Perhaps if we didn't marginalize huge numbers of poor people of color and
ration their access to resources like good housing, good food, good education,
and good jobs, and if we didn't patrol their segregated neighborhoods with
foreign troops whom we call police officers, we'd have fewer criminals to begin
with.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2018 6:35 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: First Step Act Has Sinister Implications for the
Poor and Marginalized
We just can't seem to get past the need to kick folks when they're down.
Eternal Punishment is our motto.
You would think folks would notice a real difference after a couple of
centuries of legal violence. Our citizens should be meek and obedient, and
very law abiding. But somehow we have the world's largest percentage of
incarcerated. And frankly, it doesn't seem to have made the streets any safer.
It's that definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over while
expecting a different outcome. So let's keep on beating up our criminals and
maybe, just maybe they will grow wings and halos.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/20/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
First Step Act Has Sinister Implications for the Poor and Marginalized
night.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
By Candice Bernd, Truthout Published December 19, 2018
The Senate passed the First Step Act on Tuesday night in an 87-12 vote
after vigorous debate over legislative amendments that would have
gutted much of the bill. The legislation now moves to the House for a
vote later this week, where it is expected to pass.
The sentencing reform legislation, shaped in large part by Jared
Kushner and Koch Industries attorney Mark Holden, expands job training
and other rehabilitation-oriented programming designed to reduce
recidivism rates among federal prisoners deemed "low-risk." It also
expands early-release programs and somewhat reins in sentencing laws,
including mandatory minimums for drug offenses.
The legislation's changes to sentencing laws include allowing judges
more flexibility to pass sentences below mandatory minimums for
nonviolent drug offenders and reducing mandatory minimums associated
with the three-strikes law. The legislation also prohibits the
shackling of pregnant prisoners and the use of solitary confinement for
juveniles.
The latest version, which came to the Senate floor via another,
unrelated bill, advanced Monday with stripped-down provisions and
additional measures demanded by law enforcement groups, including the
National Sheriff's Association and "tough-on-crime" Republicans.
Senators voted against a set of amendments to the bill Tuesday that
reform advocates deemed "poison pill" amendments ahead of the
legislation's passage. Republican Senators Tom Cotton and John Kennedy
authored three amendments that advocates say would have unacceptably
whittled down the already feeble legislation.
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The amendments would have excluded felons from early release,
prerelease custody and supervised release; notified victims before a
prisoner is allowed to transfer out early; and tracked the
effectiveness of the anti-recidivism programs. Advocates, however, say
the amendments would have led to further stigmatization of
incarcerated people, risked re-traumatizing victims of crime, and
discouraged the neediest prisoners from participating in
recidivism-reduction programming.
In a stunning reversal, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
indicated last week that he would bring the bill to the Senate floor
after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley expressed
frustration over McConnell's inaction. President Trump, the Fraternal
Order of the Police, and for-profit prison corporations GEO Group and
CoreCivic all support the legislation.
"We can look at this legislation as immediate relief for a very small
number of people, but what are [Black and Brown] communities going to
look like in
20 years?"
Some conservative senators are already touting the bill's passage in
the Senate as a legislative victory after Congress's previous effort
at bipartisan prison reform in the wake of the Ferguson uprising in
2014-15 largely stalled. Others, like Senators Cotton and Kennedy,
have decried the bill as weakening the Republican Party's "law-and-order"
identity.
The bill is limited to federal prisons, which only constitute about 13
percent of the overall US prison system, or about 180,000 of 2.1
million incarcerated people in US jails and prisons. Further, prison
reform advocates argue the bill systematically excludes casualties of
the war on drugs, since the legislation does not make any sentence
reductions retroactive other than those under the 2010 Fair Sentencing
Act, which somewhat reduced the disparity between crack and powdered
cocaine sentences.
The legislation could liberate several thousand prisoners hit with
harsh drug sentences prior to the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, and
represents the most significant blow to mandatory minimums since the
2010 legislation was passed.
Still, the modest sentence reductions in the bill are so narrow that
veteran reform advocates say the long-term, harmful provisions of the
legislation - including its reliance on racist risk assessment
mechanisms and expansion of electronic monitoring and other forms of
privatized surveillance - outweigh its benefits. For instance, the
bill contains no measures that would prevent private prison
corporations from charging those they place on electronic monitors
from paying fees associated with the devices.
"It's important for us to focus on the long-term impacts of any
legislation that we put in place," said Vivian Nixon, a formerly
incarcerated person and director of College and Community Fellowship.
"We can look at this legislation as immediate relief for a very small
number of people, but what are [Black and Brown] communities going to
look like in 20 years when .
there's a huge percentage of people with criminal justice histories in
very targeted, under-resourced communities who are bogged down with
these electronic monitors and payments that they can't make?"
