Another good interview. What I really liked in this interview is the piece where Abunimah says how US, which is usually held up as the role model of integration of diverse population, cannot actually be held as that kind of role model where there's so much systematic racial injustice there.
Continuing onwards, he says something, which really struck home that even if Palestinians do achieve the dream of one-state solution where Israelis & Palestinians live side by side, peacefully; Palestinians, in fact, be heavily discriminated & oppressed, similar to Muslims in India are still discriminated & Blacks in South Africa who are still trying to come out of discrimination & oppression they were suffering during apartheid.
Then, Abunimah says something which informed & blew my mind that how Israel & US do have "shared values"; the values all American Presidents have always talked about for the past 6 decades or so. That's the "shared values" of discriminating against & oppressing Palestinians, African-Americans, Latinos, & other "coloureds". Racism is very much entrenched in Israeli & American societies, alike. On top of that, & especially in light of what happened in Baltimore & other American cities, & even in Toronto, the American law enforcement agencies visit Israel on a regular basis, to receive training on how to be better at security. They watch & learn torture techniques in Israel where Palestinians, adults & children alike, are tortured in Israeli prisons.
So, it shows me the ignorance of general public in North America & pretty much all over the world when US, Canada & Europe are held up as paragons of human rights, when these countries are no different from Israel, & treat their coloured populations in no different way; by making harsher criminal laws, hypermilitarization of policing, making education unaffordable, & keeping good jobs away from them.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So, in chapter one of the book--I'm going to read a quote--you talk about what Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle:
While abolishing the racism and violence of Zionism practices against Palestinians is the key to justice and peace in historic Palestine, no less than the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States were absolutely necessary, recent American history demonstrates that systems of racial control and the ideologies underpinning them remain robust and adaptable. A formally liberal and rights-based order can allow a system just as oppressive as Jim Crow to hide and flourish in plain sight.
One of your themes in the first chapter is what Palestinians can learn from African Americans. And we're in a city that's 65% African-American, and you've lived in Chicago for 20 years, a city with a very large African-American population. So what do you think Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle?
ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, if I can just give some context to that quote, which I think helps to answer that as more and more people have recognized that the so-called two-state solution is over, there's--more and more people are arguing, including myself, for a single democratic state encompassing what is today Israel and the occupied territories.
And often people say, well we ought to have equal rights as in the United States or as in some other countries, and what I felt that it was necessary to do is to really interrogate that and to say, well I don't think we can sincerely or honestly hold the United States up as a model when in fact there is so much systematic racial injustice.
And so what that quote leads into is a discussion of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which was a very important book for me and for many other people, to explain how equality before the law officially in the United States can coexist with mass incarceration. And that serves as a warning for Palestinians that even if they achieve full liberal rights in a single state, they may not get out from under the yoke of racism and oppression and apartheid.
But it also requires us to examine the kind of so-called shared values. And that's from a chapter in the book called "Shared Values, Shared Struggle", that at every occasion, President Obama and all his predecessors will tell us that, oh, the United States and Israel have shared values. And so what are these shared values? And I argue that it includes things like a really racialized view of the world, where Palestinians, in the case of Israel, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in the United States are viewed as some kind of demographic threat that needs to be policed and controlled and surveilled.
And these shared values take a very real form when you see ... that the top police brass from almost every major U.S. city and many smaller cities have been taken on junkets to Israel by groups including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, groups sponsored by AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, and they take them to places like Megiddo Prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured, including children, held in solitary confinement. And then they come out and they say, oh, the Israelis are so good at security and in living in a tough neighborhood. And even that language of the tough neighborhood, it comes out of a racialized American discourse. And they say, you see all these quotes from American police chiefs saying, oh, the Israelis are such experts, we're going to take what we learned back to Chicago, back to L.A., back to Baltimore.
And, in fact, Israel is--its niche now is the so-called homeland security industry, where they're exporting billions of dollars of goods, weapons, and services to federal, state, and local police and judicial authorities. So there's a real kind of convergence of ideology and business interest, where, in a sense, if you're fighting mass incarceration in the United States or if you're fighting what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you really need to be part of the same fight, because it's the same corporations profiting from them and it's the same politicians who are talking about Israel as a paragon of human rights and a model for the United States while backing the hypermilitarization of policing, the rail to jail for schoolchildren in the cities, particularly African-American schoolchildren, where we see public education being gutted and privatized and at the same time we see prisons flourishing.
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JAY: I think it was the 1940s where it was made illegal. But if you had a subdivision, a new subdivision just outside the city or a suburb in Baltimore, you actually had to sign an agreement in your deed which said that you could not sell your house to blacks--or Jews, for that matter, but particularly targeted with African Americans. Later, it was formally made illegal and then informally was still in force: if you actually tried to sell your house, you could be--there would be repercussions in terms of the people that own the subdivision; and later they used blockbusting to play this. But as late as 1969 in Baltimore, there was ... in The Baltimore Sun, there was a section of real estate classifieds for whites, a section for Jews (a separate section), and no section for blacks.
ABUNIMAH: Well, and that was true in Chicago and that was true all over the country. And it's important to--and that was true in Canada, by the way. And it's important not to lay all this history on the South and to forget how entrenched and systematic and formal this segregation and racism was throughout the United States. And the legacy of that is that cities like Chicago are still the most segregated in the world in terms of the ongoing effects of that.
But that kind of segregation, which we view today as a negative result of racism that we now repudiate, is actually the goal that Israeli policymakers are working towards with many of the laws. There's a statement from the Israeli Housing minister a few years ago, Ariel Atias, who says that we have populations mixing who shouldn't be mixing and we have to keep them apart, and so Israel actually pushing policies designed at promoting ethnoracial, ethnoreligious segregation.
But this doesn't stop President Obama from these heartfelt declarations of the values he shares with Israel. And I find that to be a particularly tragic and cruel irony, given that his own election victory is seen as being one of the fruits of the sacrifices so many people made in the civil rights struggle, that, someone like him, whose election was unimaginable, even a decade ago, is today promoting a country like Israel, whose racism against Palestinians, against Africans, against others is so systematic.
JAY: What are some other examples on the housing side in Israel of where there isn't this equal citizenship?
