New Yorker: Gopnick and the Caging of America

Excellent piece on the problems of mass incarceration in our country. Thank you, New Yorker.

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The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

by Adam Gopnik  

The New Yorker

January 30, 2012

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

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

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) 

Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country. 

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual. 

The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel. 

In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime. 

The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery. 

Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.

For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t. Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.

So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.

And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself. 

All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary. 

But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)

Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not. 

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.

Which leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.

At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. 

Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.

The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime. 

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. ♦

Another AZ Regent profits from prisons: DeConcini and CCA

I posted details on the whole CCA board awhile ago, but this one bears repeating DeConcini is also (in addition to  Anne L. Mariucci) on the AZ Board of Regents, and will help select the next University of Arizona president...

---from Corrections Corporation of America---

 

Dennis DeConcini

Dennis DeConcini, the former U.S. Senator from Arizona, was elected as an independent member of CCA's Board of Directors in February 2008. Senator DeConcini currently serves as a Director of Ceramic Protection Corporation, a publicly traded company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

He is a partner in the law firm of DeConcini McDonald Yetwin and Lacy in Tucson, Arizona, which he co-founded in 1968. DeConcini also is a Principal in the lobbyist consulting firm Parry, Romani, DeConcini & Lacy P.C. in Washington, D.C. Senator DeConcini served three terms, from January 1977 through January 1995, representing the State of Arizona in the United States Senate. As Senator, he served on the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he chaired the Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service and General Government.

He also served on the Subcommittees of Defense, Foreign Operations, Energy and Water Development, and Interior and Related Agencies. Prior to his service as a U.S. Senator, DeConcini served one elected term as the County Attorney for Pima County, Arizona.

He also is a member of the Arizona Board of Regents, a position to which he was appointed in 2006 by Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Senator DeConcini received his B.A. from the University of Arizona in 1959 and his L.L.D. from there in 1963. He also is a member of the Arizona Board of Regents, a position to which he was appointed in 2006 by Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Senator DeConcini received his B.A. from the University of Arizona in 1959 and his L.L.D. from there in 1963.

 -----------from the Tuscon Citizen-----------

Here's the Tucson Citizens' Three Sonorans' reporting on the significance of DeConcini's role on the AZ Board of Regents from August: 

UA Presidential search committee headed by CCA board member and former SALC president

by DA Morales on Aug. 16, 2011, under Immigration news

The puzzle becomes clearer as more pieces are put together.

One co-chair of the UA presidential search committee is the former SALC president, and the other is a board member of CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, member of ALEC and one of the groups behind SB1070.

Arizona’s plan for the future seems to be less education funding and more prison funding. We knew this was true of the Republicans, but also of the Democrats?

Consider Arizona’s former Democratic Senator, Dennis DeConcini, who has the Border Patrol’s port of entry in Nogales named after him.

Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest provider of corrections management services to government agencies, announced today that Dennis DeConcini, the former U.S. Senator from Arizona has been elected as an independent member of CCA’s Board of Directors.
“Senator Dennis DeConcini has a distinguished career serving the state of Arizona and the U.S. government,” said William F. Andrews, chairman of CCA’s Board of Directors. “We are extremely pleased to bring Dennis onto our Board. His extensive knowledge and understanding of government, coupled with his experience with other directorship positions, make him ideally suited to help lead management’s initiatives to enhance government’s utilization of public/private partnership in corrections.”

The press release goes on to say:

Senator DeConcini, age 70, is a partner in the law firm of DeConcini McDonald Yetwin and Lacy in Tucson, Arizona, which he co-founded in 1968. DeConcini also is a Principal in the lobbyist consulting firm Parry, Romani, DeConcini & Lacy P.C. in Washington, D.C.

The law firm may look familiar as it is the same law firm that TUSD has hired to defend it against Huppenthal’s ruling which demands the immediate end of Ethnic Studies in Tucson or else TUSD will be faced with 10% budget cut.

Talk about a win-win situation. If the appeal goes down, the likelihood of making more profits for the largest private prison corporation in America increases, and Dennis DeConcini still wins.

Respected Arizona Democrats on the board of CCA, the Arizona Democratic Party having a policy of staying silent on SB1070 and immigration… makes you wonder if it really is a two-headed beast.

