Kerik Now Sees Issues with American Prison System

In an interview with Today Show host Matt Lauer, ex-New York Police Chief Bernard Kerik said that America‘s prison system is broken.

“It’s okay to punish individuals for doing wrong,” he said, “but it’s not okay destroy them for doing something wrong,” he said. As he talked, he gave Matt Lauer a nickel to hold. Asking Matt to take note of the weight of the nickel, Kerik said that young men are being locked up for having five grams of cocaine”…an amount of cocaine that has the weight of a nickel. (http://www.today.com/news/nypd-chief-turned-inmate-kerik-prison-system-broken-8C11509923) “That’s insane.”

I Eun Kyung Kim wrote, “In his first interview since his release from prison where he served time for tax evasion and lying to federal authorities, Kerik spoke with TODAY’s Matt Lauer about lessons learned. He said the plunge from police chief to prisoner allowed him to see numerous examples of why imposing mandatory minimum sentences doesn’t work. Instead of discouraging criminal behavior, it sets up inmates for failure, he said.

“The system is supposed to help them, not destroy them,” he said.

What Kerik is saying isn’t new, but I wonder if because a white man, a former law enforcement officer who admits he “threw people in jail and threw away the key,” more people will listen.

The issue of mass incarceration was brilliantly brought to light in Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, and the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference, Inc, conducted a series of hearings in several states recently to hear about the problem and its collateral consequences, but due to the criminalization and objectification of those who are incarcerated, which tend to disproportionately be young black men, few people, especially those in positions to help do something about it, listen.

Mandatory minimum sentencing, the “war on drugs,” and the “southern strategy” have all contributed to the huge numbers of people incarcerated today. The privatization of prisons is also a huge factor in the vast numbers of people being thrown into jail. The object or purpose of the justice system, it seems, is not to “correct” but to control people and make a profit while doing it. In that respect, modern day prisons are little different than old-style plantations. It is a new form of slavery, inmates and their families say.

Kerik was adamant in his new perspective gained from having been locked up. “If the American people and members of Congress saw what I saw, there would be anger, there would be outrage, and there would be change, because nobody would stand for it,” he said in the interview.

Prison and the need for prison reform is not a favorite subject for Americans. The “tough on crime” and “law and order” mantras that are a part of American political discourse are responsible for the willingness of people to look away from the serious problems that have come with mass incarceration. The fact that one in three African-American males are in prison is no issue for Americans who have been infected and affected by the criminalization of black males. The prevalent feeling seems to be that those who commit crimes lose their rights, including the right to be treated with respect and dignity.

Nobody really seems to care or be concerned about the fact that America imprisons more people than any of the other modern nations in the world. The conditions inside prisons is leading the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference to call the issue one of human rights violations, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as justification and citing violations of the same.

Kerik said that it is impossible for a young man to be in a prison for 10 years for having five grams of cocaine and come out, ready to be integrated into society. Prison doesn’t prepare inmates for re-entry and society makes it difficult if not impossible for them to survive once they are released.

Had he not been thrown into prison, Kerik said, his perspective would never have changed.

It’s not a new thing in America that, until an issue affects white people is really isn’t an issue. The “war on drugs” was okay and needed as long as everyone knew that it was “those people” who did drugs and therefore needed to be locked up. With the explosion, however, of prescription drug abuse, and the large numbers of white people being adversely affected by it, the conversation began to shift. Drug addiction began to be talked of as an “illness.”

With Kerik’s interview, coupled with Alexander’s book and the findings of the testimonies gathered by the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference, Inc., perhaps more people will look at the issue of mass incarceration, and work to change not only it, but the collateral consequences it has caused and continues to cause.

America cannot run all over the world trying to address human rights violations without addressing its own shortcomings. America’s justice system has wreaked havoc on society, not improved it. Destroying the lives of people who make mistakes is not a good thing, not on any level. Black people have been saying that for a while; maybe now that Kerik is saying it, someone will begin to listen.

A candid observation …

Objectification Be Damned

In this nation, there are left-overs from slavery, one of the biggest being the criminalization of black people, and especially of black males.

