Captial Punishment is Wrong

Hola Everybody,
The following is in reference to the case of Troy Davis, an unfairly convicted human being who is scheduled to be executed in two weeks… If you’re not familiar with the story, Troy Davis was convicted of murdering a Georgia police officer in 1991. Nearly twenty years later, Davis remains on death row -- even though the case against him has fallen apart.

The case against him consisted entirely of witness testimony which contained inconsistencies even at the time of the trial. Since then, all but two of the state’s non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or contradicted their testimony.

Many of these witnesses have stated in sworn affidavits that they were pressured or coerced by police into testifying or signing statements against Troy Davis.

In addition, nine individuals have signed affidavits implicating Sylvester Coles, the leading alternative suspect.

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-=[ Capital Punishment: Immoral and Ineffective ]=-

The other night, during the GOP debate, the biggest applause line came when Texas Governor Rick Perry, a man who has sanctioned the deaths of 234 people (more than any other governor in US history), admitted he has never lost a wink of sleep over the matter. There was a couple of telling moments. Earlier in the debate a question about 9/11, and President Obama's decision to attack and execute Osama bin Laden drew not a single clap. The other occurred the following night during President Obama's speech on a proposed jobs bill, when not one single conservative applauded for teachers, firemen, policemen, and collective bargaining.

I can’t say I am surprised by such reactions, since it is well-known that the conservative mindset tends toward authoritarianism. Still, these reactions, I thought to myself, make it entirely possible that today’s conservatives was what Shirley Jackson envisioned when she wrote The Lottery.

Today I am not going into details about the Troy Davis case, though, whatever your feelings about state-sanctioned murder, his case should worry you because it’s likely we’re murdering an innocent man for a crime he didn’t commit. I think we might disagree on the pros and cons of capital punishment, but we should all be in agreement that justice should be, well, just. His case is almost lost but if you care, please sign a petition for the Georgia Board of pardons to consider (click here)

Not long ago, I witnessed a frustrated mother physically punishing one child for hitting his sibling. “You. Don’t. Hit. Your. Bro-ther,” she railed loudly, punctuating each syllable with a hard slap to the head, hand, and butt. It amazes me how many parents, claiming to teach respect and dignity, make no connection to the fact that by hitting a child, you’re also teaching them that the way to get your way is through physical aggression and dominance. I’m not surprised these two children fought incessantly for their mother was reinforcing their behavior.

Since as far back as the nineteenth century, evidence has shown that there is no relationship between severity of punishment and crime rate. Would Americans do the same today if it were demonstrated to them that killing criminals doesn’t make the streets any safer? It’s hard to say, but I seriously doubt it. We’re a vengeful group that worships a vengeful god.

To be sure, many support capital punishment for other reasons. For example, many individuals support electrocuting, poisoning, or shooting people who fail to respect the sacredness of human life. Because you killed someone, we will kill you seems to be the rationale. This is somewhat analogous to the mother teaching her children non-violence by demonstrating violent behavior.

The United States is nearly alone developed nations: Most industrialized nations have come to regard death penalty in the same most regard slavery: it’s morally wrong.

Opponents against the death penalty have more than morality on their side as arguments, however. For example, there is the very real possibility of executing someone innocent and the fact that race (of both convicted and victim) and class is a deciding factor in who actually gets executed. One Texas defendant was executed though his legal counsel fell asleep numerous times during the proceedings. Overwhelmingly, the color of one’s skin is the leading factor in who gets executed (click here). Two of the country’s foremost researchers on race and capital punishment, law professor David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth, along with colleagues in Philadelphia, conducted a careful analysis of race and the death penalty in Philadelphia, for example, which revealed that the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black. These results were obtained after analyzing and controlling for case differences such as the severity of the crime and the background of the defendant. The data were subjected to various forms of analysis, but the conclusion was clear: blacks were being sentenced to death far in excess of other defendants for similar crimes (click here).

But that’s a topic I won’t get into at this moment. Right now, let’s just look at capital punishment’s effects on crime. The question I’m putting forth here is whether capital punishment is a better deterrent than life imprisonment. The answer, according to the evidence, is that the two penalties are both equally ineffective.

At first glance, it seems like common sense that the looming threat of losing one’s life would keep would-be criminals in line. However, a closer, more intelligent, look reveals the majority of murders are committed 1) during a moment of rage, 2) under the influence of drugs and alcohol, or 3) unexpectedly, in the course of committing another crime, such as a robbery. In any of these cases, the killer doesn’t sit down and rationally weigh the pros and cons of what will happen when he is apprehended, so a consideration of the death penalty isn’t going to stop him.

