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Torture Experts Write APA Policy on Interrogations

DSCN5412.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.

[If you are here from John Grohol's PsychCentral, you can find my rebuttal to his post here (at the new location for this blog). Also note that Grohol has refused to respond to my rebuttal. --BG]

And then shut down the American Psychological Association.

It turns out this little tangential ethical concern about medical participation in interrogations is at the very center of how the US has been carrying out its torture policies. It has begun to appear that the involvement of psychologists in interrogations is, in fact, the smoking gun that proves torture is an integral part of US policy in the so-called War on Terror.

Though the American Medical and American Psychiatric associations have both prohibited their members from participating in interrogations of detainees, the American Psychological Association has been taking a more permissive stance.

Salon.com's Mark Benjamin:

Last summer, the APA adopted new ethical principles drafted by a task force of 10 psychologists, who were selected by the organization's leadership. That controversial task-force report, which is now official APA policy, stated that psychologists participating in terror-related interrogations are fulfilling "a valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm."

Why is the APA's stance so different from that of the other two associations? Could it be because the APA's policy recommendations were made by military men?

Salon has learned that six of the 10 psychologists on the task force have close ties to the military. The names and backgrounds of the task force participants were not made public by the APA; Salon obtained them from congressional sources. Four of the psychologists who crafted the permissive policy were involved with the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or served with the military in Afghanistan -- all environments where serious cases of abuse have been documented. . . .

Task force member Col. Larry James was the chief psychologist for the intelligence group at Guantánamo in 2003. In 2004, James was at Abu Ghraib working as the director of the behavioral sciences group in the interrogation unit there. His biography said he was sent to Abu Ghraib "in response" to the abuse scandal. Requests to interview James were rebuffed; U.S. Army Medical Command spokeswoman Cynthia Vaughn referred Salon back to the APA.

And it gets even creepier.

Col. Morgan Banks spent four months during the winter of 2001 and 2002 "supporting combat operations" at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where serious abuses have been reported. Banks told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker last summer he had also "consulted generally" on Guantánamo interrogations, but could not recall any specific cases. Banks' biography lists him as one of the founders and the senior psychologist at the Army's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program at Fort Bragg, N.C., where the military trains elite soldiers to resist torture in case of capture. The techniques used to harden those soldiers against torture -- sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, bags on the head, long exercise -- have been used on detainees in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. (Emphasis added.)

Remember Benjamin's Salon article from last month? There he reported that SERE "taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba." Now it seems that one of the torture teachers essentially wrote the book on torture techniques  and then helped write the policy that would allow his students to be involved in interrogations.

Other military psychologists on the APA ethics task force include another SERE school veteran and two others involved directly in military operations.

If you listen to APA president Gerald Koocher, who hand-picked the ethics task force, or APA director of ethics, Stephen Behnke, you might feel slightly reassured to hear that "[p]sychologists take advisory or consultative roles in relation to interrogations to help ensure interrogations are safe, legal, ethical, and effective."

However, in at least one case, the psychologists on hand were actually calling the shots on torture.

[T]he presence of a psychologist did not prevent the interrogation of so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Khatani at Guantánamo from turning brutal. Khatani was stripped naked, isolated, given intravenous fluids and forced to urinate on himself, and exercised to exhaustion during interrogations that lasted 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days.

Part of the plan was to humiliate Khatani and submit him to extreme psychological stress. He became exhausted, disoriented and hopeless. He was called a homosexual, forced to wear a mask and dance, and leashed and made to perform dog tricks. Interrogators hung pictures of fitness models on his neck and had a female interrogator "invade his personal space," according to the unredacted interrogation log obtained by Salon.

To help break down Khatani's psyche, the interrogation team included a psychologist, Maj. John Leso, a member of the military's Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, called BSCTs. The teams are a newly minted tool in the "war on terror." They include psychologists who are supposed to help interrogators break down resistance and pry loose useful information. Former Guantánamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller called the teams "essential in developing interrogation strategies" in a September 2003 internal military report.

At various points during the questioning of Khatani, Leso's BSCT operators instructed interrogators to keep the prisoner awake, force him to stop staring at a wall, and advised on the effectiveness of techniques. "BSCT observed that detainee does not like it when the interrogator points out his nonverbal responses," reads an entry in the log from Dec. 29, 2002. (Emphasis added.)

If the BSCT operators were calling the shots just this once, that's one time too many.

There is reason to be concerned, however, that the Khatani interrogation was not an isolated incident. If BSCT operators are widely guiding interrogations, then Mark Benjamin may have just unraveled the torture scandal at the level of US policy decisions and how the APA stepped forward to enable them.

Hung Out To Dry

Independence Day, originally uploaded by Acreepingmalaise.

Substantive challenges to Bush's rampant abuses of executive power have become so rare that it was truly a shock to learn the US Supreme Court ruled that military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay are illegal, under both military law and the Geneva Convention.

The same day the Supreme Court issued its ruling, another revelation hit the press with much less of a splash. On Thursday, Salon.com broke Mark Benjamin's story about an important document found among the thousands of pages of Defense Department pages obtained by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act request.

In his article "Torture Teachers," Benjamin explains the special function of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school at Fort Bragg, NC. Officially, the SERE school provides training to elite US troops in how to resist torture. Benjamin's evidence shows that SERE instructors have also been teaching students how to be effective torturers.

A March 22, 2005, sworn statement by the former chief of the Interrogation Control Element at Guantánamo said instructors from SERE also taught their methods to interrogators of the prisoners in Cuba.

"When I arrived at GTMO," reads the statement, "my predecessor arranged for SERE instructors to teach their techniques to the interrogators at GTMO ... The instructors did give some briefings to the Joint Interrogation Group interrogators...."

There are striking similarities between the reported detainee abuse at both Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and the techniques used on soldiers going through SERE school, including forced nudity, stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and exhaustion from exercise.

Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, said, "This is the missing link," proving that "that the SERE training was in fact used, for a time at least, as a basis for interrogations at Guantánamo." [Disclosure: I am an employee of Physicians for Human Rights.]

This missing link--this evidence that US torture practices were cultivated in an elite military training program at Fort Bragg, NC--ought to make it clear the extent to which the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are the function of concerted US policies in the US War on Terror.

The missing link should also be occasion to counter again what Naomi Klein has called "Our Amnesiac Torture Debate," the glossing over by liberals and conservatives, alike, of the long history of the use of torture by the US. Klein cites, as one example,  the evidence, gathered by Alfred McCoy, of how

monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls "no-touch torture," based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training programs.

The significance of the Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is therefore not that the judicial branch is finally beating back the executive excesses the Bush administration (though the legal victory is important for those reasons).

When torture is covertly practiced but officially and legally repudiated, there is still the hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail.

Klein's point is, essentially, that the rule of law provides seekers of justice with a vehicle for demanding that our governments live up to objective standards of behavior. The Hamdan ruling provides some hope for the rule of law in the US.

I'd like to find the spot behind the White House, where they've got the flag hung out to dry. I'll wave it this Fourth of July the same as I always do: in celebration of the patriots who believe enough in this country--in its people--to demand, often at great risk to themselves, that the US live up to its stated values. A country that produces such seekers of justice--that's something to wave a flag for.

~
NOTES:

• The almost lost version of the song, above, can be found on this.
• Photo is by Eddy.
• This post was partly inspired by Rachel's question.

