Category Archives: Law/Justice

This piece of pro-Israel legislation is a serious threat to free speech Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

I can’t think of any time since the conspiracy trials of the late 1960s and early 1970s that there has been an effort to attack political freedom on this magnitude and in such a direct manner.

By David Cole and Faiz Shakir

Washington Post

David Cole is national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Faiz Shakir is national political director of the ACLU.

The right to boycott has a long history in the United States, from the American Revolution to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Montgomery bus boycott to the campaign for divestment from businesses serving apartheid South Africa. Nowadays we celebrate those efforts. But precisely because boycotts are such a powerful form of expression, governments have long sought to interfere with them — from King George III to the police in Alabama, and now to the U.S. Congress.

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I entered the prison system 60 years ago. It’s never been so chaotic and dangerous Reply

by • Law/Justice

Shades of Emma Goldman.

Eric Allison

The Guardian

Prisoner looking through bars

I have been a student of the prison system since I first entered it in 1957. I was around when a bread and water diet was part of the punishment process, and even had a taste of it. And I lived through major prison riots in Parkhurst, Hull and Strangeways, circa 1990.

Following the Woolf Report that followed the Strangeways riot a year later, a Guardian leader spoke of the “mandarins who condoned and defended a prison system that in all practical ways is an affront to our definition of civilisation.” Pre-riot, I spent years in the conditions that leader attacked, then served more time in the better environment that report brought about.

But I say, hand on heart, I have never seen the system in such a chaotic and dangerous state as it is now. Where to begin in chronicling the deep malaise? Soaring death rates, from homicidal, self-inflicted and natural causes; violence levels at an all-time high; prisons awash with drugs; and overcrowding and understaffing the norm in many jails.

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Private Prison Demands Small Town Give It 300 More Prisoners or It Will Close Down Reply

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties

Where are the Shining Path when you need them?

Anti-Media

New Mexico — A small community in New Mexico is learning firsthand the consequences of relying on corporate industry to fuel your economy. In the case of Torrance County, it’s the private prison industry. From a July 25 article by the Santa Fe New Mexican:

“The company that has operated a private prison in Estancia for nearly three decades has announced it will close the Torrance County Detention Facility and lay off more than 200 employees unless it can find 300 state or federal inmates to fill empty beds within the next 60 days, according to a statement issued Tuesday by county officials.”

The closure of the prison would mean a loss of about $700,000 in annual taxes and utility payments for the town of Estancia, which has a population of 1,500. Surrounding Torrance County would see a loss of around $300,000. Incidentally, the county has no jail of its own, meaning the sheriff’s department would have to find new housing for the 50 to 75 people it arrests each month.

“This is a big issue for us,” county manager Belinda Garland told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “It’s going to affect Torrance County in a big way.”

The corporate entity that operates the facility, CoreCivic — formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America — is the second-largest private prison company in the nation. CoreCivic spokesman Jonathan Burns said this of the closing:

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Oregon bill decriminalizes possession of heroin, cocaine and other drugs Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties

Oregon: Soon to be a Pan-Anarchist homeland for druggies?

This bill isn’t as radical as it sounds but it’s a start.

By Nicole Lewis

Washington Post

An Oregon bill that passed last week makes possession of small amounts of drugs such as cocaine, shown here, a misdemeanor instead of a felony. (istock photo)

First-time offenders caught with small amounts of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illegal drugs will face less jail time and smaller fines under a new bill approved by the Oregon legislature that aims to curb mass incarceration.

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Institutionalized Racism: Yes or No? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized • Tags:

Jared Taylor of American Renaissance tries to understand the concept of “institutional racism.” Racism is said to be what holds back blacks and whites in American society, but there just don’t seem to be enough racist people or deliberately racist practices to explain large gaps in achievement. The culprit must therefore be institutions, or the structure of society. Jared Taylor shows why this explanation makes no sense, and explains what the real problem is.

Are blacks more likely to be arrested for drug offenses despite using drugs at the same rates as whites? Conventional wisdom has it that the war on drugs is inherently discriminatory, but a closer look at black crime statistics undermines explanations that rely exclusively on racial bias or police discrimination. Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, discusses several empirical studies that support a more nuanced understanding of differential arrest rates for drug-related crimes, one that avoids the pitfalls of the typically reductive explanations that emphasize systemic anti-black discrimination by a hopelessly racist police force.