ABUNIMAH: Well, it's on so many levels. It's on the micro level, where you have Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in present-day Israel, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have actually had to go to court for the right to live in Jewish neighborhoods. But it's also on the macro level. I mean, what is Gaza? Gaza is really an open-air prison where 1.7 million people live. 80% of them are refugees from areas that are now part of Israel. And the only reason they have to live in a fenced open-air prison in Gaza and can't go back to their lands--most of which are empty, by the way, in what's now southern Israel--the only reason they can't go back is because they're not Jewish. If they were Jewish, Israel would tear down the fences and say, come on home. So it's the micro level, where you have hundreds of Israeli rabbis, municipal rabbis whose salaries are paid for by the state, who've issued these public calls saying it's forbidden to rent to Arabs--you know, if you own an apartment, don't rent it to an Arab--and at the same time this macro level segregation. It's almost like, to use a South Africa analogy, the petty apartheid and the grand apartheid.
And, by the way, the reason these rabbis have been issuing these calls in recent years is because Israel has not allowed even the Palestinian population who are citizens of Israel to build a single new town in 65 years, has taken most of their land. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to get houses in areas where the houses are being built, which is in Jewish areas, and then they're being met with these kinds of decrees.
now, what if the party which injures (murderer) is a government official / diplomat / a government administration / any powerful figure (police force) & the murder itself happens to take place in a foreign place where thousands unnecessarily died [Japan, China, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yemen, Colombia, India, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine (Crimea), Rwanda, Bosnia, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Congo, Sudan, Canada, US etc.]. Where's the atonement for all those unnecessary deaths?
Although, it is despicable wherever children are sexually abused in the world, but these kinds of stories don't make the headlines in the West. When something like these surfaces in the developing world, people are up in arms that children are not being protected by the law enforcement authorities & government.
Usually, the numbers of sexual assaults on children in those countries is quite small, compared to thousands upon thousands being abused in England or North America.
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Police are recording 85 sexual assaults on children each day after an increase of more than a third in reports of abuse & exploitation, new figures have revealed.
A total of 31,238 allegations of sexual offences against children, including rape, assault & grooming offences, were made to forces in England & Wales in 2013/14, research by the NSPCC has found. The figures show an increase of 38% – more than a third – on the previous year.
The majority of the victims were aged between 12 & 16 but more than one in four – 8,282 – were younger than 11, the charity said. Of those, 2,895 are estimated to be aged 5 or under, including 94 babies.
More than three-quarters of the reported abuse cases were against girls (24,457). Britain’s largest force, the Metropolitan police, recorded the highest number of sex crimes against children, with 3,523.
The data, obtained through freedom of information requests, reveals a significant year-on-year increase in the number of sex offences against children. In 2012-13, the same research showed that a total of 22,654 sexual crimes against children were recorded by 41 police forces. All 43 forces in England & Wales responded in the latest study.
The NSPCC said that until now the total had largely remained steady & the 38% rise was the biggest increase in 6 years of requesting the figures. Since 2008/09, the number has increased by almost 50%.
Last year the charity helped 2,400 young victims through its therapeutic recovery programme, but it says there are not enough services to support every child who has experienced abuse.
Jon Brown, senior policy officer for the NSPCC, said: “Our estimate is that there are 50,000 children in the country who need help & support for abuse who are not getting it.
“We need the government to step up & breach this gap. It cannot be right that so many children are going without support. We should be treating this as a public health problem given the damage done into adulthood to individuals who have been abused as children.”
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Police experts say the effect of the case has been to encourage more victims, both those reporting abuse in the past & ongoing abuse, to come forward because they are now more confident they will be believed.
But improved recording methods by police have also been cited as a possible reason for the increase.
Brown said it was not clear whether the increase in reports of abuse was due to an actual rise or increased confidence of victims coming forward.
He agreed with comments made last month by Simon Bailey, chief constable of Norfolk & the national police lead on child abuse, that there was a real increase in abuse taking place, much of it facilitated by the internet.
Responding to the new figures, Bailey said they still represented the tip of the iceberg.
“Many, many, more victims have found the confidence to report abuse, knowing they will be treated with sensitivity & respect, that we will listen to them & that we will take their allegations seriously,” he said.
“Increased reporting means we are dealing with unprecedented number of investigations but it is my belief that more abuse is being perpetrated. The internet has given people the ability to sit in their room & indulge fantasies in a way that simply was not available to them two decades ago.”
Last month Bailey revealed that the police are investigating more than 1,400 prominent men, including politicians, celebrities & those linked to institutions, over allegations that they have sexually abused children in the past. The investigations are being carried out by forces across the country & coordinated by a team running Operation Hydrant.
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Peter Wanless, the charity’s chief executive, said: “These figures are disturbing & clearly illustrate child sexual abuse is a continuing & widespread problem that needs urgent action. But we know this is still only a fraction of the true number of victims because some endure an agonising wait of many years before telling anyone – & others never reveal what has happened to them.”
A great opinion piece. It essentially highlights what I blogged about in my previous blog post where corrections officers in prisons are also silently suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
Since, I put most of what I think about this issue, in that blog post, I won't repeat myself, here. But, this opinion piece comes back to the same point that victims of violent crimes also want the same changes in the prison system, as the corrections officers; rehabilitation of prisoners instead of packing them in prisons like sardines. Building more prisons won't solve the crime. Locking a first-time offender with a hardened criminal only increases the chances that that first-time offender is only going to become a hardened criminal him/herself.
So, governments should be using the tax dollars in building more rehab centers for criminals, instead of building more & bigger prisons. Current prison system doesn't help anyone, but actually exploits the prisoner & the whole society.
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When policymakers think of the people who comprise the victims’ rights movement, young people of color from low-income communities may not be the first group that leaps to mind. But the facts suggest these survivors should be.
My organization conducted 2 years of research & found that 1 in 5 Californians experience crime – but its impact is concentrated & unequal. The majority of crime victims live in lower-income communities & repeat victimization is even more concentrated (echoing research on victimization in the entire US). When it comes to violent crime, those most likely to be repeatedly victimized are young people of color, especially African-American & Latino males.
2 out of 3 crime survivors reported being victimized more than once in the last 5 years. Many repeat victims have long histories of suffering multiple types of crimes, such as sexual exploitation, abuse or community violence. Worse still, only a small number of survivors receive any help, despite often experiencing severe depression, anxiety & post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of crime.
Young people of color from low-income communities bear an unconscionably disproportionate burden of violence & crime – & are victimized at staggering rates while also the least likely to get help to recover from trauma. Most frequently victimized, least often supported. There is something terribly wrong with this picture.