It's nice when they like your writing, but...

Just a coincidence? Maybe, except it's at least two coincidences... Tell me what you think...

Yesterday on TalkLeft:

http://talkleft.com/new_archives/014801.html

Chicago's Abu Ghraib

Let's not forget prisoner abuse begins at home. [emphasis added --BG]

It's called Area 2. And for nearly two decades beginning in 1971, it was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags places over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions.

In December on HungryBlues:

http://minorjive.typepad.com/hungryblues/2005/12/torture_begins_.html

Torture Begins At Home

US sanctioned torture is one of the pressing human rights issues of our time. I very much admire and am grateful for the moral vigilance with which some are responding to this administration's attack on democracy and human rights in its war on terror. Yet I also wish for a day when there is comparable popular awareness of and outrage about the long standing, institutionalized human rights abuses that take place within US borders. The most recent example of the latter to come my way was in Salim Muwakkil's latest article in In These Times:

The latest domestic example is Chicago, where for nearly two decades (from 1973 to 1991) the police department virtually condoned the torture of more than 100 black criminal suspects. Those illegal techniques led to the wrongful conviction of dozens of black men, and even prompted Amnesty International in 1990 to call for an inquiry into police torture in the city.

VOICES FROM THE GULF COAST - Special Issue of Dollars & Sense Magazine

March 29, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Chris Sturr
or Amy Gluckman
617-447-2177

VOICES FROM THE GULF COAST

THE STORIES YOU HAVEN’T HEARD
ABOUT
HURRICANE KATRINA & GULF COAST RECONSTRUCTION

When Hurricane Katrina struck six months ago, the mainstream media was shocked to discover the scope of poverty in New Orleans. And that’s about as deep as the coverage has gone.

Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice has just released its 56-page special issue (March/April 2006) on Katrina. In it, you’ll discover how Katrina exposed—and has intensified—a whole range of unjust systems of racial and economic domination.

Did you know:

• When Katrina struck, the New Orleans jail housed about 6,800 prisoners, including violent felons but also plenty of people awaiting arraignment or trial, like a guy arrested for reading Tarot cards without a permit and homeless people arrested for begging or sleeping on the street. Prisoners were locked in first-floor cells as the water rose; some spent days standing in sewage-filled cells with little food or water. Meanwhile, the facility’s scant two-page evacuation plan was on “this guy’s computer” that got flooded.

But the story goes back much farther. The jail’s population has increased eightfold since the mid-1970s—while the city’s population has dropped. Why? Because the parish sheriff makes money for each prisoner he houses. As one sheriff commented, “fewer inmates translates into less revenue for the jail.” Locking up fewer New Orleanians would mean shrinking the sheriff’s fat patronage-based fiefdom.

• When Katrina struck, it devastated nearly the entire Mississippi coast, in some places for miles inland. Thousands lost their homes. But state and federal relief and reconstruction plans are doing little to help people rebuild their homes or find other housing. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour decided to spend the state’s entire $5.3 billion federal Katrina relief grant on retroactive flood insurance for otherwise insured homeowners—not a penny for renters, uninsured homeowners, or to repair public housing.

But the story goes back much farther. For years, redevelopment plans in coastal cities like Biloxi and Gulfport have been endangering low-income and black neighborhoods. “There are people here who’ll tell you that developers and local politicians have been trying to flood us out of existence, because with each piece of land, they haul in a bunch of red clay, which is semi-impervious, dump it in the wetlands to build up land on which to put a slab or a parking lot, then on the slab they put a building, a big ‘ole Wal-Mart or something,” says Mississippi historian and community organizer Derrick Evans.

• When Katrina struck, the flooding in New Orleans left behind a layer of toxic sediment—contaminants include arsenic and diesel-fuel substances—in neighborhoods throughout the city. The EPA has not begun any cleanup of the sediment. Government agencies are recommending that returnees wear protective gear like Tyvek suits when they work on their homes but, as environmental justice activist Monique Harden notes, “not one government agency provides this protective gear to people returning to the area.”

But the story goes back much farther. For years, low-income and black communities in Louisiana have faced the massive legal(!) dumping of toxic pollutants. In fact, the historic African-American community of Mossville, La., is the focus of the first-ever environmental human-rights lawsuit brought against the U.S. government, now pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.

These are just some of the in-depth stories you’ll read in this special issue of Dollars & Sense. The issue includes:

• Repopulating New Orleans – How did San Francisco do what a top economist says New Orleans cannot?

• Gone to Mississippi – A journey along the state’s devastated coast

• Activist Perspectives on Katrina: Three Interviews

Mississippi historian and activist Derrick Evans – “Ground Zero of Someone Else’s Future”
East Biloxi community activist Jearlean Osborne – “The Storm of Life after Katrina”
Environmental justice activist Monique Harden – Katrina Hits Cancer Alley

• Down by Law – Orleans Parish Prison before and after Katrina

• Bringing Them All Back Home – Housing in New Orleans, six months later

• SPECIAL PULLOUT CENTERFOLD – Rogues’ Gallery of Katrina Profiteers / Map of the Katrina Diaspora / Roster of progressive Gulf Coast organizations

• And more!!!

Authors and editors available for interviews – contact Chris Sturr or Amy Gluckman at (617) 447-2177.


Founded in 1974, Dollars & Sense explains the workings of the U.S. and international economies and provides left perspectives on current economic affairs. It is edited and produced by a collective of economists, journalists, and activists who are committed to social justice and economic democracy. 

Vague And Overbroad Powers

The Black Commentator's Margaret Kimberly notes that Halliburton has won yet another multi-million dollar government contract—this one to build "temporary detention facilities" in case of an "immigration emergency."

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.

Kimberly quotes the passage, above, from Halliburton's press release and then comments:

Anyone paying a little bit of attention will ask, "What immigration emergency?" If there is an immigration emergency looming on the horizon it is a big secret. Of course immigrants will be the first ensnared in the net that big brother Bush has in mind, but the net won't stop with them.

What sort of national emergency requires detention centers? America has plenty of prisons. More of our population is behind bars than in any country on earth. There are detention centers for immigration in existence already. As for helping in case of a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina proved that saving American lives is not on the Bush agenda.

When the word detention comes up, hairs should rise on the back of every neck. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the creation of "enemy combatants" these detention centers can be used to lock up anyone for any reason for any length of time that Uncle Sam wishes.

Kimberly hopes for the "best case scenario" in which "this contract may be just the latest hand out to the welfare queen of corporate America," but she also entertains the more likely possibility that "our government is planning to create more [Jose] Padillas." I say "more likely" because history suggests this development is nothing less than a revival of J. Edgar Hoover's Emergency Detention Program, detailed in a 1976 Congressional report:

The development of plans during this period for emergency detention of dangerous persons and for intelligence about such persons took place entirely within the executive branch. In contrast to the employee security program, these plans were not only withheld from the public and Congress but were framed in terms which disregarded the legislation enacted by Congress. Director Hoover's decision to ignore Attorney General Biddle's 1943 directive abolishing the wartime Custodial Detention List had been an example of the inability of the Attorney General to control domestic intelligence operations. In the 1950s the FBI and the Justice Department collaborated in a decision to disregard the attempt by Congress to provide statutory direction for the Emergency Detention Program. This is not to say that the Justice Department itself was fully aware of the FBI's activities in this area. The FBI kept secret from the Department its most sweeping list of potentially dangerous persons, first called the "Communist Index" and later renamed the "Reserve Index," as well as its targeting programs for intensive investigation of "key figures" and "top functionaries" and its own detention priorities labeled "Detcom" and "Comsab"(emphasis added).

