Category Archives: Politics and Culture

Boston Globe Critiques Three-Strikes Sentencing Plan


Lois Ahrens at The Real Cost of Prisons, a Massachusetts prisoner advocacy site, forwarded me this editorial from Northeaster University criminologist James Alan Fox about potential overbreadth in the three-strikes sentencing bill currently under consideration in the Statehouse. An excerpt follows.

…By current statute, third-time felons charged and convicted as habitual offenders must serve one-half of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole consideration. Crafted in response to two particularly high profile murder cases involving repeat offenders, both the Senate and the House bills call for increasing the threshold from one-half to two-thirds of the maximum sentence imposed.

But the more significant change comes with the second portion (Subsection b) of these bills, which makes those habitual offenders who had committed one of a long list of nearly 60 crimes ineligible for parole consideration (as well as “good time” reduction). These prisoners would need to serve the maximum with no gifts from a parole board (or a dying royalty).

A close examination of the list of crimes raises two concerns. The first involves the overly broad range of offenses among those that disallow parole, and the other relates to the subset that is punishable by life without parole.

While the array of serious felonies appropriately includes such atrocities as homicide and rape, lesser offenses such as stalking in violation of a restraining order and assault with intent to commit robbery would also make the third-timer ineligible for early release on parole.

Particularly curious, if not problematic, is the fate of those convicted on a smaller subset of crimes that are punishable by as much as a life sentence. At the severity extreme, there is, of course, murder. A first degree murder conviction already carries a life sentence without parole eligibility, whether the offender is a first-timer or a repeat criminal. A habitual offender convicted of second degree murder would also, by virtue of the pending legislation, receive life without parole.

Not so reasonable, however, is that many other habitual offenders convicted of crimes far short of murder could also be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. If charged as a habitual offender, defendants convicted of such crimes as armed robbery and burglary could be sent away to prison forever.

While I do not mean to minimize the severity of such transgressions, they do not rise to the gravity level of homicide. Life without parole should be reserved for the very worst of the worst, and robbers and burglars — even habitual ones — do not fall in the category of those who should never ever experience freedom again. The most serious crimes short of homicide require long sentences, but not life-long ones.
…

 

A Three-Strikes Prisoner Speaks Out


Last month I wrote about how Massachusetts is considering a “three-strikes” sentencing bill. I asked my prison pen pal “Conway”, whose poetry I’ve often shared on this blog, to share his thoughts about the unjust impact of such legislation. A nonviolent offender, Conway is serving 25-to-life in a supermax facility in California for receiving stolen goods. The “EDGE” program that he mentions was a youth mentoring program that he taught in before he was transferred to his current facility. Conway is a talented writer and artist who used his skills to help at-risk youth find safer outlets for their negative emotions.

Here is an excerpt from the letter he sent me last week:

****
“…So the Mass. State House is contemplating a three-strikes bill? Didn’t or haven’t they seen that it broke New York’s budget and California, which supposedly had one of the largest economies, has now begun sending prisoners to five other states because of overcrowding.

California has been forced by the Supreme Court to reduce their prison population. And they have created a [prison] guard union that forces the lawmakers to bow down to their agenda. Sounds like someone is not thinking about the people except as commodities/prisoners.

That’s one way to build a voters’ market.

Only the franchised can vote. Next comes the prison labor bill. Put those crooks/slaves to work for pennies an hour. Sound familiar? ‘Cause they did that here. Same time they put the three strikes into effect. Check Prison Industries and the Joint Venture Program, Penal Code 2717.4. 

It’s all legalized slavery.

It’s sad really how easy the voting public is manipulated.

For example: They show television programs with perfect or dysfunctional lives. (But not truly dysfunctional.) Then they advertise all this shiny crap every 10 minutes and you say ‘Wow! I want some of that.’ But wait there’s more.

You need money, you need to stay away from where money is, ’cause the cops know you ain’t got none. Don’t betray your morals, our morals.

If you work 10 hours a day, I’ll pay you minimum wage for 8 hours. And you can make payments on this car someone already wore out.

Oh? You have a record? No soup for you!

The frustrating way that a carrot is dangled in front of an old plow horse, basically…

…Wackenhut or some other private prison conglomeration…convince the public that crime is on the rise with false pie charts, and media exploitation of some heinous crime that is unexplainable. Because no one knows what’s going through some of these sociopaths heads. Some are just broken machines; broken by the prison system itself. These broken machines pacing back and forth and back and forth, until one day these fools just open the cage, hand them 200 dollars and drop them off at a bus station.

