at people who are charged with our wonderful, ideal system and have perverted it and made us all accomplices in torture and harm. We were standing shoulder to shoulder with prison guards who abuse prisoners; DAs and police who lie, who give up honesty and integrity to convict.

We became part of the problem. Only we didn’t even realize there was a problem. They lie. They suck us in to be their accomplices. We asked no questions. We believed them. No. We believed the idea of a system. We believed they were the embodiment of truth. They kept us safe from people who would harm us, who were really terrible people.

But what do they do? “Lose” evidence, lie to protect themselves, serve as judge and jury to convict whom they have decided is guilty. Screw looking at evidence. How did they get to the place where they are in such a hallowed system of our country, protecting our country’s ideals, being the keeper for those ideals and now corrupting those ideals.

Am I naïve? Not now. Was I? Yes. But I’m in the company of the majority of our country. I listen over and over and OVER again to “I had no idea how this system works! I was shocked to learn how it really works.” Problem is – no one does know until it happens. No one believes until it does happen.

I’m angry that I was blindsided. Is it my fault? Should I have known better? WHY SHOULD I!?!! Where’s the disconnect here? That our system as taught to high-schoolers is just too much of a fairy tale? I should know better than to believe such a fairy tale could actually work? Are the people in the justice system just laughing at me for being so naive?

Or is the disconnect in how people have subverted the ideal? The people who have gotten used to having it their way? People who have decide they are smarter than tedious “truth and justice” and will improve a hopelessly naïve system?

Are we in The Matrix*? They have created this fake world that they’ve sold us on that every thing is right in our world, that they have the knowledge and expertise to keep it the ideal it is.

But behind their words and assurances that create the perfect illusion is a world of crumbling, moldy, derelict laws. A blighted world wildly out of control with more and more laws, penalties, and incarcerations for longer and longer times. A world destroyed with smoking embers, blown out, burned down buildings, haunted people. Out of sight behind the illusion they create with their paternalistic, mesmerizing lies! Do we choose to believe their lies because it’s just easier? No! I think we believe because we truly believe that they are the pillars of our justice system. We hear their excuses—which they call “reasons”—and that reinforces what we already instinctively believe.

But now pieces of their façade may be cracking. Can they hold it together and continue to make us believe their fake world? We know what is really behind their world of “safety, justice and truth”. We’ve seen and heard the destroyed lives, the money taken from society and spent to warehouse people and then return wasted people with wasted lives and difficult options. The LIES – The harm – The self-supporting arguments.

What will it take to bring down the phony façade of a tough on crime, retribution, vengeance model of justice and return us to where most people already think we are: convicting wrong-doers but with consideration of mitigating or extenuating circumstances, incarcerating only people who are a threat and then rehabilitating them so they can live as successful citizens. Giving people a chance to pay for their crime and then re-joining society. Being humans helping humans.

My passion. I want people to know what I’ve learned. I want to shock them awake to what our criminal justice system has become. No, ladies and gentlemen, it is not what you believe it is.

Unfortunately, most of you will never really find that out. No, it’s not fortunate that you will never have a loved one, or yourself, caught up in this horrible system. It’s not fortunate that you’ll never have an accusation made at you of something you never did. It’s not fortunate that you get to keep living oblivious to how our criminal justice system has lost its way in mandatory sentencing. Because unless you are unfortunate enough to have personal contact with this devastating system, you won’t try to do something about it.

(From Wikipedia: The Matrix movie depicts a dystopian [an imaginary community or society that is undesirable or frightening] future in which reality as perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality called “the Matrix”, created by sentient machines to subdue the human population,)

Personally, I find what she has to say believable and compelling.

Campaign to End Mass Incarceration

Advocacy

Apr 252015

Here’s the latest celebrity attempt to help prisoners.

John Legend has launched a campaign to end mass incarceration.

The Grammy-winning singer announced the multiyear initiative, FREE AMERICA, on Monday. He will visit and perform at a correctional facility on Thursday in Austin, Texas, where he also will be part of a press conference with state legislators to discuss Texas’ criminal justice system.

"We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country," Legend said in an interview. "It’s destroying families, it’s destroying communities and we’re the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration."

Legend, 36, will also visit a California state prison and co-host a criminal justice event with Politico in Washington, D.C., later this month. The campaign will include help from other artists — to be announced — and organizations committed to ending mass incarceration…

Inserted from <AP>

Click through for more. Kudos! This is so necessary!