ACLU releases "Banking on Bondage: Private prisons and mass incarceration"

-----------from the American Civil Liberties Union--------------

New ACLU Report Documents Destructive Impact of Prison Privatization

November 2, 2011

Private Prison Industry Feeds on Nation’s Crippling Addiction to Incarceration While Reaping Multi-Billion Dollar Revenues

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today released a new report providing the first comprehensive analysis of the destructive impact of prison privatization.

The report, “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,” traces the rise of the for-profit prison industry over the past three decades and shows how private prison companies have capitalized on the nation’s addiction to incarceration to achieve gigantic profits. All the while, the report shows, mass incarceration wreaks havoc on communities by unnecessarily depriving individuals of their liberty, draining government resources and bringing little or no benefit to public safety.

“Our nation’s reliance on mass incarceration has bankrupted government budgets, torn families and communities apart, disproportionately impacted people of color, and provided no benefit to public safety,” said David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project and the author of the report. “But it has been a bonanza for the private prison industry, which rakes in billions of dollars a year and dishes out multi-million dollar compensation packages to its top executives. For-profit prison companies are a barrier to the kind of criminal justice reform that is desperately needed in America.”

Spurred by criminal laws that impose needlessly steep sentences – especially for low-level, non-violent offenders – and curtail rehabilitation opportunities, the United States today imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. The crippling cost of incarcerating increasing numbers of Americans has saddled government budgets with rising debt and exacerbated the current fiscal crisis confronting states across the nation. Yet the two largest private prison companies alone obtained nearly $3 billion in revenue in 2010.

While evidence that privatization saves taxpayers money is mixed at best, for-profit prison advocates continue to trot out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes confronting state governments.

• Arizona has announced plans to award 5,000 additional prison beds to private contractors despite a recent statement by the state’s auditor general that for-profit imprisonment in Arizona may cost more than incarceration in publicly operated facilities.
• Florida has attempted to increase its reliance on private prisons in a misguided attempt to reign in prisons costs despite concerns that doing so could impede more serious and fundamental changes, such as sentencing reform.
• The Louisiana legislature last year narrowly defeated a proposal pushed by Gov. Bobby Jindal to sell off three state prisons to private companies after state legislators expressed deep concerns about doing so.
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement intends to create a new network of massive immigration detention centers, managed largely by private companies, even as allegations of sexual abuse in private facilities continue to surface. In August 2011, a security officer employed by a private prison company pled guilty to sexual abuse of a female detainee; in the following month another employee of a private prison company pled guilty to similar crimes.

Empirical studies may also show a heightened level of violence against prisoners in privately run institutions, a possible reflection of the higher rate of staff turnover in private prisons, which can result in inexperienced guards walking the tiers.

But despite serious questions about the wisdom of privatizing prison systems, some members of the for-profit prison industry are using shrewd tactics, including extensive lobbying, lavish campaign contributions and efforts to control information, to garner more and more government contracts and lock up ever-increasing numbers of people.

“It is imperative that we halt the expansion of for-profit incarceration,” said Shapiro. “The private prison industry helped create, and continues to feed off, the social ill of mass incarceration. Private prisons cannot be part of the solution – economic or ethical – to our nation’s addiction to incarceration.”

A copy of the report is available online at:
www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/banking-bondage-private-prisons-and-mass-i...

WSJ Review: The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

Crimes, Courts And Cures

Why the justice system does a bad job of separating defendants who deserve punishment from those who don't.

Wall Street Journal

OCTOBER 26, 2011

By PAUL G. CASSELL

How has the American criminal-justice system become one of the most punitive in the world without providing a corresponding level of public safety? In "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice," William J. Stuntz—a revered Harvard law professor who died of colon cancer earlier this year at the age of 52—offers a provocative big-picture answer.

Perhaps aware that "collapse" in the book's title requires justification, Mr. Stuntz begins by reviewing some statistics. As he shows, in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, amid the largest crime wave in American history, the U.S. prison population declined. Imprisonment rates plummeted to some of the lowest ever seen in the modern Western world. High-crime neighborhoods, as Mr. Stuntz puts it, were "abandoned to their fate."

The backlash to this crime wave was equally striking. Since the mid-1970s, America has punished crime more and more severely. New York's imprisonment rate, for example, has sextupled. In a span of a little more than 30 years, "America first embraced punishment levels lower than Sweden's, then built a justice system more punitive than Russia's."

