Black Lives: Addiction – Insiders Speak Out About the Murky Drug Trading World in the US

Black Lives: Addiction – Insiders Speak Out About the Murky Drug Trading World in the US

RT (2019)

Film Review

This episode consists of interviews with an ex-cop, a former gang leader and various drug dealers and ex-drug dealers. It also features a debate between a Black pastor and a drug dealer whether whether the latter can earn as much money doing a “legal” hustle. The dealer, who deals drugs mainly to pay child support, highlights his genuine lack of legal options. As Michelle Alexander documents so vividly in The New Jim Crow, his criminal record disqualifies him for student aid, public housing and most employment.

In my view, the main weakness of this episode is its failure to examine the CIA role in international drug trafficking or their role (first exposed by late investigative journalist Gary Webb and subsequently admitted by the CIA Inspector General) in supplying crack cocaine to California gangs. See

CIA’s Drug Trade Essential to Geopolitics

The CIA and the Drug Trade

CIA Drug Trafficking on Prime Time TV

 

Involuntary Servitude: Prisoners Fight California Wildfires

Thanks to climate change, California’s wildfire season got an early start in 2016 – in February. According to the BBC, 30 percent of California’s firefighters (roughly 4,000) are state prison inmates. They make $2 a day while at fire camp, and $1 an hour while on a fire line – saving state taxpayers $80 million a year. Inmates also earn two days off their sentence for every day they’re on a fire. The work of battling a 100 foot high fire wall is incredibly dangerous, and inmate firefighters suffer a “handful” of injuries every year – usually from falling branches and debris.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

While the BBC feature quotes inmates as being honored by the “privilege” of fighting fires, the inmate fire fighting program is taking place against the backdrop of a federal court order requiring California to reduce overcrowding. In 2011, the The Supreme Court upheld  a lower court ruling ordering California to cut their prison populations (by reducing the sentences of low level offenders).

State correction officials complied by offering an early prison-release program to all minimum security offenders – but only “so long as it proves not to deplete the numbers of inmate firefighters.” In 2014, state Attorney General Kamala Harris argued against the program, concerned it would severely impact fire camp participation “a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.”

The New Jim Crow

In other words, California is openly balancing the state budget on the backs of prison slave labor.

Given that low income minorities comprise the great majority of California’s prison population – for circumstances largely beyond their control – this policy clearly violates the UN Convention on Human  Rights (which forbids slavery and involuntary servitude).

In fact, it sounds a lot like southern Jim Crow laws.*

In The New Jim Crow , lawyer Michelle Alexander describes in detail how urban police deliberately target minority neighborhoods for enforcement of drug possession and other victimless crimes. She also cites numerous examples of minority arrestees forced to cop guilty pleas owing to their inability to obtain competent legal representation.

Below prisoners fight a 2014 fire in Shasta County.

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*In the Jim Crow system that followed Reconstruction, most southern states passed arbitrary vagrancy laws that were used to imprison black males and force them into unpaid slave labor on plantations, on the railroads and in factories and mines. See 1941: The Year Slavery Finally Ended

 

HUD Ends Blanket Ban on Renting to Ex-Felons

At the beginning of June, Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) ruled that landlords who exclude ex-convicts as renters may be breaking the law under the Fair Housing Act.*

The new rule reads, “A housing provider violates the Fair Housing Act when the provider’s policy or practice has an unjustified discriminatory effect, even when the provider had no intent to discriminate.”

In essence it prohibits a blanket ban against tenants with criminal records. It still permits a case-by-case assessment of whether tenants could pose a threat. In other words, the new guidelines allow a landlord from excluding an ex-convict if that person represents a threat to the safety and security of the other residents in the building.

The new rule also cautions landlords against selectively enforcing a ban on applicants with criminal records: denying housing to black ex-felons while accepting white people with criminal histories.

Supreme Court Ruling on Disparate Impact

The new guidelines follow a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling last June that the 1968 Fair Housing Act applies to disparate impact as well as “discriminatory intent”. The ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v Inclusive Communities Project prohibits any housing policy that results in poorer outcomes for protected groups, such as black Americans, regardless of whether they were intentionally discriminatory.

The HUD requirement remains that local public housing authorities ban (for life) anyone convicted of producing methamphetamines on public housing property, as well as registered sex offenders. HUD guidelines also require public housing authorities evict public housing residents if they or someone in their unit – even an unrelated guest – commits a drug crime.