In fact, critical, careful thought about why people break the law not only leads us to question the effectiveness of capital punishment in particular, but also presents a challenge to the idea that incarcerating more people for longer periods of time is a rational response to crime in general. Want proof? Well, put this in your pipe and smoke it for a bit: Despite the fact that the US already incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world, crimes rates are far higher than in most other countries. The conservative/ neoconservative assumption that crime rates were rising because the “costs” of crime in America were too low, is simply put, wrong. In fact, there is credible evidence that shows that too much incarceration serves to destabilize communities, therefore making those communities less safe (click here)

But I digress, the question at hand is whether capital punishment is a better deterrent than life imprisonment. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that capital punishment isn’t a deterrent since criminologists have never found any crime-reducing advantage correlated to capital punishment. Actually, there was one (much-celebrated) study by an economist, Isaac Ehrlich, that claimed to find support for the “fact” that each additional execution resulted in eight prevented homicides. The problem was Ehrlich's study was seriously flawed. It hinged on the on the fact that more murders were committed in the 1960s, when fewer executions were taking place. Of course, he ignored regional differences in the murder rate and other possible reasons for the increase in homicides (the easier availability of guns, for one). In addition, it turns out that other crimes of violence -- the kind that had never been punishable by death -- increased even more rapidly than homicides. Hmmmm...

In any case, other researchers have since tried to look for and failed to find the effects that Ehrlich arrived at. This makes sense considering the fact that economists have a long-standing poor record in research, and this particular study contradicted everything done before then. In 1978, the National Academy of Sciences studied and rejected Ehrlich's methodology (he used a technique known as regression analysis) and concluded that there was no useful evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment. In other words, we don’t know. And surely a practice as drastic as killing someone should be considered only if we do know that it makes our lives better and our communities safer.

But researchers being the dense people they are, two leading criminologists decided that just in case regression analyses did make sense in this context, it was worth giving it another shot. They studied homicides and executions in New York State from every month from 1907 to 1963 and found that the death penalty not only failed to reduce the murder rate but actually seemed to increase it. On average, two additional murders occurred during the month following the execution. These researchers extrapolated that the death penalty had what they termed a “brutalizing effect” that was most likely due to criminals taking their cue from the state and imitating its violence. Sounds like parents who beat their children to me!

The researchers summarized, “The lesson of the execution, then, may be to devalue life [and to teach] that it is correct and appropriate to kill those who have gravely offended us.” Another writer put it more succinctly in the Journal of Law and Criminology, “Use of the death penalty by the state, despite an intention to convey the message that killing is unacceptable, may convey the opposite message to the public.” In other words (and as all parents should already know): action speaks louder than words.

Of course, the methodology used by these researchers is as equally debatable as it was when Ehrlich used it. However, it still follows that, using the same methodology, the conclusion remains the same: the death penalty does not act as a deterrent against homicides. In fact, there has never been a case where homicides went up after a state abolished capital punishment. In addition, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be those where the death penalty is used. Other research has found that the same is true globally. One study combed through old crime records to what happened in twelve countries that had abolished capital punishment between 1890 and 1968 and found that “abolition was followed more often than not by absolute decreases in homicide rates.” [emphasis added]

Anyone seriously concerned in making our cities safer would do better to look into the real root causes of crime. The consensus among those who have looked at this issue is that capital punishment is not a deterrent to murder. Anyone claiming to be pro death under the guise of being pro “law and order,” should probably reconsider their beliefs. And any human being who states they can sleep peacefully after ordering the murder of another human being is quite possibly a sociopath. But we seem to like to elect those into office.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… Love,

Resources

If you would like to experience a compelling look at the issue moral of capital punishment, check out the film, The Exonerated (click here)

If you're interested in studying crime and punishment without the academic jargon, check out Elliott Currie's Crime and Punishment in America (click here). Prepare to have your opinions, biases, and assumptions challenged.

Not too long ago, the NY Times published an article on how exonerations through the use of DNA are forcing state lawmakers across to the country to change laws (click here).

Ball of Confusion (Madness)

¡Hola! Everybody...
What can I say? There’s sooooo much going on in the world today it’s hard to figure out where to start... (lots of links!)

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-=[ It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World ]=-

It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.

-- Elizabeth Taylor

First, while the mostly conservative US media and political class assure us that toxic sludge (or at least “safe nuclear reactors”) are good for us, you’d better not drink the water (or milk) in Japan, cuz, you know, the radiation levels are kinda/ sorta above levels. Shit, I live about 25 miles from a steaming mess of nuke that’s more dangerous than the Japanese glow-in-the-dark one. Imagine trying to evacuate about 22,232,494 (more or less) people from the NY Metro area? We’re not very polite... LOL

I find it ironic that the same people who were after the Village Idiot’s head (on a platter) for waging war under false pretexts and redistributing wealth (upwards), now applaud Obama as he does the same. In fact, we’re fighting three wars right now. Teachers are being fired, jobs (and record profits) continue to be outsourced, republican state governors are trying to bring us back to the days of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire tragedy, and we just ejaculated 131 Tomahawk missiles at $1 million a pop.