Director Hoover advised Attorney General Clark in March 1946 of the existence of its Security Index, although he did not say that it had existed since Attorney General Biddle's 1943 directive. The Index listed persons "who would be dangerous or potentially dangerous in the event of . . . serious crisis, involving the United States and the U.S.S.R." The Justice Department then prepared a memorandum concluding that the available options for action in an emergency were a declaration of martial law or suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The FBI Director recommended going to Congress to secure "statutory backing for detention" (emphasis added).

After a conference between Department and FBI officials, the FBI submitted a lengthy analysis of its standards for classifying potentially dangerous persons. The memorandum gave specific examples of "Communists and Communist sympathizers whose names appear in the Bureau's Security Index." However, the FBI did not provide any specific examples in the category "Espionage Suspects and Government Employees in Communist Underground." Assistant Director Ladd advised Director Hoover of the reason for excluding any such examples:

The Bureau has identified over 100 persons who are logically suspected of being in the Government Communist Underground; however, at the present time, the Bureau does not have evidence, whether admissible or otherwise, reflecting actual membership in the Communist Party. It is believed that for security reasons, examples of these logical suspects should not be set forth at this time. (emphasis added)

The Director noted, "I most certainly agree. There are too many leaks."

This past week there was a related revelation about a central repository of alleged terrorism suspects (via Julius Speaks):

The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of alleged international terrorism suspects or people who aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.

The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center - created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency - contains a far greater number of international terrorist suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed.

The keeping of large lists of "suspects" is also part of the Hoover heritage. The Custodial Detention List was established in the early 1940s, abolished by Attorney General Francis Biddle in 1943, and immediately re-invented by Hoover as the Security Index, which was maintained through the early 1970s, when it was re-named as the Administrative Index. At each stage in the game, there were subsidiary indices—such as the Communist Index, the Reserve Index and the Agitator Index—less well-known to the Attorney General and Congressional oversight committees. The 1976 Congressional report states that

By early 1951, the total had increased to 13,901 names [on the Security Index] as the result of an FBI decision after the outbreak of the Korean War to broaden "the basis for inclusion in the Security Index to include alI active members of the Communist Party." The size of the Communist Index, as contrasted with the Security Index, was indicated by the figures from the New York field office which had 2,897 names on the Security Index and 42,000 names on the Communist Index. Since the Communist Index was based on "allegations of Communist activity," it was "a measure of investigations performed." If this proportion applied "throughout the field," as the FBI memorandum suggested, then the Communist Indexes in the field offices contained over 200,000 names.

The Bush administration says we should take some comfort in knowing that US citizens comprise "only a very, very small fraction" of the 325,00 names in the National Counterterrorism Center's central repository. "The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.," a Bush administration official said.

The comments of ACLU legislative counsel for privacy rights, Timothy Sparapani, are more to the point:

We have lists that are having baby lists at this point, they're spawning faster than rabbits.... If we have over 300,000 known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we've got a much bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly doubt that is the case.

The existence of these over-swollen lists is evidence of what the new, Halliburton-built detention centers are intended for. The development of an infrastructure for mass detentions does not come out of the blue. It has long been a desired power of the federal law enforcement. Even in 1974, after many of these earlier programs came to light and the Attorney General demanded more precise "guidelines" for how security lists would be maintained, the 1976 Congressional report concluded that "the broad claims of power in the hands of the Executive branch could readily permit a return to the vague and overbroad domestic intelligence policies of the past."

And readily permit a return they have.

FURTHER READING
FOX Unleashes Vile McCarthyite Smear Campaign Against Cindy and the Peace Movement

Before Katrina: Modern Day Debtors' Prison In Gulfport, MS

Gulfport, MS was in the news over the weekend with a jaw-dropping story. Saturday's US News & World Report told of a class action suit against the city, concerning what amounted to a debtors' prison before Hurricane Katrina:

Last July, a homeless man named Hubert Lindsey was stopped by police officers in Gulfport, Miss., for riding his bicycle without a light. The police soon discovered that Lindsey was a wanted man. Gulfport records showed he owed $4,780 in old fines. So, off to jail he went. Legal activists now suing the city in federal court say it was pretty obvious that Lindsey couldn't pay the fines. According to their complaint, he lived in a tent, was unemployed, and appeared permanently disabled by an unseeing eye and a mangled arm. But without a lawyer to plead his case, the question of whether Lindsey was a scofflaw or just plain poor never came up. Nor did the question of whether the fines were really owed, or if it was constitutional to jail him for debts he couldn't pay. Nobody, the activists say, even bothered to mention alternatives like community service. The judge ordered Lindsey to "sit out" the fine in jail. That took nearly two months.

[U]p until Hurricane Katrina hit, [Gulfport police were] beating the pavement looking for those who owed fines for things like public profanity--at $222 a pop. The result of Gulfport's fine-reclamation project was that while it collected modest sums of money, it also packed the county jail with hundreds of people who couldn't pay. The Southern Center for Human Rights filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Gulfport last July. Attorney Sarah Geraghty says that before bringing the case against the city, she witnessed hundreds of court adjudications involving Gulfport's poor in which no defense attorney was present or even offered. Many defendants, Geraghty said, were obviously indigent, mentally ill, or physically disabled, like Hubert Lindsey; some had been jailed for fines they had already paid. One mentally ill woman attempted suicide by jumping from an elevated cell in the county jail after she was picked up for having failed to pay several city fines; the lawsuit alleges that police then grabbed her again on the same charge a few months later, causing her to miss the surgery scheduled to fix the broken bones in her feet.

As we attempt to understand the observable disparities in who gets relief and what gets rebuilt, it is important to keep in mind the city's demonstrated attitude towards its poor. It is also important to keep in mind what strips of pavement the city was beating and whom it tended to be looking for. The Amended Complaint from the lawsuit, which attorney Sarah Geraghty has sent me, describes

a special force of police officers charged with patrolling the streets of Gulfport to arrest citizens who have failed to pay fines assessed by the Gulfport Municipal Court. These officers conduct periodic sweeps, during which they search the streets for people who look as though they might the City old fines. During these sweeps, the officers go into predominantly African-American neighborhoods and stop people in the streets without any independent reason or suspicion, but for the sole purpose of checking to see if they owe the City old fines. Those who owe fines are taken to jail.

The state of Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black Americans in the country [PDF]. Second is Louisiana. Mississippi and Louisiana are pretty much tied for the highest poverty rates in the US, both hovering just below 20% statewide. We cannot discuss the effects of Katrina and the issues around reconstruction without serious, ongoing considerations of race and poverty.

Further Reading
• Sun Herald, "A lawsuit alleges that practices in Gulfport's Municipal Court are creating a DEBTORS PRISON"
• Southern Center for Human Rights Indigent Defense Cases In The News

(Cross posted on the d&s blog.)

