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Vol. 13 Issue 3…Dedicated to the Dialogue on
Race…January 17, 2010
Growing Generations
for Jail
By John Burl Smith
"Children do the time right
alongside of their parents. This is one of the worst epidemics facing
Children of incarcerated parents
are a problem that is growing like weeds in
Numbers alone do not tell the story and the depth of the problem depends on
one's role or how it impacts them. According to Lisa Thorpe-Vaugn, president of
Non-Profit Leadership Training Institute, children of incarcerated parents face
a higher risk, about 65 %, of being incarcerated themselves. For most, the
trauma of sudden separation from their sole caregiver and moved from caretaker
to caretaker can create feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, depression
and guilt. Absent positive intervention, the behavioral consequences can be
severe emotional withdrawal and failure in school, resulting in delinquency.
The problem grows as these children fall through the cracks and become seeded
in what some researchers call "inter-generational incarceration."
During arrest, police do not routinely ask whether the person has children, nor
do sentencing judges or correctional agencies raise this question as a matter
of concern. No agency collects data about such children, so more is known about
the parents than the children.
At midyear 2007, the Justice
Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimated that of the 1,518,535
inmates -- 52% state and 63% federal - 809,800 were parents of 1,706,600 minor
children. Proportionally, this means approximately 2.3% of the nation's 74
million children under the age of 18 (7-1-07) had a parent in prison. Blacks
were 8 and Hispanic 3 times, more likely than white children to have a parent
in prison. Among minor children with parents in prison, 67% were black, 24% Hispanic,
and 0.9% white. More than 4 in 10 fathers in state and federal prisons were
black, compared to 3 in 10 white and about 2 in 10 Hispanic. Among mothers, 48%
were white, 28% black, and 17% Hispanic.
An American Bar Association (ABA)
study found that "While law enforcement policies and procedures
specifically addressing children of arrestees may not currently exist in most
agencies, the issue of accountability-and subsequently legal liability-is
nevertheless present." Courts have found that officers have a duty to
reasonably ensure the safety of unattended children following a caretaker's
arrest [White v. Rochford, 592
F2d 381 (7th Cir. 1979)]. This study found that when a child's welfare is
involved, law enforcement officers make a variety of placement decisions in the
field -- calling in child protective services (CPS), taking the child to the
police station, or informally placing the child with the parent's neighbors, relatives
or friends.
Dr. Denise Johnston, Director of
the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents at
The pattern of repeated
parent-child separation resulting from multiple parental arrests can be
devastating and have severe social consequences -- delinquency and
inter-generational incarceration. According to a 1987 national study by the
American Correctional Association, "The average adult female offender is a
minority between the ages of 25 to 29, who before arrest, was a single parent
living with one to three children. Comes from a single parent or broken home,
where half of her other family members are incarcerated, including 54 % of her
brothers and sisters. She is a high school drop out, unemployed, likely to have
been the victim of sexual abuse, started using alcohol or drugs between the
ages of 13 and 14. Her criminal
behavior follows a primary pattern: to pay for drugs, relieve economic
pressures, or poor judgment."
The foregoing description of
incarcerated parents and their offspring paints a picture indicative of people
buried in a cycle of unemployment, few opportunities, ignorance, low
self-esteem and poverty. Synonymous to seeds that fall from plants, their
condition passes from one generation to the next unchanged because their
conditions of life are unchanged. Susan Philips, a professor of social work at
the University of Illinois-Chicago, pointed out that "The criminal justice
and child welfare systems are the two most powerful systems in the lives of
such families. She believes entry into foster care tends to be driven more by
overarching crises besieging the household, rather than just parental
incarceration."
During the 1980s, the "War
on Drugs" began what has become a devastating process in inner-city
neighborhoods. Like blight on communities, police put thousands of poor blacks
and Latinos in prison and child welfare put their children in foster care,
planting seeds of inter-generational incarceration that this society will reap
for decades. This problem in black and Latino communities has reached epidemic
levels. Accordingly, the Center for an Urban Future (1998) reported that
"one out of every 22 black children and one in every 59 Latino children in
Northwestern University Law Professor Dorothy Roberts studied the long-term
impact of child welfare and law enforcement interventions and supports the
thesis that it is a cruel cycle that spans generations. In her book Shattered Bonds, she noted that many
black foster care children, marginalized and neglected by the system, wind up
in the juvenile justice system as adolescents. "These institutions serve a
similar function. Both use blame and punishment to address the problems of the
populations under their control."