Hold on while I sneeze:

::ACHOOO-HYPOCRITES::

Sorry, but I’m allergic to moral cowardice.

On the entertainment front, raging beauty, talented actor, compassionate activist, Elizabeth Taylor passed away. The first time I saw The Last time I saw Paris, I was so struck by her beauty, it felt as if her image was burned into my brain synapses. What a gorgeous freak of nature! IMNSO, Taylor was matched in beauty and talent only by the as sublime Dorothy Dandridge (who, unfortunately, wasn’t allowed to shine). Taylor also cared, she left the world a little better than she found it, AFAIC.

I spent all day yesterday meeting with lawmakers and attempting to sway their positions regarding criminal justice policy. The event was part of a coalition of organizations that included a group from the Juvenile Justice movement. Right now NY State, which is facing a so-called budget deficit, is maintaining several empty prisons at the cost of more than $200 million per year. In addition, we’re closing schools at a time when we’re sending juveniles to prisons deemed inhumane by federal investigators. The cost of keeping one child in prison per year in New York state? Over $100,000. Some researchers put the actual cost at over $200,000 per bed, per year!

The good news? For me it was hanging out with a great bunch of very young activists, who were well-versed on the issues and who, in passionate terms and an informed manner, schooled members of our state legislature on the foolishness of incarceration as a panacea for all social ills. Even legislators hostile to our agenda seemed genuinely impressed by the young people in my group. I’ll be writing little bit more about this process later on this week. For those of you who like to beat up on our youth, I am compelled to ask: what the fuck are you doing to make this world a better place?

So, there you have it: there’s the mess, the message, and there’s also solutions to the mess. Which part did you play today? Are you making this a better world?

Just sayin...

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery form civilization...

Justice as Retribution

¡Hola! Everybody...

The most challenging aspect of blogging is the art of adequately articulating complex issues in everyday language in a short amount of space. I often miss the mark in this regard. Following this, I will post the second part on justice as social control.

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-=[ From the Plantation to the Bing ]=-

“One of the interesting ways of settling the race problem comes ... in this period of unemployment among the poor. In Waterloo, Kentucky, the enterprising chief of police is arresting all unemployed Negroes and putting them in jail, thus securing their labor for the state at the cheapest possible figure. This bright idea... is used through the South and strong sermons and editorials are written against ‘lazy’ Negroes. Despite this there are people in this country who wonder at the increase in ‘crime’ among colored people.”

-- W.E.B. Du Bois, unsigned editorial, “Logic,” The Crisis, Vol. 9 (January, 1915), p. 132

Some of the poorest Brooklyn city blocks are also some of the priciest. You couldn’t tell by the surroundings or by the people who live there -- mostly people of color most of whom live below the poverty line. They are called million dollar blocks by criminal-justice experts who study this phenomenon: In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks that fit this category -- city blocks where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million.

At the same time, a quick look at the surrounding schools and other social institutions in the area would bring shame to any right-thinking American, regardless of color.

In a relatively short period of time, we have moved from a nation that dared to envision a Great Society to a nation that now incarcerates more people than any other. While we have 5% of the world’s population, yet we account for 25% of the world’s prison population (most of those in US prisons are people of color). At the same time, we remain the most violent and crime-ridden of all advanced democracies. It’s not even close.

The following is an attempt to articulate a problem from a civil rights perspective with a hip hop sensibility.

How did we get here? Well, it wasn’t by accident and it didn’t happen overnight. In order to understand how we became a nation of prisons we have to look at crime and punishment from a historical context. A task I couldn’t possibly hope to do in a one or two-page Word document. Still, before I move on, I have to at least try.

Sociologist Loic Wacquant (2002) maintains that historically not one but several institutions have been implemented to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the United States. The first was chattel slavery which made possible the plantation economy and the caste of racial division from colonial times to the Civil War. The second was the Jim Crow system of legally imposed discrimination and segregation that served as the foundation for the agricultural society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition. America’s third mechanism for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis was the ghetto. It corresponded with the African-American Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partly obsolete by the mounting protest of blacks against continued racism, culminating with the urban riots of the 1960s. The fourth, Wacquant contends, is the institutional complex formed by the leftovers of the black ghetto and the prison/ industrial complex with which it has become joined by a linked relationship with institutional racism.

What this suggests is that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand one -- its timing, composition, and inception as well as the silent ignorance and acceptance of its harmful effects on those it affects -- without returning to the former as a starting point. In other words, from a historical viewpoint, the mass incarceration of mostly people of color in the United States is a direct offshoot from the roots of the institution of racism.