No one reached out in here and the thing is, if you did see a headshrink they just fill out a subscription [sic] for pills that make you sleep or nonresponsive.

Do I know a cure? No. I don’t even know what I would do to change the current way things are run. But I do know that another tough on crime bill, is not a deterrent to crime or a way to manage human lives.

How about voting for a second change program. When a person paroles, they enter a working environment that treats them like people. Like their lives can be whole again if they want to show the effort.

They could learn a trade and earn an honest dollar. Feel proud of their accomplishments without being locked in a toilet every night.

Obviously some would fail to assimilate. But, most prisoners would rather take a beating than subject themselves to this drudgery.

Most of these prisoners are not good with frustration. So, they lash out (because, maybe that’s a learned response). But, give em something to be proud of. And enforce that attitude and you’d see miracles.

I wish that I could of had a follow-up program for my EDGE kids. All of those kids had serious potential. They just needed someone to show an interest in their abilities. Someone to listen to their frustration, that went through the same unique things…It’s such a shame that the prison officials decided to stop the program, because of the new warden.

We had a judge come in and see a couple of our groups and he wanted to make it a mandatory program for the juvenile offenders in his jurisdiction. He even bought a huge library of child psychology books and different self-help books to help us explore our program.

Why wouldn’t something like that work for prisoners as well?”

****

 

Call for Anthology Submissions: Survivors in Solidarity with Prison Abolition


This call for anthology submissions is reprinted from the Survivors in Solidarity website. Hat tip to Lois Ahrens at The Real Cost of Prisons, a Massachusetts-based prisoners’ rights weblog, for alerting me to this project.

Working Title: Challenging Convictions: Survivors of Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence Writing on Solidarity with Prison Abolition.

Completed submissions due: April 15, 2012.

Like much prison abolition work, the call for this anthology comes from frustration and hope: frustration with organizers against sexual assault and domestic violence who treat the police as a universally available and as a good solution; frustration with prison abolitionists who only use “domestic violence” and “rape” as provocative examples; and, frustration with academic discussions that use only distanced third-person case studies and statistics to talk about sexual violence and the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). But, this project also shares the hope and worth of working toward building communities without prisons and without sexual violence. Most importantly, it is anchored in the belief that resisting prisons, domestic violence, and sexual assault are inseparable.

Organizers of this anthology want to hear from survivors in conversation with prison abolition struggles. We are interested in receiving submissions from survivors who are/have been imprisoned, and survivors who have not. Both those survivors who have sought police intervention, as well as those who haven’t, are encouraged to submit. We are looking for personal essays and creative non-fiction from fellow survivors who are interested in discussing their unique needs in anti-violence work and prison abolitionism.

Discussions of sexual assault, domestic violence, police violence, prejudice within courts, and imprisonment cannot be separated from experiences of privilege and marginalization. Overwhelmingly people who are perceived to be white, straight, able-bodied, normatively masculine, settlers who are legal residents/citizens, and/or financially stable are not only less likely to experience violence but also less likely to encounter the criminal injustice system than those who are not accorded the privileges associated with these positions. At the same time, sexual assault and domestic violence support centers and shelters are often designed with certain privileges assumed. We are especially interested in contributions that explore how experiences of race, ability, gender, citizenship, sexuality, or class inform your understandings of, or interactions with cops, prisons, and sexual assault/domestic violence support.

For complete submission guidelines and suggested topics, read more on their website.

9th Circuit Rules Prop 8 Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional


The 9th Circuit, the federal appeals court based in California, today upheld the trial court’s ruling that California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. This referendum, narrowly passed in 2008, stripped same-sex couples of the right to marry. Here’s a quick summary from the San Francisco Chronicle’s website:

A federal appeals court declared California’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional today, saying a state can’t revoke gay rights solely because a majority of its voters disapprove of homosexuality.

In a 2-1 ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Proposition 8’s limitations on access to marriage took rights away from a vulnerable minority without benefiting parents, children or the marital institution.

“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples,” said Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the majority opinion…

…Reinhardt, joined by Judge Michael Hawkins, pointedly refrained from deciding whether gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry. Instead, he said Prop. 8 violated the Constitution because it was rooted in moral disproval of gays and lesbians and withdrew rights they had won less than six months earlier, when the state Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

Their narrowly framed ruling would apply only to California, if upheld on appeal.