My Name is Cocaine
By Desiree Kimbrue
I cause people grief, I cause people pain,
You may not know me, my name is cocaine.
I make people cry, I make people shout,
Try me twice and
you'll never get out.
Once you try me, you'll want more,
I live all around you, I might live next door.
When I possess you, you'll steal, cheat, and lie,
The crimes you'll
commit just to get high.
If you need me, I live all around,
I live in your schools; I live in your town.
I'll take everything from you, your morals your pride,
Once I'm with you,
I'm always by your side.
You'll steal from your mom, and lie to your dad,
Even when they cry you are never sad.
Come with me and do my ways,
Forget your family
and how you were raised.
I turn people from family, and separate friends,
And I'll be your friend in the very end.
Once you're with me you'll never love again,
You'll fade, and blow
away with the wind.
I'll take away your family, your friends, your home,
Then you won't have anyone, you'll be all alone.
I'll take until you have nothing left to give,
When I'm done with
you, there will be no will to live.
I'm warning you this is no game,
You'll be lucky if I don't drive you insane.
I live with you everywhere, even in your bed,
The things you will
see inside of your head.
Now that I've got you, you'll never be free,
At the end you'll regret ever trying me.
You should have said no, and walked away,
But instead you said
yes and choose to stay.
I can bring more sorrow and misery than words can tell,
If you try me I'll lead you straight to hell.
Now I'm your master, you are my slave,
I'll go with you
everywhere even to your grave.
Now that you're met me, what will you do?
Will you try me or
not, it's all up to you.
About
Me: I wrote this poem because my mom did drugs and it was hard on me. So
I wrote this to tell people that drugs can ruin your life! My Name is Desiree
Kimbrue. Poem posted on http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/
Women Behind Bars (Excerpts)
By Silja J.A. Talvi
Oklahoman Tina Thomas has been
caught up in the American war on drugs. In many respects, she fits the common
profile of a woman doing time for a drug-related offense. Her crimes have
ranged from possession to check forgery and theft, including an arrest for
trying to steal a $64 comforter from Wal-Mart. Sentenced to a two-year state
prison term, Thomas admits that she committed her crimes to feed the
"800-pound gorilla on my back that I just hadn't been able to shake."
Thomas is part of an alarming
statistical trend and a modern-day
Thomas and other women have had
the misfortune of being sucked into what the federal government calls the
"war on drugs." We have our own "drug czar," who sits atop
the massive Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). President Nixon
started this war in 1969, and President Reagan kicked it into high gear. It's
been a full-throttle battle since, even through the
By 1980, the number of
drug-related arrests stood at 581,000. Just 10 years later, that number had
nearly doubled to 1,090,000.
In 2005, the FBI reported that
law enforcement officers made more arrests for drug-abuse violations (1.8
million) than for any other offense.
One of the most surprising facts about these figures, as far as police are
concerned, is the drug of choice: marijuana. Cannabis is classified as a
Schedule I drug, which means that it is one of the most dangerous drugs
imaginable.
Cocaine, on the other hand, a
leading cause of overdose deaths, is classified as a Schedule II. So is PCP. Go
figure.
In 2005, nearly 43 percent of all drug arrests were for cannabis possession
(37.7 percent) or "sales and manufacture" (4.3 percent). That's
millions of arrests and billions of dollars--and amounts to a lot of misery and
money down the drain.
In 2008, the ONDCP drug-war budget will reach a record $12.9 billion, with $8
billion of this funding being funneled into law enforcement. Bear in mind that
these are only the official numbers. Many criminal justice experts point out
that the figure doesn't incorporate the costs of incarcerating people sentenced
for drug offenses. The real expenditure, including the costs of imprisonment,
comes close to $22 billion, according to an analysis by the drug policy
newsletter, Drug War Chronicle.