Now, you might be wondering what I mean by a “hip hop sensibility,” and if you bear with me, I’ll try to explain. I cannot, in all good conscience, profess to know much about contemporary hip hop. As a Nuyorican born and raised in the ghettos of New York City, I was there at its inception, long before MTV, and long before hip-hop culture was co-opted by the mainstream. I will be honest and say I stopped listening to hip hop before it made its way (via Yo! MTV Raps) or BET. Through the years, I have maintained an interest in some groups that I felt offered a powerful social message -- groups such as Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and some others, but I don’t know jack about contemporary hip-hop, nor do I like much of it. For me, hip-hop was more than a musical genre; it was a ghetto scream for recognition, combining several elements of modern and traditional culture, not the least of which was technology. Hip-hop was an urban folklore expressing the gritty reality of life in the black and Puerto Rican ghettos of New York City.

I think hip-hop is relevant to a discussion of mass incarceration because its attitude and moral stance is often called into question and vilified by both black and white conservatives. I contend that hip-hop informs this discussion and has the potential to give it a proper philosophical framework.

Hip-hop as the dominant chosen form of entertainment and instruction of gifted young people, has both good and bad effects. If we look beyond the polemics, hip-hop also serves to resist (and sometimes reinforce) the effects of a postmodern world steeped in free-market fundamentalism, aggressive macho militarianism, and the increasing privatization of the social sphere (think BP). The racial dimension of hip-hop is unavoidable, and it is here where, if looked at as more than mere black cultural expression, it can inform and illuminate the discussion.

You ain’t gotta be locked up to be in prison / Look how we livin’ / 30,000 niggas a day up in the bing, standin routine / They put us in a box, just like our life on the block -- Dead Prez, Behind Enemy Lines

If we view criminal justice as retribution, then we have to acknowledge that justice as retribution mirrors the sentiment that vengeance is sweet, redeeming those who have been wronged. It is a desire often expressed by rappers themselves. Yet their desire for retribution isn’t proposed as part of a legitimate system of punishment. For one, the situations they portray are oftentimes outside the law. However, lurking under rappers’ desire to settle scores lies a steadfast belief that the law does not (and never did) protect them. If the law doesn’t protect you and won’t guarantee justice, then it follows that you may have to protect yourself from your enemies.

Many rappers are skeptical about justice in America and alarmed by our criminal justice system. Hip-hop lyrics strongly suggest that racial bias in our criminal justice system undermines the notion of equal protection under the law. They also question whether the historically unprecedented massive effort to incarcerate black men serves the purpose of public safety. For rappers, the notion of the public good and retribution appears as a facade for an unjust form of social control that helps maintain a system of privilege for whites. Rap music often aims to strip away the veneer of justice from a system that unfairly targets youth of color.

Circle the block where the beef’s at / and park in front of my enemy’s eyes/ They see that it’s war we life-stealers, hollow-tip busters. -- Nas, Every Ghetto

The popular idea of retribution as a legally sanctioned form of punishment is based on the assumption that criminal acts call for punishment -- separate from the consequences of punishment, such as permanent disenfranchisement and the enduring collateral consequences of imprisonment (i.e., obstacles to employment, education, and housing). From this perspective, the ends (retribution) justify the means at whatever societal cost. The point being that justice is served only when wrongdoers suffer.

In a lawless context, the line between retribution and self-defense is not so clear, but advocates of retribution (“retributivists”) are not interested in retaliation as a reaction to a perceived threat. They advocate retaliation for wrongdoing as a matter of justice. This led one of the most famous retributivists, Immanuel Kant, to stress the difference between vengeance and retribution (a persistent theme in the western and noir film genres, by the way). In Kant’s view, vengeance is emotional and personal, reckless and often disproportionate to the crime.

A civilized society, Kant argued, would replace vengeance with retribution. Yet the ideal of retribution carries more than a trace of vengeance, as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, pemphasized in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995). Some recent retributivists, Jeffrie Murphy’s Getting Even, for example, urge us to embrace the emotional and the personal value of punishment as retribution. These philosophers accept the connection between vengeance and the justification of punishment. They offer us four conditions that vengeance must meet in order to be considered justice:

1. Communication. The penalty must communicate what the offender did wrong.
2. Desert. The punishment must be deserved.
3. Proportionality. The punishment must fit the crime.
4. Authority. A legitimate authority must administer the punishment.

When these conditions are met, retributionists claim, vengeance leads us to justice...

However, rappers spin a cautionary tale -- the retributivist’s conditions aren’t met. In Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, Public Enemy’s Chuck D implies that the authority of a government that doesn’t care about some of its people can’t claim legitimacy. A legitimate government serves the interests of all its people, including minority groups. A government that fails to provide equal protection for all manages only to exercise power, not legitimate authority. In other words, might does not make right.

The most basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution and associated with our criminal justice system are the following: people should not be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment); people are innocent until proven guilty through due process of the law (Fifth Amendment); people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment); people should be equally protected by the law (Fourteenth Amendment).

Many rap artists correctly point out violations of these basic constitutional rights -- police and prosecutorial misconduct, lack of access to legal counsel, unfair sentencing policies, and inhumane prison conditions. These are well documented and disproportionately affect African Americans and other people of color.