Beyond lacking access to recovery support, most crime victims also disagree with the direction criminal justice policymaking has taken over the last few decades of prison expansion. While the traditional approach to victims’ rights has focused on toughening punishments for people convicted of crime & strengthening the rights of victims during criminal proceedings, our research shows that most survivors of crime think that our current investments in justice system are unwise. 2 out of 3 California victims surveyed believe bloated prisons either make inmates better at committing crimes or have no impact on crime at all. Most survivors want greater investments into rehabilitation, mental health treatment & prevention over bigger prisons & jails.
Listening to crime victims can tell us a lot how we should reform our safety & justice systems. We must embrace survivors as unexpected advocates for justice reform. It’s time to stop pretending that building more prisons protects survivors – it doesn’t.
Procedural rights for victims are critical, & accountability for people who commit crime is an essential component of an effective criminal justice system. Yet, many victims never even get to a courtroom. National statistics reveal that over half of violent crime goes unreported, eliminating any possibility of a prosecution. And even when violent crimes are reported, less than half result in an arrest. So focusing only on criminal proceedings leaves out the experiences & needs of the majority of crime survivors.
Packed prisons & extreme sentencing for the fraction of crimes that result in a conviction also depletes the very resources needed to improve victim protection & community safety. We need to rethink what investments can serve & protect as many victims as possible, including the communities most impacted by crime. We should pay special attention to the needs of those at greatest risk of being repeatedly victimized, such as youth of color.
When victims go without trauma recovery support, they risk being victimized again & falling through the cracks in life: dropping out of school, suffering health problems, self-medicating to the point of addiction & even turning to crime themselves.
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Instead of continuing to create harsh penalties that, in turn, create more prisons as our response to crime, we should invest in mental health care & trauma-informed services for anyone traumatized by violence, as well as safe places to go when crisis erupts, family support programs & economic recovery assistance for victims. We also need to improve the relationship between police, prosecutors & the communities they serve, so that victims trust – & can safely cooperate with – law enforcement to solve more crimes.
Despite the prevalence of pro-victim rhetoric during the prison-building era, few policymakers have asked themselves who experiences crime, who is most vulnerable to repeat crime or what survivors need to recover & avoid future harm. Most crime victims have never been at the center of attention of criminal justice policies, nor have their experiences & needs been considered as penal codes & prison populations mushroomed over the past 3 decades.
But the evidence suggests that when you ask the people most affected, survivors are less interested in spending tax dollars to fill more prisons & instead want to prioritize investments that will actually prevent crime in the first place. It is time for policymakers to finally listen – & put the perspectives of those most vulnerable to harm at the center of policies.
A good article highlighting something which us, in the general public, never think about: corrections officers in prisons are also subjected to daily abuse & stress, which leads them to suffer from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
The main problem is the prison system. It's the same system all over the world; if a person is convicted for a crime, then he/she is thrown in a jail cell for a determined amount of time or for life. Now, if the prison system stops at that point, even then, it will not create a huge problem. It becomes a huge problem when the government officials starts listening to prison-industrial complex lobbyists, & in pandering for their constituents' votes, start broadening the definition of crime.
That's when several things start to happen:
1. Any kind of crime, major or minor, is considered huge.
2. Judges & the state prosecutors are rewarded for prosecuting as many people as they can.
3. More convicted criminals can be shown by politicians, to the general public, as the proof that their tough-on-crime stance is working.
4. As more people get convicted, even for minor offences, prisons start to fill up fast.
5. Prison-industrial complex start to get "free" labourers in the form of convicted prisoners, which is another form of slavery.
6. Governments & businesses start to pay the companies involved in the prison-industrial complex in the form of subsidies & for products made from prisoners' labour.
7. So, now, those prisons become like a business unto itself. And, as every business' primary responsibility is to lower its costs & increase its profits, those prisons start to be judged with the same metrics. That's where, the problem starts to snowball into a giant problem with very adverse consequences for the whole society.
As prisons become like businesses, they start to treat all prisoners as the same. So, even a hardened criminal is treated the same as first-time offender. In that case, a first-time offender might have benefited a lot with more of a rehab approach, instead of being locked up with a hardened criminal. But, since, rehabs cost money & prisons don't want to invest in something which cost money, that first-time offender never gets any rehab treatment, to the point, that he/she becomes a hardened criminal him/herself.
So, now, the society has to tolerate a hardened criminal, if he/she is ever released. Since, he/she is a hardened criminal now, he/she will most likely commit the offence again, which will result him/her in receiving a much harsher sentence. That will only help in overcrowding of the prisons.
Furthermore, as prisons are not allowed or discouraged from investing in prisons, prisoners increase (which also is creating overcrowding in American prisons), but the number of prison guards / corrections officers don't increase, accordingly. The ratio of prisoners to corrections officers gets all skewed, with as much as, 50 or more prisoners are handled by one corrections officer. Imagine, if that's how many children are being taught by one teacher. That would be considered unthinkable in North American education system.
Of course, handling so many criminals, many of whom themselves might be suffering from several physical & mental health problems, for which they don't receive any kind of treatment, by one corrections officer, is only going to cause those corrections officers huge stress. Since, stress is the root cause of many other health problems, those officers also become prone to several physical & mental health problems.
Further compounding the problem is the macho culture of prisons, where showing any kind of weakness is considered almost fatal by both prisoners & corrections officers. So, of course, corrections officers suffer in silence with these physical & mental issues. They take out their pent-up frustrations & anger on prisoners, which is wrong & unjustifiable, & cause more rifts in general society, when it sees how police are treating prisoners.
So, the main issue to resolve here is breaking up the prison-industrial complex:
1. Prisons need to be under governments' control, where governments should invest in rehab treatments of prisoners.
2. Government should help in the reintegration of prisoners after they are released from prisons, reducing the chances of them committing a crime again. After all, if they commit a crime again, they will go to prison once again, & the taxpayers will pick the tab anyway. So, why not invest in making those prisoners a tax-paying citizen, instead of tax-consuming prisoner?
3. Politicians should not be pandering for votes on their crime-reducing capabilities. Let objective data on crimes dictate those policies, since all data nowadays keeps saying that crimes are continuously decreasing. Politicians may also not focus on this issue if they are not receiving any money from prison-industrial complex.
4. Reducing the ratio of prisoner to corrections officers by either reducing the prisoner population or increasing the number of corrections officers or both. This may not be required if politicians don't unnecessarily expand the definition of crime & treat every crime the same way. Minor offences are treated by rehab approach & major offences are processed through the prison system.