We're not getting much of a bang
for these big bucks. Unintentional drug overdoses have become the second-most
common form of accidental death after car crashes. While the government
increases funding for anti-drug missions in Colombia and Afghanistan by tens of
millions every year, federal allocations to the Center for Substance Abuse
Prevention and the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment are being cut by $32
million in 2008.
A 2006 Government Accountability Office report revealed that our $1.4 billion
anti-drug media blitz wasn't working, either. And it wasn't the first
organization to note this. In 2003, the White House Office of Management and
Budget disclosed that it found these ads lacking in any demonstrable success.
What's worse, the people who need help aren't getting it. In the rest of the
Western world, assistance with drug and alcohol problems is widely accessible.
They predominantly view heavy drug use or full-blown addiction as public health
issues, not behavioral issues subject to prosecution (except in cases involving
other criminal activity).
In the
Marc Mauer, executive director of
the Washington D.C.-based Sentencing Project, asks the very pertinent question
of whether police are arresting crack and cocaine users in general, or
specifically going into communities of color and lower-income neighborhoods,
where some people are using drugs and engaging in the street trade.
"Conducting drug arrests in
minority neighborhoods does have advantages for law enforcement," writes
Mauer in his 2006 book, Race to
Incarcerate. "First, it is far easier to make arrests in such
areas, since drug dealing is more likely to take place in open-air drug
markets. In contrast, drug dealing is suburban neighborhoods almost invariably
takes place behind closed doors and is therefore not readily identifiable to
passing police."
This is a crucial point. Many
substance users are men and women with professional careers. People with
middle- to upper-class incomes tend to use their drugs behind doors in nice
houses, in well-to-do neighborhoods. They slip under the drug war radar, just
as college students do.
A quarter of full-time undergraduate students meet the criteria for substance
abuse or dependence, something the
Yet none of this is anything that the Office of National Drug Control Policy
cares to have mentioned, much less examine. It's just another one of those
inconvenient truths.
About Me: Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior
editor at In These Times, an
investigative journalist and essayist. Her work has appeared in many newspapers
and magazines. Her book, Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S.
Prison System was published in 2007. (Source: www.inthesetimes.com)
Whites Smoke Pot, but Blacks Are Arrested
By Jim Dwyer
Outside a music club on
But the SoHo bouncers and the
Last year, black New Yorkers were seven times more likely than whites to be
arrested for marijuana possession and no more serious crime. Latinos were four
times more likely.
In 2001, during his first
campaign for mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg was asked by
Like most white New Yorkers, he
stood almost no chance of being locked up for his pot use, being handcuffed,
fingerprinted and spending a night in Central Booking.
Mr. Bloomberg may have been the
first major city candidate to acknowledge using pot, but as mayor he has led a
sweeping expansion of arrests, according to a recent study by Harry G. Levine,
a sociology professor at
During Mr. Bloomberg's first two terms in office, the lowest-level marijuana
arrests were up, on average, by 50 percent over when his predecessor, Rudolph
Giuliani, was in office. Last year, Professor Levine said, the city made 40,300
such arrests -- about 12 percent of arrests for all crimes. Of these, 87
percent were of blacks or Latinos.
In 2008, the police made more pot
arrests "than in the 12 years of Mayor Koch, plus the four years of Mayor
Dinkins, plus the first two years of Mayor Giuliani," Mr. Levine wrote.
"In other words, in one year, 2008, Bloomberg made more pot arrests than
in 18 years of Koch, Dinkins and Giuliani combined."
The mayor's office said on Tuesday that it could not estimate the cost of such
arrests. Mr. Levine, drawing on studies done in other cities, estimated that they
could range from $53 million to $88 million annually.
Whatever the precise costs, are all these marijuana arrests -- wildly
disproportionate in their racial impact, and consuming the energy of thousands
of police officers, the courts, prosecutors and defense lawyers -- truly
helping the city?
Mr. Bloomberg's chief criminal justice aide, John Feinblatt, declined to
discuss the city's approach to marijuana arrests, or the findings of the study.
But through a spokesman, he issued a statement maintaining the pot arrests have
helped drive down violent crime.
"Marijuana arrests -- which rarely lead to jail -- are concentrated in
neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of violent crime because that's
where the police focus their attention in order to reduce victimization,"
Mr. Feinblatt said. "This continued focus on low-level offending has been
part of the city's effective crime-reduction strategy, which has resulted in a
35 percent decrease in crime since 2001."