Consider Mos Def description of racial profiling, “The po-po stop him and show no respect / ‘Is there a problem officer? / Damn straight, it’s called race.” Racial profiling is a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with excessive force and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (Amnesty International, 2004). Problems such as these undermine not just rights in the US, but international rights as well. In addition, they call into question whether many punishments have been fairly implemented.

Grounds for doubt about punishment as retribution extend beyond racial bias in its application. How could we know whether the desert condition or the proportionality condition for justice as retribution has been justified? Consider the following articulation from a leading retributionist on fitting the punishment to the crime:

“Tailoring the fit appears to depend on the moral sensitivity or intuitions of the punishers. When is the fit right? When does a suit of clothes fit? When it feels right? Yes, but also when it looks right to the wearers and others... Morality is an art, not a science.” [emphasis added]

Statements such as this should give us cause for alarm. The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious America dooms the justification of punishment. Our system of punishment costs us about 60 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, sometimes for a lifetime. Biblical references to the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or the art of morality are woefully inadequate as a justification for a system of punishment. My next entry will deal with punishment as social control.

Love,

Eddie

Notes:

“The Bing” is slang for prison and/ or solitary confinement

Unless otherwise noted, all statistic are from the Bureau of justice Statistics

Resources

Amnesty International. (2004). Threat and humiliation: Racial profiling, domestic security, and human rights in the United States. New York: Amnesty International, USA.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans. 2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books.

Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US. New Left Review, 13(January-February ), 41-60.

Where the Heart is...

¡Hola! Everybody…
I can write… really. I can sit down, and under the right conditions, I can write prolifically (if not well LOL). However, I am easily distracted. Any change in my writing ritual, any distraction -- a phone call, for example -- will sidetrack me for hours. So, the move has taken away from the everyday ritual -- the familiarity -- and the back pain (at its worst today), has resulted in zero writing. As I settle in to my new apartment, the ritual will come back, but the back pain (exacerbated by sitting) will definitely put a damper on my blogging…

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(St. Michaels at 4th Ave.)

-=[ Home ]=-

A house is not a home…

My first morning here, a bright sunny Sunday morning, I was awakened by a hushed but insistent, not particularly good mariachi singing right outside my window. Annoyed, I got up to see who it was and to request they take their singing ass somewhere else. When I looked, I saw a short, older Latino, dressed in black, with black cowboy hat and boots. He wore dark wrap-around shades, and with the small accordion he held, he played the same three chords over and over again. He sang songs of heartbreak, of love lost and regained and lost again, in his hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.

Next to him, stood a large shopping cart full of roses for sale and young Latino/a families on their way from church occasionally stop and purchase a few. Eventually, I notice he is blind, his cane pressed up against his armpit. He comes here most mornings to sing of love lost in that same hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.

I have moved from the largely upscale, yuppie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope to Sunset Park. It’s not that far away, and still somewhat upscale, but there is definitely more diversity. It's a neighborhood first colonized by a wave of Puerto Ricans in the 50s and 60s and later revived by an explosion of Latin American and Asian immigrants. One avenue block up, on 5^th Avenue, you can walk the main drag and see scores of businesses offering their goods and services to the many different Latino/as that live here. Young Salvadoran teen girls and Mexicans from Puebla pass by Dominican hair salons, Puerto Rican and Mexican restaurants, or buy treats from sidewalk vendors selling everything from aguacates to mangoes, caña, and piraguas.

I live in a very young neighborhood of families with both parents, something you rarely see outside of a Latino/a neighborhood. My building, a six-family building, has one family from India, the old patriarch a hilarious character. On the ground floor behind me, lives a Dominican, a single mother of an adolescent girl. Above me, lives a Salvadoran couple with their young son.

Sunset Park is also home to one of the largest Asian communities in the city. Some say it’s larger than the more famous Manhattan Chinatown. So, in addition to the Latino/a offerings, you can also shop for all things Asian. On 8^th avenue (the number eight signifying luck) you can find Chinese businesses, including grocery stores, restaurants, Buddhist temples, video stores, bakeries, and community organizations, and even a Hong Kong Supermarket. And again, there is that unmistakable youthful energy rubbing up against traditional family structures, as young immigrant families work hard for The Dream. On Sundays, you’re lucky if you’re able to find an empty seat at one of the many different restaurants as families -- mostly young Latino/as and Asians -- all congregate to observe the traditional Sunday repast. Some days you’ll see two or three generations seated together as impatient teens, annoyed at being saddled with tending to their infant siblings, break bread with their parents and grandparents.

I see all of this and I am reminded of the America I knew growing up in New York and I smile, knowing I have arrived home…

Someone recently wrote me privately, asking why I am so angry about what’s going on in Arizona. I feel the answer to that question is self-evident. There are certain values I believe in. There aren’t too many principles I can lay claim to, but the few I value, I hold dear. Two of those principles are fairness and justice. I am light-skinned with blue eyes and I can probably pass for white in Arizona. But for me, racial profiling is deeply offensive to the values of justice and fairness.