Black victims of white cops should get the same love, support and justice as Justine Damond Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized

By Shaun King

New York Daily News

Are you familiar with the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell shares in his book, “Outliers?” It basically states that it takes about 10,000 hours of time and effort in a field to become an expert in it. I’m now nearing my 10,000 hours on police brutality and injustice in America. Going on four straight years, it’s dominated my life as I’ve studied not hundreds, but thousands of cases from top to bottom. I’ve written over a thousand articles on the topic. I’ve organized, agonized, strategized, fundraised, recorded, presented, brainstormed, protested, researched, counseled, and dreamed about how we can solve this crisis — or at least drastically improve it.

3TP MNDTY

(HANDOUT/REUTERS)

And in all of those hours, in all of those cases, I’ve never seen what I’m seeing in Minnesota at this very moment surrounding the horrific police killing of Justine Damond — an Australian immigrant and yoga instructor who was just weeks away from getting married when she called 911 to report suspicious noises outside of her Minneapolis home. The police showed up. Justine, in her pajamas, went outside to meet them, but was fatally shot by one of the reporting officers.

All of that is textbook police brutality. I could name a dozen cases off the top of my head where a family called 911 for help but ended up being victimized by the police instead. Everything about what happened to Justine Damond is normal in America — except the demographics.

She’s white — a sweet, popular, peaceful, blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman at that.

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Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017 Reply

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

An interesting new study.

By Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy

Prison Policy Initiative

Wait, does the United States have 1.3 million or more than 2 million people in prison? Are most people in state and federal prisons locked up for drug offenses? Frustrating questions like these abound because our systems of confinement are so fragmented and controlled by various entities. There is a lot of interesting and valuable research out there, but varying definitions make it hard — for both people new to criminal justice and for experienced policy wonks — to get the big picture.

This report offers some much needed clarity by piecing together this country’s disparate systems of confinement. The American criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 901 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 76 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories. And we go deeper to provide further detail on why people are locked up in all of those different types of facilities.

Pie chart showing the number of people locked up on a given day in the United States by facility type and the underlying offense using the newest data available in March 2017.

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Don’t Like Militarized Police and Mass Incarceration? Blame Progressivism. Reply

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

By Thaddeus Russell

Reason

Our cities are saturated with militarized law enforcement officers. An extraordinarily high number of American civilians are killed by police each year. The U.S. prison population is the largest in the world. And we are only beginning to understand why.

In recent years, scholars such as Naomi Murakawa and Marie Gottschalk and activists in the Black Lives Matter movement have broken from the civil rights generation’s obeisance to the Democratic Party, and from the left’s reflexive assumption that “law and order” Republicans are exclusively to blame for this situation. Instead, they have persuasively argued that much of today’s criminal justice regime originated in policies forged by liberal Democrats in the second half of the 20th century, in particular under the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton.

Yet even this new and welcome historical analysis of militarized policing and mass incarceration does not go deep enough.

The campaign to criminalize victimless behaviors and then build a carceral system large and efficient enough to contain the criminals it would create began long before the 1960s, with the formation of the political regime we now call liberalism. The intellectuals and policy makers who created the modern wars on drugs and crime were the direct descendants of the original progressives, who emerged at the turn of the 20th century. Those progressives consistently argued that disruptive and marginal populations should be encouraged to assimilate into the formal culture of the country and to adopt the responsibilities of American citizenship, but they also held that individuals who refused to do so should be removed from society. Indeed, it could be said that progressivism was created around those twin projects.

Unlike scientific racists, who were the dominant ideologists of race until World War II, progressives generally maintained that there were no innate barriers in any race of people to acquiring the personality of a “good” American. Progressives believed that certain races and nationalities had not attained the level of civilization of white Americans and northern Europeans, but also thought those peoples could and should be raised to that level. That is, most progressives were simultaneously anti-racist and hostile to cultures other than their own. Immigrants who brought alien ways of living, radical political ideas, and criminal behavior into the U.S. were invited into progressives’ settlement houses, where they were given free vocational education, subsidized room and board, and instructions on the proper attitudes and behaviors of Americans. Those who demonstrated a willingness to follow the rules of their new society—even those who were originally believed to be of an inferior race, such as Italians, Jews, and Slavs—were deemed worthy of full citizenship.