In effect, Mr. Feinblatt was arguing a variation on the
"broken-windows" theory of crime-fighting -- that cracking down on
symptoms of public disorder helps head off more serious problems.
Mr. Levine argues that such arrests drain resources needed for dealing with
serious threats.
The possession of less than an ounce of marijuana was decriminalized by the
State Legislature in 1977, reduced to a violation, the equivalent of a traffic
ticket. "Burning" it or having it "open to public view" is
a misdemeanor.
The handful of white pot smokers who do get arrested can be found in court on
Mondays and Tuesdays, when they must answer tickets typically issued for
smoking pot in a park. The rest of the week is taken up with blacks and
Latinos, who are more likely to have spent a night in jail before court, said
Edward McCarthy, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society.
"Some of the police officers, who are at the start of their careers, are
apologetic when they make these arrests," Mr. McCarthy said. "They
say, 'if my lieutenant or sergeant weren't here, I'd let you go.' "
Book Review: "Dorm Room Dealers
By Phillip S. Smith
Whom do you picture when you read
the phrase "drug dealer"? It's probably not the subjects of this
book. They're white, upper-middle class and beyond, upwardly mobile college
students blithely enmeshed in a web of criminality -- drug use and sales --
that, for them at least, goes unnoticed, and even when noticed, largely
unpunished.
And that really irks A. Rafik Mohamed and Erik D. Fritsvold, authors of
"Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class"
(2010) and Southern California sociologists, who gained entrée into a
network of drug sellers and users centered on a private college in San Diego
and spent six years interviewing and observing them as they partied hearty,
gobbled and swapped pills, and peddled dope with reckless abandon. It's not, as
the authors make clear, that they wish their student subjects were punished
with the same heavy hand awaiting a poor black kid slinging crack on an inner
city street corner.
In fact, Mohamed and Fritsvold make equally clear that they view
And that partially answers the
questions the authors posed at the beginning of the book. Why do privileged
college students -- who have everything to lose and little to gain -- choose to
sell drugs? Well, because they can do so with almost total impunity. They are
not the target of the drug war. They're the wrong color and the wrong class.
They essentially get a free pass -- from police, who ignore them; from college
administrators, who don't want to upset their parents; from doctors, who are
happy to prescribe them whatever pills they desire... because they are the
children of "good people," i.e. white and wealthy people.
Mohamed and Fritsvold show repeatedly the reckless abandon with which their
subjects went about their business: Dope deals over the phone with uncoded
messages, driving around high with pounds of pot in the car, doing drug
transactions visible from the street, selling to strangers, smuggling hundreds
of pills across the Mexican border. These campus dealers lacked even the basics
of drug dealer security measures, yet they flew under the radar of the drug
warriors.
Even when the rare encounter with police occurred, these well-connected
students skated. In one instance, a dealer got too wasted and attacked
someone's car. He persuaded a police officer to take him home in handcuffs to get
cash to pay for the damages. The cop ignored the scales, the pot, the evidence
of drug dealing, and happily took a hundred dollar bill for his efforts. In
another instance, a beach front dealer was the victim of an armed robbery. He
had no qualms about calling the police, who once again couldn't see the
evidence of dealing staring them in the face and who managed to catch the
robbers. The dealer wisely didn't claim the pounds of pot police recovered and
didn't face any consequences.
Even when the rare arrest for drug dealing occurred, these folks emerged
relatively unscathed. With daddy's money and daddy's lawyers, serious felony
charges evaporate. One dealer, who could have gone to prison for years, ended
up with probation for a misdemeanor, which was subsequently wiped from his
record. Ah, privilege -- ain't it sweet?
The lack of consequences for
breaking drug laws may help explain their almost universal lack of interest in
drug law reform. These student dope-slingers were not SSDP types. Only one of
the two dozen or so watched by Mohamed and Fritsvold expressed any interest in
changing the laws. Why should these folks care about reforming the drug laws?
They appear to be irrelevant to their lives. Perhaps if these privileged
students were subjected to the wrath of the drug war the same way their poorer,
darker-skinned counterparts were, they and their powerful parents might begin
to feel compelled to address the drug laws. Until then, not so much.