Mr. Stuntz readily acknowledges what many legal scholars do not: America's current lock-'em-up philosophy has dramatically helped to reduce urban crime. Since 1991, violent-crime rates have declined roughly a third nationwide and as much as two-thirds in a few cities (New York among them). Even so, Mr. Stuntz counts these declines as a pyrrhic victory, given that violence per capita in the U.S. today remains significantly higher than in 1950. And he is unwilling simply to assign all the credit for recent crime drops to increased punishment. He wonders, for example, why crime rates began falling only around 1991—two decades after prison populations started steeply rising.

To unravel such complexities, Mr. Stuntz tries to place America's contemporary criminal-justice problems in their historical legal context. He first looks at the 14th Amendment's effort in 1868 to ensure that newly freed slaves received "the equal protection of the laws"—a promise that fell apart a few years later when the Supreme Court eviscerated the equal-protection guarantee and left generations of Southern blacks to be victimized by Klan violence. Mr. Stuntz argues that narrow equal-protection jurisprudence helps to explain why, nearly a century later, Chief Justice Earl Warren began spinning constitutional restrictions from the 14th Amendment's other important provision, the Due Process Clause.

Justice Warren faced a Southern criminal-justice system that treated blacks unequally. More generally, he was dealing with an American system that did little for indigent defendants. But rather than address racism and poverty head-on as equal-protection matters, the Supreme Court let old precedents divert its attention to due-process claims. The court ended up dealing with such problems indirectly through an array of new procedural requirements. For example, the Warren Court tried to rein in questionable police evidence-seizure tactics by imposing an exclusionary rule on the states (in Mapp v. Ohio). The court likewise responded to unequal treatment during police questioning by creating its famous warning and waiver requirements (in Miranda v. Arizona).

This web of new procedures had an important effect: Defense attorneys, embracing the new rights, did not bring forward evidence of their clients' innocence but instead sought to suppress evidence of their guilt. Whatever the other merits of the procedures, they were bound to make the justice system do a worse job of separating defendants who deserve punishment from those who don't.

Mr. Stuntz powerfully argues that such decisions have perversely worsened inequality in the criminal-justice system. The Miranda rule, for example, gives sophisticated suspects—mainly recidivists and white-collar defendants—the ability to "lawyer up" and avoid questioning altogether. Many other suspects—including the innocent but poor—waive their rights and receive less protection than they did before Miranda.

These excessive procedures contributed to a new punitiveness in criminal sentencing, Mr. Stuntz says. With fewer violent criminals successfully prosecuted under Warren-court restrictions, those who are convicted are incarcerated longer. And because of the difficulty of finding witnesses willing to testify against gang members and other violent criminals, easily proven "surrogate" crimes (namely, drug possession) are punished more harshly.

"The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" concludes that our system suffers "from the rule of too much law and the wrong kind of politics." Mr. Stuntz recommends a host of reforms, including decentralization that would encourage local control responsive to local crime. He also argues for expanding city police forces—because the increased police presence would discourage the commission of crimes.

But he seems to back away from his argument that excessive proceduralism is part of the problem. While critiquing decisions such as Mapp and Miranda, Mr. Stuntz never urges that they be overturned or restructured, even though such changes could lead to the decentralized decision-making that he supports. Instead, he singles out for overruling Supreme Court precedents limiting equal-protection argument by defendants. He targets United States v. Armstrong, for example, which barred drug dealers from arguing that prosecutors must be racially discriminating when statistics indicate disparities in charges being brought. But overturning the law would lead to precisely the kind of procedural litigation that Mr. Stuntz deplores.

Nonetheless, the overarching themes of "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" deserve wide discussion, and the book as a whole can be rightly seen as the capstone to a distinguished legal career. Americans may debate whether our criminal-justice system has truly collapsed, but few would argue that it can't be improved.

Mr. Cassell is a professor of criminal law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah.

Billions Behind Bars: Resist ALEC.

Came across this editorial today that serves as a good reason to promote the ALEC Resistance in Scottsdale, November 29-December 3, 2011. Neither the National ACLU nor CNBC endorse (or even know about, as far as I can tell) this planned week of action...

AZ Resists ALEC

--------Catch this CNBC special on October 18-------

For-Profit Prisons: A Barrier to Serious Criminal Justice Reform

CNBC.com

Wednesday, 12 Oct 2011 | 2:26 PM ET

By: David Shapiro
Staff Attorney, ACLU National Prison Project

The imprisonment of human beings at record levels is both a moral failure and an economic one — especially at a time when state governments confront enormous fiscal crises caused largely by bloated and unnecessary prison spending. But mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group: the private prison industry. As current incarceration levels harm the nation as a whole, for-profit prisons obtain taxpayer dollars in ever greater amounts. Private prison executives, meanwhile, bring in multi-million dollar compensation packages.