Black people were objectified while they were slaves; the objectification morphed into criminalization after Reconstruction as blacks were arrested for the slightest offenses to justify them being imprisoned and made to work for individuals and corporations. The situation is classically described in Douglas Blackmon’s book, Slavery by Another Name. As more and more black people were arrested, the canvas was being painted that had on it the picture of black people; they were “bad” and not worthy of freedom. It did not matter that black men were being targeted and manipulated by an angry South that resented their free slave labor having been taken away by the emancipation of the slaves. All the public saw and heard was that black people were being arrested. There was more trust in an unjust justice system than there was of innocent people who were being railroaded, their lives and the lives of their families forever destroyed.

That criminalization and objectification has made it easy and justifiable in the present day for law enforcement and vigilantes to shoot and kill black people, especially black males, with little chance of being held accountable, and/or to arrest them for non-violent offenses, most often drug related, offenses for which their white counterparts are forgiven.

But perhaps there is a bigger problem that we seldom talk about, and that is, how black people may have criminalized and objectified ourselves as well.

There is systemic injustice , supported by an insensitive and calloused justice system, that has resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of black males. According to Michelle Alexander in her book, The New Jim Crow, one in three African-American men is currently under control of the criminal justice system – in prison, in jail, on probation or on parole. That is an inordinate number of individuals, the vast majority of whom, according to Alexander and others, are in prison for non-violent offenses. There is in America a racial caste system, and nobody seems to care.

But black people, too many of us, don’t seem to care about ourselves. We kill each other with abandon. The self-hatred comes right out of slavery and the racism that slavery spawned. America did a good job of associating “black” with “bad,” and unfortunately, that association bred a sense of self-hatred in us that is obvious in how we too often treat each other.

There are some warriors of the race, people who refuse to accept what society has fed us. They stand up and fight for justice, no matter the odds against them. The work that Ruby Sales of The Spirit House Project supports the parents and relatives of people who have been victims of systemic violence. The bravery of Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, continues to inspire me, and recently, the tenacity of the parents of young Kendrick Johnson has been inspirational. The parents of slain young black men have too much pain to be stymied by the doubts that self-hatred so often and too often produces. Historically, Mamie Till was one of those warriors who refused to let criminalization and objectification and racism and hatred stop her quest for justice in the death of her son.

The prayer is that more and more black people will step out of the tent which likes to house the disenfranchised, dispossessed and unwanted. Staying in the tent only exacerbates the sense of hopelessness and gloom that inhabits people who hate themselves. It feeds self-hatred. Getting out into the light, risking failure in order to have a victory, is what is needed, objectification and criminalization aside. The parents and relatives of slain black people need not be afraid, but need to take their cues from those who have entered the ring of injustice, determined to win, whether the violence against their loved one was done by police and vigilantes, or by angry black youth.

Just because there are left-overs from slavery doesn’t mean we have to eat them. They are spoiled and need to be disintegrated.

A candid observation …

Health Care for the Poor Still Elusive

We have the Affordable Care Act and we still have literally millions of people who cannot afford and will not have, health care.

How in the world can that be? The Affordable Care Act was supposed to help that very demographic, wasn’t it?

A New York Times article said that nearly two-thirds of poor, black people, and single mothers, in addition to one-half of all low-wage earners, will still not have access to health care. (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/health/millions-of-poor-are-left-uncovered-by-health-law.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131003).

The vast number of these people live in states controlled by Republicans, and in which those lawmakers have voted against expanding Medicaid. “The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are
home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of
poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the
country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those
excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’
aides.” said the NYT article.

While some are appalled that so many people will still be unable to get health care, others are not surprised.

Some say that the Affordable Care Act was designed not to help poor black people, or single mothers, or low-wage earners. It was designed, they say, to benefit low wage earners who happen to be white.

It is sadly ironic that the majority of the poor people whom this act was ostensibly created to help are apparently black. They live primarily in Southern states where, again, Republican lawmakers have balked at extending Medicaid, citing cost. The American citizens who will still not be able to get health care, many of them, make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but not enough money to keep them above the poverty line, making them eligible to qualify for subsidies, which the ACA is providing.

It is equally as ironic that some lawmakers feel justified in not supporting the expansion of Medicaid because they seem to feel that the poor are poor because they are lazy and want to take advantage of working Americans. There is great disdain for the poor, blaming them for their poverty and spreading this belief so that great numbers of people buy into the hype. While in one breath, lawmakers will say that in America, democracy makes it possible for “all” people to be successful and therefore, not poor, in another breath, they will support a system which is not democratic at all, but, rather, oligarchic in nature, supporting the expansion of the very rich on the backs of poor people and their labor.