CoreCivic and GEO Group, the nation's largest for-profit prison
corporations, strongly back the bill, and have urged representatives
not to adjourn before passing it. Both companies are expanding heavily
into reentry and post-prison rehabilitation services, and the
legislation presents new opportunities to boost their profits,
authorizing a $375 million expansion of post-prison services.
Moreover, Koch Industries, whose attorney Holden helped shape First
Step, has worked to privatize reentry services through funding the
Texas Public Policy Foundation's "Right on Crime" operation.
"This is like a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card for extremely low-risk,
well-resourced people who find their way into federal prison."
Nixon points out that because of the way risk assessments measure
static factors like a person's income, work history or where they
lived at the time of their offense, many poor people of color will not
even be eligible for early release under electronic monitoring, while
those deemed low-risk, such as white-collar criminals, will likely be
able to go free without any electronic surveillance. "This is like a
'Get Out of Jail Free' card for extremely low-risk, well-resourced
people who find their way into federal prison," Nixon said.
Moreover, she worries that the bill sets a precedent for expanding
"e-carceration" strategies that could spread beyond the federal prison
system. "Whatever the federal system does, there are many states
[that] are likely to follow suit, which means we're not only talking
about the small number of federal prisoners, we're talking about 2
million people in jails and prisons around the country," she said.
Nixon argues the bill was conceived of and drafted predominantly by
"grasstops" nonprofit staffers, lawyers and people in government, not
the communities of color most directly impacted by policing and the
prison system. Further, the bill's prioritizing of low-risk,
well-resourced prisoners is a reflection of Kushner's familial
experiences with the prison
system: His father Charles was released from prison in 2006 after
serving two years for illegal campaign contributions.
A real reform bill, she says, would have made the 2015 Sentencing
Reform and Corrections Act retroactive, focused less on risk
assessments and more on "needs assessments" to provide adequate
programming for incarcerated people, and would have included
provisions to limit public-private partnerships.
"What is in this federal bill that says we will not double the current
federal population on community supervision?"
DeAnna Hoskins, president of JustLeadershipUSA, which seeks to reduce
the carceral population in the US, agrees, telling Truthout that
static factors disproportionately affect risk assessments for Black and Brown
communities.
For instance, over-policing of predominantly Black and Brown schools
can result in early criminal records for young people of color.
Criminal records resulting from civil rights violations such as
stop-and-frisk and racial profiling can, and often do, play into risk
assessments.
"What is in this federal bill that says we will not double the current
federal population on community supervision, especially when the cost
is shifted from the government to the individual?" Hoskins said.
She also points out that it's not just casualties of the war on drugs
who are systematically carved out of the bill, but also prisoners with
many disabilities, since the bill only outlines screenings for
prisoners with learning or cognitive impairments. The bill also carves
out undocumented immigrants, who constituted more than half of federal
criminal prosecutions in 2016 and make up about a third of all people
sent to federal prisons annually.
"I think what will happen at the end of the day is that the arc of all
these exclusions will kind of cement these problematic policies around
immigrants."
Paromita Shah, who is associate director at the National Immigration
Project of the National Lawyers Guild, argues that the way the
legislation singles out migrants' unauthorized reentry into the US as
one of the most serious classes of offenses is troubling, and that the
legislation gives the administration the tools to exacerbate the
problems caused by the administration's "zero tolerance" policy, which
has led to separations of thousands of migrant families at the border.
"If you're an immigrant, the presumption under our laws is that,
[immigrants] shouldn't have access to these [rehabilitation] services
because [they're] just not going to be here," Shah told Truthout. "I
think what will happen at the end of the day is that the arc of all
these exclusions will kind of cement these problematic policies around
immigrants."
She also points out that the legislation funnels anyone presumed to be
"deportable" into what's known as the "Institutional Hearing Program,"
which
holds deportation hearings for immigrants while they are still in
federal prison. Shah says the program undermines due process
protections and remains inaccessible in many federal prisons. The
legislation forces people to undergo the program as a condition for
applying for time credits, ultimately pushing more immigrants toward
the likelihood of deportation.
The Trump administration's draconian immigration policies have also
proved lucrative to these private prison profiteers as well, and Shah
worries the bill will likewise only further cement GEO Group and
CoreCivic's ability to profit from the federal detention system in how
it singles out unauthorized reentry.
"There may not be an immediate impact right now, but I feel like it's
a tradeoff," Shah said. "Pushing out a bill like this while federal
prosecutions of [unauthorized reentries] remain one of the highest
prosecuted offenses in our criminal justice system, it just seems like
a real disconnect."
Nixon, Hoskins and Shah all hope to see Democrats take a shot at
deepening reforms the Senate just passed, while putting accountability
measures in place, when they take control of the House in January.
"It's just a baby step. If they want a true first step," Hoskins says,
Congress would have had a real debate. "If this is true
bipartisanship, then what are [lawmakers] scared of, and why the need
to push this bill through?
Because it protects them, [white-collar criminals] and not the most
marginalized."
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