Miscounting Prisoners Hurts Rural Communities As Well As Urban Ones

Peter Wagner has a fascinating new piece on Prisoners of the Census. If you're new to what Peter does, his organization, the Prison Policy Initiative, does innovative research and advocacy on the problems that ensue from counting mostly urban Black and Latino prisoners as residents of the predominantly white rural communities where many are imprisoned. Miscounting prisoners in this way diminishes the political clout of the communities the prisoners come from and provides the host communities with a windfall of tax revenues, based on the "increase" in their populations. The surprising thing is that communities who lose money to this arrangement are not the urban ones where the prisoners come from, but the the other adjacent rural areas that don't host prisons.

[M]ost of the money redirected by prison census counts is raised in specialty taxes (liquor taxes, cigarette taxes, recreational park usage fees, hunting-fishing licenses, etc.) and county sales taxes. Not all states have these revenue sources, and in the big picture this is small change, but it is important to see who pays for the windfall received by some.

Dutchess County, NY, can provide a detailed example. In 2003, the town of Fishkill and the small City of Beacon argued over whether the prison counted in one town was really in the other because $85,000 in county sales tax revenues was at stake. Although the prisoners were from New York City, neither the prisoners nor New York City had a valid claim on these funds.

This was not a state sales tax being distributed within the state on the basis of population, but a county sales tax being distributed on the basis of population within the county. The county sets the tax rate — about 3% of each purchase — and keeps that money locally. As a result of their "population" based formula, towns with elevated populations due to prisoners get an extra share. So if that money doesn't belong to New York City or to the prison towns, to whom does it belong?

That money belongs to every other town in the county that does not have a prison. The towns with prisons get a windfall, and every community without a prison is deprived of about 1.7% of the tax receipts it would otherwise receive.

(Read the rest.)

Some Information On Locating Louisiana Prisoners Post Katrina

Critical Resistance has a fact sheet with much of the available information. Unfortunately, there is not a simple way to plug a person's name into a database and come up with his or her present location. Here are some resources from the fact sheet that may be helpful with some persistence:

HOW TO FIND AND CONTACT PRISONERS MOVED AFTER KATRINA:

* Local and state prisoners who were evacuated can be located by name on a list being assembled by a coalition of attorney’s groups in Louisiana. Attorneys are currently attempting to contact and interview every adult prisoner moved in the wake of Katrina, so this list will be updated. That list can be found at: http://www.lidab.com/Links%20to%20Displaced%20Inmates%20Lists.htm* [or try: http://tinyurl.com/dyxjk] and updates and further links can be found at: http://www.lacdlkatrinarelief.blogspot.com/

* The Department of Corrections (DOC) established hotlines to call for locating family members moved from Orleans’ area prisons and jails. They are: 225-342-3998 and 225-342-5935 and are supposed to be staffed from 7:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m. Hunt Correctional Center, where many male prisoners from OPP may have been transferred, also set up a hotline: 225-352-5924. DOC staff will only tell family members where their loved one is located, and no other information (release date, case status, etc.). Family members should be allowed to give a message to their loved one.

* Youth who were in Bridge City Center for Youth (BCCY) were moved to Jetson Correctional Center and can be located by calling Jetson at 225-778-9000; ask for John Anderson, Michael Gaines, Ricky Wright, or Linda London. Demand the child be brought to the phone to speak immediately with their family member.

* Young people held at the Youth Study Center, Plaquemine Detention Center, St. Bernard Center, Terrebonne Detention Center, and Riverde Detention Center have been routed to placements in other parts of the state. Family members should call Perla at (225) 287-7988 or (225) 328-3607 (cell) or Stacey at (225) 287-7955 to find out where their child is located. Ask Perla for a phone number, call, and demand that they be permitted to speak to their child immediately on the phone.

* As of Friday, September 17th, a coalition of attorneys in Louisiana has been able to secure releases for nearly 500 prisoners held beyond their sentences – mostly people on parole violations and “municipal” charges. These people are being released with a delay, but should be cycling out in 24-72 hours. The attorneys state that this should be the beginning of a process of getting people out who were “overdue for release.” See http://www.lacdlkatrinarelief.blogspot.com/ for more information.

Also see the main page of the Louisiana Indigent Defense Assistance Board website.

~
*I corrected the url. –BG

Heartbreak

My writing for this blog has been lighter for a little while now. That's not the reason for my title, but in case you were wondering, these are some of the things I've been doing instead of writing lengthy posts:

• three weeks of work on that article in In These Times
• a follow up piece, currently in the works
• a contract research job
• a flurry of job applications and interviews
• shepherding a special issue of Dollars & Sense

Writing less means that though I'm still reading a lot of blogs, many things slip by that under other circumstances I'd be blogging as I saw them. One such thing was yet another amazing blog post by Clayton Cubitt, this one about going back to McKain Street in New Orleans, the spot now nestled under the I-10 highway ramp that is still home to the shotgun shack where his grandmother lived almost her whole life and where she raised his mother and his aunt. I'm not going to quote it, just go read it and check out the photograph. It's heartbreaking, but it is also gorgeously elegiac. The post is about a month old, but as far as I can see, only two other people have linked to it. It's got the timelessness of art, which means that telling you about it now is still timely.

There isn't really a neat way to write about the other kind of heartbreak my title refers to. I don't know how many people check the comments over here, but one byproduct of my urge to document underpublicized injustices is that others who are suffering similar circumstances occasionally write in with own experiences, sometimes because they are desperate for help or even just because no one else seems to care.

The single post that's gotten the most of these kinds of comments is More On The Prisoners From Orleans Parish Prison, posted at the end of September. In October, I got two comments from people who had loved ones in Orleans Parish Prison at the onset of Katrina. And then last night, I received three more comments (from two people).

It has been more frequent than not that when I've known small ways to help Katrina survivors who contact me here, it's been impossible to reach them with the information they might need. In one case, for example, Juana Bourgeois said she was looking for her friend Byron Joshua. Angela Wessels from the Southern Center for Human Rights helped me determine what prison Mr. Joshua was relocated to (turns out he is one of the Coleman 900), but I was not able to reach Juana to give her the information.

On one of my posts, about the the class action suit brought by Katrina survivors against FEMA, got this wrenching comment from JeanMarie Arend:

I was filing for disability in La. at time of hurricanes Rita and Katrina. I relocated to MN. I still haven't got any housing or financial assistance. On Nov. 2 2005 it was inperative that I have a anterior cervical dysectamy and fushion with them putting in a steel rod. The vertabra affected are c-4,c=5,c=6. I suffer from partial paralysis in my arms and hands, as well as suffer from extreme headaches. Yet I am still homeless and penniless. The medical assistance I get from the state of MN. does not cover my teeth which due to the injury are broken off and abcessed. And the state of MN. allowed me 203.00$ per month which they are now taking away as of Dec. 2005, although just the healing on the surgery will be 1 and 1/2 years. I can not work and I can not get help from anywere. And yes I am filed with FEMA. They are sending me mail with my astranged husbands number on it although I have my own FEMA number I must use to refer to my case.I call them weekly and have been told 3x now to fax certian papers in which I do and yet they never get to my file.HELP ME PLEASE DISABLED IN MN> P.S. yes I refiled here in MN for my disability.

I emailed JeanMarie back immediately, but my message bounced. I think her comment is for real, since my sitemeter showed that she was writing from Minnesota and that she found HungryBlues by googling "free disaster relief for katrina victims with disabilities." I wanted to tell her that I have a friend in Minnesota who has formed a People's Hurricane Relief Fund Solidarity Group. One of the things that PHRF Solidarity Groups do is locate evacuees in their area and help them organize and obtain resources that they need.