And make no mistake about it, Arizona using race to demand that people produce “papers” to prove who they are is a police-state tactic diametrically opposed, not just to my personal values, but that shouldn’t be unacceptable in America. If we don’t stop this law now, similar ones will spread across the nation. Already, lawmakers in at least 10 other states have promised to bring similar bills to their legislatures. The land I was born in, America, is my home. And in my home, racial profiling is wrong. It is un-American is the most essential way.

And if you think you’re safe, or rationalize that this is an intelligent solution to the largely fabricated crisis of immigration, you should think again. And if you’re a person of color and think they won’t profile your black or brown ass, think again. And if you’re a light-skinned Latino/a with blue-eyes internally ashamed of your own kind and in your neurotic eagerness to assimilate, support Arizona’s apartheid-like strategy, think again. For if you allow it to be done to those you fear and loathe, what makes you think it won’t be done to you?

And if you can bring yourself to hate and dehumanize another human being, regardless of their citizenship status, perhaps what you really hate is a part of yourself.

Love,

Eddie

Justice as Retribution

¡Hola! Everybody...
My friend Rippa strongly suggested to me to offer the following... I am honored that he would ask. As always, the most challenging aspect of blogging is attempting to articulate complex issues in everyday language and in a short amount of space. I will have to present the following in two parts... today, I tackle justice as retribution and the next installment (for Monday) will tackle justice as social control.

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-=[ From the Plantation to the Bing: Retribution ]=-

“One of the interesting ways of settling the race problem comes ... in this period of unemployment among the poor. In Waterloo, Kentucky, the enterprising chief of police is arresting all unemployed Negroes and putting them in jail, thus securing their labor for the state at the cheapest possible figure. This bright idea... is used through the South and strong sermons and editorials are written against ‘lazy’ Negroes. Despite this there are people in this country who wonder at the increase in ‘crime’ among colored people.”

-- W.E.B. Du Bois, unsigned editorial, “Logic,” The Crisis, Vol. 9 (January, 1915), p. 132

Some of the poorest Brooklyn city blocks are also some of the priciest. You couldn’t tell by the surroundings or by the people who live there -- mostly people of color most of whom live below the poverty line. They are called million dollar blocks by criminal-justice experts who study this phenomenon: In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks that fit this category -- ones where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million.

At the same time, a quick look at the surrounding schools and other social institutions in the area would bring shame to any right-thinking American, regardless of color. The following is an attempt to articulate a problem from a civil rights perspective with a hip hop sensibility.

In a relatively short period of time, we have moved from a nation that dared to envision a Great Society to a nation that now incarcerates more people than any other. While we have 5% of the world’s population, we account for 25% of the world’s prison population (most of those in US prisons are people of color). At the same time, we remain the most violent and crime-ridden of all advanced democracies.

It’s not even close.

How did we get here? Well, it wasn’t by accident and it didn’t happen overnight. In order to understand how we became a nation of prisons we have to look at crime and punishment from a historical context. A task I couldn’t possibly hope to do in a one or two-page Word document. Still, before I move on, I have to at least try.

Sociologist Loic Wacquant (2002) maintains that historically not one but several institutions have been implemented to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the United States. The first was chattel slavery which made possible the plantation economy and the caste of racial division from colonial times to the Civil War. The second was the Jim Crow system of legally imposed discrimination and segregation that served as the foundation for the agricultural society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition. America’s third mechanism for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis was the ghetto. It corresponded with the African-American Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partly obsolete by the mounting protest of blacks against continued racism, culminating with the urban riots of the 1960s. The fourth, Wacquant contends, is the institutional complex formed by the leftovers of the black ghetto and the prison/ industrial complex with which it has become joined by a linked relationship with institutional racism.

What this suggests is that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand one -- its timing, composition, and inception as well as the silent ignorance and acceptance of its harmful effects on those it affects -- without returning to the former as a starting point. In other words, from a historical viewpoint, the mass incarceration of mostly people of color in the United States is a direct offshoot from the roots of the institution of racism.

Now, you might be wondering what I mean by a “hip hop sensibility,” and if you bear with me, I’ll try to explain. I cannot, in all good conscience, profess to know much about present-day hip hop. As a Nuyorican born and raised in the ghettos of New York City, I was there at its inception, long before MTV, and long before hip-hop culture became mainstream. I will be honest and say I stopped listening to hip hop before it made its way (via Yo! MTV Raps) or BET. through the years, I have maintained an interest in some groups that I felt offered a powerful social message -- groups such as Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and some others, but I don’t know jack about contemporary hip-hop, nor do I like much of it. For me, hip-hop was more than a musical genre; it was a ghetto scream calling out for recognition, combining several elements of modern and traditional culture, not the least of which was technology. Hip-hop was an urban folklore expressing the gritty reality of life in the black and Puerto Rican ghettos of New York City.