In dissent, Judge N. Randy Smith said Prop. 8 must be upheld if there was any reasonable basis for its enactment. For example, he said, Californians could have concluded – rightly or wrongly – that children were better off with married, biological parents, and that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples would encourage responsible child-rearing.

But the court majority said prohibiting same-sex marriage does not encourage opposite-sex couples to marry or raise children.

Read the rest of the article here.
Read the court decision here. The appeals court decided the case more narrowly than the trial court, which had ruled that gays and lesbians had an affirmative constitutional right to marry. The 9th Circuit found that Prop 8 did not pass even the lowest standard of review, namely whether there was any rational basis for the law to advance a legitimate public purpose. This standard does not require the court to treat gays and lesbians as a specially protected class.

The case now heads to the Supreme Court.

Two Poems by Louie Crew


The poet Louie Crew (a/k/a “Quean Lutibelle”) is an Emeritus professor of English at Rutgers University, and a widely published advocate for GLBT Christians in the Episcopal Church. He has kindly permitted me to reprint the two poems below, which were recently featured in issue #99 of Caught in the Net, a poetry newsletter from the UK-based writers’ resource site The Poetry Kit. Thanks also to The Poetry Kit’s Jim Bennett for permission.
Check out Louie’s list of recommended poetry publishers here.

Don’t Hang Up

Don’t hang up,
I’m not a heckler.
I NEED your help
but I can’t tell you my name.
I’m in a phone booth
while mom buys groceries,
so I won’t take long.
I heard your talk show
and I’m scared. Last summer,
when I was just thirteen,
I balled with a guy
I met at the bus station.
Now I’ve got these purple spots
all down my stomach.
I drink five shakes a day
and I have lost fifteen pounds
in just three months!
I’m afraid to go to our doctor
cause he’s my dad.
He’d beat the shit out of me
for liking guys.
Can you tell me somebody else
to call?
Cripes! Here comes mom. Bye!

****

Fay

My one earring stores my powers.
It charms my lover into bed.
Worn aisle-side on buses and trains,
   
it reserves me a double seat
    until all others are filled.
On campus it keeps me off all
   
but the most enlightened committees.
It is 99% foolproof in protecting me
   
from wasting time on racists.
At times it has made otherwise sane folks
   
dangle from dormitory windows to giggle,
   
“Where’s your husband?”
Worn with a cap and gown, it wards off
   
any threat of Respectability.
In class, it assures that students question
   
what I say and not vainly agree
   
because of who said it.
In church, it has made stranger priests
   
spill me a double portion of the Mass….
When I take it off, people take me
   
for any other mortal.

Massachusetts Considers Punitive “Three-Strikes” Law


Even as pressure builds in California to overturn their “three-strikes” criminal sentencing law, the Massachusetts legislature is trying to slip a similar bill under the public’s radar. Three-strikes laws impose harsh mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders, regardless of the seriousness of the third crime. Thus, for instance, a person with two prior felonies can be sentenced to 25-to-life for a nonviolent offense such as drug possession or petty theft. My pen pal “Conway” is one victim of this system.

This unreasonable policy has contributed to such severe overcrowding in California prisons that the US Supreme Court recently ruled that conditions there violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Why would we want to bring this problem to Massachusetts?

A letter that ran Tuesday in our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, eloquently makes the case against this proposed law. It was authored by Leslie Walker, the executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, and Lois Ahrens, the director of The Real Cost of Prisons Project of Northampton.

Unless recent legislation that fast-tracked both the Massachusetts House and Senate is slowed down and reconsidered, Massachusetts prisons will rapidly move into the ranks of the most overcrowded and expensive in the nation.

The two “Three Strikes and You’re Out” bills, which passed in the final moments of the November legislative session, will make a bad situation worse.

Look at two examples:

MCI-Concord, meant to hold 614 prisoners, is jammed with 1,345 men for a 219 percent occupancy rate.

MCI-Framingham was meant to hold 388 women and now houses 445 – a 115 percent occupancy rate.

Worst of all is MCI-Framingham’s Awaiting Trial Unit, where 215 women who have been convicted of no crime are crammed into a space designed for 64 – more than 330 percent the intended occupancy.

The number of prisoners in Department of Correction custody is at an all-time high. Overcrowding averages 143 percent over capacity. The corrections department has reported that parole releases have dropped by 56 percent in 2011, mostly due to parole practices and policies promoted by the Patrick administration. Even without the new law, Massachusetts faces increased corrections costs of approximately $100 million dollars a year.