Last night's messages were from Anicia Chatters, who is looking for a friend of hers who was in Orleans Parish Prison before Katrina, and Sherre Boteler, whose husband has been stuck in jail for 125 days, waiting for a trial for a crime she does not believe he committed.

my husband was in orleans parish jail also on a rape charge that he didnt do.....i have evidence that he was lied on and falsely arrested and still cant get help for him.....also my husband is very ill and they knew that and still left him there to die. he was also left out in the rain on the field at hunts [info]. it is all true! he has been to 3 prisons since hurricane and has been incarcrated now for 125 days just waiting to go to court.

The heartbreak is not that Ben Greenberg feels helpless to do anything for individuals who've contacted him. Rather, it's that these glimpses of individual tragedies is most of what we get to know about the lives of those worst affected by Hurricane Katrina and that each fragment of a story that we hear can be multiplied by thousands.

Sherre Boteler gets the last word:

you know what i dont understand about our "great mayor"...lol ray nagin....he's more worried about the city having mardi gras and hearing people parting in the streets than geting help for these men and women that they left to die in the wake of a cat. 5 hurricane. what a joke he is!! who gives a damn about mardi gras? and the city rebuilding for the partiers.... we want out family members back ! i have not sen my husband in 4 months. it took me 8 days to even find out that he was still alive after the hurricane. i lived from shelter to shelter all alone for 8 weeks with not even help from fema....because they are a joke too. the entire government is a joke! the "declartion of independence" says all men and women are to created equally. DOSENT THAT COUNT FOR THE ONES IN JAIL ALSO.....THEY SAVED THE ANIMALS BUT TREATED OUR HUSBANDS, MOTHERS, FATHERS, BROTHERS, AND SISTERS WORSE. WHO IS GONNA STAND UP AND BE MEN AND SAY THEY WERE WRONG....and now they are saying it may be another 6 months to a year before anyone even sees a court room. they say they lost their evidence on the cases they had well, i have proof of my husbands innocense and they still dont care. but they gonna have mardi gras! WHAT A JOKE! "I'LL NEVER GO BACK!"

Hear Peter Wagner Speak About Prison Policy

I received the following announcement from Peter Wagner's Prisoners of the Census email list:

Tomorrow, Saturday Dec. 3 in Providence RI, I'll be giving the keynote lecture at the "U.S. Prison System: Community and Political Impacts" conference. My lecture will be at 1pm in Starr Auditorium, MacMillian 117
at Brown University. This conference is organized by Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Education Department, Africana Studies, Brown Green Party, Brown Democrats, Democracy Matters, American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Informed Democracy, and Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.

Next Saturday, Dec. 10, I'm going to be in New York City as the guest speaker at the Community Service Society of New York Roundtable Discussion on Prisoner Re-entry Issues. The discussion is from noon to 3pm in Conference Room 4A at 105 East 22nd Street.

More info about Peter Wagner:

Peter Wagner, JD, Executive Director. Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. His current focus is on working to demonstrate - through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses - the distortion of the democratic process that results from the U.S. Census Bureau's practice of counting the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated. The New York Times editorial board has twice supported his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the "leading public critic" of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, and a keynote address to a conference at Harvard University. Mr. Wagner's publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).

Also see the Prisoners of the Census and Prison Policy Initiative websites.

Sheriff Illegally Withholding Records on Orleans Parish Prison, ACLU Lawsuit Charges

Sheriff Illegally Withholding Records on Orleans Parish Prison, ACLU Lawsuit Charges

ACLU of Louisiana to Testify Before New Orleans City Council on Wednesday


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 10, 2005


BATON ROUGE, LA -- The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana today filed a lawsuit charging that Orleans Parish Prison officials are violating state law by refusing to turn over public records that would shine light on why prisoners were abandoned when Hurricane Katrina struck.

"The public deserves to know the truth about what really happened inside Orleans Parish Prison," said Joe Cook, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. "We need to know why Orleans Parish Prison fell into complete chaos while surrounding parishes managed to evacuate guards and prisoners to safety. Only then can we prevent this from happening again."

The ACLU of Louisiana filed public records requests with Sheriff Marlin N. Gusman and other state officials on September 22. After two weeks without a response, the ACLU sent a follow-up letter to Sheriff Gusman on October 5. To this day, Orleans Parish Prison has not provided a single document pursuant to the requests.

Specifically, the ACLU asked for:

• All documents pertaining to any deaths that have occurred on the premises of the prison since August 26, 2005;
• All documents pertaining to the collection of dead bodies from the premises of the prison, and the disposition of those bodies; and
• All documents pertaining to any evacuation plans that were in effect at the prison as of August 26.

The national ACLU, which represents the prisoners under a longstanding class-action lawsuit over prison conditions, filed similar requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act with the U.S. Marshals, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Justice.

According to eyewitness accounts, the Orleans Parish Prison fell into chaos in the five days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. As the water rose in the prison buildings, deputies deserted en masse, leaving behind prisoners in locked cells. Prisoners broke windows and either leapt out or set fire to pieces of clothing and held them outside the windows to signal to rescuers. The prisoners spent days without power, food or water, some standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests or necks.

Attorneys from the ACLU of Louisiana will appear before the New Orleans City Council on November 16 to present statements from prisoners who were abandoned at Orleans Parish Prison. The statements were obtained through questionnaires distributed to the prisoners.

The national ACLU filed a separate motion on behalf of the prisoners in September in U.S. District Court, charging that no evacuation plans were in place at the time Katrina struck. The motion cites reports that Sheriff Gusman did not seek state assistance until midnight on August 29, days after other parish prisons had already called for help. On October 19, the judge in that case ordered Sheriff Gusman to provide a copy of the current evacuation plan.


For more information on the federal lawsuit, and copies of the original state and federal public records requests, go to: <http://www.aclu.org/Prisons/Prisons.cfm?ID=19178&c=121> .

What's That Quote From Faulkner Again?

 

Quote of note: “Our results suggest that the death penalty has become a sort of legal replacement for the lynchings in the past...”

DEATH SENTENCES LINKED TO HISTORY OF LYNCHING IN STATES

COLUMBUS , Ohio – States that sentence the most criminals to death also tend to be the states that had the most lynchings in the past, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that the number of death sentences for all criminals – Black and white – were higher in states with a history of lynchings. But the link was even stronger when only Black death sentences were analyzed.

The results may be shocking to many people, but they aren't surprising to sociologists who study the racial aspects of the death penalty, said David Jacobs, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University .

“Our results suggest that the death penalty has become a sort of legal replacement for the lynchings in the past,” Jacobs said. “This hasn't been done overtly, and probably no one has consciously made such a decision. But the results show a clear connection.”

Another study finding reinforces this idea. Results showed that the number of death sentences in states with the most lynchings increased as the state's population of African Americans grew larger, at least to a certain point. The researchers believe that is because, as their numbers increase, Blacks are seen by the white majority as a growing threat....

The findings also showed that the number of death sentences increases in states after a growth in the population of Blacks. But the number of death sentences begins to go down once the population of African Americans reaches a threshold of about 20 to 22 percent.