5. Changing the macho culture may never happen but it is certainly a desirable option. It will be very hard to do since organizational cultures don't change so easily, especially, considering it's the prison system we are talking about.
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Michael Van Patten’s 18-year-old son came home to find his dad crouching on the kitchen floor, gun in hand, a nearly empty bottle of gin by his side, tears running down his cheeks. Trevor grabbed the weapon, ran up to his room, shut the door & didn’t speak to his dad – or anyone – about the incident for 13 years.
For Michael, this was the build-up of nearly 3 decades working as a corrections officer at the Oregon state penitentiary. “The only way I knew how to deal with it was to eat a bullet.”
There is little awareness of how the culture of endemic violence in prisons affects the correction officers who interact with prisoners. But with over 2 million prisoners & around half a million COs, it is a widespread & underreported problem.
Corrections officers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at more than double the rate of military veterans in the US, according to Caterina Spinaris, the leading professional in corrections-specific clinical research & founder of Desert Waters Correctional Outreach, a nonprofit based in Colorado.
This in turn inevitably affects prisoners. While there is no hard data on guard-on-inmate assaults, interviews with current & former corrections officers revealed that COs occasionally take out the stress of the job on inmates.
In 2011, Spinaris did an anonymous survey of corrections officers, testing them for indications of PTSD: repeated flashbacks of traumatic incidents, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, suicidal thoughts & alienation, among others. She found that 34% of corrections officers suffer from PTSD. This compares to 14% of military veterans.
The suicide rate among corrections officers is twice as high as that of both police officers & the general public, according to a New Jersey police taskforce. An earlier national study found that corrections officers’ suicide risk was 39% higher than all other professions combined.
“Right now, we’re about where the military was 10, 15 years ago when it comes to them dealing with PTSD,” Van Patten tells me. Nearly 20 of his fellow officers have committed suicide since he started working in corrections. He nearly became a statistic himself.
Van Patten was assaulted when he was helping a nurse give a rectal exam to an inmate suspected of packing drugs. As he was reaching down to grab the inmate’s ankles to flip him over, the inmate came down on Van Patten’s back, dislocating his skull from his spinal vertebrae. Van Patten couldn’t walk for 5 months, nor could he hold his newborn child.
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Most of his job, around 95% as he estimates, is pretty mundane. Every day he does a cell count, keeps an eye on inmate’s activities, fetches someone toilet paper. This goes on for 8 or, often, 16 hours straight – sometimes without a lunch break, depending on the day.
It’s the other 5% that leads to the extraordinarily high rate of PTSD: dealing with inmate violence, coming home with faeces smeared all over his uniform, trying to stop suicide attempts.
Van Patten said the biggest stress factor is not knowing when crisis situations may arise. This leads to permanent hyper-vigilance, “because we go into a place where we have control, but yet we don’t have control, because the inmates let us run the prison. If they wanted to, they could take it. They’re compliant until they choose not to be,” he said.
As soon as a CO enters a prison, he or she goes into battle mode. “We put on our armour. When you walk through the first gate, it clicks. And so does your back,” says Michael Morgan, an ex-officer at Oregon state penitentiary. “You’re in the pressure cooker” for at least 8 hours – the duration of one shift.
Corrections wisdom dictates that you deal with trauma by not dealing with it at all. “They teach us to leave it at the gate,” said Morgan. “Eight and the gate” is the unofficial motto.
But even off-duty, the guards are always on edge. At an interview over lunch, Jeff Hernandez, another CO at Oregon state penitentiary, requested to swap places at a restaurant so he could sit facing the entrance of the room. This is a common quirk among those working in corrections.
COs say working in prison has significant long-term effects on your personality. Van Patten said the job changed him within 6 months. He became more cynical, withdrawn & aggressive.
“You almost become non-human, robotic, emotionless,” said Charles Ewlad, the warden at Riverhead correctional facility at the eastern end of New York’s Long Island. When he first started, “people came to work hammered every day. That was the deal.” This is no longer the status quo, though substance abuse is still a widespread coping mechanism.
“I went to work every day & I put this persona on,” Van Patten said. He has seen inmates show up at recreational activities with a 9-inch shank sticking out of their eye, others hang themselves, & still others cut their arteries & bleed to death.
“I didn’t know how to release the stuff I kept dreaming about. You’re doing tier count & you’re watching a human being die in front of your eyes because he’s coughing up lungs & screaming with his eyes for help & there’s nothing you can do,” Van Patten said. “Even though he’s an inmate, he’s still human; you’re still human.”
On the first day of work, his son Trevor – who also works as a corrections officer – remembers seeing the remains of a prisoner who was beaten to death by other inmates. “You see people smashing pumpkins on Halloween. Imagine all of the orange being red. And then all the orange on the outside being white. That’s what it looked like on first image. That’s a human being.” An hour after that he was eating lunch, then went back to work.
‘When I was struggling, nobody helped me’
In the years & months leading up to his attempted suicide, Michael suffered from all the typical symptoms of PTSD: insomnia, cold sweats, phantom violence while asleep. He worked out obsessively & self-medicated with alcohol.
He didn’t even know what PTSD was at the time. That’s partly because it’s not something that COs talked about. The culture is tough & macho, and any sign of vulnerability, especially a mental health diagnosis, carries stigma.
“Officers can never be weak. Inmates can never be weak. It’s its own world,” said Brian Baisley, the head of the medical evaluation unit at Riverhead.
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Jeff Hernandez, the CO at Oregon state penitentiary, recalls one incident where an officer working on the notoriously difficult intensive management unit had a breakdown & burst into tears on the job. “I know from talking to several people there really still is an undercurrent of ‘You never should have done that on the unit’,” he said.
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PTSD is considered taboo partly because many fear a diagnosis will have negative repercussions on their career prospects.
“They won’t get diagnosed because of the stigma,” Michael Van Patten says. Many are afraid that they will be put through a “fit for duty” test with a state psychologist as a result, & will be decertified.
Some corrections officers at Oregon state penitentiary & Riverhead in Long Island do not think prison is a rehabilitative solution, merely a punitive one. “There’s got to be a better way to do things than put, say, James here in a corridor with 30 inmates for 8 hours,” says Charles Ewlad, warden of Riverhead.