This Is Innocence

Advocacy

Apr 062015

FEATURED SPEAKER

Jennifer Thompson is an advocate for judicial reform and the healing power of forgiveness. Her strong convictions were born of a brutal rape she suffered as a twenty-two year old college student. Her compelling testimony sent a young man to a life term in prison for a crime he did not commit. That man, Ronald Cotton, was eventually freed thanks in large part to newly developed DNA tests which eventually identified the true perpetrator. Together they co-authored a joint memoir, Picking Cotton, a New York Times best-seller, which recounts their journeys and the tragedy that brought them together. They have successfully lobbied state legislators to change compensation laws for the wrongly convicted, to abolish the death penalty, to revise police eyewitness line-up procedures, and for many other causes. She has appeared on Oprah, Sixty Minutes, The Today Show, Good Morning America, 20/20, The View, NPR, Diane Rheams, People magazine, RedBook, Newsweek, and in other media outlets. Her Op-Eds have appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere. Jennifer and Ronald speak before a variety of audiences about race, class, judicial reform, human error, and forgiveness.

Inserted from <OIP>

Mercy Corps Action Center
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Portland, OR 97204

Thursday, May 14, 2015 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (PDT)

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Bridging the divide

Advocacy

Oct 272014

I’m Pleased to announce that Partnership for Safety and Justice has just released a new plan to reform our public safety system.

Partnership for Safety and Justice, along with crime victim advocates and criminal justice reformers from around the country, released Bridging the Divide: A new paradigm for addressing safety, crime, and victimization. This report highlights the importance of reforming our public safety system for both victims of crime and people accused of and convicted of crime. When we work for survivors of crime, as well as people who have committed crime, more individuals and communities can get safe, become healthy, and thrive. A core objective of this approach is eliminating racial disparities for victims of crime and people accused and convicted of crime.

PSJ pioneered this model to address safety, crime, and victimization in Oregon. We’ve had many successes along the way. Most recently, in 2013, PSJ helped pass justice reinvestment legislation that flatlines prison growth for the next 5 years and reinvests savings into other vital parts of our public safety system, like addiction treatment, mental health services, reentry services, and victim services. Because of smart sentencing reform, Oregon doubled funding for lifesaving domestic and sexual violence services…

Inserted from <PSJ>

Click through for more. I see this as an excellent plan to move from retributive to restorative justice.

Senate Rejects Vitter Amendment

Advocacy

Feb 102014

Senator David Vitter (R-LA), joined by several other Republicans, tried to prohibit people, who have ever been convicted of certain sexual offences, from receiving food stamps. Fortunately for our communities, they failed.

Today [Feb 4], the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan farm bill conference agreement that effectively neutralizes an effort by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) to ban food stamps for life for people with certain felony convictions.

In May, Senator Vitter offered an amendment to the farm bill that would have denied food assistance through SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, for life to anyone ever convicted of certain violent offenses. The measure would have resulted in reduced SNAP benefits in households with people convicted of such offenses, affecting children as well as adults. The House later adopted a similar amendment to its farm bill.

About one in six of the 1.6 million people in state or federal prison has been convicted of an offense targeted by these amendments. Over time, the ban would have applied to more than a million people. Disparities in the criminal justice system mean African-Americans and Latinos would have been disproportionately affected.

The Sentencing Project joined a diverse group of civil rights, faith, labor, and criminal justice advocacy organizations in strongly opposing Senator Vitter’s counterproductive food stamp ban…

Inserted from <The Sentencing Project>

Hat Tip: CURE National

Realistically, the most important thing in dealing with offenders of this type is that they do not reoffend. The Vitter Amendment would have made that goal more difficult. First, people receiving food stamps are less likely to move without notifying authorities, making it easier for authorities to supervise them. Second, that availability of help, gives former offenders a stake in their communities, and with it, a greater incentive to stay crime-free.

Vitter’s motivation appears to have been purely political, a great irony, given his own sexual history.

Kudos to all who joined in defeating this measure.

Gangsters to Greyhounds

Advocacy

Dec 282013

Here is an excellent article about the use of online Registries to track people who have committed sexual crimes.

Contrary to popular belief, offender registries are not a recent phenomenon. Offender registries are government-controlled systems that track the movements and other activities of certain persons with criminal convictions. While today they are most commonly used for sex offenders, registries have been adopted

since the 1930s to regulate persons convicted of a wide variety of offenses including embezzlement, arson, and drug crimes.

Early registries were widely criticized as ineffective and overly punitive, and many were eliminated through litigation or legislative repeals. Others simply fell into disuse over the course of the 20th century. Now, there is a growing body of research that demonstrates that modern sex offender registries are similarly ineffective at reducing crime. Sex offender registries are costly, vastly overbroad, and error-ridden.

Even worse, the overwhelming stigma of public notification provisions may actually increase recidivism among offenders.2 [sic] Despite their repeated history of failure, enthusiasm for publicly available, internet-based registries for every offense imaginable has only grown in recent years. There have been proposals across the country to register those found guilty of animal abuse, arson, drug offenses, domestic violence, and even failure to pay child support.