With these millions of people still unable to get affordable health care, the health of the very poor will still be jeopardized. Children will still be in danger from getting sick and possibly dying from preventable and treatable diseases, and adults will not be able to get the care and medication they need to, likewise, get treatable diseases diagnosed or to get medications that will keep those diseases from killing them.

All of the showboating on television, with Tea Party Republicans saying that they are speaking on behalf of “the American people” has been disturbing and disgusting. “The American people,” for them, obviously do not include poor black and brown people, single mothers, and people unable to make a living wage.

The politicians in Washington are playing a game with the lives of all Americans as they fight like children having temper tantrums, working to defund the Affordable Care Act. It wouldn’t be so troubling if Tea Party Republicans had a viable health care plan in place to replace the ACA, one that would help people like these millions of black, brown and poor people.

They are not concerned with that part of America’s population, though. These politicians are fighting for is a group of people who object to big government and the role big government has historically played in taking care of “the least of these.” They do not have the slightest concern, say, for the American citizen who needs treatment and medication for high blood pressure, or for the child who has an abscessed tooth, and who happens to be poor.

It is a scary thing to be poor in such a wealthy land. It is scary and troubling and frustrating to work, as the work ethic says we must – and still be deemed unworthy to make a living wage. The government shut-down, forced by the opposition between Tea Party Republicans who are fighting President Obama by opposing the ACA, is making poor people suffer even more as their salaries are being withheld.

Nobody cares about you if you’re poor – not even here in America, where our political system is supposed to be “exceptional” and above that in all other developed countries. The fact that many Americans are a paycheck away from being put out on the street, should be troubling to a group of people who say they govern for “the American people.”

Apparently, that’s not true. They govern for “some” American people. Black, brown and poor people of all colors, as well as people struggling to make ends meet, just don’t seem to matter. No matter what lofty words are used to describe America’s democratic ideals, her oligarchic reality says that there is a serious chasm between the ideal and the real.

Poor people count. Black and brown people count. Single mothers …count.

Somebody ought to remind Congress of the same because it seems that millions of Americans have been forgotten.

A candid observation…

On American Exceptionalism

What if we said that on paper and on principle, America is exceptional, but in practice, we have a little more work to do?

The sparring that has been going on since Russian president Vladimir Putin questioned the concept of “American exceptionalism” has caused this writer some deep thought. Certainly, it is good to be an American, and to live in America, but that doesn’t mean that one cannot and will not look at the areas where our ideals and our praxis contradict each other.

The contradiction between ideal and praxis was created even as our founding documents were created. The phrase “all men are created equal” was certainly an idea which, if meant, would have created an exceptional nation because nations in general were more apt to create and thrive on societies in which all people were not, in fact, equal. The very idea that we would want to be a nation where that reality would not be our model …made us exceptional.

But from the beginning there was a problem. All men were NOT created equal, the Founding Fathers decided. Equality was relegated to white, male landowners. Everyone else was …well, not so equal after all.

As time went on, in spite of our being a democracy, meaning to this writer at least, that the words of the Founding Fathers should at least be our guiding principle, it was clear that we were not a democracy in the way those words suggested. In fact, there began to be a real struggle between “virtual democracy” and “virulent demagoguery,” according to Chip Berlet and the late Margaret Quigley. The diversity that democracy would presumably have supported began to be feared and despised, even as more and more different ethnic groups populated our country. Pat Buchanan, not all that long ago, wrote, “The burning issue here has almost nothing to do with economics and almost everything to do with race and ethnicity. If British subjects, fleeing a depression, were pouring into this country through Canada, there would be few alarms. The central objection to the present flood of illegals is they are not English-speaking white people from Western Europe; they are Spanish-speaking brown and black people from Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean. (“The Theocratic Right” in Eyes Right , edited by Chip Berlet, p. 38) Buchanan is also to have said, “The world hails democracy in principle; in practice, most men believe there are things higher in the order of value – among them, tribe and nation, family and faith.” (p. 38) Berlet notes in his essay that “with white racial nationalism, democracy was seriously challenged. With its anti-elitist, egalitarian assumptions, democracy did not appeal to the reactionary rightists of the 1920s, who insisted that the U.S. was not a democracy but a representative republic.” Many Americans on the Right, asserts Berlet, “exhibit a deep disdain for democracy.”