I think hip-hop is relevant to a discussion of mass incarceration because its attitude and moral stance is often called into question and vilified by both black and white conservatives. I contend that hip-hop informs this discussion and has the potential to give it a proper philosophical framework.

Hip-hop as the dominant chosen form of entertainment and instruction of gifted young people, has both good and bad effects. If we look beyond the polemics, hip-hop also serves to resist (and sometimes reinforce) the effects of a postmodern world steeped in free-market fundamentalism, aggressive macho militarianism, and increasing privatization of the social sphere. The racial dimension of hip-hop is unavoidable, and it is here where hip-hop, if looked at as more than mere black cultural expression, can inform and illuminate the present dialog.

“You ain’t gotta be locked up to be in prison / Look how we livin’ / 30,000 niggas a day up in the bing, standin routine / They put us in a box, just like our life on the block” -- Dead Prez, Behind Enemy Lines

If we view criminal justice as retribution, then we have to acknowledge that justice as retribution mirrors the sentiment that vengeance is sweet, redeeming those who have been wronged at the hands of others. It is a desire often expressed by rappers themselves. Yet their desire for retribution isn’t proposed as part of a legitimate system of punishment. For one, the situations they portray are oftentimes way outside the law. However, lurking under rappers’ desire to settle scores lies a steadfast belief that the law does not (and never did) protect them. If the law doesn’t protect you and won’t guarantee justice, then it follows that you may have to protect yourself from your enemies.

Many rappers are skeptical about justice in America and alarmed by our criminal justice system. Hip-hop lyrics strongly suggest that racial bias in our criminal justice system undermines the notion of equal protection under the law. They also strenuously question whether the historically unprecedented massive effort to incarcerate black men serves the purpose of public safety. For them, the notion of the public good and retribution appears as a facade for an unjust form of social control that helps maintain a system of privilege for whites. Rap music often aims to strip away the veneer of justice from a system that unfairly targets youth of color.

“Circle the block where the beef’s at / and park in front of my enemy’s eyes/ They see that it’s war we life-stealers, hollow-tip busters.” -- Nas, Every Ghetto

The popular idea of retribution as a legally sanctioned form of punishment is based on the assumption that criminal acts call for punishment -- separate from the consequences of punishment, such as permanent disenfranchisement and the enduring collateral consequences of imprisonment. From this perspective, the ends (retribution) justify the means at whatever societal cost. The point being that justice is served only when wrongdoers suffer.

In a lawless context, the line between retribution and self-defense is not so clear, but advocates of retribution (“retributivists”) are not interested in retaliation as a reaction to a perceived threat. They advocate retaliation for wrongdoing as a matter of justice. This led one of the most famous retributivists, Immanuel Kant, to stress the difference between vengeance and retribution (a persistent theme in the western and film noir genres, by the way). In Kant’s view, vengeance is emotional and personal, reckless and often disproportionate to the crime.

A civilized society, Kant argued, would replace vengeance with retribution. Yet the ideal of retribution carries more than a trace of vengeance, as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, emphasized in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995). Some recent retributivists, as in Jeffrie Murphy’s Getting Even, urge us to embrace the emotional and the personal value of punishment as retribution. These philosophers accept the connection between vengeance and the justification of punishment. They offer us four conditions that vengeance must meet in order to be considered justice:

1. Communication. The penalty must communicate what the offender did wrong.
2. Desert. The punishment must be deserved.
3. Proportionality. The punishment must fit the crime.
4. Authority. A legitimate authority must administer the punishment.

When these conditions are met, it is claimed, vengeance leads us to justice...

However, rappers tell us a cautionary tale -- the retributivist’s conditions aren’t met. In Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, Public Enemy’s Chuck D implies that the authority of a government that doesn’t care about some of its people can’t claim legitimacy. A legitimate government serves the interests of all its people, including minority groups. A government that fails to provide equal protection for all manages only to exercise power, not legitimate authority. In other words, might does not make right.

The most basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution and associated with our criminal justice system are the following: people should not be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment); people are innocent until proven guilty through due process of the law (Fifth Amendment); people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment (Eight Amendment); people should be equally protected by the law (Fourteenth Amendment). [Note: The Bush Administration shred much of our constitution. What? You didn’t get the memo?]

Many rap artists correctly point out violations of these basic constitutional rights -- police and prosecutorial misconduct, lack of access to legal counsel, unfair sentencing policies, and inhumane prison conditions. These are well documented and disproportionately affect African Americans and Latino/as.

Consider Mos Def description of racial profiling, “The po-po stop him and show no respect / ‘Is there a problem officer? / Damn straight, it’s called race.” Racial profiling is a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with excessive force and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (Amnesty International, 2004). Problems such as these undermine not just rights in the US, but international rights as well. In addition, they call into question whether many punishments have been fairly implemented.

