Just about the time that POTUS Obama was snarling traffic getting to his starzilla party in Studio City, civil rights attorney and best selling author Michelle Alexander was rockin’ the house across town in Compton, where she gave a 90-minute speech in front of a large and wildly enthusiastic crowd at a the New Philadelphia AME Church, talking about how Jim Crow is alive and well in this country’s criminal justice system.

Alexander is a legal scholar and a racial equality advocacy lawyer with an impressive resume that includes a Supreme Court clerkship and lots more after that.

But what has really put her on the map is her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in which, with mounds of research, Alexander lays out her thesis that the mass incarceration the U.S. has embraced since the mid-1980’s as its primary method of social control is, for black communities, simply devastating. The result is a second class caste system in which, in some major American cities, more than one half of all working age black men, and a growing number of black women, and other minorities, are relegated to a permanently disenfranchised status—much like in the days of Jim Crow, but in far greater numbers. Right now if you are a black man anywhere in America, there is a 32 percent chance that you’ll go to jail or prison at some point in your life.

The New Jim Crow has been the book that criminal justice activists and experts have been urgently recommending above all others these past two years—to the point that when it came out in paperback in January, it became a surprise NY Times best seller.

I first became aware of Alexander’s work when I watched an April 2010 episode of Bill Moyer’s Journal that featured her together with superstar civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, and the combination of what they had to say grabbed my attention, as it encapsulated and quantified what I’d seen anecdotally in my reporting for years.

The usual wiggly iPhone videos below will give you a glimpse of what she has to say as they are from the very beginning of Alexander’s 90-minute talk Thursday night.

You might also enjoy the clip of Alexander with Stephen Colbert on the Cobert Report.

Better yet, just get the book.

However you do it, find a way to check out what Michelle Alexander has to say. Hers is a deeply important American voice that is very much worth your time and attention.

PS: THIS WILL BE A SHORT POSTING because everyone at WitnessLA is working on stories. So stay tuned. There’s a lot coming up soon.

IN THE MEANTIME, TAKE A LOOK AT THIS STORY ON THE CRIME REPORT: CRACKING THE BLUE WALL OF SILENCE, in which former and serving NYPD cops talk about racial profiling and arrest quotas.

ALSO CHECK OUT THE 30-YEAR SENTENCE FOR A FIRST TIME OFFENSE BY THE TEXAS GRANDMOTHER who may or may not have known she was smuggling a ton of drugs in the tour buses that she co-owned, but who got the book thrown at her because she wouldn’t take a deal and had nobody else to give up, so had nothing of value to trade to prosecutors. The Houston Chron has the story.

PS: I’M DELIBERATELY IGNORING THIS STORY, but it’s not that I didn’t see it.

ARE AMERICAN POLICE DEPARTMENTS BECOMING INCREASINGLY MILITARIZED—AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY)?

The Huff Post’s Radley Balko has a well-researched story about the increased militarization of American police departments in the 10 years since 9/11.

Here’s how it opens:

New York magazine reported some telling figures last month on how delayed-notice search warrants – also known as “sneak-and-peek” warrants — have been used in recent years. Though passed with the PATRIOT Act and justified as a much-needed weapon in the war on terrorism, the sneak-and-peek was used in a terror investigation just 15 times between 2006 and 2009. In drug investigations, however, it was used more than 1,600 times during the same period.

It’s a familiar storyline. In the 10 years since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has claimed a number of new policing powers in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, often at the expense of civil liberties. But once claimed, those powers are overwhelmingly used in the war on drugs. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuing militarization of America’s police departments.

Balko follows up with a lot of compelling facts and stats about the over the top acquisition of military weapons and overuse of SWAT teams, among other issues.

(By the way, the latter issue is a problem that I don’t believe really applies to LA, where SWAT originated, and which has arguably the most disciplined and professionalized SWAT teams in the nation. But earlier this year Forbes had an anecdote-filled story about the overuse of SWAT teams, which, together with the tank-like Bearcat, were being deployed to serve warrants on nonviolent offenders.)

However the use of powers granted for purposes of combating terrorists, and legal tools like RICO, which were designed for organized crime, and employing them for street-level drug and gang crime is an increasing trend that affects LA along with other areas of the country.

To make this point, Balko quotes critics like longtime San Jose, California, police chief Joseph McNamara, now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. McNamara told Balko that this trend, now driven by the war on terror in addition to the war on drugs, has caused police to lose sight of their role as keepers of the peace.