The Felon Next Door

On April 4, the British Guardian ran an excellent and (in my opinion) balanced article about the cruel bans on housing and employment for formerly incarcerated African American and Hispanic men who have been preyed upon by a brutally racist criminal justice system.** Because of systemic housing discrimination – even by public housing facilities – many of these individuals have been doomed to homelessness on their release.

Contrast that with a blatantly racist article in Investors Business Daily about the Obama administration making it easier “for felons to move in next door.”  IBD accuses the Obama administration of trying to “racially balance” the US ZIP code by ZIP code. The outcome they claim will be to import violent crime into the suburbs, while lowering property values and negatively impacting local schools.

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*The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968 and signed into law by President Lyndon B Johnson. It prohibits discrimination in housing on the grounds of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Criminal history is not a protected status under the law, but HUD’s new guidelines rely on the concept of “disparate impact”, noting that black and Latino people are disproportionately incarcerated and therefore more likely to excluded by blanket policies.

**In The New Jim Crow, African American attorney Michelle Alexander gives a heart breaking account of police bounty systems that deliberately target minority neighborhoods looking for pot smokers and innocent black arrestees forced to cop felony pleas because they can’t afford decent legal representation.

 

Hitting Private Prisons Where it Hurts: Prison Divestment

Divesting from the Prison Industrial Complex

The National Prison Divestment Campaign has been in the news the last few weeks, after the University of California became the second US college to sell their shares in private prison companies.

Founded by Enlace* in May 2011, the National Prison Divestment Campaign consists of a coalition of over 150 grassroots organizations, worker centers, unions, and other nonprofits. Over the past four years, this coalition has won numerous victories, such as the recent divestments of SCOPIA, Amica Mutual Insurance, and DSM Netherlands, and the implementation of a investment policy for the City of Portland, OR, that will prevent the city from ever investing in private prisons.

The National Prison Divestment Campaign focuses primarily on two companies: Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group (GEO). These companies have a history of buying politicians and using lobbying for policies that criminalize immigrants and people of color. One example of this policy is the latest federal budget, which proposes a record allocation of $2.9 billion for the Department of Homeland Security to imprison 34,000 people on any given day. Meanwhile, legislatures at every level of government are cutting budgets for essential services like public education and healthcare.

In June, Columbia University became the first US college to divest from private prisons. This entailed dumping 220,00 shares in G4S, the world’s largest private security firm, as well as its shares in CCA. On December 29, the University of California joined them, selling $30 million $30 million of CCA and GEO stock.

African American lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander describes the infamous school-to-prison pipeline endured by minority families in The New Jim Crow. The US has the highest prison population in the world. The vast majority are African Americans and Hispanics, locked away for victimless crimes such as drug possession. As Alexander ably documents police disproportionately enforce these crimes in minority communities, where effective legal representation is virtually non-existent.

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*Enlace is a strategic alliance of low-wage worker centers, unions, and community organizations in Mexico and in the U.S.

Has the Tough on Crime Era Ended?

Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice

Edited by Inimai Chettiar and Michael Waldman

Book Review

Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow has helped spark a national debate on the mass incarceration of Africans. Solutions, a collection of essays, is intended as a response. As many are written by presidential hopefuls, the range of solutions is cautious. None of the authors support the most obvious (and popular) criminal justice reform, namely legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana use.*

Likewise there are no essays by anti-Wall Street senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Both were viewed as prospective presidential candidates when Solutions was being readied for publication.

That being said, I was intrigued to see so many Republican politicians, both of the neoconservative Christian and the libertarian stripe, abandon their tough-on-crime rhetoric to argue for reducing prison populations. The forward, by Bill Clinton, argues that despite extreme political polarization on other issues, ending the incarceration of Americans for minor and victimless crimes is one area ripe for genuine bipartisan cooperation.

In his essay, Marc Levin, Director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, suggests that conservatives, applying their core principles of personal responsibility, accountability and limited government, have become “the most vocal champions of prison reform.” In this regard, he and other key conservatives have clearly parted company with the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which continues to lobby for tough-on-crime legislation and increasing prison privatization.