These student dealers were mostly vending pot, with a few offering cocaine and
ecstasy as sidelines. There was no mention of heroin or methamphetamines. One
finding that surprised the authors was the prevalence of the pill culture.
Students were gobbling down Valium, Xanax, Oxycontin, Lorcet, Vicodin, Adderall
and Ritalin like crazy, swapping or selling excess pills, lying to doctors to
get prescriptions, even smuggling in loads obtained in
The pill-poppers felt even less like criminals than the illicit drug dealers
did. All of the students were able to rationalize their lawbreaking, in part,
the authors suggest, because they never really self-identified as dope dealers.
After all, dope dealers live in the inner city, are poor, and are a different
color. For the subjects of "Dorm Room Dealers," collegiate
dope-dealing was incidental, a passing phase on their road to mainstream
success as realtors, upper management types, and business owners. They were
invested in conventional lives and careers, and, as follow up interviews suggest,
as a group they are now doing quite well.
"Dorm Room Dealers" is a valuable contribution to the ethnography of
drug use and drug selling and is an interesting read, too. But at $50 for the
hardback, you'll probably want to check it out of your campus library or wait
for the paperback. (Source: http://stopthedrugwar.org)
Disgruntled wants to know: On December
22, 2009, President Barack Obama gave an interview on Talking to American Urban
Radio Networks to reporter April Ryan to "rebut recent criticism from
actor Danny Glover and some members of Congress that he has not done enough
since taking office to help the African-American community." Glover said
"the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large
extent, as the Bush administration. I don't see anything different."
Claiming that "polls show African-Americans express 'overwhelming support'
for what my administration has tried to do," Mr. Obama, for the first
time, used collective pronouns like "we and us" to describe the
condition of blacks in America. "We were some of the folks who were most
affected by predatory lending. There's a long history of us being the last
hired and the first fired. As I said on health care, we're the ones who are in
the worst position to absorb companies deciding to drop their health care
plans." Could it be that an election is approaching with white Democrats
in deep "do-do?" Is Mr. Obama trying to work his "black
magic" to get "us" to come out and vote for them, even though
"we" have been overlooked by them to get campaign contributions from
banks, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies?
Disgruntled
says: While shopping for goodies to celebrate my 67th birthday with Dot
and the grandkids, I glanced at a fashion magazine with the First Lady on the
cover. It seems these days high fashion dominates her interest. I wonder about
her message to young girls and women. Young girls are inundated with Barbie's
unhealthy thin diet conscious latest fashion popularity advertising crave.
Where are the First Lady's policy concerns for improving the lives and raising
the hopes of young girls? First Ladies going back to Martha Washington, Dolley
Madison and even Mary Todd Lincoln quietly influenced national policy through
their husbands and then there was Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson or
Hilary Clinton who took more active roles. Rather than a fashion diva, the
First Lady could use her bully pulpit to push for a dialogue on race. Like
Nancy Reagan and "Just say No," the First Mom could become a
megaphone for children whose parents are incarcerated. Maybe, she could even
step outside the White House to find a model to emulate such as Althea Gibson,
who advocated for fitness, since today one in five American children is seriously
overweight. The First Children have warm beds and plenty of food, but what of
the millions of poor hungry homeless needy children who just experienced the
coldest winter in years living on the streets of
Disgruntled feels: Mired! The tragic tale
of
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls
Email www.nytimes.com
...Sentenced to Abuse...The Justice Department needs to act swiftly and
decisively to protect young people who are being battered and raped in juvenile
corrections facilities all across the country. A shocking new study by the
Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics surveyed more than 9,000
young people in custody and found that 12 percent reported being sexually
abused one or more times, mainly by staff members. Particularly alarming, the
study found several juvenile facilities where 30 percent or more of the young
people reported being raped. Some of the institutions with high rates of
victimization were in
Email www.wsws.org...Millions
more
Email stubbsent@yahoo.com...Help repeal the
racist unjust MANDATORY MIMINUM SENTENCING LAW! One of the most glaring
injustices in
Email www.truthout.org
...Army Files Charges Against Single Mother...By: Dahr Jamail... The Army has
filed charges for a special court-martial against Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, a
single mother of a one-year-old baby.