Most progressives believed that the culture of blacks was especially retarded, but they nonetheless funded hundreds of settlement houses for blacks and helped establish the first major civil rights organizations, the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. One mission of those organizations was to eliminate the “pathologies” of native black culture, to “adjust or assimilate” blacks to the dominant culture, and to make them into “orderly citizens.” This was a brutal and puritanical assimilationism, but it ran directly counter to the belief of the scientific racists that blacks were biologically incapable of becoming civilized. Nonetheless, progressives acknowledged that some immigrants and blacks and even some native-born whites would choose renegade lives of crime over constrained lives as citizens, and for that eventuality they created the basis of what is now called the carceral state.

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Trump Regime Seeks to Strengthen the Police State Reply

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties

Not exactly a surprise.

MSN.Com

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions is directing federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges possible against the vast majority of suspects, a reversal of Obama-era policies that is sure to send more people to prison and for much longer terms.

The move has long been expected from Sessions, a former federal prosecutor who cut his teeth during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic and who has promised to make combating violence and drugs the Justice Department’s top priority.

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The Iron Jaws of the Police State: Trump’s America Is a Constitution-Free Zone Reply

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

“Policing is broken… It has evolved as a paramilitary, bureaucratic, organizational arrangement that distances police officers from the communities they’ve been sworn to protect and serve. When we have shooting after shooting after shooting that most people would define as at least questionable, it’s time to look, not just at a few bad apples, but the barrel. And I’m convinced that it is the barrel that is rotted.”— Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief

By John W. Whitehead

Rutherford Institute

Please.

Somebody give Attorney General Jeff Sessions a copy of the Constitution.

And while you’re at it, get a copy to President Trump, too.

In fact, you might want to share a copy with the nation’s police officers, as well.

I have my doubts that any of these individuals—all of whom swore to uphold and defend the Constitution—have ever read any of the nation’s founding documents.

Had they actually read and understood the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, there would be no militarized police, no mass surveillance, no police shootings of unarmed individuals, no SWAT team raids, no tasering of children, no asset forfeiture schemes or any of the other government-sanctioned abuses that get passed off as law and order these days.

We’ve got serious problems in this country, and they won’t be solved on the golf course, by wining and dining corporate CEOs, giving local police forces more military equipment, locking down the nation, or pretending that the only threats to our freedoms are posed by forces beyond our borders or by “anti-government” extremists hiding among us.

So far, Trump’s first 100 days in office have been no different from Obama’s last 100 days, at least when it comes to the government’s ongoing war on our freedoms.

Government corruption remains at an all-time high.

Police shootings and misconduct have continued unabated.

The nation’s endless wars continue to push us to the brink of financial ruin.

And “we the people” are still being treated as if we have no rights, are entitled to no protections, and exist solely for the purpose of sustaining the American police state with our hard-earned tax dollars.

Just take the policing crisis in this country, for instance.

Sessions—the chief lawyer for the government and the head of the Justice Department, which is entrusted with ensuring that the nation’s laws are faithfully carried out and holding government officials accountable to abiding by their oaths of office to “uphold and defend the Constitution”—doesn’t think we’ve got a policing problem in America.

In fact, Sessions thinks the police are doing a great job (apart from “the individual misdeeds of bad actors,” that is).

For that matter, so does Trump.

Really, really great.

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Unraveling Political Theory: What is Neoliberalism? Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Law/Justice, Uncategorized

To understand the world of politics and change it for the better, it’s paramount that people begin to study political theory and the ways in which it has manifest throughout history up into the present day. By bringing light to the origins of political and philosophical thought, the present day becomes all the more explainable because one is now able to see the logical progression of such manifestations.