If Berlet’s assertions are true, how, then, can a nation which espouses to be a democracy but within which there is a sizeable group of people with a disdain for the very things democracy is supposed to be about, be…exceptional?

Perhaps it is this disdain for democracy that is guiding the Congress to do things like cutting $40 billion from the food stamp program, apparently not caring that the numbers of hungry people in this nation are growing daily? How are we an exceptional when we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world? We, the United States, lock up more people per capita than anybody in the world, including the two most totalitarian states in the world, Russia and China, according to Bill Kleiber, of Restorative Justice Ministries of America. We have five percent of the population in the world, according to Rebecca Robertson, ACLU, Texas, “but we have 25 percent of the incarcerated population of the world.”

We have heard of the growing chasm between the rich and poor here. That sort of chasm is not supposed to be extant in a democracy, is it? If “all men are created equal,” then somewhere, something is wrong, right?

Many Americans feel that with growing diversity here, they are being marginalized. Sara Diamond writes in “The Christian Right Seeks Dominion,” that “evangelical Christians …feel they are being persecuted by secular society.” Well, when one feels persecuted, one fights back, and that truth begs one to wonder if what we see going on in Congress is part of that fighting back, a fierce determination to stop all this dribble about this nation being a democracy and to pull it back to its roots of being …just like other nations which make no bones about not being “democratic.”

Frederick Clarkson writes in his essay “Christian Reconstructionalism” that there are a fair number of people who are involved in strategically trying to make America less “democratic” and more “theocratic,” a nation which will live by “Biblical principles” where the inequality of people is a staple. He quotes a Rev. Joseph Morecraft, who believes in Reconstructionism, as saying democracy “is mob rule,” and that the purpose of civil government is to “terrorize evil-doers…The purpose of government,” according to Morecraft, is to “protect the church of Jesus Christ.” (p. 76, Eyes Right)

It seems that we agree on one thing: that government should protect – but the issue, the divide, seems to be agreement on who or what should be protected. It seems to this writer that government should protect its people, its citizens. Government should find ways to help empower people, not keep them under the government’s thumb. That feels like government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” as our beloved President Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address. But the issue is that for some, that is democratic dribble. For some, the purpose of government is to protect the church of Jesus Christ – which to them is a church which supports and defends inequality – in the name of religion.

Americans, it seems, are a little ambiguous when it comes to their agreeing whether or not America is exceptional. A Pew Research survey taken in 2011 had 48 percent of Americans questioned saying that America was exceptional and 42 percent saying…um, not so much. The poll also indicated a significant difference in the way younger and older Americans responded. According to an article on CNN.com, “The poll indicated a wide generational divide, with 65% of those 65 and older saying the U.S was the world’s greatest country. But that number dropped to 50% for those 35-64 and to 34% for people 18-34. There was also a partisan divide, with 63% of Republicans saying the U.S. was the greatest country in the world. That number dropped to 46% among Democrats and 41% among independent.” (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/12/polls-is-america-exceptional/?iref=allsearch)

At the end of the day, we will all define “exceptionalism” by our own set of standards, values and beliefs. This writer struggles with the notion of America being exceptional when there are so many people living in poverty, hungry, without health care…and us having a Congress which apparently does not realize that or care about it. The values this writer ascribes to just don’t seem to gel with values where the quest for profit trumps the needs of human beings. This writer is deeply disturbed about the rate of incarceration, the fact that many children are hungry and can only get fair to good nutrition at school. This writer is saddened that public education is in many places under attack, and that prisons for profit are being in record numbers, with empty beds waiting for tenants, while it is getting more and more expensive for students to go to college, or for some students, in college, to stay there, because of cuts made in funding for Parent Student Loans and the reduction of Pell grant awards.

The ideal of democracy is good on paper. If we practiced it, we would indeed be exceptional. Unfortunately, for this writer, the fact that for too many of us, “democracy” means more the ability to partake in capitalism than it does to care for people who are suffering.