“Probably at that point, Blacks have enough votes and political influence within states to reduce the number of death sentences,” Jacobs said.

The results of the study suggest that the United States is still a product of its past, Jacobs said.

“Historical events continue to influence the current behavior of important social institutions. But the main point is that our findings do not support claims that the death penalty is administered in a color-blind fashion.”

(Whole thing.)

Further Reading
• STATES WITH HIGHER PROPORTIONS OF BLACK CITIZENS MORE LIKELY TO HAVE DEATH PENALTY, STUDY FINDS

• PRISON POPULATION SWELLS UNDER REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS, STUDY SAYS

Critical Resistance Fact Sheet On Prisoners And Policing Post Katrina

Go read it.

More On the Coleman 900

Last night, I posted on my volunteer work to help identify the approximately 900 prisoners form Orleans Parish Prison who were evacuated to the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Coleman, Florida.

After I and the other volunteers entered the essential data from the "Katrina Master Listing" of OPP inmates into our spreadsheets, there was an additional step of entering each prisoner's name into the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) online Inmate Locater. The BOP assigns each prisoner a "Register Number" and a projected release date—both of which we also entered into our spreadsheets.

There was also one other bit of information that came up for each prisoner. In the column that lists the prisoner's location was the specific facility at Coleman FCC where the prisoner is housed. Every prisoner whose data I saw was in USP Coleman II, a high security facility. Coleman FCC has one low security, one medium security and two high security facilities. Though many of the Coleman 900 do not belong in prison at all, they are currently in a high security federal penitentiary facility.

Rights? What Rights?

On Thursday night, I volunteered in a project to identify prisoners who had been in Orleans Parish Prison before Hurricane Katrina and were then evacuated to a federal penitentiary in Coleman, Florida. Angela Wessels, an attorney in Boston, who works for the Southern Center for Human Rights (based in Atlanta), is doing an amazing job overseeing the process of gathering volunteers—mostly local law students and her friends—to slog through the roughly 8,500 names on the "Hurricane Katrina Master Listing" and create a database of the inmates who were evacuated to Coleman.

OPP is the facility that includes Templeman III, the unit that was abandoned by prison guards with prisoners locked inside, while flood waters rose to chest level. For four days prisoners were trapped inside without food or drinking water. Orleans Parish Prison is both a jail where arrestees are kept pre-trial and a prison where sentenced convicts reside.*

Phyllis Mann explains:

There are lawyers all over the state, criminal defense lawyers, who are going to all of these facilities. There are 35 facilities that we are aware of all over the State of Louisiana, where over 8,500 people from Orleans jails were evacuated. And we're literally having to go in and meet with these people one by one to figure out when they got arrested, why they were in jail, whether they have been convicted or whether they were waiting for trial, whether it was a misdemeanor or a felony.

I understand that the computers from the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office were retrieved from Orleans on Friday, and their information technology people have been working to try to get as much information off of those computers as possible. And eventually what will happen is they're going to start matching the information they can recover from those computers to the information that we have been getting by going in and interviewing these people one by one, so that we can figure out where they're supposed to be. I would say a good half of them are not supposed to be in jail at all. They have served whatever sentence they had received and should be released. But until we can figure that out, they're sitting there. (Emphasis added.)

While there is small number of local New Orleans attorneys doing the herculean work of identifying and visiting individually every OPP prisoner evacuated to other facilities in Louisiana, there hasn't been adequate information for anyone to address the situations of the prisoners who were evacuated out of state.

Of the approximately 8,500 prisoners who were in OPP, about 900 were sent to Coleman Penitentiary. Working with the Master Listing and a very recently obtained list of the names of prisoners who had been evacuated to Coleman, volunteers have been identifying the inmates in Coleman who should have an arraignment, bond hearing, access to a lawyer, be in rehab or work-release programs, or have past or imminent release dates. Last Wednesday and Thursday nights, rooms full of volunteers entered the data on these inmates into spreadsheets to create a database of the prisoners in Coleman whom attorneys could help in an immediate way. This was the work that I was doing on Thursday. Once this new database is complete, attorneys who can go to Coleman Penitentiary will have the information they need about who is there and whom they can help.

At one point, while I was going through my hunk of pages from the Katrina Master Listing, there was something odd. I noticed that for one of the prisoners I was entering into the spreadsheet the booking date was later than his sentencing date, which didn't make sense to me. I asked Angela about it. She explained the funny dates mean the inmate had completed a sentence at another prison and was transported to Orleans Parish Prison just prior to his release. Now instead of being on queue to re-enter civilian life, this person has been shipped to a federal penitentiary in Florida, without access to an attorney or the ability to communicate with anyone to tell them where he is or even just to let family members know he is alive. And that's just one story out of roughly 900 that there are to be told about the Orleans Parish Prisoners who were evacuated to Coleman Penitentiary in Florida.

~
*Previously I confessed some confusion about whether OPP only functioned as a jail or if it functioned both as a jail and as a prison. Based on my work Thursday night, it is evident that the latter is indeed the case.

UPDATE, 10/24: Now that I have her permission to include it, I've added Angela Wessel's name. Adding her name to the sentence in the first paragraph forced me to remove the mention of my having met Angela through the Prison Policy Initiative.

Also see: More On The Coleman 900

Slave Wages

Last week, Jeanne said,

Poor people can't get back to their lives on a promise of a job and a home. They need a guarantee and help getting back.

Today, she's got some of the reasons why. On the one hand she's found a rare instance of a local, NOLA company that got a contract to provide electricians for reconstruction work. The company, Knight Enterprises, hired local workers and paid union wages—and then lost the contract to other companies paying less and offering no benefits. The locals were replaced by out-of-state workers and were left with nowhere to go.

An electrician and foreman with Knight Enterprises cried as he recounted how his team of workers were kicked out of government tents by an out-of-state firm and forced to sleep in their cars.

What's worse, the local work force is competing with migrant Latino labor, mainly from Honduras and Mexico. The suspension of Davis Bacon that made Knight Enterprises unable to compete in the current market also turns undocumented workers into slave labor and leaves them vulnerable to physical abuse.

Housing for workers often lacks running water and contractors have failed to provide food, training and wage rates as promised, James Hale, vice president with the Laborers' International Union of North America, told a policy conference of opposition Democrats in the US Senate.

In one case, workers had not been paid for three weeks and at another site there were allegations that security guards were mistreating laborers, said Hale, who supported his allegations with photographs.

Once again, the post-Katrina landscape exposes and magnifies the injustices that were already there. The working conditions, described above, are not unique to migrant reconstruction workers in NOLA. And while we demonize and racially profile Latino workers, we also know that we need 'em and we need 'em bad:

Recognizing the demand for migrant labor, and to help speed reconstruction in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended rules mandating employers to prove that workers they hire are citizens or have a legal right to work in the United States.

That's the same Dept. of Homeland Security whose Michael Chertoff was quoted today saying we need more jails for undocumented workers (via TalkLeft):

"Today, a non-Mexican illegal immigrant caught trying to enter the United States across the southwest border has an 80 percent chance of being released immediately because we lack the holding facilities," he added.

"Through a comprehensive approach, we are moving to end this 'catch and release' style of border enforcement by reengineering our detention and removal process."

We let the undocumented workers in or we "enforce" the law, as it suits the needs of the industries that exploit them. Either way, it's just another way that the US upholds the institution of slavery.