With this urge to better understand the root of many of the common political ideologies present in the world, The Last American Vagabond has decided to team up with Keith Preston in a new podcast series in which the who, what, where, when and how of different political theories will be explored.

My Take on the “Muslim Travel Ban” Reply

by • Administration, American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy

A number of people have for my views on the so-called “Muslim travel ban” imposed by the Trump administration. Here goes:

Statistically, the evidence shows that right-wing terrorists have been slightly more violent in the years since 9-11 than Islamists, at least in the US obviously. But the meaning I take from this data is that the neocons and other hawks are blowing the Islamic terrorism threat way out of proportion, while liberals and the Left blow the right-wing terrorism threat out of proportion. Both groups need these false narratives to be true for ideological reasons.

The neocons and other hawks want a permanent war against Islam and the Left wants a permanent war against whitey, so there always has to be some looming threat on the horizon. The real violence is the US comes mostly from inner city gangs that murder each other over drug dealing disputes, from fights and domestic violence that spirals out of control, and from the mentally ill or lone nuts like Adam Lanza, Dylan Roof, or Omar Mateen.

September 11, 2001 was a singular but spectacular incident that has predictably kept plenty of people up in arms ever since. The OKC bombing in ’95, which killed about 150, had the same impact on the Left. I remember how after OKC the Left was saying many more such acts were just around the corner. But over 20 years later there’s been no such thing. The same thing happened with 9-11. I remember people talking about how there was going to be nuclear destruction of US cities and terrorism with bioweapons and all kinds of stuff. But 15 years later there’s only been a handful of incidents like Orlando, San Bernardino, and Ft. Hood that were perpetrated by lone nuts or small groups of friends acting as freelancers.

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How to Fix the Left 1

by • Activism, Law/Justice, Strategy • Tags:

By Alden Braddock

Peoples Post Modernist

Reject liberal(isms). Embrace your will to power.

The Left (even in radical circles)in many respects has failed as a movement. Race baiting, class politics, compromise on top of compromise and a clumsy at best praxis to achieving the ends we strive for are what we have now and accepting this reality is the only what we can now move past it. The old God is dead and we shall lay the groundwork of our stronghold on His grave. In order to do this we must be willing to embrace some new ideas;

1. We must stop pandering to identity politics. Treating people as collectives or even worse as sociological concepts trips individual action of any meaning and obfuscates our shared goal of fostering a world of self sufficiency, unshackled creative expression and freedom from imposed conditions. Yes, we can see the grave injustices levied against minorities by the state but recent events have made it clear that our cure is far worse than the disease. Arguing over who oppresses who, supporting language policing in an effort to hide from open dialogue and stick to our safe spaces have done us all a great disservice. Revolution never happens within a person’ comfort zone.

2. We must be willing to do what the right has done; collaborate with a wide variety of anti-state affinity groups (hard greens, third world nationalists, agorists, gender-nihilist/queer organizations, ext.) in order to crush our opposition and while we’re at it crush everybody’s enemy the neo-liberal/globalist.

3. We must be ruthless but use violence with tact and be willing to organize. Providing aid, organization/mobilization to and radicalizing groups like BLM and focusing on the core idea which motivate dissent (opposition to police brutality)instead of race and gender baiting will take us much further in achieving our long term goals

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SF judge explains why 66,000 arrest warrants were discarded Reply

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

By Bob Egelko

San Francisco Gate

San Francisco’s Presiding Judge John Stewart explained to the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board on Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, why he and his colleagues discarded 66,000 arrest warrants issued over five years for so-called quality-of-life crimes. Photo: STOCK XCHANGE

San Francisco’s chief judge says he and his colleagues discarded 66,000 arrest warrants issued over five years for quality-of-life crimes, like sleeping on the sidewalk, because it made no sense to lock people up for fines they couldn’t afford.

The crimes, which also include urinating on sidewalks and being drunk in public, are infractions punishable only by fines. But when those who were cited failed to show up in court, judges in the past have issued bench warrants ordering them to appear, with a sentence of five days in jail for failing to show up.

But San Francisco Superior Court judges stopped issuing the warrants a year ago and recently disposed of about 66,000 bench warrants issued since January 2011. The city’s police union and some members of the public have protested, but Presiding Judge John Stewart defended the court’s action Tuesday in a meeting with The Chronicle’s editorial board.