“‘Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed,’ McNamara wrote in a 2006 article for the Wall Street Journal. ‘An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed.” Noting the considerable firepower police now carry, McNamara added, “Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.’”

Anyway, read the rest of the story. It’s worth your time.

JAILS AND PRISONS AND RACE

Marc Mauer, head of the highly regarded Sentencing Project, released a paper on Monday that looks at the causes and consequences of the “extreme racial disparities in incarceration in the U.S.”

The paper is a chapter in a soon-to-be-released special edition of the Prison Journal, a prominent peer review quarterly that looks (as the title suggests) issues surrounding incarceration practices and policies.

Here’s an overview of the raw numbers Mauer is attempting to explore:

….If current trends continue, 1 of every 3 African American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can 1 of every 6 Latino males, compared to 1 in 17 White males. For women, the overall figures are considerably lower, but the racial/ethnic disparities are similar: 1 of every 18 African American females, 1 of every 45 Hispanic females, and 1 of every 111 White females can expect to spend time in prison….

Why is that so? As LA’s Chief Public Defender Ron Brown said to me at a conference a few months ago, either we postulate that “Black and Latino people have a criminal gene or something else is going on.”

Mauer goes looking for that “something else,” and finds a complex weave of reasons and influences in his sober-eyed examination and analysis. Yet, when looked at together the weave adds up to racial inequities on a massive scale—that must be addressed for all of our health and well being.

Read the full article here.

NOTE: WE’RE BUSY WORKING ON THE FIRST PART OF THE “DANGEROUS JAILS” SERIES THAT WILL BE OUT LATER THIS WEEK.

This will be Part I of a new series about abuse inside the LA County jail system, and it’s part of the WitnessLA and Spot.Us-sponsored LA Justice Report project. It’ll be out later this week.

So stay tuned.

In 2007, the Los Angeles Urban League began a project that, in theory anyway, is exactly what LA needs.

The Urban League’s idea is to fundamentally transform the 70-block neighborhood surrounding the campus of Crenshaw High School.

The center of the transformation is to be the high school itself. But there is much more to the concept. One could say that the larger purpose is to recalibrate the educational outcomes for Crenshaw’s students by remaking the ecology of the community itself.

The notion that a host of social ills—failing schools, gang violence, public health challenges, unemployment, lack of low-cost housing, prison reentry—should best be viewed and solved, not separately, but as pieces of an interdependent system, is a concept that has been gaining currency over the last decade.

However, the ecological theory of community problem solving is one thing; putting it successfully into action is quite another.

Geoffrey Canada’s now famous 100 block Harlem’s Children’s Zone is the best known example of the concept in action.

The Urban League is trying it’s own version—the hope being that, if their model is successful, it can be replicated around the city, and beyond.

Three years into the project, the staff of Annenberg’s Neon Tommy has done a multi-faceted interim assessment of progress made. The Neon Tommy reporters ask what has been achieved? What remains to be done? Overall, how well is the project working?

Neon Tommy gives the Urban League’s Neighborhoods@Work endeavor mixed reviews. But the news is not altogether unpromising.

To give you a small taste of some of the anecdotal stories in the package, here is an excerpt from an article by NT’s Olga Khazan, who examines how Crenshaw students and teachers manage to achieve despite high levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among both the student and the faculty population.

(Olga’s video above features Raheem Giddens from Crenshaw High.)

During a mid-morning break between classes at Crenshaw High School, a senior named Patricia was showing Sybel Stanley pictures of a prom dress on her phone. Earlier in the week, another girl at the school had told her friends that the dress in question, clearly a store-bought number, had been special-made for her by a designer. Patricia was speaking in the outraged tone of a sassy high schooler-cum-prosecutor, and Stanley, whether in earnest or in a convincing show of support, was shocked as well.

“Well, would you look at that,” Stanley said. Sybel Stanley is a parent-resource coordinator at Crenshaw, which essentially means she makes sure students are doing well enough at home to do well enough at school. Her round frame barely breaks 5 feet, and she has a gap-toothed grin that she’s quick to flash anyone who needs it.

“She’s gonna show up at the prom, and someone else is gonna have her same dress on!” Patricia said. Patricia’s bobbed black hair is straightened and pulled back in a pink headband that matches her shirt. Everything about her appearance is carefully coordinated, from her purse to her phone cover.

“I mean, it’s a dress. Why would you lie about that?” she concluded emphatically. After all, nothing is sacred in high school if not prom.

“Well, you know how tight money is for everyone these days,” Stanley said.

Suddenly Patricia remembered something on a more serious note.