Many people have the mistaken impression that slavery was outlawed or abolished in the United States after the Civil War by the passage of the 13th Amendment. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The 13th Amendment reads, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." The effect of the 13th Amendment was not to abolish slavery, but to limit it to those who had been convicted of crimes.

This reality was made apparent following the Civil War when large numbers of newly freed black slaves found themselves "duly convicted" of crimes and thrown in state prisons where, once again, they labored without pay. This led the Virginia Supreme Court to remark in an 1871 case, Ruffin v. Commonwealth, that prisoners were "slaves of the state." Little has changed since then, except the states are less honest about their slaveholding practices. . . .

Until [the 1980s], most prisons produced goods for their own use or for sale to other state agencies, license plates being the most famous example. But in a 1986 study, former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called for transforming prisons into "factories with fences." In essence, the report argued that prisons should once again become not only self-sustaining, but profit-producing entities requiring minimal financial input from the state. . . .

The slavery context and the history of racist ideology as a tool for upholding the economic conditions of slavery should be kept well in mind when we read how exploitation of migrant Latino workers demonizes local Hondurans in NOLA.

Local Hondurans, who comprise the city's largest Latino population, report being the object of the anger from blacks and whites, who fear losing their livelihoods to low-wage Latino workers. Zapotec-speaking Oaxacan Indians walk the streets of New Orleans and elsewhere throughout Louisiana and Mississippi after being threatened with deportation and kicked off local military bases, where they worked for local contractors without getting paid.

Latinos in the Gulf region are being racially profiled by local and federal authorities, says Victoria Cintra of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, one of the only organizations addressing Latino immigrant concerns in the region. Cintra believes the Bush administration's suspension of the Davis Bacon Act, which requires payment of prevailing wages, along with its temporary removal of documentation requirements on I-9 forms has strained race relations by lowering wages and fostering competition between groups.

Lerone Bennett, Jr. explains:

In order to preserve domestic tranquillity, the leading groups in the colonies made it a matter of public policy to destroy the solidarity of the laborers. Laws were passed requiring different groups to keep to themselves, and the seeds of dissension were artfully and systematically sown. Indians were offered bounties for betraying black runaways; blacks were given minor rewards for fighting Indians; and poor whites were used as fodder in the disciplining of both reds and blacks.

Malik Rahim gets the last word (transcribed from this):

The explosion that hit New Orleans wasn't no dynamite. It was something far worse than dynamite—or atomic bomb. It was greed, corruption and neglect. The neglect was they didn't care because Louisiana is a old Southern state and it's still ran by old Southern money. And one thing they was never able to forget is that they allowed that the major city in the South to become a city that is controlled by Blacks. And the effort has always been since Dutch Morial the first black mayor took office was how can they get this city back. And they have tried everything...

Prisons Create The Conditions For Crime

Abstract Concept
High levels of incarceration concentrated in impoverished communities have a destabilizing effect on community life, so that the most basic underpinnings of informal social control are damaged. This, in turn, reproduces the very dynamics that sustain crime.

(William Raspberry, quoting Todd Clear (via Racism Ain't Over))

Concrete Example
The greatest economic drain to the African American and poor community is not buying food. It's court costs. See a mother whose son is just arrested for a $5 bag of weed. Now all of a sudden she's got to mortgage her house to get him out and pay some little shyster lawyer that know that this is his first offense and he gonna get probation. But he won't tell her that. He make her believe that her child gonna wind up in the penitentiary for life. And we live in a city that will spend $90,000 to keep a child in detention—per year—and won't spend $90,000 on the community...

(Malik Rahim, transcribed from his talk about Common Ground and NOLA)

Obligatory Listening - Malik Rahim and Scott Crow Talk About Common Ground

Almost ten days ago, Common Ground posted three audio files of Rahim and Crow talking about the founding of the Common Ground Collective, what it has faced so far, and what it plans for the future. For those unfamiliar, Common Ground "is a local, community-run organization offering assistance, mutual aid and support to New Orleans communities that have been historically neglected and underserved."

I loaded the three mp3s on my iPod and listened (not to worry, through my car stereo) as I drove around on my errands and to and from work yesterday. Maybe not the wisest decision, since I was alternately banging my fist on the dashboard and crying a good bit of the time. But I got all the way through the talk, and I'm really glad I did. If you want to understand what it has been like on the ground, since the early days of the flooding, and if you want to understand more about the history of criminal neglect of low-income people and African Americans that contextualizes what we are seeing now—then you must listen to Crow and Rahim.

Scott Crow is a community organizer from Texas who has been involved in the National Coalition to Free the Angola 3. In Part 1 (14:55), he tells his story of going to New Orleans with a friend, in the first days of the flooding, to try to rescue Robert "King" Wilkerson, one of the Angola 3 who was finally released after thirty-one years of wrongful imprisonment—almost twenty-nine of which were in solitary confinement. Crow's story is harrowing and moving and reveals a great deal about what was actually happening in that first week after Katrina. Through his amazing efforts to save Wilkerson, which were ultimately successful, Crow met up with Malik Rahim and began working with him to bring free medical care and food and other relief to the storm victims in NOLA and its environs.

Malik Rahim was a member of the Black Panther Party in NOLA in the 1970s. He lived in the Bay Area for a while, but several years ago, he returned to NOLA and to his work there as a community organizer and activist. From early on in the disaster, Rahim has been outspoken about the criminal neglect and the racism and contempt for the poor that have compounded the disaster beyond all imagination. In Part 2 (37:23), he speaks at length about conditions on the ground in NOLA from the earliest days of the flooding, and he provides essential background information about the criminal justice system, poverty, racism, and the white power structure in New Orleans. Someone who is a fast typist should transcribe this one, so Rahim's background information and analysis can get wider circulation.

In Part 3 (17:20), Scott Crow talks about the mission, vision and strategy of Common Ground. Crow emphasizes the point that he and others, who are outside, white activists, are there not to "help" Black and poor people but to support the work that local members of the community are doing with resources that may not be immediately available to them.

While the Red Cross and FEMA vacillate between concerted neglect and appalling incompetence, Common Ground delivers effective aid to thousands of people affected by the storm. In some cases, Common Ground has been the first respondents hurricane victims have seen. In the particularly appalling case of the Native American community in the city of Dulac in Terribone Parish, when Common Ground showed up at the end of September, after Rita, they were bringing the first (and only) aid to an area completely devastated by flooding. If you want to be sure your money or your supplies or your volunteer hours go directly towards aiding the people of New Orleans, I recommend giving to Common Ground.

For more information about Common Ground, read the Collective's blog, as well as the blogs by Common Ground volunteers, Real Reports and Bay To Gulf People's Pipeline.

Prison Policy Initiative

Yesterday evening I was one of the co-hosts of a reception for the Prison Policy Initiative. It was a great event with Executive Director Peter Wagner speaking alongside Joseph "Jazz" Hayden and Mark Dubnoff.

Wagner spoke about his innovative work on census policy and felony disenfranchisement. Hayden spoke about his 15 years of work to overturn felony disenfranchisement laws. Dubnoff spoke about being pro bono counsel in Simmons v. Galvin—the case challenging the constitutional amendment adopted by Massachusetts in 2000 to deprive convicted felons of their right to vote.