Levin and editor Inimai Chettiar hold up Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Pennsylvania as model states, due to their shift from prison building to community based alternatives. As Levin readily admits, Texas reforms were driven by a need to control ballooning prison costs in an era of severe budgetary shortfalls. He brags how Texas has saved taxpayers billions of dollars by eliminating mandatory minimum sentences (allowing judges more discretion in sentencing), by offering drug and mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration, by increasing formal rehabilitation and through various measures aimed at increasing the employability of ex-offenders (including a provision for law abiding ex-offenders to seal their criminal record).

A few of the essays read like stump speeches, full of vague ideological platitudes without meaningful detail on how prison reform can be accomplished. Others are surprisingly detailed.

Here are some examples:

Vice-President Joe Biden (D): reads like a stump speech and quotes extensively from Martin Luther King. He calls for restoring police staffing cuts and more genuine community policing. Doesn’t explain where the funding will come from, given the massive debt this administration has racked up for bank bailouts and the wars in the Middle East.

Hillary Clinton (D): reads like a stump speech, with frequent references to what Robert Kennedy would do and “my friend” Nelson Mandela. Calls for respect for the law, ending inequality, reforming mandatory minimum sentencing, ending racial profiling by the police, increasing use of drug diversion (ie mandatory treatment as an alternative to incarceration), restoring police staffing cuts, increasing community policing and restoring voting rights to ex-offenders. She also makes no mention of how all this would be funded.

Ted Cruz (US Senator Texas – R): calls for more jury trials and an end to mandatory minimum sentencing. Proposes a federal law requiring prosecutors to disclose all exculpatory** evidence before an accused can enter into a plea bargain. Also supports the Military Justice Improvement Law. This would increase military convictions for rape by transferring responsibility for prosecution from unit commanders to independent federal prosecutors.

Mike Huckabee (former Arkansas governor – R): would eliminate waste by treating drug addicts, rather than incarcerating them. He would also work to build character in American young people by strengthening families.

David Keene (former president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Conservative Union: would reduce the number of crimes punishable by prison, end three strikes laws (which require mandatory life imprisonment for a third felony), amend grounds for probation revocation so they’re only used to protect communities from violent criminals and end arbitrary police violence against African Americans for nonviolent crimes.

Martin O’Malley (former Maryland governor – D): would abolish the death penalty because it’s expensive, ineffective, wasteful and unjustly applied (poor minorities are far more likely to receive the death penalty because they can’t afford adequate legal representation). He states that only six other (mainly authoritarian) countries have the death penalty: Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. (For some reason he omits Egypt.)

Rand Paul (US Senator Kentucky – R): would end mandatory minimum sentencing, police militarization, disproportionate sentencing of minorities for drug crimes and civil asset forfeiture laws.** He would also allow juvenile/nonviolent offenders to have their criminal records sealed.

Rick Parry (former Texas governor – R): calls for increasing use of drug courts, expanded rehabilitation and mandatory drug and mental health treatment in lieu of incarceration.

Marco Rubio (US Senator Florida – R): would require federal government and regulatory agencies to publish all federal laws and regulations in one place, would end civil forfeiture laws and would rein in “out of control” regulatory agencies. (Me, too. I think they should start putting corporate white collar criminals in jail, but I doubt this is what he means).

Scott Walker (Wisconsin governor – R): advocates for more workplace drug testing and more programs to reduce heroin addiction.

James Webb (former US Senator Virginia – D): would appoint a federal commission on mass incarceration to study the problem some more (you can’t make this stuff up).

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*At present marijuana has been legalized for recreational purposes in four states (Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Colorado) and for medical purposes in 11 other states. Marijuana possession has been decriminalized or reduced to a misdemeanor in many other states. Cannabis possession for any purpose remains a felony in only six states (Wisconsin, Texas, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alabama).
*Exculpatory evidence is evidence that tends to exonerate a defendant of guilt.
**Civil asset forfeiture is a legal tool that allows law enforcement officials to seize, (without due process) property they assert has been involved in certain criminal activity. The burden remains on the defendant to initiate separate legal action to recover their property, even if they’re acquitted or charges are dropped.

Solutions is published under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded free at Solutions

White Like Me

White Like Me

Scott Morris (2013)

Film Review

White Like Me is a frank examination of white privilege featuring long time white civil rights activist Tim Wise. Contrary to popular misconception, the political disenfranchisement of people of color didn’t end with the Civil War or the 1960s civil rights movement. The majority of black people attend poorly funded, segregated inner city schools, face massive job discrimination and have much poorer health status. Thanks to these historic structural disadvantages, they also bear the brunt of the 2008 downturn and growing inequality.