Today, the United States incarcerates 2.3 million individuals — more people, both per capita and in absolute terms, than any other nation in the world including Russia, China and Iran. The current incarceration rate deprives record numbers of individuals of their liberty, disproportionately affects people of color and has at best a minimal effect on public safety. The crippling cost of imprisoning more and more Americans — non-violent offenders in the majority of cases — saddles governments with escalating debt.

This social ill — mass incarceration — is the private prison industry’s bread and butter. Private prison companies openly admit that their profits depend on locking up more people. For example, in a 2010 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the largest private prison company stated: “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by ... leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices ...”

As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates. The number of inmates in private prisons increased by roughly 1600 percent between 1990 and 2009. In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone took in nearly $3 billion in revenue, and their top executives each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million.

• Embrace Competition to Lower Costs, Improve Performance in Prisons

While the for-profit prison industry touts the idea that governments can save money through privatization, private prisons often fail to deliver demonstrable fiscal benefits — and can even cost taxpayers more than publicly operated institutions. Numerous studies by researchers, state governments and federal agencies contradict the supposed economic benefits touted by industry supporters.

As state governments across the nation confront deep fiscal deficits, the notion that private prisons demonstrably reduce the costs of incarceration is more than untrue — it is dangerous and irresponsible. Inflated assertions about cost savings threaten to lure states into privatization, rather than reducing incarceration rates and limiting corrections spending through serious criminal justice reform.

Empirical studies also show a heightened level of violence in some private prisons. With every incentive to slash salaries so as to maximize corporate profits, private prison companies in some instances fill their facilities with inexperienced staff. After an infamous escape from an Arizona private prison in 2010, for example, the Arizona Department of Corrections reported that at the prison “[s]taff are fairly ‘green’ across all shifts,” “are not proficient with weapons” and habitually ignore sounding alarms. Private facilities have also been linked to atrocious conditions. In a private juvenile facility in Texas, for example, auditors reported, “[c]ells were filthy, smelled of feces and urine.”

Now is the time for serious criminal justice reform, not privatization schemes. The private prison industry feeds off the mass incarceration problem and cannot be part of the solution. The only real way to cut prison spending is to cut the number of people we keep in prison.

Shapiro is a Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project. He litigates cases and engages in advocacy regarding prison and detention conditions, including immigration detention, access to information about prison conditions, the right of prisoners to communicate with the outside world and to practice religion, and the freedom from arbitrary body cavity searches. Prior to joining the ACLU, Shapiro worked as an associate at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, where he litigated First Amendment cases in federal trial and appellate courts, and served as a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Shapiro is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School and studied as a Fulbright Scholar in Moscow, Russia. 

Watch the premiere of "Billions Behind Bars: Inside America's Prison Industry" Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 9pm, 10pm, 12am and 1am ET.

© 2011 CNBC.com

Exposing ALEC: Crashing the Colonial Party.

SB 1070 Signs of Resistance series
Loop 202, Phoenix, AZ (July 29, 2010)

Crash the Party - Expose the American Legislative Exchange Council

Friday, October 07 2011 @ 01:26 PM CDT

By Ingored
Slingshot #107 (Berkeley, California)

Folks in Arizona are calling for "creative diversity of tactics" during five days of protest November 29 – December 3 against the American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) "States and Nation Policy Summit" in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale. ALEC helps corporations pass laws to increase their profits. The protest and day of direct action on November 30 aim to expose the cozy relationships between big-name corporate interests and the right-wing politicians who service them.

The Council is a non-profit forum where corporations work with legislators to write model laws to strengthen corporate power through deregulation, attacks on labor and immigrants, and by weakening environmental and health laws. The model legislation coming out of ALEC is introduced in state legislatures nationwide by thousands of state representatives and other politicians -- and ALEC claims that roughly 17 percent of the proposed bills are signed into law. ALEC claims to have almost 2,000 legislator-members -- about 1/3 of all state legislators from all 50 states, the vast majority of whom are conservative. 98 percent of its income comes from corporate sources representing a Who's Who of 300 major US companies, trade groups and law firms.