Existing registries are expanding and becoming increasingly punitive. Without a concerted effort to stop the tide of offender registration, we are at risk of repeating past mistakes on a much larger and more treacherous scale.

Offender registries are backwards, punitive measures that do not make communities safer. Unfortunately, those in favor of more nuanced, data-driven methods of reducing violence and sexual abuse face substantial barriers in overcoming precedent from years when registries were far narrower in scope than they are today… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Sex Offender Statistics>

I am personally acquainted with cases where such online registries have thoroughly disrupted the lives of individuals, who had completed treatment and lived productive lives in their communities. The greatest danger to the community comes not from offenders, who have completed treatment, but6 from those, who have not yet been discovered. I urge you to click through to the original article. It contains a wealth of information on why we need to be concerned with restoring such individuals, not heaping additional punishment on them.

RIP Sister Antonia Brenner

Advocacy

Oct 222013

I’m sorry to learn of the passing of Sister Antonia Brenner, one of those rare indivisuals with a genuine heart for prisoners. She is an inspiration to us all.

Sister Antonia Brenner, a Beverly Hills-raised mother of seven who became a Roman Catholic nun and moved into a notorious Tijuana prison where she spent more than three decades mending broken lives, easing tensions and dispensing everything from toothbrushes to bail money, has died. She was 86.

Brenner, who had been in declining health, died Thursday of natural causes at the home of her religious order in Tijuana where her fellow sisters had cared for her in her final days, said Christina Brenner, her daughter-in-law.

She was born Mary Clarke in Los Angeles on Dec. 1, 1926, to Irish immigrant parents. Her father grew wealthy running an office supply business, and the family counted Hollywood stars such as Cary Grant among their neighbors. She married and raised four daughters and three sons, all the while becoming deeply involved in charity work.

In 1977, after her children were grown and two marriages had ended in divorce — a source of sadness that she rarely talked about — Brenner gave away her expensive clothes and belongings, left her Ventura apartment and moved to La Mesa penitentiary. She had delivered donations in the past to the prison, each visit filling her with compassion.

"Something happened to me when I saw men behind bars. … When I left, I thought a lot about the men. When it was cold, I wondered if the men were warm; when it was raining, if they had shelter," Brenner told The Times in a 1982 interview. "I wondered if they had medicine and how their families were doing. …You know, when I returned to the prison to live, I felt as if I’d come home."…

Inserted from <LA Times>

Please click through for the rest of this excellent article.

Thanks to CURE National for pointing this article out.

Injustice for Sex Offenders

Advocacy

Jul 302013

There is one class of offender that is often considered worse than all the others combined, although that is rarely the case. Because of that, they have been targeted with legislation that has become progressively more draconian over time.

…Every year, on their birthdays, registrants are required to go to the police department and re-register. They must update their picture and residential information that will appear on the website and address any other concerns. Throughout the year, Emily keeps a folder documenting all the places she goes and the permission she obtained to go there: to her weekly Bible study group; parent-teacher meetings and so on. When she makes her birthday trip to the police department, she must take this folder with her.

Eugene Porter, a therapist who has worked with convicted sex offenders and male child victims of sexual abuse since 1984, describes this annual ritual as a “powerful shaming structure.”

And what about the shamers? Criminologist and professor Chrysanthi Leon remarked that the public spectacle of these hyper-restrictive laws is a “crucial way of signaling that we’re doing something about sexual violence, when in reality we’re doing very little.”

Tom Tobin, a psychologist by training and currently serving as the vice-chair of the California Sex Offender Management Board, carefully acknowledges the unique trauma experienced by a victim of a sexual crime, but questions whether concern for this lasting emotional damage is what fuels our current handling of such crimes.

“I think there’s something more primitive," he says. "There’s something about human sexuality that engages some part of everyone so that if we can identify this group who can be the ‘bad ones’ around human sexuality, or the exercise of it, than maybe it lets the rest of us off the hook. We can be sexist, anti-woman; we can make our own behaviors acceptable because it’s the sex offenders who are violating peoples’ rights. I think there’s something deeper and more profound going on that makes it difficult for people to respond in a thoughtful way.”

When Eugene Porter reflects on the experiences he has witnessed and treated over the course of his three-decade career, he conveys an authority over and insight into a subject of which he nevertheless insists we must “acknowledge the level of our own ignorance.”

“Being a sex offender is the worst stigma—maybe after 9/11, being a terrorist is as bad,” Porter asserts.

It is not uncommon to hear people who work in this field employ the metaphor of terrorist to describe how the criminal justice system has come to treat and portray sex offenders. Both specters have been ascribed a set of behaviors and placed on a continuum of threat to a vulnerable society. Wherever one falls on that continuum, there is an assumption that forward progression on it is inevitable.