Blaming the Victim

Many white conservatives use Obama’s election to the White House to shift the blame to the African American community for their miserable economic and social conditions. If a black man can achieve the highest office in the nation, they argue, it must mean that racism has ended. By extension, it must be their own fault if African Americans remain at the bottom of the heap.

They conveniently overlook the fact that Obama lost the white vote by a 57% to 43% landslide. In some southern states, he only garnered 10% of the vote.

Examples of White Privilege

In examining specific privileges, white people enjoy Wise begins by discussing three important federal programs that blacks were excluded from until the late sixties: Social Security, Federal Housing Authority (FHA) loans and VA loans.

He traces how Roosevelt deliberately excluded domestic servants and agriculture workers (occupations employing 80% of African Americans) to win the support of southern Democrats.

At the same time, the FHA made it virtually impossible for blacks to access loan guarantees with the following language:

Areas surrounding a location are investigated to determine whether incompatible racial and social groups are present, for the purpose of making a prediction regarding the probability of the location being invaded by such groups. If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values.

There were no specific laws excluding black veterans from VA-guaranteed loans – this was down to banks refusing to give them mortgages, even when the federal government guaranteed them.

White Affirmative Action

Other privileges whites have enjoyed include freedom from racial profiling by police and white affirmative action in education. This begins in elementary school when white kids have the option of attending well-funded non-ghetto schools. It continues at the college level, where white beneficiaries of affirmative action are called “legacy” students. On average, colleges admit twice as many white students whose parents or grandparents attended as minority students who qualify for affirmative action.

Whites also have the privilege of indulging in occasional marijuana use without losing their civil and human rights for the rest of their life. The film quotes from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow  to demonstrate how the War on Drugs deliberately targets people of color for mass incarceration.

The filmmaker also features University of Massachusetts professor John Bracey, who explains how structural racism hurts white people. As one example, Bracey talks about the millions of poor whites who have lost access to welfare benefits, thanks to the deliberate misportrayal of social safety net programs as primarily benefiting minorities.

Coming to Grips with White Privilege

Wise concludes with advice for white people who are genuine in wanting to conquer their unconscious racism:

Among other suggestions he calls on them to

1. make the conscious decision not to be colorblind and close their eyes to racial disparities and inequality. In order to address racial disparities, we must first learn to see them.
2. acknowledge that we all have unconscious racial biases that can affect our behavior in ways that maintain or exacerbate inequality.
3. study and honor the long tradition of white anti-racist activists who are our role models.

Wise also has a book entitled White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son.

The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander (2010)

Book Review

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration of African Americans functions as a racialized caste system similar to Jim Crow segregation laws. She defines caste as “as system in which a stigmatized racial group is locked into inferior position by law and custom.” In addition to the mass imprisonment itself, America’s unusually harsh treatment of ex-felons means extraordinarily high numbers of African Americans face legal discrimination for the rest of their life.

It’s both legal and socially acceptable to discriminate against ex-offenders. Federal agencies are legally required to exclude ex-felons from welfare and food stamp programs, public housing and Pell grants and student loans. Job discrimination against ex-felons is legal in nearly all states, and most states prohibit ex-felons from voting or serving on juries. Unable to find jobs or housing (relatives who take them in risk losing their homes under drug forfeiture* laws), many return to prison when they can’t meet the terms of their probation/parole (which usually includes stable housing and employment).

In addition to tracing the political origins of the War on Drugs, The New Jim Crow also provides a detailed analysis of the complex political and sociological dynamics that underlie white racism and the refusal of a post-racial “colorblind” society to acknowledge the immense damage mass incarceration wreaks on African American families and communities. She also explains the perplexing paradox that leads working class whites to vote against their own economic interests by electing Tea Party conservatives.

The War on Drugs: A Republican Scam

As Alexander elegantly demonstrates, the War on Drugs is part of a deliberate strategy by the Republican Party to play on racial animosity among working class whites to win their votes. The American elite has used this divide and conquer strategy to discourage multiracial coalitions all the way back to Bacon’s Rebellion* in 1676. According to Alexander, the original Jim Crow laws were largely a reaction to a brief multiracial coalition that formed as part of the Populist movement in the late 1800s.