Despite ALEC's bold-faced role in putting government at the service of corporations, most people haven't known about ALEC until recently. There were small protests at ALEC's spring meeting in Cincinnati and its annual meeting in New Orleans. In July, the Center for Media and Democracy released roughly 800 leaked model bills developed by the Council that are now on-line and subject to public scrutiny. If thousands of people disrupt ALEC's Phoenix meeting, it will help expose ALEC and make it a household name.

Twelve years after 50,000 demonstrators shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle on November 30 using a "diversity of tactics" to expose the way the WTO puts government at the service of corporations to exploit the Earth and her people, could history repeat itself in Phoenix on November 30, 2011? By pushing state and local governments to serve corporate interests, ALEC is like an internal-US version of the WTO. Many folks around the country are making plans to be in Phoenix in late November, and solidarity protests are planned for November 30 nationwide.

American Legislative Exchange Council Exposed

ALEC's mission statement explains that it exists "to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty, through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America's state legislators, members of the private sector, the federal government, and general public."

ALEC currently has 9 task forces on different topics, each co-chaired by one elected official and one or more representatives of the "private sector" i.e. a corporate representative. Together, corporations and elected officials develop model legislation. Task forces include: Public Safety and Elections; Civil Justice; Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development; Education; Energy, Environment and Agriculture; Health and Human Services; International Relations; Tax and Fiscal Policy; Telecommunications and Information Technology.

ALEC has a board of directors composed of elected officials, plus a "private enterprise board" composed of corporate representatives. The private enterprise board includes representatives from (among others) the right-wing Koch brothers (Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC - Mike Morgan), ExxonMobil Corporation (Randy Smith), Peabody Energy (Kelly Mader), AT&T (Bill Leahy), Wal-Mart Stores (Maggie Sans), Coca-Cola (Gene Rackley), Kraft Foods, Inc. (Derek Crawford), State Farm Insurance Co. (Roland Spies), UPS (Richard McArdle), Intuit, Inc. (Bernie McKay), Bayer Corp. (Sandra Oliver), GlaxoSmithKline (John Del Giorno), Pfizer Inc (Michael Hubert), Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) (Jeffrey Bond) and the American Bail Coalition (William Carmichael).

The 800 model laws drafted by ALEC are mind-boggling in their pro-corporate scope. They cover school privatization, green house gas emissions, union busting, industrial farming, biotech, fracking, pesticides, liquified natural gas, childhood lead exposure, health insurance, coal ash, international trade, water, banking, consumer protection, auto insurance, credit cards, tort reform, voter ID, guns, death and taxes. ALEC provided inspiration for Wisconsin Governor Walker's bill stripping public union of collective bargaining rights that led to massive protests in early 2011.

ALEC's corporate members pay $7,000 to $25,000 a year, plus thousands more to participate on task forces. Legislative members pay $50 a year. Besides getting access to model legislation written by ALEC, legislators and their families receive all-expense-paid trips to ALEC meetings (read: free vacation) where they can network with wealthy corporate representatives -- potential campaign contributors. ALEC spent $251,873 for childcare during 2009 so its guests could enjoy themselves. The November Summit meeting, for instance, will be at the luxurious Westin Kierland Hotel in the wealthy Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale.

Criminal Injustice

It is either fitting -- or ironic -- that ALEC is having their meeting in Arizona given ALEC's involvement in drafting Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the harsh anti-immigrant law passed in 2010 that sparked massive protests and a boycott against Arizona. SB 1070 requires Arizona police to attempt to determine an individual's immigration status during a "lawful stop, detention or arrest" when there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is undocumented. The law makes it a misdemeanor for any alien 14-years old or older to be in Arizona without carrying federal registration papers. SB 1070 also makes it illegal to give rides to immigrants or "conceal, harbor or shield" them if they are in the US illegally. The law, which almost requires racial profiling, is on hold after a federal judge issued an injunction blocking its enforcement.

During a December, 2009 meeting in Washington DC ALEC developed a model act with provisions that would become SB 1070 known as the "No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act." At the time, Arizona Senator Russell Pearce, who introduced SB 1070 in Arizona, was an executive member of ALEC's task force on Public Safety and Elections. The private enterprise executive members of the task force included Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the US, as well as the American Bail Coalition, representing bail bondsmen and bounty hunters. The National Rifle Association was the private enterprise chair of the task force.