“Oh Granny, you don’t even know,” Patricia said. “My momma broke down this morning.”

Patricia, like many of her Crenshaw peers, was accepted to college. But her mom, like many Crenshaw moms, was having trouble paying her initial deposit. That morning Patricia was faced with the reality of the financial pressures when she saw her mother crying….

Read on.

Then read wonderful articles by Neon Tommy editor,Callie Schweitzer, and Andrew Khouri and Shirin Parsavand and Catherine Cloutier and LeTania Kirkland.

It’s all very good stuff. Enjoy!

And a big thank you to Neon Tommy for doing an important series of stories that most other major LA news outlets have somehow managed to ignore.

Over the weekend, I finally read the stunning speech—remarkably for its political bravery—- that Jim Webb made to the Senate this past Thursday, when he introduced his bill calling for a blue ribbon commission to reform the nation’s criminal justice system, which he calls “a national disgrace.” The bill, titled the National Criminal Justice Act of 2009, is what many of us with an eye on criminal justice issues have been eagerly awaiting since late last year.

I knew that criminal justice advocates like Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project had been working with Webb and his staff. But even so, his presentation was more intelligent more articulate, more informed—and more courageous—than most had dared to hope for. Here are some clips:

Let’s start with a premise that I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world’s population; we have 25% of the world’s known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. I would ask my fellow senators and my fellow citizens to think about the challenges that attend these kinds of numbers when we are looking at people who have been released from prison and are reentering American society. We have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are reentering American society without the transition necessary
to allow them to again become productive citizens.

[SNIP]

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has written about Webb’s bill in a manner that illuminates both the man and the issue.

Here’s how Glenn’s article opens:

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb’s impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb’s interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless “tough-on-crime” hysteria, an increasingly irrational “drug war,” and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan — and virtually every other country in the world — to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a “a nation of jailers” whose “prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history.”

What’s most notable about Webb’s decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is. He isn’t just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America’s oppressive prison state. His critique of what we’re doing is fundamental, not incremental.

Yep.

Webb himself had an article in Parade Magazine on Sunday in which he explains and campaigns for his bill.

On Sunday, he was also interviewed for NPR

***************************************************************************************************

They came in bus load after bus load from all the states bordering Louisiana, and from states farther away too. There were several contingents from California.

The state police said the crowd was at least 15,000, probably 20,000. Organizers thought it was double what the police were saying.

At midday, buses were still bringing marchers into town. At some point the gridlock was so bad that many simply got out of the buses and went in on foot.

By afternoon, organizers said, the crowd ballooned to 50,000. By that point, state police said, it was too spread out to count.

One measure of the symbolic significance of Jena and of Thursday’s march in Louisiana was demonstrated at an LA event Thursday night at the California African American Museum. It was a gala affair organized to honor the LAPD’s highest ranking black officer, Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger, and Douglas Barry, the city’s first black fire chief, and had no particular political overtones.

The evening drew a big crowd. All but a smattering in the audience were African American. (I was among the smattering.) At some point in the night, one of the speakers brought up Jena.

“This night is made more powerful,” he said, “by the fact that it’s being held today….on the day of the Jena march.” Heads nodded all over the room, then the applause grew and grew.

The speaker never said why Jena was important.

He didn’t have to.

Various news outlets are reporting that the Jena issue has thrown something of a hand grenade straight into the midst of the field of Democratic presidential candidates.

Good.

Today, Americans from all over these United States will march in Jena, Louisiana, because of a tree that has become a lightening rod.

If for some reason, you’ve missed the the controversy about the half-dozen black kids, known now as the Jena Six, here’s a fast rundown from a column by Trey Ellis.

The Jena 6 case began last fall when a new black student to the mostly white, rural Louisiana town of Jena sat under the “white tree,” so called because it was the place where the white kids at school congregated.

The next day three white boys on the rodeo team hung three nooses from the tree.

The white boys were only given an in-school suspension, their act deemed no more than a “prank.”

The day after that several of the school’s black high school football stars organized a peaceful silent protest under the tree. The school freaked, called in the police and the next day Reed Walters, the local D.A., addressed the school. There, he is reported to have looked at the black kids in the audience, waved his pen in the air and said, “With a stroke of this pen, I can make your life disappear.”

The football season was a good one for Jena and for a few months there was relative quiet in the town. Then on November 30th, a wing of the high school was burned down. Whites thought it was blacks and the blacks assumed it was the whites.

Wayne Goodman of NPR, has a detailed description of what happened after that:

Read the rest of this entry »