“We’re doing time too, we’re just getting paid for it,” says Brian Dawes, head of the American Correctional Officer Intelligence Network. The national average annual wage for a CO is $44,910, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In California this can go up to $100,000.
In 2013, Van Patten decided to go public within his department about his attempted suicide, out of concern over the recent slate of staff suicides. “I finally thought that I’d been around there long enough, that someone had to break the ice.”
He recorded a video of himself speaking to his son Trevor about the incident. That was the first time they ever spoke about it together. The film was screened at the annual in-service training.
Jeff Hernandez remembers feeling shocked when he saw the video in that context: “I was not prepared because his personality has never been where I could even consider the possibility of him trying to do something like that.”
But some COs still feel the stigma of having mental health issues. Michael Morgan, the ex-CO, was diagnosed with PTSD. He said that when he reached out to the state’s mental health emergency hotline & the department during his extended breakdown, they were dismissive of him once he said that he wasn’t feeling suicidal.
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Morgan’s mental health struggles started when he was pulled over in 2010 for driving while drunk. He spent 32 hours on the other side of the bars for the first time while he was waiting to be arraigned. “I pretty much hit rock bottom,” he said. “When I was struggling, nobody helped me.”
A year later, he got a decertification notice based on multiple charges. ...
“There were times when I got off a 12-hour shift that I would go out in my truck & I would turn the radio up as far as it would go for 5 to 10 minutes, just to feel something different that I could say: ‘OK, I can feel this rather than the other sensation’.”
It was during this period that Morgan ended up in the psychiatric ward. He was driving in the car with his wife when he pulled over, put on the emergency brake & told his wife to call the police on him: “I didn’t feel in control & I knew that that’s not a good thing.”
Morgan was diagnosed with PTSD on the psychiatric ward. Although this seal caused him a lot of anxiety, it actually helped him in his appeal to the decertification panel.
Once he submitted his medical paperwork, instead of firing him they transferred him from security to a non-security job under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
He is now the co-facilitator of a mental health training program at Oregon state penitentiary &, along with Michael Van Patten, is making an example of himself to raise awareness of PTSD.
“But,” Van Patten said, “you can’t change a culture over night.”
Torture of Gitmo & Abu Ghraib detainees doesn't upset one when one considers that mentally ill prisoners are so inhumanely abused in mainland US. Deaths & tortures of African-Americans become less of a surprise when one compares those incidents with this news. After all, those detainees were not even Americans & belonged to a different religion & ethnicity. After all, those African-Americans were of sound mental health (at least most were).
I'm definitely not saying that torturing POWs (Prisoners of War) is all ok or abusing & killing of African-Americans by American cops is ok from any perspective.
What I am saying that in American culture / society, the top brass (government) is showing with their actions, around the world (foreign policy), that the powerful should & can do anything to the powerless without any fear of reprisals or punishment. Even if the army or police do get caught & sentenced, they are out in the general population within a few short months.
The concept, at least in the corporate world, is becoming common that leadership is a very important factor in the success of a company. Leadership defines the culture & tone of the whole organization.
Well, ironically, American governmental leadership has spread this notion in its own citizens that the powerful should eat the lunch of powerless with impunity. It spread this idea by invading countries at will & unilaterally, & killing anyone it likes, without any fear of reprisals. American leadership takes those reprehensible actions because they think that since their army is the largest & most powerful in the world, they can do anything to the powerless. Well, that same idea has sown itself in the common citizenry, where law enforcement authorities (cops) & law enforcement apparatus (prisons) are abusing the powerless with impunity.
You reap what you sow !!!
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Human Rights Watch has issued a report stating that mentally ill prisoners are being abused in detention facilities across the US, & that these practices are happening in over 5,000 facilities.
The activist group says inmates are being subjected to unnecessary & excessive use of force, & the problem is widespread.
The report provides details of cases where inmates were shocked with Tasers, & where pepper spray was used against them.
In some cases, prisoners were left in restraint chairs for days, or put in scalding showers.
“I think the public & legislators for far too long have been willing to send people to prison, without thinking a whole lot about what life behind bars [is like]. And what goes on behind bars is often hidden, people don’t know what is happening,” Jamie Fellner, one of the report’s authors & senior adviser at Human Rights Watch, told RT.
“What we wanted to focus on was <…> the fact that in so many cases when force wasn’t required, when you had non-violent, minor non-threatening misconduct by a prisoner that didn’t need to be responded to with force,” Fellner concluded.
Among the especially troubling cases was Nick Christie, a 62-year-old man who had recently stopped taking his medications for depression & anxiety. He was incarcerated in Florida in 2009 for a nonviolent misdemeanor.
At one point, locked in his cell & crying out for medical help, he kept yelling & banging on the cell door.
Prison officials sprayed him with chemical spray over a dozen times in 36 hours, & immobilized him in a restraint chair with a spit mask covering his face. He died from cardiac arrest.
Another Florida prisoner diagnosed with schizophrenia defecated on the floor of his cell & refused to clean it up.
Officers allegedly put him in a scalding shower, left him there for over an hour, & the inmate subsequently died.
However, the case that specifically caught the attention of human rights activists was 35-year-old Christopher Lopez. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic & was discovered on his cell floor semi-conscious.
Staff failed to call medics & instead put Lopez in a restraint chair. A few hours later, he experienced a severe seizure.
The officers finally released him from the chair, but left him lying handcuffed on the floor. Lopez died a few hours later. His lawyer spoke to RT about the case.
“His mother had contacted me & said he had died in custody, she went to look at the body and saw signs of abuse. That got me interested, I got hold of the autopsy report, & began to investigate it,” attorney David Lane said.
“What appeared to be the cause of death was an overdose of psychotropic medication to the point of electrolyte imbalance, & his heart was slowly stopping,” he added.
The lawyer also told RT that the general attitude towards mentally ill inmates in the US is that they are a “management problem,” & they are dealt with like this, “as opposed to mentally ill human beings.”
Around 20% of prisoners in the US have a serious mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder & major depression, according to a press release issued by Human Rights Watch. Inmates suffering from such conditions often find it difficult to cope with imprisonment & to comply with instructions.
A great opinion piece. Simply fantastic. Left me speechless. Some points in it were similar to what I've been saying all along in my blog posts (for example, I've always said that slavery has not ended but immigration in the developed world is a form of slavery when migrants are considered second-class citizens, & regardless of how much US & the developed world lectures the developing world on human rights abuses, the developed world itself has a far worse continuing record in human rights abuses). A must-read piece.