It is significant that corporations which stand to profit when more people are arrested and imprisoned are pushing laws that will accomplish that goal. For example, CCA was expected to earn $74 million for operating private immigration detention centers during 2010.

SB 1070 is not the first law-and-order bill linked to ALEC. ALEC and its partners in the private prison business were behind the dozens of Three Strikes, truth-in-sentencing and mandatory minimum laws passed by states over the last 20 years. ALEC's model Three Strikes law was called the "Habitual Violent Offender Incarceration Act." These laws have helped double the number of people imprisoned in the US in the last generation, particularly decimating communities of color. The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world -- over 2 million people. ALEC's corporate partners have made millions off human suffering.

ALEC has tried to focus the war on terrorism against non-violent environmental protestors by drafting "The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" (a broader version of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act) and the "Environmental Corrupt Organizations-Preventative Legislation and Neutralization" act which treats activists like organized crime syndicates. Even publishing this article could be illegal under the act. These laws have been proposed in at least 16 states.

Because of ALEC's role in drafting SB 1070, Arizona activists in Project Baldwin describing themselves as "a group of people in occupied Indigenous lands" are organizing the protest in November. Their call to action notes "Whether maintained by the state or corporations, we're against all systems of control. We are for freedom of movement for all people. ALEC should know there are a million better things to do with their time than plotting mass incarceration. But there's nowhere we'd rather be than confronting their meeting. We're calling for four days of action here in occupied Onk Akimel O'odham lands from November 29th - December 3rd, 2011, with an emphasis for action on November 30th (N30!). We encourage a creative diversity of tactics on N30, the 12th anniversary of the Seattle uprising against the WTO. No matter the acronym, ALEC is no different than all the other gangs of businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats that we've been resisting for over 500 years."

Colonialism

Project Baldwin puts ALEC in the context of colonialism: "Ultimately, there is nothing particularly remarkable about ALEC - everywhere those who benefit most from capitalism meet to devise ways to tweak the existing systems of economic exploitation to work more effectively in their interest.

"Internationally, institutions like the WTO and the IMF are the mechanisms of neo-colonialism, manipulating international markets and rewriting national laws to more efficiently channel the flow of resources from south to north, from poor states to wealthy ones, from marginalized peoples to the global ruling class. ALEC, in turn, represents the collusion of capital and the state to orchestrate the same process at the domestic level in the U.S.

"The policies that ALEC promotes are fundamentally designed to maintain control over marginalized populations upon whose exploitation the nation's corporations and ruling class depend to maintain their economic and political domination. For instance, ALEC's work on the behalf of the prison industry has targeted communities of color for criminalization and incarceration, creating a constant flow of human fodder for the prison industry and reinforcing the racialized and class-based hierarchies that underpin capitalism.

"It is important to articulate resistance to ALEC in terms of what it represents on a global scale and the role it plays in the over 500 year process of colonization in the Americas. ALEC presents the unique opportunity to resist colonialism by directly confronting capital and the state while illustrating the ways in which each institution supports and defends the other.

"ALEC is the perfect example of how hollow and false social democracy is. ALEC and every one of the policies it promotes deserve to be directly confronted with fierce and uncompromising resistance to interrupt their ability to destroy lives and promote misery."

For more information about ALEC and how you can go to Arizona to shut it down, check out: alecexposed.org or azresistsalec.wordpress.com or email projectbaldwin@riseup.net. To plug into the November 30 solidarity action in the Bay Area, contact: communityactiondefense@gmail.com, Communityactiondefense.wordpress.com

Immigration and Mass Incarceration in the Obama Era

The New Operation Wetback

Counterpunch.org
By JAMES KILGORE

Last week Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) joined a demonstration in Washington D.C. to protest the refusal of President Obama to use his executive powers to halt the deportations of the undocumented. Gutierrez’ arrest came only two days after Obama had addressed a conference of the National Council of La Raza. Conveniently forgetting the history of the civil right struggles that made his Presidency a possibility, Obama reminded those attending that he was bound to “uphold the laws on the books.”

With over 392,000 deportations in 2010, more than in any of the Bush years, many activists fear we are in the midst of a repeat of notorious episodes of the past such as the “Repatriation” campaign of the 1930s and the infamous Operation Wetback of 1954, both of which resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Latinos.