Nixon was the first president to deliberately target the racist vote with the intention of transferring previously Democratic southern states to the Republican column. He pioneered the use of racially coded rhetoric such as “law and order,” “tough on crime” and the “undeserving” vs the “deserving” poor.

Here Alexander emphasizes that the affluent white liberals who championed 1960s civil rights legislation were essentially immune to the economic impact of most civil rights legislation. As professionals and academics, they weren’t competing with African Americans for the same jobs. Moreover, as residents of wealthy suburbs, their kids were excluded from mandatory busing laws.

Targeting the Racist Vote

Thanks to a highly sophisticated public relations campaign by Nixon and Republicans, by 1980 low income whites no longer saw poverty as stemming from a faulty economic system. They now blamed civil rights legislation and an overly generous welfare system. As a result, 22% of registered Democrats voted for Reagan in 1980.

Although Nixon coined the term, it would be Reagan who formerly launched the War on Drugs in 1982. The Reagan administration cut the white collar law enforcement in half to focus on street crime. This was during a period when street crime was rapidly declining and sociologists were predicting a phase-out of US prisons as they didn’t deter crime. Reagan also significantly increased DEA and FBI anti-drug enforcement while drastically decreasing funding for drug treatment. He also instituted financial incentives rewarding local policing units for high numbers of drug arrests. Alexander believes these financial rewards were directly responsible for initiating wholesale street sweeps and stop and frisk laws that have led cops to regularly jack up black motorists and inner city youths in the hope of finding illegal drugs.

Finally in 1985, he launched a major media campaign to sensationalize the crack cocaine epidemic. It worked. In 1980, only 2% of the US population viewed illegal drug use as the most important issue facing the US in 1980. By 1989 this number had reached 64%.

Clinton Escalates the War on Drugs

In 1992 Clinton and the New Democrats tried to recapture the Democratic votes they had lost to Regan and Bush by promising to enact even stricter anti-crime and anti-drug laws. Thus it was under Clinton law enforcement budgets and jail populations exploded. It was also Clinton who ended AFDC (Aid For Dependent Children) started under the New Deal – at precisely the same time inner city communities lost all their manufacturing jobs when factories shut down and moved overseas.

Clinton also initiated the federal programs to militarize local police, providing training to set up SWAT teams and surplus Pentagon tanks, body armor, weapons and helicopters. He also enacted the laws denying former drug felons access to federal programs. Sadly Obama, the first African American president, renewed and increased funding for many of these programs.

Discrimination in the Courts

In addition to discriminatory*** drug policing that focuses nearly exclusively on inner cities, African American defendants fare nearly as badly in court. Alexander cites many instances in which poor defendants receive limited or no access to legal representation. Many innocent clients, totally unaware of the future impact of a felony conviction, are intimidated into pleading guilty in return for a reduced sentence.

Ending the War on Drugs

In addition to outlining the ugly racialized history of the War on Drugs, Alexander also summarizes the conservative Supreme Court decisions that have systematically denied due process to people of color facing drug possessions. She concludes by offering a way forward – to end both the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration of people of color.

In addition to legalizing marijuana (and possibly other drugs), she calls for the total structural reform of the criminal justice system. She believes only a multiracial movement with bottom up advocacy for poor blacks and whites alike can bring this about. This is exactly what Martin Luther king was working for when he was assassinated.

In the following video, Alexander talks about her book

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*Drug forfeiture or asset forfeiture laws allow federal and state authorities to confiscate any and all assets (mainly homes, cars and cash) of an individual suspected of a drug-related crime. A subsequent finding of innocence doesn’t guarantee return of the assets, which often requires a lengthy and expensive court process. Some police departments deliberately misuse this law to confiscate cash and belongings of black motorists even where no arrest is made.
**Bacon’s Rebellion was an armed rebellion of white settlers and black and white indentured servants that would lead plantation owners to push for formal slavery laws to discourage further collaboration between whites and blacks.
***Although African Americans constitute only 15% of drug users, they represent 75% of the US prison population. Statistically drug dealers are more likely to be white than black, but local law enforcement authorities make no effort to police white suburbs or university campuses for illegal drug use. In fact, 80% of drug arrests are for possession (in 80% of cases for marijuana). Only 20% of arrests are for sales