Only thing I will add here is that although, this opinion piece is focused on African-Americans, I will add all minorities in it; be it South Asians or Latinos. Any & all minority, which is "coloured", is very adversely affected by North American racism on a daily basis. If you see there that I mentioned "North American," because racism is as much in US as in Canada. We, Canadians, may think there's no or far less racism in Canada than US, but ask any minority in Canada how they are faring in Canadian society, & they will tell you how racism has affected them.
A great line from the piece: "Rather than the land of the free, the United States of America is the land of cruelty & barbarity, a corporate dictatorship under which the poor & dispossessed are locked out of society, denied healthcare, housing, education, & life chances compatible with a humane system of government & economy."
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Organizers from the group, Ferguson Action, declared recently that, “The war on Black people in Baltimore is the same war on Black people across America. Decades of poverty, unemployment, under-funded schools & police terrorism have reached a boiling point in Baltimore & cities around the country."
The scenes of civil unrest in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray – the latest in an alarming number of young black man to end up dead at the hands of the police or while in police custody – broke with a recent pattern of non-violent protest & attempts to gain justice & redress through the system. Despite 6 of the cops involved in the Freddie Gray case being charged with Gray’s homicide, it remains to be seen whether the unrest in Baltimore is a one-off event or a deepening of a developing crisis that appears to have no end in sight.
According to figures compiled by the Free Thought Project – a US justice advocacy group – 136 people had been killed by the police across the country. It’s a figure that makes sober reading when we break it down into 1 victim every 8 hours, or 3 per day. No other industrialized nation compares in this regard, highlighting the extent to which social cohesion in a country that extends itself in lecturing other nations around the world on human rights is near non-existent.
That said, those included in the aforementioned number of victims of police violence are not only black people, & it is a fact that more white people have been killed by the police than black, until of course we break that statistic down to factor in the proportion of black victims from the population as a whole.
It would be a mistake to put this crisis down to a few rogue & racist cops. It runs much deeper than that, exposing the ugly truth of a society that operates according to the maxim of all against all. In other words, the culture of racism & brutality that pervades increasingly militarized police departments is a symptom of the foundation of injustice upon which the nation & its institutions rest. Rather than the land of the free, the United States of America is the land of cruelty & barbarity, a corporate dictatorship under which the poor & dispossessed are locked out of society, denied healthcare, housing, education, & life chances compatible with a humane system of government & economy.
The corollary to this is a male prison population of over 2 million that is disproportionately black, making the US, a country that makes up just 5% of the entire world's population, home to a quarter of the entire world’s prison population. This in itself is a withering indictment of a nation that extends itself in claiming exceptionalism based on its self-appointed status as the land of the free. This view is based on a belief that the majority of crimes are a product of poverty, alienation, & social exclusion. The black American novelist, Ralph Ellison, in his most famous novel – ‘Invisible Man’ – opines that, “Crime is an act of unconscious rebellion.”
In the US in 2015 there is much to rebel about.
I saw it for myself during a recent visit to Los Angeles, a city where the sheer number of homeless human beings is simply staggering. Everywhere I went I came across them shuffling up & down the street mumbling to themselves, carrying their earthly belongings in plastic bags or, if they’re lucky, pushing them in a shopping kart.
This huge colony of homeless people exists in the entertainment capital of the world, home to Hollywood, where the mythology of the American dream projects the lie that poverty & social exclusion are products of individual failure rather than systemic failure, while material wealth & success is a measure of human worth & moral rectitude. It is of course a lie, one that has succeeded in acting as a smokescreen to conceal the widening & deepening cracks in the nation's foundations.
Those suffering under the weight of this system should not expect to receive any succor from Washington anytime soon.
On the contrary, here resides a political culture & political class slavishly devoted to the rights, interests, & advancement of corporations & their very rich executives, shareholders, & investors – i.e. the rich. The by-product of this culture has been the normalization of social & economic injustice, which as mentioned is the foundation of a foreign policy of war, military intervention, & the blithe disregard for international law & national sovereignty as & when those aforementioned corporate interests dictate.
Some may question the validity of linking US foreign policy to the state of its society at home, but they'd be wrong. Both are inextricably linked, forging a circular relationship of injustice, violence, leading inexorably to atomization & crises. Malcolm X put it best when he said, “You can’t understand what’s going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand what’s going on in the Congo.”
In the US class & race constitute two sides of the same coin. Black people make up around 13% of the population, which translates to just over 30 million people, the majority of whom can trace their roots in the country to slavery, with the argument gaining traction that the plantation still exists for young black males today in the shape of a vast network of Federal & State correctional facilities.
No justice, no peace & black lives matter are the clarion calls of a movement that has emerged in response to a wave of violence committed by police departments viewed increasingly as forces of occupation rather than law & order.
Who will guard the guardians?
Ghulam Hassan is in the mood to celebrate Eid ... 3 months early. His 1.5-acre farm in a small village in Helmand province has been blooming with white & crimson flowers. Now the petals are just beginning to drop, giving way to round, sticky, pungent green pods. In a few more days the pods will swell to the size of a bulb. This is when Mr Hassan’s family of 14 will move in. They will carefully slice open the bulbs & collect the oozing white latex or resin – the main ingredient in heroin.
“This is a bumper crop. The yield will be enough to feed my family for more than a year,” Mr Hassan said, gazing gleefully at his poppy field just outside the village of Hajj Alam in the Nehri Saraj district.
He is one of thousands of Afghan farmers who, despite the best efforts first of the US-led coalition & now of the country’s own anti-narcotics department, are growing more poppies than ever before.
Not only is the income from opium up to $1,800 (£1,200) per acre, some 12 times higher than that from conventional crops, but there is another, more insidious factor at work. Last year, like the year before that, Hassan had sown wheat.
“I borrowed from relatives & friends to buy seeds & fertilisers. The harvest was good,” he said. “But that’s where the good news ended. Because of the Taliban threat, truck drivers were not willing to carry the produce to bigger markets. As a result, most of my wheat rotted in the field. The crop was lost & I was left with a $4,000 debt.”
Dozens of Mr Hassan’s neighbours too have discarded wheat, maize & vegetable crops for opium poppies, which not only gives them easy access to credit & protection from the Taliban, but also fetches more money.
There is no sign that the Afghan government, now supposed to be policing the whole country itself since the formal conclusion of the US-led combat operation last year, is bringing the Taliban under control. More than 7 months after President Ashraf Ghani took office, Afghanistan still does not have a Defence Minister, & the security situation is deteriorating nationwide.