With the logic of a continuum, on which offenders are interminably placed, a justification emerges for a permanent registry that treats all offenders of crimes involving sexual arousal or genitalia as essentially the same. Our attachment to a powerful system that confines and separates thousands of individuals, making pariahs of them all , reveals for whom these shaming rituals and spectacles provide a soothing salve: it’s for those of us not on the list.

Charlotte Silver is an independent journalist currently based in San Francisco. She writes for Al Jazeera English, Inter Press Service, Truthout, The Electronic Intifada and other publications. Follow her on Twitter @CharESilver… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Alternet>

This is just the last section of an extensive article that covers the subject in depth. I urge you to click through to

I became aware of this article through a newsletter from CURE National:

CURE is one of the very few organizations out there who will advocate for those most marginalized by society. The topic of sex offenders is treated by many as the third rail of politics. As a result, we have watched as those who are convicted of even the most inoffensive or understandable legal transgressions – often while they were still in their teenage years or as even quite young juveniles – are made to suffer the most draconian sentences. In some cases, young people whose only offense was with another consenting adolescent while they were still minors themselves can be locked away indefinitely in psychiatric facilities under prison-like conditions merely because the state argues they might commit a future sexual crime if they are released. Kansas University Law School professor Corey Yung wrote in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology comparing civil commitment to Guantanamo Bay, and arguing that in many ways the civil commitment prisoners are worse off…

They deserve thanks for their willingness to oppose the trend.

The Caging of America

Advocacy

Jan 302012

In October of 1990, I heard a prison cell door clang shut behind me for the first time. Reality struck. Time stopped. It was easier for me than for many, because I served only nine years. Ever since I have searched for ways to convey the experience to others, who have not been there themselves. I never could do so to my complete satisfaction, but in a recent article, Adam Gopnik has. Here is a very small part of it:

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve…

Inserted from <The New Yorker>

I urge you to click the link and read the entire article, especially if you think that prison is somehow like a country club. You may think that prisoners deserve abuse, or that it just does not matter to you, but it does. Almost every person locked behind bars will be released. They will walk your streets. They will live in your neighborhoods. The quality of care and opportunities for prisoners to rebuild themselves, as productive citizens, who obey the law, has a direct effect on your safety and that of your family. If you can’t support making prisons places to restore people, because it’s the right thing to do. do it because it’s the selfish thing to do.

Why an Ex-Con Can Be a Great Hire

Advocacy

Nov 292011

One of the most important steps in making our communities safer is to give people who return from prison a vested interest in their community. Nothing does that better then a job, so hiring an ex-con makes your community a safer place to live. More often than not, they are excellent employees.

A few years ago, Dunkin’ Donuts manager Luke Halloran had some tough jobs to fill at a store he ran in one of Chicago’s sketchiest areas. It had been robbed several times, a body had been found in a nearby trash container, and employees hired locally enjoyed giving away the store’s products to their friends.

Halloran had an idea: He would hire an ex-con from a local halfway house — someone with the street smarts to feel comfortable working in a dangerous neighborhood. It worked so well, he hired more when he opened up a store of his own. Now a third of his employees are past and present guests of the state — and Halloran says the former convicts are among his best employees. "They never miss a day, get drug tested and will work any shift," he says.

Hiring ex-felons is an experiment that hundreds of business owners have tried — and one that state and federal governments have supported with tax breaks. Uncle Sam offers businesses a credit of up to 40 percent of income taxes on the first $6,000 of wages paid to each former inmate they hire, a deal similar to those offered for hiring from other targeted categories, like welfare recipients and the disabled. "I give them the second chance they wouldn’t get," says Halloran, who has worked in the Dunkin’ Donuts system since 1975.

For the most part, the ex-cons are humbled by circumstances and grateful for any job they can get. "’Oh, thank you for giving me this job!’ isn’t something you hear from the general population," says Karim Khowaja, who operates 16 Dunkin’ Donuts in downtown Chicago and has hired at least six ex-cons in the past 18 months. "They are very humble." Apparently, working a coffee counter, sweeping floors or doing anything useful is better than being restricted to a half-way house — a step up from prison, but not a leap. What’s more, keeping a steady job is generally the only way an inmate can leave transitional housing and earn, say, a weekend pass to visit family. Intrigued, we went to Chicago to meet Halloran’s crew and check in with other area business owners who have taken similar steps…

Inserted from <Smart Money> Hat Tip <Sponsors, Inc.>

I strongly recommend clicking through to the source to read the rest of this excellent article.

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Mercy Corps Action Center 28 Southwest 1st Avenue Portland, OR 97204

Thursday, May 14, 2015 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM (PDT)

Mercy Corps Action Center
28 Southwest 1st Avenue
Portland, OR 97204