An analysis performed on sentencing data provided by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission illustrates how costly implementation of a “Three Strikes” law would be to taxpayers: an annual burden of between $75 million to $125 million could be added because between 1,500 to 2,500 prisoners could be sentenced to life with parole.

This means that the commonwealth will have to build new prison space at a cost of $100,000 per cell since our prisons are far beyond capacity. We are already paying $1 billion a year simply to incarcerate men and women, with each costing taxpayers almost as much as a year’s tuition at one of the Valley’s private colleges – approximately $50,000.

We will also keep paying the annual costs to house the same prisoner over and over because the current system is too strained to take steps that might keep prisoners from committing another crime – only 2.4 percent of the corrections department budget is spent on programming.

Education – the more one has, the more effective it is – has been proven to be one of the most successful ways of keeping people from returning to prison, but like other programs proven to rehabilitate, it is hampered without funds.

The chance for a Massachusetts prisoner to leave crime through such programs is nearly zero.

The current “Three Strikes” bills are not cost effective because they are too broadly drawn. For example, the Senate version of the bill sweeps in nonviolent convictions and mandates the third strike maximum punishment even if the previous cases were not serious enough to require a sentence of more than a day in jail. The bills would not allow judges to consider how long ago the offenses occurred or any mitigating circumstances. This would continue to overfill our prisons.

No government official wants to be labeled as “soft on crime.” But officials in other states have advocated for smart prison reform that have saved millions for taxpayers and increased public safety.

Malcolm Young, of Northwestern Law School’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, writing in The Crime Report notes, “Several states are moving ahead with carefully researched plans and strategies grounded in “best practices,” bent on reducing prison incarceration and corrections costs. Among them are Ohio, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi.”

These and other states, like New York, Michigan and New Jersey, have also reduced their prison populations with shorter sentences for nonviolent crimes, elimination of mandatory minimums for low-level drug offenses and creative alternatives to prison. The result is hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced corrections spending and lower recidivism rates.

If the current “Three Strikes” bills pass, we’ll be wasting millions of dollars while doing nothing to cut crime in Massachusetts – and continue to crowd prisons. Forget education. Forget rehabilitation.

Without such tools, those we sentence to prison will get out with even fewer resources than they have now and that means compromising the public’s safety. We urge legislators to take several steps back and consider the consequences of the hurriedly made and costly decisions which will be with us for decades.

To get involved, visit www.smartoncrimema.org. Write or call your state representatives (see House and Senate websites to find your legislator’s contact information).


Mended Souls, Better Than New


A friend who is a sexual abuse survivor loaned me Renee Fredrickson’s Recovered Memories to help me be a better ally and represent these issues more accurately in my creative writing. I’d like to share these words from the book’s final chapter, as an inspiration to anyone recovering from trauma.

On display in the Freer Museum in Washington, D.C., are ancient Zen ceremonial bowls renowned for their delicate beauty and fine craftsmanship. Over generations of use these lovely porcelain bowls became cracked and chipped, and some had whole pieces missing. Rather than being discarded or devalued because of the damage, the porcelain was repaired with gold. The gold adds strength, beauty, and value to the bowls, and the sacred bowls are marvelously enhanced by the repair process.

So it is with survivors. You were damaged as you grew up, and the more abusively you were handled, the greater the damage. When you undertake to repair this damage, you replace bitterness and sadness with understanding and healing. You become stronger and more resilient when change comes. You grow kinder to yourself and more compassionate toward those you love. You, like the sacred bowls, are enhanced rather than diminished by the repair process. (pg.225)

(See images of repaired Zen bowls here and here.)

Gender-Policing Ron Paul


My best friend from Harvard is gradually winning me over to support Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy over Obama’s. The feisty libertarian is holding his own in the GOP race despite derision from self-styled experts in both parties and some suspicious poll-doctoring by the major news networks. Anyone with so wide a range of ideological enemies is probably putting his finger on some uncomfortable truths about our country’s asset bubble, military over-spending, creeping police state, and substitution of “culture wars” for genuine solutions. The site Ron Paul Myths gives a good overview of his actual positions and how they’ve been misrepresented.

This morning my friend called my attention to this generally favorable Washington Post article, which nonetheless treats the Texas congressman as something of a sideshow act. As Hillary Clinton found, gender-policing is one of the tools that commentators use to undermine a candidate, making it seem ridiculous, even unnatural, for this person to inhabit the office of Big-Daddy-in-Chief. Because we’ve unconsciously imbibed these stereotypes for so long, we don’t even realize the commentary is biased.