Meanwhile, the prospect of a higher income at a time of growing insecurity is driving more & more farmers to take up poppy cultivation. Last year, according to official Afghan & UN figures, the total area under opium poppy cultivation in the country rose by 7%, to more than 550,000 acres. Helmand, with almost 300,000 acres, had the dubious distinction of being Afghanistan’s biggest poppy-growing province.
Officials in the ministry of counter-narcotics say that Helmand is on course to set a record for poppy-growing this year, with the area under the crop rising a further 16%.
It is bad news for Colonel Mohamed Abdali, head of the interior ministry’s counter-narcotics police team in Helmand, whose already difficult job is becoming ever more challenging. Colonel Abdali is responsible for eradicating the province’s poppy fields. For the past 4 months, he & his 80-man team have been gathering information, mapping & photographing the fields. “We have prepared our own database – location of the fields, area under the crop, owners, etc,” Colonel Abdali said. “We send this data to the counter-narcotics ministry & on its clearance, destroy the fields.
“We have only a small, one-and-a-half month window to destroy the crop. It’s best to clear the field when the poppy has blossomed. Eradicating the crop before that allows a farmer to replant & regrow.” As he spoke, he signalled his men to mount 4 US-made Massey Ferguson tractors. Escorted by 15 armed soldiers in 3 police vans, they began to roll towards Trikh Nawar, ... some 20 miles from where Mr Hassan was preparing to harvest his crop.
The convoy makes its first stop at Haji Mamoon Khan’s field, & soldiers jump out to take up defensive positions. On Colonel Abdali’s signal, 5 men set off carefully to search for mines or any hidden improvised-explosive devices. “We always follow this drill. We are the enemies of both the Taliban & the drug dealers, said Colonel Abdali. “The villagers are also hostile to us. We have to keep our eyes & ears open for lurking Taliban fighters, roadside bombs & IEDs. We can’t take any chances.”
When a whistle from the field gave an “all-clear” signal, 2 tractors set about ploughing up Mr Khan’s poppies.
“They have ruined me & my family,” said the farmer, contemplating the crop that he had nurtured for months. “The produce would have helped me pay for my wife’s surgery & for my son’s wedding. But it’s all gone now. I can’t bring home happiness.”
His quiet sobs seem to unsettle the young colonel. “I know I am destroying someone’s livelihood. An entire family was depending on this crop,” Colonel Abdali said. “But it would have destroyed so many other families.”
The next day, as the team prepared to enter another poppy farm, Colonel Abdali received a phone call back at his Lashkar Gah HQ. “There’s been a landmine explosion,” the caller said. “One officer is dead, one is wounded.”
“Do not touch anything. Come out of the farm. Tread only on the tractor tyre marks,” Colonel Abdali warned.
The explosion, in Trikh Nawar, came as Sayed Shah, a counter-narcotics officer, was trying to defuse a mine. His body, covered by a tarpaulin, was lying in an ambulance, & 2 soldiers were bleeding from head wounds. As the ambulance was about to pull away, a phone rang in the dead soldier’s pocket. Colonel Abdali pulled out the phone to answer it. The caller was the soldier’s brother. “Sayed Shah is a martyr now. We are bringing him home,” Colonel Abdali told him.
Although, the protests in Baltimore & Ferguson are long gone, & hopefully, not forgotten, the tyranny of modern media continues unabated & unabashedly.
Journalism used to be, & still is, a very respected profession, but just like several other professions (lawyer, politician, & even religious clergy) is now corrupted & a hollow of its former glory & respect.
Now, the modern media is all about ratings, sales, & marketing. It is only there to spread more chaos & hatred through sensational stories, & going as far as, fabricating stories (like it happened in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War & once again, before the Iraq war in 2003).
But, then can we really blame the media for further inciting violence & hatred, & stoking the public's anger? Can we really blame the media for not even reporting on those stories, which don't have some kind of "juice" & "drama" in them? As this opinion piece & several other articles said that cameras in Baltimore weren't even rolling until protestors became violent. Peaceful protests weren't even covered & then so-called journalists, news anchors, & media personalities openly questioned why these protestors are so violent, even though, they never saw peaceful protests, which happened for days on end.
Anyway, I'd say that the modern media & the general public are both equally to blame. Why? Because, the media is all about marketing its services to the public. They are a business, after all. So, you need to ask yourself that why do the viewer ratings only go up when media is showing violence & sensational news stories. Because, it's what the general public craves. A TV news story is boring if no drama is happening in it.
Media is a very powerful way to help resolve such heavy issues as justice, peace, equality etc. TV news can very easily either inflame the society & turn people against each other, & hence, stalling any improvement, whatsoever, taking place in terms of justice & equality among the general public, OR, it can solve those same problems the society is suffering from, by starting a deep dialogue & showing how & what people are doing to improve relations & mending differences; be it ethnic, racial, cultural, or regional.
After all, we, humans are not so different from each other. Tyranny of the popular media seems to be creating more rifts in our society for its own profitability at the expense of social harmony.
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If it were ever in doubt, the protests in Baltimore have shown us once again that only some types of violence are visible, or really matter. As demonstrations in this US city surged following the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, the terrible violence of that death - on top of so many more, at the hands of US police - was sidelined out of the story.
Gray was arrested when he fled after "catching the eye" of a police officer & his neck was broken while in police custody, but it was the smashed glass storefronts on Baltimore's streets that became the focus of concern.
The US media went into overdrive with its depiction of "chaos, violence & lawlessness" as MSNBC put it. Collective establishment heads were shaken at the looting.
The clear racist overtones in the coverage of "black rioters", as news website Breitbart.com headlined it or of "thugs" on a rampage, as so many more news organisations depicted it, was routinely denied, while widespread haranguing using the trump card of "protest violence" took hold.
Peaceful protests
CNN host Wolf Blitzer demanded that Baltimore community organiser Deray McKesson denounce violence and support only peaceful protests.
"You are suggesting broken windows are worse than broken spines," came the response to this attempt to redefine the significant details of the story, in a city that has already paid out nearly $6m to alleged victims of police brutality, including a grandmother and a pregnant woman.
And so here it is again: The stealthy tyranny of the "non-violent" proviso demanded of popular protests. Events in Baltimore are symptomatic of & particular to the US & its bloody history of state & social violence, in all its forms, against black Americans from slavery to the streets today. But the unrepresentative & wholly marginal violence of broken windows is invariably invoked against all protests that are struggles against power & its abuses.