Democracy should be “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” It doesn’t feel like that’s the kind of nation we live in.

A candid observation …

HBCUs in Danger?

While we as a nation deal with the crisis afforded by student loan debt, there is yet another crisis looming, of equal importance, and that is, the fact that historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are struggling to stay afloat these days largely due to changes made in how Parent PLUS loans and PELL grants are disbursed.

According to an article which appeared in “Essence” Magazine, HBCUs lost 14,000 students in 2013, largely due to these changes. (http://www.essence.com/2013/07/22/there-war-hbcus/) Parents with shaky credit are no longer able to get the Parent PLUS loans that were once more easily obtained, and the result is, many African-American students are having to leave school because they cannot afford it, and many more African-American students are not able to enter HBCUs to which they have been granted admission because they cannot afford it.

While African-Americans have frequently been accused of “whining” in this nation, the fact of the matter is that they have continually beat up against barriers to their advancement. In the “Essence” article cited above, the mother of a student who wants to attend Howard University has battled homelessness and other hardships but has yet pushed to get to make it possible for her daughter to attend college. Without a Parent PLUS loan (she was turned down), it is doubtful that her daughter will be able to attend the college of her choice.

Some would argue that it’s no big deal; that the young woman should merely choose a college which her mother can more afford, apply, get in and be done with it. Yet that argument misses the important role HBCUs have played in the lives of countless African-Americans.

We all know how colleges have been wont to admit African-Americans in our nation. Many HBCUs were established in order to accommodate black students who would not have been admitted to white schools, no matter their grades or ability to pay. The United Church of Christ, for example, established 500 land grant colleges in the 19th century for black students; of these, six remain: Fisk, Toogaloo, Dillard, Huston-Tillotson, Lemoyne-Owen, and Talladega.

These colleges provided not only a stellar education for their students, but also a sense of community, affirmation and acceptance which the students rarely, if ever, received in their daily lives as American citizens. As these students graduated, they did so with a renewed sense of themselves and their talents, and with a belief that they had worth and something of extreme importance to offer to this country and to the world.

Being in an environment where they were not the “minority,” but were, rather, just part of a large group of people with similar goals was worth more than anyone could imagine. They didn’t compare themselves to white people; they had teachers who cared about them as individuals and went the extra mile to make sure they succeeded. College was an extension of home, yet a release from home at the same time; parents were gently nudged to let go of their children and let the college finish the work the parents had begun. It would be OK, was the message given. Their “babies” would be taken care of, even as they were expected to succeed and make the most of the opportunity they were being given.

The result of an HBCU education is often stark. My own daughter attended an all-white, private high school, but opted to attend Spelman College in Atlanta. She left Columbus a little shy and reserved, but graduated from Spelman confident and self-assured. She was, literally, a changed person, a well-adjusted young woman who had found herself in an environment where she was encouraged to do so.

If these colleges slip away because of bureaucratic red tape, making it difficult, if not impossible, for students like my daughter to attend, the result will be devastating to a group of people who have been fighting against discrimination from the beginning of our existence here. Students ought not be penalized because of the financial difficulties of their parents. African-American children deserve the same rights as white students. HBCUs have given them a venue to exercise that right, and have produced some amazing graduates.

Alumni of HBCUs need to take up the banner and make more donations. Endowments of HBCUs are critically low, and far below the endowments of major white universities. Nettie Hailes, a civil rights activist, said to a group of HBCU students who gathered in Washington, D.C. recently for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington that “you owe something for the space you occupy on planet earth.” Those who have gotten ahead because of the opportunities afforded them in HBCUs can’t forget what a gift those colleges were to them.

Sometimes, those who fight for justice get tired and want to stop, but situations like this make it clear that the fight for justice can never stop; the struggle continues, no matter what. When it comes to saving HBCUs, the struggle should be front, center …and made obvious to everyone. The fact that HBCUs lost 14,000 students this year … with the possibility of even more having to drop out because of their need for financial aid but hampered because of a resistant federal government – is unconscionable. Our HBCUs are a national treasure which have produced …national treasures, who have been able to receive a quality education unencumbered by racism. That experience is worth its weight in gold.

Ella Baker, civil rights activist, said, “We who believe in freedom …cannot rest until it comes.” It hasn’t come yet, Ella, not yet.

A candid observation …