Grounds for doubt about punishment as retribution extend beyond racial bias in its application. How could we know whether the desert condition or the proportionality condition for justice as retribution has been justified? Consider the following articulation from a leading retributivist on fitting the punishment to the crime:

“Tailoring the fit appears to depend on the moral sensitivity or intuitions of the punishers. When is the fit right? When does a suit of clothes fit? When it feels right? Yes, but also when it looks right to the wearers and others.... Morality is an art, not a science.”

Statements such as this should give us cause for alarm. The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious America dooms the justification of punishment. Our system of punishment costs us about 60 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, sometimes for a lifetime. Biblical references to the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or the art of morality are woefully inadequate as a justification for a system of punishment. My next entry will deal with punishment as social control.

Love,

Eddie

Notes:

“The Bing” is slang for prison and/ or solitary confinement

Unless otherwise noted, all statistic are from the Bureau of justice Statistics

Resources

Amnesty International. (2004). Threat and humiliation: Racial profiling, domestic security, and human rights in the United States. New York: Amnesty International, USA.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans. 2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books.

Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US. New Left Review, 13(January-February ), 41-60.

The Shame of a Nation

¡Hola! Everybody...
This morning, as I was waking up, making coffee, I was overhearing an interview with former education “Czar,” William Bennett. This was the guy who wrote several books on virtue (for children, no less) and was later found to be an inveterate gambler. Now, I’m not one to judge, but if I’m going to get on a bully pulpit, I’d better have my own shit together. Imagine setting myself up as an addiction "expert" and all the while doing drugs. My question is so: why are conservatives like Bennett still considered relevant? Why is he on TV giving “expert” testimony on Obama’s presidency? Why aren’t the media asking Bennett about his own indiscretions?

I want to thank the people who were nice enough to subscribe to my blog and respond: thanks Sabi, Saynt, Dana, Rippa, Will, Kenny and Ellen!

* * *

-=[ A Savage Disgrace ]=-

Not too long ago, I attended a conference in which one of the panelists related a story that to me is more horrifying than any slasher movie. A child in kindergarten class was asked to draw a picture showing how he saw himself in the future. It’s an innocent enough exercise, one given in kindergarten classes across the nation. The child drew an elaborate diagram. In it he drew his school. From his school, he drew a tunnel that wound its way through a rather sophisticated landscape. That tunnel led to a prison.

Now, the teacher was horrified. She called in her superiors, who called the parents, and so on. When asked why he would draw such a picture, he responded in the typical honesty only children can muster. He said he drew it because it was true.

And he’s right...

After watching that blustering fool, William Bennett, CNN gave some lip service to a report on the US prison population. We incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. We have 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population. There are currently 2.3 million men and women behind bars in the USA right now. Add to that the 5 million on probation and parole and you have an epidemic.

The vast majority of those in prison are young people of color. You might say that this is so because people of color are more prone to crime, but you would be wrong. The Sentencing Project has shown that all other factors controlled a black youth is five times more likely to be sentenced to prison than his white peer -- even when the crime and criminal histories are the same.

You might say that, hey, prison is fucked up, but we need to lock up criminals in order to stem the tidal wave of crime. Again, you would be wrong. There is no correlation between incarceration and crime rates. In fact, New York City’s record crime drops occurred during a decade in which the prison population was decreasing.

You might say that the collateral damage done to these individuals is justified if it keeps dangerous criminals off the street and again, you would be wrong. The majority of those currently incarcerated are non-violent, first time offenders -- often low level drug dealers who are addicted. Our criminal justice system is full overburdened, that if everyone currently fighting a case would choose to go to trail, the system would implode. As a result, plea-bargaining -- giving up the right to a fair trial in exchange for a more lenient sentence is the norm rather than the exception.

In other words, the vast majority or people in prison didn’t even have the benefit of a fair trail.

Finally, you might not give a fuck because you think this doesn’t affect you, but, again -- you would be wrong. Where do you think our government gets the money to build and maintain these prisons...?

They get if from money that would’ve other wise gone to education, health care, and community revitalization projects that, in the long run, do more to prevent crime than anything else we could think of. The money comes from your child’s school, from your community, from your pockets. In other words, we have transformed ourselves from a nation that envisioned a Great Society, to a prison nation. Our responses to addiction, poverty, lack of access to opportunities all rolled into one: incarceration.

And for what? For an expensive way to destroy a life? Here in NYC, we would rather spend over $70, 000 a year to lock up a black youth, than to spend a fraction of that to send him to a decent school.

So, considering the above, how wrong was that child? We call it the school-to-prison pipeline. In the coming days, I’m going to tie all this together and putting to rest, once and for all, the notion that we live in a post-racial anything. It’s all connected, folks...

Love,

Eddie