From the streets of England during its riots of 2011, or back to the anti-capitalists protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999; the IMF in Prague & the G8 summit in Genoa; from the protests engulfing marginalised French suburbs, to Ferguson in the US, right across to the Palestinian struggle to be free from occupation - all these movements against inequality & injustice are bound by the media depiction of protest as suddenly, senselessly "violent".
Such loaded appraisals are wilfully blind to the fact that situations never go from total calm to sudden violence. There is a daily, pervasive state violence that is never spoken of, much less acknowledged: for Palestinians living under a brutal military occupation; for marginalised, disenfranchised young people in British cities or French suburbs; for African Americans disproportionately impoverished, disadvantaged & preyed upon by US police, surviving generation upon generation of institutionalised & violent racism; for the global South diminished & drained by neo-liberal policies imposed upon it by the IMF & the WTO.
The violence never starts with protesters on the streets - it's just that this is the moment the cameras decide to start filming. In this context, it takes a special kind of struggle-free, reality-blind sanctimony for media commentators to start preaching about the need for non-violence.
Moreover, the disproportionate focus on the violence of broken windows & looted shops ignores the full panorama of these issues: the lengthy, ongoing debates within protest movements over the merits & drawbacks of violence (against property, not people) as a tactic; the attempts within communities to prevent & guard against violence, or dissipate tensions, or take action to clear up in the aftermath; the pressure-cooker conditions created by ramped up, over-militarised, heavy-handed & often provocative policing; the simple fact that movements unite over causes if not always tactics; or just that understanding why a few people might steal trainers during protests is not at all the same as justifying such behaviour.
Instead, the "non-violence" theme is rolled out precisely to prevent any such debate over causes, context or history. This media preoccupation is in place to ensure that we stop talk about anything else.
We know the Martin Luther King quote: "A riot is the language of the unheard." The question is why, after so long, are these voices still not listened to? And who is it that doesn't want us to hear them?
Rachel Shabi is a journalist & author of Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands.
Since, I have previously blogged a few times how the American criminal justice is all racially biased & "arrest & sentence now, ask questions later," I won't reiterate my thoughts here. This piece is quite great in explaining how the US criminal justice benefits a few at the expense of many.
While reading this great opinion piece, you do have to keep in mind that this is currently happening, & has been happening, in US, & not in some Middle Eastern country or some other 3rd world country. This is the country which touts its human rights record around the world while its criminal justice system is so flawed that African-Americans are now out on the streets, protesting against decades of oppression & marginalization.
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Walter Scott, a 50-year-old black man killed by a South Carolina police officer during a chase that millions of people have now viewed on video, is the latest victim of a criminal justice system whose tentacles have reshaped the very nature of American democracy.
This latest shooting illustrates how the relationship between law enforcement & poor & working-class communities of color requires a fundamental transformation. The necessary political & policy changes will need to be amplified by a cultural shift that can stop the criminalization of black & brown bodies in the US.
The simple reason why police officers can often routinely brutalize &, in certain horrific instances such as Scott’s, even execute black citizens is the consent they essentially receive from the US criminal justice system & other political & civic institutions.
Over the past 35 years, America’s criminal justice system, swept up by the hysteria over the rise of crack cocaine & the broader War on Drugs, has transformed into a system of racial control, oppression & containment that has often turned the idea of black citizenship into an Orwellian nightmare. Racial disparities in death sentences between whites & blacks became glaring enough to help change former pro-death penalty Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun into a notable dissenter by 1994.
Legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s bestselling The New Jim Crow revealed a stunning indictment of a criminal justice system that has allowed wide-scale racial profiling lead to mass arrests, incarceration for nonviolent offenses, & for those who leave prison, a segregated existence that in too many ways replicates the political disfranchisement of racial apartheid.
Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged as much in his 2013 speech granting federal prosecutors more discretion in handling drug-crime cases. The police are the tip of the spear in a system that includes prosecutors, judges, probation officers & politicians.
Democrats & Republicans have both contributed to this new status quo. President Ronald Reagan, the conservative icon, signed the 1980s antidrug bills that effectively racialized drug crimes; users & dealers of crack cocaine (many of whom are black) are punished far more harshly than users of powdered cocaine (many of whom are white). President Bill Clinton, who Toni Morrison once called the nation’s “first black president,” signed crime & welfare reform bills that blocked ex-offenders’ access to public housing, food stamps & other vital support. Many lost voting rights as well.
Even as national crime rates declined throughout the 1990s, the federal government, through its Byrne grants, distributed billions of dollars to state & local law enforcement authorities. The resulting militarization of many police forces appeared to offer police another incentive to detain & arrest some of the most vulnerable citizens.
The justice system’s punitive nature & rapacious appetite mean that blacks who are released from prison often have too little opportunity available. Former inmates suffer high rates of unemployment, lack resources to complete education, cannot vote & can be returned to jail for a litany of nonviolent offenses, among them failure to pay child support, the reason Scott is suspected of having run from the officer.
The elephant in the room is that America’s three-decade-long prison boom, which now accounts for about 2 million inmates from roughly 350,000 inmates in 1980, has been largely driven by drug arrests & what looks like a targeting of black and brown men & women.
Police shootings of unarmed black men are the most visible manifestations of a virtual normalization of black criminality. US politicians & the public often appear to lack empathy & presume guilt in connection with many people of color.
The recommendations from the Obama administration’s interim taskforce on policing in the 21st century do not fully acknowledge the scale of this crisis. Law enforcement’s tentacles have invaded US public schools, welfare offices, voting booths & popular culture.
The presumption of guilt & innocence is important here. Studies have shown that whites are often given second chances. One recent study revealed stunning results about the degree of white privilege allowed. African-Americans face a starker reality: One youthful indiscretion can mean a lifetime of living on the margins — or worse.
Can such as system be transformed? Yes, but not if we refuse to diagnose the problem. America’s prison-industrial complex is a booming business that has successfully monetized the criminalization of African-Americans through private prisons, federal grants & an entertainment industry that pushes images of black criminality to young people like a drug dealer pushes designer narcotics.
The US justice system needs to be reimagined so radically that police officers can see that black people, however flawed & imperfect, are not only citizens worthy of respect but also human beings deserving of dignity whose lives matter greatly.