But several things are different this time around. A crucial distinction is that we are in the era of mass incarceration. Not only are the undocumented being deported, many are going to prison for years before being delivered across the border. While the writings of Michelle Alexander and others have highlighted the widespread targeting of young African-American males by the criminal justice system, few have noted that in the last decade the complexion of new faces behind bars has been dramatically changing. Since the turn of the century, the number of blacks in prisons has declined slightly, while the ranks of Latinos incarcerated has increased by nearly 50%, reaching just over 300,000 in 2009.

A second distinguishing feature of the current state of affairs is the presence of the private prison corporations. For the likes of the industry’s leading powers, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, detaining immigrants has been the life blood for reviving their financial fortunes.

Just over a decade ago their bottom lines were flagging. Freshly built prisons sat with empty beds while share values plummeted. For financial year 1999 CCA reported losses of $53.4 million and laid off 40% of its workforce. Then came the windfall - 9/11.

In 2001 Steven Logan, then CEO of Cornell Industries, a private prison firm which has since merged with GEO, spelled out exactly what this meant for his sector :

"I think it's clear that with the events of Sept. 11, there's a heightened focus on detention, both on the borders and within the U.S. [and] more people are gonna get caught…So that's a positive for our business. The federal business is the best business for us. It's the most consistent business for us, and the events of Sept. 11 are increasing that level of business."

Logan was right. The Patriot Act and other legislation led to a new wave of immigration detentions. By linking immigrants to terrorism, aggressive roundups supplied Latinos and other undocumented people to fill those empty private prison cells. Tougher immigration laws mandated felony convictions and prison time for cases which previously merited only deportation. Suddenly, the business of detaining immigrants was booming. PBS Commentator Maria Hinojosa went so far as to call this the new “Gold Rush” for private prisons.

The figures support Hinojosa’s assertion. While private prisons own or operate only 8% of general prison beds, they control 49% of the immigration detention market. CCA alone operates 14 facilities via contracts with ICE, providing 14, 556 beds. They have laid the groundwork for more business through the creation of a vast lobbying and advocacy network. From 1999-2009 the corporation spent more than $18 million on lobbying, mostly focusing on harsher sentencing, prison privatization and immigration.

One significant result of their lobbying efforts was the passage of SB 1070 in Arizona, a law which nearly provides police with a license to profile Latinos for stops and searches. The roots of SB 1070 lie in the halls of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a far right grouping that specializes in supplying template legislation to elected state officials. CCA and other private prison firms are key participants in ALEC and played a major role in the development of the template that ended up as SB 1070.

For its part, GEO Group has also been carving out its immigration market niche. Earlier this year they broke ground on a new 600 bed detention center in Karnes County, Texas. At about the same time the company bought a controlling interest in BI Corporation, the largest provider of electronic monitoring systems in the U.S. The primary motivation for this takeover was the five year, $372 million contract BI signed with ICE in 2009 to step up the Bush initiated Intense Supervision Appearance Program. (ISAP 11). Under this arrangement the Feds hired BI to provide ankle bracelets and a host of other surveillance for some 27,000 people awaiting deportation or asylum hearings.

Sadly, the Obama presidency has consistently provided encouragement for the likes of CCA and GEO to grow the market for detainees. While failing to pass immigration reform or the Dream Act, the current administration has kept the core of the previous administration’s immigration policy measures intact. These include the Operation Endgame, a 2003 measure that promised to purge the nation of all “illegals” by 2012 and the more vibrant Secure Communities (S-Comm). Under S-Comm the Federal government authorizes local authorities to share fingerprints with ICE of all those they arrest. Though supposedly intended to capture only people with serious criminal backgrounds, in reality S-Comm has led to the detention and deportation of thousands of people with no previous convictions.

At the National Council of La Raza’s Conference Obama tried to console the audience by saying that he knows “very well the pain and heartbreak deportation has caused.” His words failed to resonate. Instead Rep. Gutierrez and others took to the streets, demonstrating that “I feel your pain” statements and appeals to the audacity of hope carry little credibility these days. It is time for a serious change of direction on immigration issues or pretty soon, just as Michelle Alexander has referred to the mass incarceration of African-Americans as the New Jim Crow, we may hear people start to call the ongoing repression of Latinos a “New Operation Wetback.”

James Kilgore is a Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois. He is the author of three novels, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, Freedom Never Rests and Prudence Couldn’t Swim, all written during his six and a half years of incarceration. He can be reached at waazn1@gmail.com