For the last two years, PPI was sustained by Executive Director Peter Wagner's Soros Fellowship. When the fellowship ran out last spring, Wagner just kept working on his projects, unpaid, but also set himself the task of finding a fiscal sponsor that could accept donations for PPI once it incorporated as a 501c3 nonprofit organization.

Both Hayden and Dubnoff testified to the fact that a wide range of people who work on prisoners' issues have come to rely on the work that PPI does. Hayden traveled from New York City in order to support the cause.

PPI is now a 501c3, and Wagner has found a fiscal sponsor, so you can support the cause, too, by making a tax-deductible donation here.

(Image via Prison Policy Initiative.)

A Little More Context

As with the other crimes against the people of New Orleans that we have been reading about in recent weeks, the criminal treatment of prisoners in the aftermath of Katrina is part of a long and terrible problem. Jordan Flaherty's latest email lays out a good bit of context:

Despite the attempts to explain away the officer’s behavior, the incident fits into a well-defined pattern of police conduct in New Orleans. In the last year, seven young Black men have been killed by New Orleans police, and none of the officers involved have been punished.

This year has seen mounting evidence of a police department out of control. Less than a week before Hurricane Katrina, on Wednesday August 24, Keith Griffin, a New Orleans police officer, was booked with aggravated rape and kidnapping. According to a Times-Picayune report, “Griffin is accused of pulling over a bicyclist under the guise of a police stop in the early morning hours of July 11. The two-year veteran officer allegedly detained the woman, drove her to a remote spot along the Industrial Canal near Deslonde Street, then sexually assaulted her.”

This is hardly an isolated incident. Another recent Times-Picayune article reported, “in April, seven-year veteran officer Corey Johnson was booked with aggravated rape for allegedly forcing a woman to perform oral sex, after he identified himself as an officer in order to enter the woman's Treme home.”

Another article states “Eight officers were arrested during a six-month stretch last year on charges that ranged from shoplifting to theft to conspiracy to rob a bank...In April 2004, 16-year veteran James Adams was booked with aggravated kidnapping, extortion and malfeasance after he was accused of threatening to arrest a woman unless she agreed to have sex with him."

Police misconduct in this notoriously corrupt city goes back decades, and occasionally it explodes in scandal. In a September 2000 report, the progressive policy institute reported “a 1994 crackdown on police corruption led to 200 dismissals and upwards of 60 criminal charges, including two murder convictions of police officers. Investigators at the time discovered that for six months in 1994, as many as 29 New Orleans police officers protected a cocaine supply warehouse containing 286 pounds of cocaine. The FBI indicted ten officers who had been paid nearly $100,000 by undercover agents. The investigation ended abruptly after one officer successfully orchestrated the execution of a witness.” . . .

The white-flight suburbs around New Orleans are in many ways worse. During the 1980s, Jefferson Parish sheriff Harry Lee famously ordered special scrutiny for any black people traveling in white sections of the parish. "It's obvious," Lee said, "that two young blacks driving a rinky-dink car in a predominantly white neighborhood? They'll be stopped."

The New Orleans Gambit newspaper reported that 1994, “after two black men died in the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center within one week, Lee faced protests from the black community and responded by withdrawing his officers from a predominantly black neighborhood. ‘To hell with them,’ he'd said. ‘I haven't heard one word of support from one black person.’”

The Gambit also reported in April of this year that in Jefferson Parish officers were found to be using as target practice what critics referred to as “a blatantly racist caricature” of a Black male. Sheriff Lee laughed when presented with the charges. "I'm looking at this thing that people say is offensive," he says. "I've looked at it, I don't find it offensive, and I have no interest in correcting it."

These accusations of “target practice” gained force a few weeks later with the May 31 killing of 16-year-old Antoine Colbert, who was behind the wheel of a stolen pickup truck with two other teens. 110 shots were fired into the truck, killing Colbert and injuring his passengers. In response to criticism from Black ministers over the incident, Lee responded “they can kiss my ass.”

Also see: FAMILY MEMBERS AND PRISONERS SHARE NIGHTMARE AFTER KATRINA

More Prisoner Abuses In NOLA

Human Rights Watch reports that Six Weeks after Hurricane, Arrests for Minor Offenses Turn into Indefinite Jail Time.

Six weeks later, they are still waiting to be brought before a judge. Even if found guilty, they would only have spent 10 days at most in jail. Many would have been released on bond and some would never have been prosecuted. Instead, they remain locked up in jails scattered throughout the state, unable to rejoin their families, many of whom are also struggling to rebuild their lives in the wake of the hurricane.

“People entitled to freedom remain behind bars because public officials are putting up obstacles instead of restoring justice after the hurricane,” said Corinne Carey, a lawyer and researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Keeping people locked up six weeks after the storm for petty offenses they may not have even committed makes a mockery of due process.”

Local parish prisons—the equivalent of a county jail—in six Louisiana parishes hit hardest by the hurricane held more than 8,500 people when the storm hit. These detainees were evacuated to 43 state and local facilities across the state. Several hundred were sent to Florida as well. Some had been convicted of felonies and were under the jurisdiction of the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections. But most were being held for minor municipal offenses or misdemeanors such as public intoxication, disorderly conduct, sleeping in a public place, traffic violations, or even reading tarot cards without a license. . . .

Prosecutors and department of corrections officials have not simply dragged their feet, however. They have also actively sought to impede the release of those who should be free. In habeas and civil rights proceedings brought on behalf of some 200 prisoners, the state’s attorney general, the district attorney, and the department of corrections all argued that the court should delay releasing those who served their time until they could demonstrate that they had somewhere to go when they were released. There is no requirement under Louisiana law, however, that those released after serving their sentence inform authorities of where they intend to go.

While there was plenty of coverage of the NOLA police beating of retired school teacher Robert Davis, much less discussed has been "Camp Amtrak," the makeshift prison where he was taken. Camp Amtrak is a place that sounds like our own Guantanimo, right here in the continental US.

In interviews both inside and outside of Camp Amtrak, people who had been through the process told harrowing accounts of police brutality and harsh conditions. Some of them, like Davis, had visible injuries. Many said police had attacked them or others in their cells with pepper spray. All recounted trying to sleep on the concrete floor of the bus parking lot with just one blanket – or in some cases no blanket – to protect them from the cold and the mosquitoes which swoop in on randomly alternating nights here. None was given a phone call or access to an attorney.

Many of the arrests that bring prisoners to Camp Amtrak are gratuitous, and there are reports of terrible violence against the prisoners.

"I was in my yard, and a young white guy came by the gate and I was talking to him and the police came and arrested both of us," he recounted. "He was outside breaking curfew; I was inside… behind the gate. The police broke my gate down with a pick-ax. They broke it completely off the fence."

Jack continued: "It makes me really angry, man. It made me realize that the law isn’t working the way it is supposed to."

Sandy Freelander, a relief volunteer from Wisconsin, was also one of the hundreds arrested. He said that he and two friends – one a New Orleanian widely known here for having helped rescue hundreds of people in the Seventh Ward during the flooding – were detained by police in a parking lot last Thursday. He said that they were on their knees with their hands behind their heads when a police officer attacked his friend.

One of the motivations for accumulating these prisoners at Camp Amtrak is to provide the police with slave labor for its clean ups of its facilities.

A visit to the courtroom yesterday confirmed their accounts. In