“You’re putting somebody in jail because they’re poor and can’t pay a fine,” he said. “We got a lot of criticism, but we thought it was the right thing to do.”

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The Illogic of Indiscriminate Incarceration Reply

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Uncategorized

By Jacob Sullum

Seychelles, a group of 115 islands off the east coast of Africa with 92,000 residents, does not figure prominently on many lists, but it leads the world in locking people up. It is the only country with a higher incarceration rate than the United States.

If the reforms recommended in a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice were fully implemented, the U.S. would fall from second to fourth place on that list—behind Seychelles, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Turkmenistan, but still far ahead of every other liberal democracy, not to mention Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe. The report is nevertheless an admirable effort to grapple with the morally and fiscally pressing question of who belongs behind bars and who doesn’t.

Between 1974 and 2007, the U.S. imprisonment rate (excluding people in local jails) soared from 102 to 506 per 100,000, thanks to changes in sentencing (including mandatory minimums and “three strikes” laws), parole (including “truth in sentencing” laws), and prosecutorial practices (including an increased tendency to bring charges). Since 2007 the imprisonment rate has declined a bit, but it is still more than four times as high as in the mid-1970s.

This imprisonment binge was largely a response to crime rates, which rose dramatically from the 1960s until the early ’90s, when they began a long slide. Today the violent and property crime rates are half what they were in 1991.

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“Black Lives Matter has a plantation mentality” 2

by • Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized

So says former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown. Here’s the money quote:

“When it first formed, armed BPP members patrolled Oakland neighbourhoods – in their iconic blue-shirt, leather jacket, black beret combo – to keep an eye on the police. They were caricatured as violent militants, but they were standing up for rights as old as the Constitution itself. Newton, a law student, made himself an expert on gun law. Whenever the cops piped up, he’d blast them with the Second Amendment, Supreme Court judgements, chapter and verse: ‘I will observe you carrying out your duties whether you like it or not!’

By Tom Slater

Spiked Online

“I don’t know what Black Lives Matter does, so I can’t tell you how it compares to what the Black Panther Party was. I know what the BPP was. I know the lives we lost, the struggle we put into place, the efforts we made, the assaults on us by the police and government – I know all that. I don’t know what Black Lives Matter does. So if you can tell me, I’ll give you my thoughts.’

So says Elaine Brown, activist, singer and former chairwoman of the Black Panther Party, talking to me from her home in Oakland, California. She doesn’t like my question. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, a revolutionary, socialist, black-power organisation formed in Oakland by then college students Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. And, as journalists scrabble to pen pieces about ‘what’s changed’, cack-handed comparisons abound.

I ask Brown about Black Lives Matter, the movement that erupted in the wake of the shooting of Mike Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. This nebulous hashtag-come-protest movement has been compared – both by its supporters and detractors – with the BPP; it’s either hailed as a continuation of the struggle or slammed as a resurgence in ‘divisive’, ‘militant’ black nationalism. Talking to Brown it becomes clear that both sides give BLM too much credit.

‘There is no comparison’, she says. ‘The next wave of young people running out here, who are complaining and protesting about the murders of young black men and women by the police all over the country, they will protest but they will not rise up in an organised fashion, with an agenda, to create revolutionary change… We advocated community self-defence organisations to be formed, so that we would not be assaulted by the police, so that we would bear arms and assume our human rights.’

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NO CONFIDENCE: Vote for Yourself Reply

by • American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Electoralism/Democratism, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Religion and Philosophy

unfit-to-rule-clinton-trump

In the face of a particularly pitiful election selection, Ann Sterzinger makes the case for giving oneself the first and final vote.

Personally, were I American, I’d either just stay home or turn up only to draw a cock on the ballot paper, in line with my anti-democratic precedent (#Brexit exempted). Still, I suppose voting for oneself, or “no confidence”, works as another way to inoculate oneself from the pozz of the team-sport/herd-animal mentality undergirding electoral politics.

Also: Hurhur…she said “minge”….

~MRDA~

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