From the headline, “Ron Paul’s slight stature and high-pitched passions set him apart at debates”, a suspicion of effeminacy is cast over everything that follows. (Not that I perceive anything wrong with effeminacy, but most readers would.) Though the piece fairly summarizes his positions, and notes that he has the most enthusiastic supporters of all the GOP candidates, we’re told that “experts” have written him off, in part because he doesn’t perform masculinity in the same way as Romney and Gingrich. The article mentions his “high-pitched voice”, “smaller” and “weaker” build, and “excitable hands”. Hello, Dolly!

The reporter, Sarah Kaufman, isn’t actually saying that she thinks these traits make him un-presidential–merely acknowledging that the hypothetical average voter could feel that way. Nonetheless, by pointing out Paul’s image problem without discussing sexism as a factor, the article subtly perpetuates these slurs.

Ron Paul, you just became the queer candidate.

Thoughts on Transgender Day of Remembrance


Apologies for the blog hiatus. 30 Poems in November is kicking my butt. (Donate here to raise funds for literacy education.) More original content will be posted soon.

Meanwhile, I would like to share these eloquent words from Natalie at the Skepchick blog about the importance of today’s Transgender Day of Remembrance. Activists estimate that over 100 transgendered people are murdered each year in hate crimes. This is in addition to the other violence, discrimination, and sensationalized misrepresentation in the media that transpeople endure on a regular basis. On a more positive note, though, Massachusetts finally passed a bill to add some protections to our civil rights law for gender identity and expression. The compromise legislation now bans discrimination in employment, education, healthcare, and housing, though they were not able to get enough votes to add public accommodations to the list.

Natalie’s blog post explains why trans rights should matter to everyone (boldface emphasis mine):

…I suppose a question with these kinds of things is often why exactly one should care beyond simple respect for the deceased and ongoing commitment to working against bigotry in its many forms. How does this relate to those beyond the immediate consequences?

Part of it is the internalization of fear by the rest of us. Our lives begin to become defined and restrained by it. In much the same way that women may often internalize fear of sexual assault and lose luxuries such as the ability to walk around after dark without needing to be constantly attentive of their surroundings, keeping keys clenched in their fist, trans people end up losing similar luxuries of being able to feel safe in many circumstances. Our lives become limited by that fear in very real ways. It becomes a force of social control that keeps us quiet and invisible. We desperately strive for “passability” far beyond what is simply comfortable self-expression out of awareness of the very real dangers that come with being visibly gender variant. I don’t really like painting my nails all that much, but every little bit helps.

Part of it is that this affects people beyond those who fall within the transgender spectrum. It is essentially about policing the lines of gender. Using violence and the threat thereof as a means of imposing very real consequences for those who transgress the carefully delineated paths afforded to those born with certain particular anatomies. It marks in blood a line that you may not cross. This confines all of us. Male, female or neither, cis or trans, straight or queer, binary-identified or not, we all end up boxed into a coercively defined destiny based on nothing more than the configuration of one particular body part.

Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of victims of trans-related violence are women. This sends a strong message that it is unacceptable to value femaleness or femininity, or to consider these states preferable, empowering or fulfilling. MtF spectrum individuals embody a fundamental challenge to the assumption of male superiority. Who could possibly be happier as a woman than as a man? Who would want to trade the almighty phallus for the lowly vagina? Along with using violence and fear to enforce a gender binary, it uses the same to enforce patriarchy.

These messages are internalized into our culture. They mean something very, very real. There are untold many who remain in their prescribed gender roles only out of fear of retribution.

But this day isn’t about gender theory or politics or the struggle forward for the living. It is about recognizing, remembering and respecting those we’ve lost. But a big aspect of respecting them is to recognize what it is they died for. They sacrificed their lives for the idea that all of us, regardless of where we fall within the various spectrums of gender and sexuality, can express ourselves and exist exactly as we are, exactly as we feel ourselves to truly be. They died to build a world where we needn’t live in fear and compromise, where we needn’t apologize for our gender. Where our identity is our own. Where biology is not destiny.

So if you get a chance today, please take a moment to pause and think, or to grieve. Perhaps light a candle. Perhaps reflect a bit on the freedom that you may enjoy to express your gender in a manner that is honest and comfortable, or reflect on those who may not yet have that privilege. Perhaps reflect on how valuable and meaningful that is, what it is to feel at home in your body. Remember that it is something that some people have given their lives for.

Read the whole post here. (Hat tip to the Twitter feed of No Longer Quivering, a must-read site for women recovering from patriarchal religious abuse.)